Ratings and Reviews by verityvirtue

scarfmemory is a short game (about 10-15 minutes' play for one play-through), in memory of a lost scarf - something beautiful, now forever gone. More accurately described as an interactive diary, it reads like a stream of tangentially connected thoughts and experiences, accompanied by occasional photos.

The game works with links which expand out, when you click on them, to a related chunk of text. How to explain? It's like how Lime Ergot worked - you click on a link, it expands out to relate a related memory or experience. It muses on the fate of the scarf, and the musings of a creator: where are these bits of yourself, whose intimate history only you know? Is anyone using it? If they use it, would they know its story - how it came about? Would it matter?

I felt the reflection made it a little more than just a 'day in life' kind of game, simply because it was thoughtful, and it was born of something which other creators of things would probably have thought about.

scarfmemory is as simple as it sounds, and to say there was nothing else remarkable about this game would be to treat this little game unfairly.

(Spoiler - click to show)As a last thought, I got a BAD END at the end of the game, which left me wondering if I could get a good ending...

Women come to her when their husbands stray. She accepts not crude cash, but things of beauty. She will fix them- for as long as they live.

The Fixer is linear, but a delight to play through. Emelumadu paints a city where spirits and humans mingle; where believing in mysticism is common sense and practicality. She merges the absurd with the filthy; the beautiful with the pragmatic.

Emelumadu’s writing is rich with flavour and beautifully detailed, even when she goes into sordid detail of a certain character. Her writing moves from being initially subtle - from hinting at the narrator’s identity - to exulting in the narrator’s strange abilities.

The Fixer also uses graphics throughout the story, though I didn’t listen to the audio, and the story art is gorgeous and unobtrusive. A delight to read.

This game was written for the Twiny Jam, meaning this game was written within 300 words. In South America, the Water Wars are raging, but, for you, you're more concerned about your own building's water ration. It starts at midnight, and if you start early enough, maybe you'll have enough for a shower, to flush the toilet and wash your clothes today.

This game, given its brevity, uses the cyclinglink macro to economise on words and to great effect: Mason used it to implement steps of a routine, such as preparing for a shower. This, combined with timed text, created a sense of urgency appropriate to the situation.

The game is limited in scope, but there are hints to a mildly dystopic future - hints of a wider world, and that made it feel less like a short game per se, but rather a limited window into the author's world.

You are a junior diplomat, though not a very good one; you probably shouldn’t have gone to that party last night, amongst other things. And now you have an angry Glorpian in front of you. And Glorpians are sticklers for etiquette.

Tea Ceremony is a simple game, in prose and in mechanics. The writing is perhaps sparser than it could be, though it serves its purpose. This game, however, has puzzles at its heart, rather than story. Whether this harms or helps the story is another creature altogether. Logic puzzles abound, which will probably be familiar to even newbies. Mechanically, Tea Ceremony is well-done; the parser handles commands for the puzzles intuitively and everything the player needs to know to solve the puzzles and win the game is clearly stated in-game.

The game’s very simple prose gives the feeling of being unsubstantial, but there are, in fact, some gems, as suggested at the end of the game, to discover. Strong, technically, imbued with a sense of playfulness, even if it doesn’t give the impression of being highly polished.