Reviews by Draconis

Wrapping this year's reviews with one more murder mystery! This is another one in the vein of The Killings in Wasacona: you have a limited amount of time to solve the case, important actions all consume fractions of this time, and the clock controls various opportunities (e.g. a character might only be available in the evening, since she's asleep in the mornings). It's also a choice-based Twine piece.

Winter-Over, though, crosses this with a classic closed circle scenario: a murder occurred among the staff of an Antarctic research station in the middle of polar winter, and nobody will be able to enter or leave for ten days. Which means the killer must have been one of your coworkers…and until you can find and confront them, you're locked in with them, with no means of escape. The game is named after the "winter-over syndrome" that affects people wintering over in the research bases, which is definitely getting to the protagonist as the game progresses—managing your levels of stress is vital, and all the descriptions of rooms and characters in the game change as you become stressed, becoming increasingly paranoid.

The atmosphere is excellent, but I admit I struggled with the interface. The majority of the gameplay involves exploring the station, figuring out which people will be at which places at which times, and asking them questions. Questioning one person might unlock new dialogue with another—if Alice says her alibi was playing board games with Bob, then you can go talk to Bob to confirm or deny it, and then potentially go back to Alice to push her on the contradiction—and a convenient NOTES tab automatically keeps track of what you've learned about everyone's schedule.

Another part of the gameplay, though, involves doing various tasks (gardening, dishes, etc) with people to reduce your stress and improve your relationship with them. The better your relationship is, the more they'll tell you. But I got hopelessly stuck on this part for a while, because I thought I needed to find the appropriate NPC in the appropriate room for it—you don't, if you choose to do dishes, you can summon any NPC from anywhere in the station to do them with you, instead of only the one in the cafeteria.

(On the interface side, I also didn't love how often the game presented text one paragraph at a time with a "click to continue" link, instead of an actual choice or a full page of text to read. But that's not uncommon in Twine, it's just not my style, so I can't dock points for that.)

Once I figured out the interface, I quickly ruled out all but one of the suspects. But I kept searching, since I didn't have a motive, and I wasn't sure if the rest of the staff would accept my logic without one—and thus gave the killer the chance to try to silence me! Maybe I could have ended the case a few days earlier, but having that uncertainty, and getting attacked for it, was a high point. It felt like it was happening because of how I was playing the character, rather than just being scripted (even though, of course, it was), and immersed me well in the situation.

I also found the two twists (what (Spoiler - click to show)Victor was up to and what (Spoiler - click to show)Bob was up to) excellent, and it ended the story on a very high note. The ambience, and how it changed with my stress level, was great, and the logistical management was very fun. There are just a few things I wish had been different:
- I wish the stress-reducing activities tied into the logistics of the station more, instead of being able to summon NPCs anywhere at any time; this would probably need more activities in different rooms, but it would also play up that stress gets worse when you're alone
- The days and nights kind of blurred together, which I'm sure is intentional, but also meant I quickly lost track of how many days I had left; adding something like "three days until the authorities arrive" to the date display would have helped that, since I have no idea if I finished with one day left or with five (I very quickly forgot which date the deadline was)

Overall, though, a very fun mystery, and a good note to end on!

Big, unapologetic, lovingly-made tribute to the Enchanter games? Sign me up! There was basically no chance that I would actually dislike this game, and it delivered all the things I expected: bizarrely-specific spells and potions, magical solutions to mundane problems, weird contraptions with no apparent purpose, and a climactic battle against an evil being. I'm even going to indulge my own pride a bit and interpret some aspects as Scroll Thief references even if they probably aren't (a rule against first-year students using GNUSTO, an invisible barrier that stops you from carrying books out of the room, restrictions being put on teleportation spells to stop you from telefragging yourself or others).

So before I continue on with the review, please understand that my overall impression was very positive. I had a lot of fun with this game. The flavor and writing were very much on-point for the "Zorkian" aesthetic. And the abandoned shopping mall is a classic way to throw a bunch of puzzles together; it reminded me of Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, which also used that setting to great effect. I laughed out loud at the moment that uses Inform's default parser responses to comedic effect:

> The noogle spell (dress the target in an outfit perfect for his or her personality).
>
> > remove towel
> (first closing the room door)
> You take off the fluffy pink towel.
>
> > noogle me
> POOF! You are surrounded by a cloud of pink smoke. When it dissipates, you find that you are wearing the perfect outfit!
>
> > x outfit
> Which do you mean, the orange high tops, the yellow leggings, the pink shorts or the oversized T-shirt?

My main criticisms come in a couple different varieties. First, the polish issues: places where there are fun, sensible puzzles, but the implementation makes them less fun than they could be. Missing synonyms (a ROUND KNOB allows X KNOB but not X ROUND), overall lack of cluing (when seeing a gold circle, why would my first instinct be (Spoiler - click to show)PUT CIRCLE ON WALL to make a rectangle?), and sometimes just a general fiddliness that doesn't work well with the parser model (in one specific case, you have to RUN NORTH to beat a time limit when just NORTH isn't enough; anywhere else, even when under an even stricter time limit, RUN NORTH says you're in no hurry). I think another round or two of testing would have smoothed these all away, and the experience would have been better for it.

(Also in this category is "it wasn't a bug but it would have been nice" features. In the opening segment, a key NPC won't appear until you have all the equipment you need, but I didn't know what I was missing and had to wander the map randomly until I realized I hadn't examined a particular closet. A mention of what exactly I was missing would have helped. And a lot of things had limits on them that felt kind of artificial. Why does the DYSMU potion only have four doses? Is there really any difference, gameplay-wise, between "I messed up that sequence, I'll try again" and "I messed up that sequence, I'll restore and try again", except forcing the player to save often?)

Second, the map felt enormous, which sometimes served a purpose and sometimes didn't—do we really need four rooms with almost identical descriptions to express that this bridge is really long? In the main body of the game, there are tons of puzzles you can access immediately, but many of them can't be solved until you have items or spells from other areas. I think a bit more gating would have helped with this: puzzles that block off a whole section of the map until solved, instead of just giving you an item to apply elsewhere.

And third, is a problem that showed up a lot in the original Zork and Enchanter trilogies.

There come times when an author has clearly come up with a really awesome idea for a puzzle, where you need to take these specific steps to solve it. The machine room in Enchanter, the coal mine in Sorcerer, the featureless plain and treasure vault in Spellbreaker. They have a vision in their head of how the puzzle should play out, and all they have to do is guide the player along that path. This game had a few of these, most notably the strange machine in JCZorkmid.

Except, something else in the game would get in the way of that. So they add reasons you can't use that thing. The key moment of the coal mine in Sorcerer is using time travel and giving your spellbook to your alternate self.
- What if the player just drops the book to pick up later? Well, anything dropped in the coal mine is lost forever.
- What if they throw the book into the next room? There's a lake there, if you throw the spellbook it gets soaked and ruined.
- What if they memorize all the spells they need before doing this puzzle? Well you see the VILSTU potion has an odd side effect that erases all spells you've memorized when it wears off.

And so on and so on. And the problem is, it tends to become much more satisfying for the designer than the player, because the player can't solve the puzzle using their knowledge of how the world works—if they try to use their knowledge from elsewhere, diabolus ex machina stops them.

For an example from this game, there's a segment where you lose all your clothes, and can't continue until you can preserve your modesty somehow. Early on in the game, you learned a "magically create clothes" spell…but that's not the intended solution here, so the device that puts you in this segment also erases all your known spells and takes away your spell book, and you have to memorize them again afterward.

Now, restrictions like this aren't always a bad thing. The way the game keeps you from using the time travel spell in different places (the temporal rune) is brilliant and makes sense, and lets you learn the rule and then figure out how to use it. But some puzzles, like the strange machine, really didn't work for me, because it felt like it wasn't testing my ability to use the tools I was given—it was testing my ability to guess which specific solution the developer had in mind.

All in all, this game had a lot in common with BOSH. It was a big, sprawling puzzlefest with fantasy elements that didn't take itself too seriously but was also deeply, enjoyably earnest about it…and it could have crossed the line from "fun" to "amazing" if it just had a bit more polish, and maybe refactored a few of the trickier puzzles. I hope it gets that little bit more polish after the competition, and I look forward to what the implementor does next!

You are government agent Larch Faraji (they/them) of the Bureau of Strange Happenings, tasked with investigating aliens, ghosts, and other potentially paranormal goings-on and keeping the citizens of the United States safe from all manner of horrible things. And you'll get to that just as soon as you can answer your phone. You see, budget cuts have forced the Bureau out of its nice, cushy Washington DC headquarters into a hastily-converted department store on the edge of a swamp in Maryland. And the Bureau's new secretary has managed to lock your new phone inside your new desk, and the hex key has fallen down an air vent, and your boss is more interested in sixteenth-century alchemists than here-and-now logistics, and…

Structure-wise, this is an Inform parser game with some interesting quirks (the narration is entirely third-person, for example, and room headings are integrated into the descriptions), which is structured as a bureaucratic farce that quickly turns into lighthearted occult-horror pastiche. I'm pretty sure at least parts of it are riffing on The X-Files, which unfortunately I've never seen. It wears its colors on its sleeve, starting out with a very solid bout of participatory comedy—where the jokes are funnier because the game is making you an active part of them instead of just telling them to you—involving trying to answer that damn phone, which quickly leads you into a tunnel to four-dimensional hyperspace in order to access the abandoned laundromat next door.

It's a long game; I barely finished within the two hours allotted, with ample use of the built-in adaptive hints and David Welbourn's excellent walkthrough. And overall, I very much enjoyed it! My big complaint is that it's a game with a lot of potential, and I wish it had gotten more polish to let that potential show through.

For example, there were some truly excellent puzzles hampered by (in my opinion) just a little bit too much obscurity. I loved the puzzle involving a strange way of encoding numbers on a map (well, "map"), for example, and would have loved to solve it entirely myself, but the fact that the key clue says "love is all you need" instead of "you need to get to zero" (relying on the player's knowledge of tennis scoring, and—more importantly—the player connecting this clue to tennis in the first place) sent me to the hints. An important widget is hidden behind a tapestry, but there's no cue that you need to MOVE TAPESTRY to find it, and variants like TAKE TAPESTRY have (custom!) messages saying it shouldn't be moved.

The polish gets thinner and thinner as the game approaches its end, until when you finally have the vitally-important screwdriver to retrieve the vitally-important hex key, this happens:

> \> unscrew vent
> It is fixed in place.
>
> A phone is ringing somewhere to the west.
>
> \> open vent
> Faraji unscrews the four screws and removes the vent cover. They take the hex wrench from inside and put the cover back on.
>
> A phone is ringing somewhere to the west.

And with one particular hidden easter egg (which I won't spoil here), I'd figured out exactly what had to be done, but wasn't able to make the parser accept it until I resorted to emailing the author for help with the syntax.

I enjoyed this game a lot, and I think it's solidly done, with a great tone and very enjoyable puzzles. I just wish it had been given more time for testing and polishing, to keep little obstacles like this from getting in the player's way—because I would have enjoyed it even more if I didn't have to keep returning to the hints and/or walkthrough.

It should surprise nobody that I'm playing the murder mysteries first, but this one feels nicely different from the rest in a way that makes a good change of pace. It's more "police procedural" than "whodunit novel"; you're a rookie FBI agent sent out on your first case, to find the truth behind a series of murders in a small American town.

The overall gameplay consists of driving around the town, trying to budget your time appropriately as you interview suspects, investigate crime scenes, and search for clues. Further events unfold at particular times, so it's important to watch the clock—the university president is only available in the mornings and afternoons, not the evenings, for example, so you might lose your chance to talk to her before the killer strikes again. This is a model that, to nobody's surprise, I think is very effective, and the graphical map (green circles for places you can visit, black circles for places you've exhausted all the options from) helps a lot in keeping it from feeling like a tedious list to lawnmower through. It makes Wasacona feel more like a town and less like a bulleted list.

The gameplay within scenes is somewhat different. Your character has five stats, chosen at the beginning of the game: Perception (finding clues), Academics (interpreting clues), Physical (moving around), Intimidation (getting information from suspects), and Intuition (reading people and detecting lies). They have to add up to zero, so I played as an "Analyst": Perception +3, Academics +6, Physical -6, Intimidation -6, Intuition +3.

Clues to the mystery tend to be gated behind one or more of these skills. When this happens, you roll a virtual d20, add your stat, and see if you got an 11 or above. Sometimes you need several rolls in a row to get a result—for example, you might need Perception to find footprints, Academics to identify the type of shoe, and Intimidation to get access to a suspect's shoe to compare it against—and this added an interesting tension to the investigation. You always know when there's something to be found, but your character didn't find it, which adds an interesting tone to things.

(Notably, getting information from suspects is always Intimidation; the killer is still out there and still killing, so you don't have time to get a warrant to access information the legal way. Your only recourse is to browbeat suspects until they let something slip, and whether you succeed or fail, they'll never talk to you again after that. It definitely gives the game a particular tone.)

I enjoyed my runthrough—and convicted the killer in three of the four murders—but I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it as much if I wasn't an Analyst. I only found two Physical checks in the entire game, for example, while Perception came up constantly. In the last murder ((Spoiler - click to show)Leroy Jameson), I failed an Academics roll early on, after which I never had a chance to get any more evidence about him, so I'm left with an impression that I could very well have gotten screwed by the dice out of finding evidence on any of the cases.

Overall, I liked this game a lot! It plays up the tragedy of the deaths in a way that a lot of classic murder mysteries don't, and the "morale" system (you get universal bonuses to all your rolls if you do things that keep the horror of it all from demotivating you, like eating a nice meal or bonding with some locals) played into that nicely. The writing was straightforward, but served its purpose well:

The neighborhood is quiet, very quiet; or perhaps that is just you, holding your breath.

I just have two main complaints (beyond the dice rolls, which—whether I liked it or not—I think it's good that the game stuck to its guns on them).

One, I wish it had been polished a bit more. The overall effect is so nice that the rough edges really stand out. For example, every time I take an action in the morgue, I get greeted by the coroner all over again; and even after I've built what I consider a very solid case against a suspect, the player character reacts with shock to finding each new piece of evidence: "If [NAME] was [new evidence], could he also be the killer?" Well, I certainly hope so, given that I've already arrested him for it!

Two, the walkthrough attached to the game shows how to get the best ending, but I have no idea how you could accomplish that without knowing the solution in advance. To prevent one of the murders, for example, you have to be patrolling in the right part of the city at the right time of night, ignoring the game unsubtly saying "you now get -3 to all rolls until you sleep". The only reason to do that (that I can tell, at least) is that you played it before and got the 911 call from that time and place.

All in all, though, I enjoyed this quite a lot, and I really hope the author continues to make more works in this vein.

The opening to this game tells you exactly what you're getting into: a good, classic cyberpunk heist, where a shady benefactor has hired you to do one last job before retirement, stealing some data from a big corporation and probably getting betrayed by the sponsor in the process. It wears its concept on its sleeve, and fortunately, it's a concept that I'm very much into.

It's a parser game written in Gamefic, a system I have no experience with (but want to look into now), and in general the system is very smooth to work with. I do wish it had a map or some sort of display of available directions, since I often found myself getting lost in the very small map, but my overall impression of the interface is positive.

The gameplay generally involves two things: hacking into devices, and "get X use X" puzzles. The hacking minigame is great fun, though I really wish it had been explained in the game itself instead of in the readme (I would _not_ have figured out the "grid" version without it), and the puzzles feel appropriately cyberpunk even when they're straightforward (scan a guy to find out what car is his, hack the car alarm to make him leave his post).

There are also some notable highlights in the writing, where the unadorned text conveys its point in a way that grand paragraphs probably wouldn't.

> \> get pencil
>
> You take the pencil.
>
> As you stand back upright, something else catches your attention from the corner of your eye.
>
> There's a dead body behind the desk.

Or, talking to your sponsor about another mercenary who was hired to take out the guards:

> "I'm surprised he was able to do that much. I broke his cover with a simple ID check."
>
> "Yeah, he wasn't too happy about that. You better hope you don't bump into him on the street."
>
> "How does he know I did it?"
>
> "I told him."

The twist was eminently predictable, but it's a staple of the genre for a reason, and it still felt good to know exactly what to do when it happened (the (Spoiler - click to show)faraday cage being nicely foreshadowed).

That said, there were some negatives too. In particular, typos or mistaken commands use up a turn, which is extremely aggravating when there's visible time pressure. And the hacking minigames are never explained in the game itself, only in the documentation. There were some other minor things that didn't really cause issues, but felt unpolished: the news articles on the TV, for example, are displayed in a random order, which is weird when some of them are meant to be followups to earlier ones.

The chain of puzzles also means there's generally only one thing you can do at a time, which means the start of the game involves a lot of fumbling around without guidance on where you need to go. The map isn't huge, so this isn't especially aggravating, but it did turn a tense in-medias-res start into a bit of a slog until I figured out which unmarked door would get me to the one device I could actually hack.

I had far too much fun with the "word" minigame, but found the other one tedious rather than fun—is there any strategy to it beyond checking every room to find the numbers you need? And the cyberware upgrade is nice, but you can access it right away at the beginning without solving any puzzles, hacking any devices, or facing any obstacles first, and there's no cost to it, so it doesn't really fit into the puzzle structure of the game. Putting a separate puzzle in front of that (maybe you don't have the money for it but can hack someone's device in the food court to steal what you need?) would help with all of these problems at once.

(I also found that device kind of confusing, because it completely trivializes the word puzzles, but in an unfun way—it lets you solve it by trying AAAAAA, BBBBBB, CCCCCC, and so on, but you have to do it by hand, which is just tedious.)

But I criticize because I want the game to be better, not because I didn't like it! Overall, this was a simple game, but it met all my expectations and I had a lot of fun with it. It's no grand work of literature, but neither are most of the things I write: it felt like it was done by someone who really loves the cyberpunk genre, and that elevated simple puzzles into a really enjoyable way to spend an hour.

This seems like a game tailored precisely for me. It's vampires planning a heist (though to assassinate someone rather than steal from them). Those are, like, my two favorite movie genres. So I went into it with high hopes.

And overall, those hopes were met! It also has numerous jokes about the life of a grad student and Jeppson's Malört, just to fine-tune it further. I'm pretty sure the author is a fan of Vampire: the Masquerade (and/or Vampire: the Requiem), given the use of terms like "sire" and "fledgling", but that's far from a complaint, coming from me, and the prose tends to get into the sort of overwrought that feels grandly operatic to me rather than tediously purple:

You settle into your own flesh, instantly delivered back into the hands of sentience. Synapses fire in reticulated order. Until this moment, you hadn't realized how little your own thoughts had been making sense. They'd been half-formed gestures at ideation, a feverish delirium. At least it's over now. You can think again.

The meeting room Lynette brings you to is oddly homey. It reminds you of the psychologists' offices at the student counseling center. Sterile enough to be a clinician's office, but dressed up with undefined trappings of home. It reminded you of when you were little, and you might catch a bug in a jar - putting a stick and a leaf in along with it to emulate its natural habitat.

He had to show you off, of course. You were no different to him than the Rolex on his wrist.

I loved the little asides about how a stake to the heart doesn't actually do anything special to vampires, a stake to the heart kills basically anything, vampires aren't special—it's a bit of a joke in the VtM community that vampires are less vulnerable to staking than humans, because it paralyzes a vampire but invariably kills living people—and Fiia's perspective was generally a delight. The premise even got me to actually read the handbook, which is a tall ask before the author has really earned my attention. (I was so sure that the Tailor being "alive and well" was a clue that vampires aren't actually undead in this world.)

Unfortunately, there were some serious speedbumps to my enjoyment that kept jarring me out of the story.

One, there are frequent tense changes. The narration switches from present to past tense and back again between paragraphs with no obvious rhyme or reason, and it got annoyingly distracting. Two, there were occasionally moments I think must have been straight-up glitches, where it switches to a different character's narration mid-paragraph with no indication (in my case, from Fiia's to Lynette's). And three, the character portraits are nice, but with only one exception they seem to exclusively show the character you chose at the beginning, which gets old quickly—they take up a lot of the screen for not much benefit.

Beyond that, I felt like there was very little for me to actually do in the story—there were some choices, but generally there were just five to ten "click to continue" links on a page, eventually leading to another page with more of them. I'm not opposed to dynamic fiction, but the constant links started to feel tedious, and in some cases, the game told me my choices didn't matter when they actually did (!), which feels like a significant no-no. (It said my choices would generally only affect the order of things, not which things happened, but after I examined the thermos first I could never go back and examine the blanket.)

Instead of all the "the last word of each sentence is a link to show the next one" things, I would have liked to make some insignificant choices at least. Things where I can characterize "my" Fiia, where it might not change the plot but it makes me think about how I want to play this. Or, barring that, just to see a whole screen at a time instead of clicking a dozen times to fill the screen.

On the flipside, some of the criticisms I've seen in other reviews didn't really strike me as problems. Some readers said Jeppson didn't strike them as especially evil, but showing Fiia's trauma flashbacks to when he flayed a subordinate alive in front of her just to show her the price of disobedience seemed very effective at changing that. (Maybe if you don't play Fiia those don't show up?) And there was one moment I especially loved but haven't seen discussed before: the letter Jeppson writes to the hunters about wanting Fiia back.

In the letter, he promises not to take any sort of revenge, if Fiia's captors either return her, or show proof that she was destroyed. That little note felt vitally important. To me, that showed that Jeppson doesn't care about Fiia; he cares about plugging an information leak. He doesn't care if she's dead, as long as she's not in his enemies' hands. To me that was the moment that established that Jeppson's lovebombing Fiia was a method of control rather than any actual affection, and I think it was very effective at it.

There were a few other complaints—seriously, these people are professionals but they couldn't tell blood from paint, find an MFA student in a university directory, or figure out why an oil painter would have turpentine on hand?—but they're small by comparison. Overall, I greatly enjoyed the story and the characters, I just wish it had gone through a bit more editing to improve the actual experience of reading it.

The classic setup for a mystery is a murder, but it can also be fun to do a bit of lower-stakes problem-solving, too. In this case, the beer in the local pub has all gone bad, and it falls to you to figure out why. Speaking personally, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a good beer and "something really bad, rotten, just all wrong", but to the protagonist this is very important.

Searching through the pub, you find some clues, and the supernatural elements build in a very effective way; I loved the vignettes with the fridge and the cellar, for example. And then you're suddenly experiencing the moment of the ghost's death, and have to prevent it. The prose is very effective and conveys the mood without going purple, and the little moments of "wait, what's happening" were a definite high point. I also liked how the search for clues was implemented thoroughly but dully, to contrast the mundane investigation you've been tasked with against the unexplainable interruptions.

Beyond that, though, it didn't quite manage to stick the landing, for me. Preventing a ghost's death in the past is a great hook for a puzzle, but the puzzle itself ((Spoiler - click to show)pick up object, take it to room) felt underwhelming by comparison, and some aspects (like looping through the scene exactly three times, no more) felt more like contrivances than mysteries. There's also a bit of an over-reliance on "You can see X here" when I think custom-written paragraphs would have provided more flavor.

The game also presents an ASK/TELL conversation system with a TOPICS command, but TOPICS always tells you the same thing (rather than adapting to what's happened), and most things I tried to ASK/TELL about got default responses, which left me playing guess-the-noun (and finding the whole process a bit unsatisfying). I think a TALK TO command might have worked better here, or a choice-based conversation system; as it stands, I got somewhat bogged down in a comparatively uninteresting part of the game.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and the bait-and-switch in the first part is very well orchestrated. I just would have liked the standard Inform mechanics to get out of my way a little more and stop clouding the well-written prose.

I loved the concept of this one, but would have liked a bit more thorough implementation.

The idea is that there are two things in front of you: something, and another thing. But you're in a place where names—in fact, nouns in general—don't exist. Can you figure out what these two things are, and use them to escape?

This is an absolutely delightful idea, and something that can only really work in a text format. And WNIEN executes it well! The process of piecing together these two things didn't take long, which meant the concept didn't wear out its welcome, but also left me wanting more. Once I'd established that (Spoiler - click to show)one was portable and the other wasn't, I tried (Spoiler - click to show)putting one on the other, and that was that.

With only two nouns in the game, it also felt especially bad to hit an unimplemented verb. This feels like a situation that lives or dies by how many absurd verbs it includes, and on that front, I was left somewhat wanting.

Still, this is a great idea for a game, I enjoyed it as the little amuse-bouche it was, and I really hope to see more works in this vein, that leverage the medium of interactive text for something that really couldn't possibly work any other way.