Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

You are 'Casey', an anxious college student with lots to hide, and you're going to your boyfriend's house for Thanksgiving. Can you keep it together?

Thanksgiving is designed with an eye towards those who unfamiliar with IF, with a preliminary explanation on how to progress in the story and colour-coded links (red is for eavesdropping; green is to progress).

The story largely involves navigating your way through social interactions with relatives: do you act cheerful, or distant? Help out, or try and remain invisible? The player took on the PC's responsibility to keep the PC's story straight. NPCs will remember your story, not least your boyfriend. What exactly was 'true' is not always clear.

The story also benefits from the PC's 'eavesdropping', adding texture and details to the boyfriend's family. It was suited to the close proximity that comes with family gatherings on occasions such as this.

I thought the idea of concealing one's identity was well done. We only ever see the bits of her past that she's actively trying to hide from her boyfriend's family, while other incidental details - her real name, details about her family - are irrelevant and thus omitted. Yet, the PC's past emerges in so many ways: not just in her new name, but also in her uncanny ability to spot scammers, perhaps even in the game's key mechanic of choosing the approach to social interactions. I would not know how factually accurate any of this is, but Thanksgiving feels like a very nuanced account of the minefield that is social interaction.

Written for Porpentine's Twiny Jam, Jetbike Gang is a branching story about being in a jetbike gang, written within 300 words. It has a similar vibe to Kitty Horrorshow's Wolfgirls in Love, with the PC living on the edge of the law in a buzzing cyberpunk-like city and being on the run. But while Wolfgirls focuses more on a particular relationship and hinting at things, Jetbike Gang uses more concrete imagery and more clearly described actions.

This game slants toward the gritty and grim, but even then there's space for some (very indirect) wordplay and a surprising amount of branching.

In this retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. You are Rosalind, the girl with the red cape, tasked to deliver food to your grandmother, who has been ill of late.

All is really not as it seems, though, and this is no walk in the, well, woods. What I liked about this were the refreshing twists on the story we’re so used to. The idea behind the game was creative enough, and, after playing, still remains ingenious. The story is mostly linear, though it contains several alternative endings, all determined by the endgame.

However, several things detracted from enjoyment of the game. There are alarmingly long stretches of text in the form of ‘visions’, which seems, above all, to be a rather lame attempt to force a lot of backstory into a few actions. This, unfortunately, occurred several times, especially toward the end of the story. Part of the moral of the story feels very heavily laid on in the beginning of the game, to the effect that it sounded very artificial. Yet nothing was said about this moral in the endgame.

The game also felt slightly glitchy at times. Some descriptions did not change even after performing actions which should have changed the object; some actions must be performed at specific locations to be able to progress with the game. The game could have been more robust if it were more flexible for the player, but this is really a small matter.

Don’t get me wrong: Moon-shaped is enjoyable in parts and does have an interesting story, but it was let down by the textwalls of backstory.

Corvidia is a short, branching Twine game-poem. The prose is sparse; the content, abstract. There are references to a daughter and a missing mother, but I found it hard to grasp what the underlying story was about. Despite its brevity, there is, in fact, branching. Choosing different words in the passages yields different passages, and playing it feels like exploring a strange environment blindfolded.

It uses some visual effects, though to no special effect (also, the sidebar gets in the way). Nonetheless, it’s an intriguing work, atmospheric and quiet, and as it lasts about a minute from start to finish, it’s worth clicking through just to have a look.

You are on the trail of Greggery Peccary, the star programmer of Trendly's Cyber Trends, who designed addictive games such as Cliikus... and now he's gone. Cyber Trends is worried, there is unrest, and it's up to you to search Guillermo City to find Greggery Peccary.

This game was submitted as part of Shufflecomp - based on Frank Zappa's The Myth of Greggery Peccary, which refers, in part, to the people who create trends... if I read the lyrics correctly. This explains the almost constant references to, well, trends and memes. You'll spot it when you see it, really.

The language is deliberately mangled - yes, it's difficult to read - which, if I read it correctly, it makes a nod to badly translated Japanese-to-English. The game touches on some ideas of using addictive media to anesthesise a population (a la Fahrenheit 451) and government-sponsored mind control, though they were never explored in detail.

One interesting feature is an adaptive map (i.e. map changes with your progress in the story). The way The Peccary Myth treats navigation is, as another reviewer has pointed out, similar to a point and click game. The story's geography is clearly set out, a helpful tool for the player, though this was not crucial to the game.

The Peccary Myth is a game which laughs at itself and is chock full of wit, but it's let down by a lack of focus on any one theme.

In this Ectocomp 2015 entry, the unnamed protagonist is robbed of her voice, and at each turn she has two options: to weep, or to seek.

The two options suggest a world of contrast: weep, and be resigned to your fate; seek, and be active in reclaiming your voice (or finding a new one).

B Minus Seven writes abstractly, hinting here and there at wisps of setting, but nothing really substantial ever features. The focus, rather, is on the PC's actions. I felt like this game could have touched on some deeper themes, but because of the abstract writing, it's like looking at something from the corner of your eye. Where is the metaphor? (Is there one?) It's never really clear.

The game is over in three moves, and I found it too short to get to the meat of the story. The protagonist remains inscrutable, a blank shell. It's hard to feel for a protagonist if you don't know much about her.

I do like concepts like this - the simplification of the choice mechanic reminded me of When acting as a particle / When acting as a wave - but it felt like a glimpse into a weird and intriguing world, rather than a chance to immerse myself and roam around.

You're alone in Harvey's apartment. It is raining. The news is on: the ‘Slicer Killer’, who has young women living alone as his prey, has claimed another victim. Harvey will be back soon.

Because of genre expectations (the genre is horror, few surprises there), I, the reader, was already conditioned to expect something bad to happen. The serial killer news is the most obvious hook that the threat to the PC's safety comes from outside, almost definitely the serial killer. That the PC is actually in danger, though, is implied. I played this once early last year, and I remarked then that because the danger was implied, it meant that there was little sense of urgency. Now that I'm playing it again, I think leaving this implicit made the player make a lot more assumptions. What's to say that the PC fits into the serial killer's demographic? All we know about the PC is that they're wearing Mickey Mouse pajamas, for goodness' sake.

There are some bright spots. Events outside the PC's control heighten the tension, including, like it or not, the news. Despite my misgivings about various cosmetic and storytelling approaches, All Alone does become quite foreboding in parts. The standard 'my dirty apartment' details are drawn up adequately to give the impression of squalour (I like "Piles of Harvey's dirty clothes crouch on the floor.").

But this is not the most polished of games. Ellipses are rendered strangely throughout (maybe it's my interpreter?). There are double spaces after full stops, which is Not A Thing we do nowadays. Also, I get (Spoiler - click to show)"The pick up the knife." when I pick up the knife from the sink.

Another major problem is that there is not nearly enough to know about the PC to make the player care about them. We know more about Harvey and even about the serial killer than we do about the PC - in this way, the PC automatically (and disturbingly) becomes the typical horror movie victim: nameless, generic and lacking almost all autonomy.

There are some events which you may or may not see, depending on what you do and in what order you do it. Some of the later events are satisfyingly foreboding. My grouse, though, is that the ending comes suddenly, and it felt a little out of the blue for me. It was ambiguous, and didn't quite link up with the implications from earlier in the game, but was perfunctorily effective (and I really liked the last sentence).