Reviews by verityvirtue

Someone - or something - has been stealing your butter and you, dairy farmer extraordinaire, are going to find out who.

Molly and the Butter Thieves is a well-designed, lovely game drawing on fairy mythology: there's the insubstantial but beautiful fairy castle; there's the thieving, mischievous, capricious fairies themselves.

There are some noteworthy design decisions - the first being the FOLLOW command, which allows you to follow NPCs, and a nifty trick which (Spoiler - click to show)allows you to wander around only in places the NPC leads you. This creates the feeling of messiness, of space, without having to implement every single bit of it.

Similar to The Warbler's Nest, content-wise, Molly and the Butter Thieves has relatively small game locations (i.e. number of rooms) and the actions the player needs to do to progress are clearly stated. Where The Warbler's Nest turns dark, though, Molly and the Butter Thieves keeps light, by keeping the stakes relatively low - it's more about protecting what's yours rather than rooting out an unwanted visitor in your home. Despite its brevity, there are still sufficient interactions with NPCs and environmental details to make it feel like a small slice of a vibrant world.

This is a short, cosy Twine set on the back of a wagon, in which the PC and their partner discuss their future. It's been a while since the apocalypse happened, but you're alive, and the town up ahead is a new opportunity...

The setting borrows elements from Westerns, though it is not unique to them: travellers on the road, never knowing what lies ahead, being separated from human company for prolonged periods at a time.

There is something comforting about discussing what seems so trivial, so individual despite the world crumbling all around you. There is something comforting in planning for the future at the end of the world, and even more so in the NPC, Sam, who responds to even the most cynical of conversational options with good grace. Emphasising that is a gentle soundtrack, partly guitar, partly sounds of nature.

Design-wise, this game features the thoughtful use of colour schemes - with different colours for each speaker - and cycling links to present conversational options.

A peaceful, intimate diversion, not unlike laika's Heretic Pride.

[Time to completion: 20-30 minutes]

This cyberpunk-styled Twine is based on the Shufflecomp release. I could not access version 1.5.

You are a space baker in a galaxy where everyone's voice is surgically removed at birth. For entertainment and relaxation, people watch ASMR videos; in fact, people have implants to enhance the effect of such videos.

This game is broadly branching, with a few major decision-making points leading to different and distinct endings. The author has really thought about the setting, here, and merges the incongruous (Viennese pastries, ASMR) with the typically dystopian (a great plague, a disfigured people) to create something wonderful.

Three Dragons was designed as a micro-RPG, and is a technically polished Twine with slick text effects. This game has several of the hallmarks of a usual RPG: there's an inventory system, combat, and a completely characterless PC.

Two things of note: stats are presented qualitatively, not quantitatively, meaning you see "You are in good health" or "The dragon is stable" instead of numerical values for health, or any other stat. This, for me, kept it from being a numbers game - it signalled that trying to keep track of health lost and damage dealt was not the point. What you have are tactics: do you feint, or swipe with your weapon, or retreat?

Second, combat is in realtime. This lends a sense of urgency to the fight: if you delay, your options dwindle. In IF and text-based combat games, this is a rare thing indeed.

So far, I haven't found any way to get anything resembling a 'successful' ending, though it's not actually clear why. Three Dragons feels like an introduction more than anything, but it introduces some interesting system which I wouldn't mind seeing in future works.

[Time to completion: 10-15 minutes]

In this small, exploration-based Twine, you are apprentice to root-mother Manya, and in exchange for story, you must help fetch herbs. The challenge here is in interpreting the indirect clues to match the description of the plants you find.

This game is relatively simple, and certainly has few frills. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this; I've found precious little IF about botany and plants (apart from Starry Seeksorrow; recommendations would be welcome), even though the act of collecting plants suits itself well to the traditional treasure hunt mechanic.

[Time to completion: 45-60 mins]

Your Uncle Zebulon has died, and while you're sure you were his favourite nephew, he bequeathed you just one item - it can be any item from his house, but you can only take one out. Your relatives have been all over the house, though, so will there be anything left?

This game is one of the games I've played this year with longer parser puzzles. One of the reasons I have stayed so far from these is because I am very bad at visualising and manipulating machines in IF - I do better when I can actually move things with my hands, which is a bit of a feat in IF. The puzzles here, however, are well-hinted. As befits an old wizard's house, Uncle Zebulon's Will makes use of some simple mechanics which work once, but are consistently implemented.

The writing is enjoyable, and I know some have called it terse or economical. This was typical of the time, but it felt natural to me; also, as others have mentioned, the one NPC that you get to talk to feels convincingly bored, with in-character 'error' messages when the player breaks the game's rules (most notably being the one object restriction when exiting the house).

A very solid game with good implementation and enjoyable writing. Would safely withstand the so-called test of time.

[Time to completion: 10-15 minutes]

You're Amity, and you're out in the park to meet Li Anderson, your girlfriend, when somebody starts yelling for help. This starts as a cozy story about two girls, but abruptly turns into a story about fighting monsters.

The writing in the beginning is not as inspired, not as sharp as one might expect. There's some self-examination along the lines of "This is my average high school life", which is not entirely unwarranted. The conversation between the PC and Li touches on deeper issues, such as how sexuality is portrayed in media.

The later part moves faster, but I sensed that it was trying to hint at something greater through elements from mythology and metaphor and cultural references - as far as I could tell, anyway. It felt incongruous - perhaps because there was too little space, narrative-wise, to lead up to this.

I had strong vibes of Birdland and Astrid Dalmady's Yesterday, You Saved the World in this game, but the emotional impact didn't quite hit it for me. Birdland did it by establishing Bridget's and Bell's character and weaknesses earlier on, making their eventual triumph more satisfying. Here, there's a lot less tension from the start, which loosens the driving force for the resolution.

Some interesting elements in this one, and this game seems to have angled at invoking fuzzy good feelings, so it's probably good for a short diversion.

Magical Makeover is a self-styled parody of over-the-top Flash games 'for girls', namely those whose interactivity consists wholly of choosing outfits. It starts with floridly named makeup products and a rhyming, snarky mirror but delves into a touch of body horror, and into riffs off fairy tales.

This game is generous, in various senses of the word. The writer revels in description, evoking sparkly, colourful images. While the passages got lengthy at times, this was made up for by the wit: the game lampshades tropes from fairy tales and adventure stories. ‘Lampshades’ doesn’t even begin to describe it - much of the game felt more like an exuberant riff.

The level of story branching was certainly generous as well. As the author says, there are seven possible endings, but I was impressed by how distinct and well-developed each of them were, with their own backstories.

In Rough Draft, you’re helping Denise, a writer suffering from writer’s block, decide the course of her story, a fairly generic fantasy-type story. At some points, though, the narrator decides that the story can go no further; you, as invisible editor, can go back and get her to rewrite at a certain decision-making point. It takes the concept of the meta-writing game and really runs with it.

What makes this game unusual is being able to visualise the story structure. I liked how information from one rejected branch unlocked decisions in other branches – a reflection, perhaps, of how brainstorming sparks off ideas, even if the original ideas never do make it into the final product.

Story branches are quickly pruned off, which means that players must do a bit of lawn-mowering (this is not necessarily meant as a harsh critique, goodness knows I’m guilty of that myself) to find the ‘right’ story branch that allows progress. It would have been great to be able to complete the story using a variety of ways – that, after all, is the power of the imagination.

It’s a pity that the meta-story (the fantasy story the player helps to write) is relatively bland. The fantasy story seems to follow stock tropes and template-like encounters; dialogue sometimes feels stilted. Nonetheless, it is evident that the author has spent much effort on this – the screens which show the story in progress are in reality separate images, as is the story map – and its implementation of this idea, which has so often been talked about, is laudable.

Time to completion: 20-30 minutes

You play Jack, whose girlfriend Elizabeth has left for Mars for a position teaching anthropology. Constrained by cost, the only means of communication you have with her are the letters, and each takes three months to arrive. Three months is a long time...

The gameplay reminded me of First Draft of the Revolution, with the epistolary format and the way branching is achieved. 13 Minutes of Light introduces a wider story arc of political unrest and social inequality to contextualise the relationship, contrasting the content of the letters with snippets from a mockup of Reddit's /r/mars.

I particularly liked Elizabeth's development from anthropology graduate to (Spoiler - click to show)political leader. This game also plays on the uncertainty and tension that comes with such a restricted form of communication as letters: how do you know what the other party really means?

There are some bits which could have been improved to make 13 Minutes of Light more enjoyable, one of which was a feedback system I didn't understand. The game tells you which parts of the letter go off well, which don't and which are mysteriously relevant to the story. This felt out of place with the theme, given that we are told (repeatedly) how long letters take to be delivered - and whose point of view are these from, anyway?

13 Minutes of Light could maybe stand to be aesthetically more pleasing, but it still represents a solid example of epistolary branching IF.