Reviews by namekuseijin

after goat simulator, and bread simulator, welcome to a new low for mankind.

the best I've played is actually Hulk Handsome's Pee Simulator. really, it's educative.

nuff said.

I got up to this:

It’s Music Duck’s biggest guitar. An enormous guitar for an enormous duck.

and the buzzing from my dumb-o-meter was too much. perhaps I should've smoked a joint...

(Spoiler - click to show)My garbage is sleeping and dreaming about the end of the world.

really, you should play it. Any game with a line like that is worth its 10 seconds of fame...

not really, but it comes to mind. There's far more prose than old Scott Adams whackyness, but that's just because we have these fucking huge cloud digital storages these days, you see, and so we should fill them with whatever crap we can and we do. But in essence, it is still 8-bits wonkyness for wonkyness sake, despite all the (bad) prose. It also has pictures, yay!

after less than 2 minutes of mindless clicking, I got to an ending in this short hypertext CYAO:


(Spoiler - click to show)
He walks with slow purpose into the sea.

You continue on with your quest and eventually solve the mystery of the Mysterious Shadows of Skullshadow Island. Congratulations! The town throws a parade, which eases the pain of your father’s loss, and you glide through life with relative ease and contentment, dwelling not on your brother’s bones asleep in the murky bed of Twilight Bay.



it's so poor and pointless that even that hinting at a scrap of a plot feels useless...

Let's face it what this really is, ok? This guy has a website shockfull with blinking ads and gossip links, so he should put on some content to go along, right? Let it be an 8-bit text adventure CYAO with pictures for a change... and the depressing thing is that I'm not actually sure it is less degrading than playing other such short pieces of shrimp and being presented a patreon link at the end.

ah, yes. let's hurrah for the comeback of commercial IF, a time when people ask how to monetize on new futile pieces of crap modeled after the most atrociously bad from the 80s before even attempting to write it...

ok,so this is from a speed-if, so it should be taken lightly. But it's not really interactive fiction, just your usual casual web game that happens to be presented in text. A bare excuse for a plot barely manages to disguise it.

anyway, it's just a matter of correctly assembling the damn bench, resorting to whatever materials you have available to you and in the right order, perhaps even ripping parts from other materials.

but why all the efforts? I couldn't find any reason in the thin plot to bother and this is what makes this apart from good puzzlefeasts.

This is a short static fiction disguising as "interactive fiction". It draws inspiration for its zany setting from many sources, including HHGG and Toy Story. It lies somewhere between a lame spoof and a nice try. I panicked and no life will come out of it.

If you want a far better short scifi story, try Asimov's The Last Question which sports a similar ending. Its only means of interaction is flipping pages, and that should feel about as exciting as clicking links.

This is a thoroughly delightful IF that is at times charming, amusing, funny and horrific, all the while being quite a straightforward, polite and extremely polished game. I started playing it last weekend and finally finished it. I don't know how I've missed it all these years!

In fact, I do. When it first came out of IFComp 2006, by some guy named Edgar O. Weyrd, I wasn't too keen on the title or the unknown author. Then, I played for a very short while and wasn't too hot on the narrator's voice and quite clueless as to the purpose of the game. It seemed you could do nothing but wander around and have a few notes written in your notebook. So, I dropped it.

Now, the very first thing I did this time around, besides learning it to be by Plotkin, was to take a careful look at that subtitle right there: A Cozy Mansion Mystery in the Making. I did not notice it my first time around and it makes things a lot clearer.

Here's how this bright IF opens up:


Grey gravel crunches in the drive. Grey windows retreat behind wrought-iron balcony rails. Grey skies press down over the looming, shadowy edifice.

You /do/ enjoy your job, but the decor can become a /bit much/ sometimes. You shall hope that the inside of this mansion proves to be cheerier.


Let me tell you right away: the narrator as pictured above is one of the most effective I've ever seen in parser IF. It's voice will stick in your head. It's able to convey your surroundings with the same ease as it strongly characterizes the PC all along, besides bringing your attention to the important points in the narrative. Yet, when I first played, somehow I was under the wrong impression that it was about some home decor designer abated by the bad weather and bad conditions of the old house. :D I don't know if it was intentional, but it can be interpreted that way at first. This time around, I took a more thourough view of my surroundings and the protagonist and got a far grimmer picture of what was really happening.

Then, as I wander around the house, taking notes on this and that and commenting upon the decor, some unexplainable things begin to happen. Doors open and close, parts of the house spin, the floor comes to life and even some portcullis appears out of nowhere. Spooky, huh? It really is a cozy mansion mistery story after all, but with one hell of a twist.

The game is divided in two parts: exploration of the mansion and the "solving" the cozy mistery proper.

The mansion is in itself a puzzle: initially, only a few rooms are open and many doors closed so your puzzle away how to open them. The fact that the protagonist seems unable or unwilling to touch on things, you'll learn other ways to open the doors. This is done by simply going around, trying different paths. Passing under some kinds of archways or doorways will produce different effects on how the house "sees" itself. Understanding how to open the different regions of the house is the puzzle and it is highly engrossing and fun.

So, besides being a traditional cozy mistery story, it's also a traditional explorative text-adventure with puzzle-solving and a few treasures to hunt after. But it doesn't feel that way, it takes those genres and bends and distorts them until something very unique came up. While there is the exploration of a map, the map is not huge, it's not overly difficult walking around it. The difficult bit is observing the effects your paths produce. But, ultimately, even an unobservant player should eventually unlock all regions by simply traversing all possible paths. Sounds boring, so, yes, be observant and read all the notes. After you explore all the map, all doors are open and the protagonist finds the "treasure", which fits just nicely in the inventory and also makes it even more clear the nature of the protagonist.

Then comes the second part, when the "guests" arrive at the mansion. If you haven't figured out the identity of the protagonist so far, the way the narrator projects the doings of the many NPCs to the future should make it clear that the protagonist sees all their actions from out of time. Your task it to figure out their intentions and connect each one to the wheres and whens around the mansion. This last part plays sort of like Clue, but in an immensely more narrative-focused and fun way. The notes in particular are striking, resembling versing couplets from Edward Gorey, I guess.

After that, your job here is done.

So, this was my review of a very enjoyable piece of parser IF that is traditional and novel at the same time and engaging and puzzling without being overly difficult nor terribly long. It's just the right size. It's also polite in the cruelty scale and you can't get stuck or be put in an unwinnable state. Give it a spin and you won't be sorry.



Now that that is over, my spoilery opinions, be warned.

----------
(Spoiler - click to show)
You are the grimm reaper. Yeah, he does seem to have an eye for decor like one woldn't normally associate with him, but given he's so restless going around reaping the souls of mortals, one can't blame him for having some hobby, even if mildly appreciating the decor in the places he visits. It may be an old stone and pipes mansion, but at least the wallpaper is bearable enough.

His nature explains why the houses reacts to his presence: he's a supernatural being, a kind of a ghost bound to earth under perpetual grey skies, a poltergeist disturbing doors.

It also explains why he sees a portcullis in the middle of the foyer or the actors in the future or in all rooms: he sees all of it out of time, all at once - how it was in the past, how it is today. That's also why intentions look like a frozen explosion.

It seems the dual nature of the game got mixed reviews: some liked only the first part, others hated it but enjoyed the latter part. I enjoyed it throughout. I can't see how some likened the first part to a maze. Really? It's just walking around rooms, not even that many. Could it that the mention of the novel Maze in the About page did it for them? By the way, while certainly influenced by some of those, this is really one of a kind. Is it right that Plotkin came up with a fairly novel anagram for Edward Gorey? never heard of him, guess he had less exposure than Dr. Seuss.

I can see that people might get shocked and disturbed at scenes such as this:

Little girl with silver bell / Lost it down the garden well
Little girl she followed after / Trailing silver bubbling laughter

But the reaper is no murderer. He merely sees intentions and collect their souls after they themselves take their foolish steps towards their departure.

I though the finale to be in the same tone as the rest of the work:


Which brings this assignment to a timely, if somewhat exhausting, close. No rest for the messenger, of course. The next pack of cards is already being shuffled, and their road has yet to be paved.


not exhausting at all, very fun, very worthwhile. Yeah, I can see how achieving this level of polish might be exhausting for the game designer, but quite the banquet to guests of the house... delightful

This was unexpectedly fine. After Investigative Journalism, I already place this author among some of the best from the twine community. should try other titles from her.

This is a more human retelling of Sailormoon, Powerpuff Girls and other anime inspired superpower girl teams. It's quite short, the narrative intermingled with flashbacks, from today to yesterday, and the best text layout I've ever witnessed on mobile.

There's a choice interface that you have to exhaust through. They are presented as a regular turn-based JRPG combat menu. Until almost to the end, when that breaks apart like most things in real life.

enjoyable, but perhaps lacking a bit more superpower punch.

Aaron A. Reed is one of a very select few individuals who know and fully embrace the narrative oportunities afforded by interactive fiction. He's one of the few to have seen in the media an oportunity for more than puerile treasure hunting romps or plain boring fantasy escapism. Here's an IF that poses as mild entertainment but features some beefy political statements behind curtains. But let's take a moment at that as the IF begins reeling.

You're given the opportunity to play as a disillusioned big hollywood studio staffer willing to hit the spotlights big time. Your very first task is to pitch your next project to your current employer, Lloyd Crohan, an irascible businessman not easily impressed. It seems no ammount of passion, choices or replays you put into the pitch gets his attention at all. Which is good, because this episode is what finally gets you to quit and to roll out a new hollywood studio of your own.

This is the fifties, an era where the golden age of Hollywood from the forties was beginning to wane, old stars to sink in drugs, TV was starting to eat away audiences and commie paranoia was widespread. A tough time to be a hollywood visionary and yet a time that started seeing the blossoming of the whole indie movie scene.

In this IF you'll go through the whole process of going from a sketch of a movie, to scripting, shooting, post-production and finally releasing it. You'll hire directors, actors, scriptwriters or whatever you need to get it to the screens. Sounds kinda crappy? You know, like one of those myriads of generic resource management games that pop up everywhere from phones to PCs? Far from it. True, at it's core, that's what your fully realized protagonist is trying to accomplish. Except you go through it not by pushing buttons or by boring inventory management but by essentially reading a novel - a finely crafted and thoughroughly engaging one at that - and making your way through the tough decisions and challenges presented to you in the usual Choice of Games bottom links interface.

Aside from choices, there's also much of that character customizing we've grow used to from CoG, including all those gender choices. I've said it before: I prefer fully fleshed out characters with their own traits, but it's a minor gripe. Most characters are not customizable, only those the protagonist may or may not develop a crush onto. Given the setting, Hollywood in the 50's, having occasional gay characters struggling to have a private life away from public scrutinization is to be expected.

Other choices of customization develop a more fully fledged character towards the way how you deal with people, by being harsher or softer, more bossy or more gentlemany and so on. They shape how stats develop and may lead to unexpected plot twists. All of these choices are never presented in an out-of-world fashion that seems to interrupt the flow of the narrative, on the contrary, they simply follow from the current plot point, nicely integrated in a brief scene where the protagonist mulls over how to deal with a request from others.

Writing is top-notch, quality prose well employed in delineating character traits and courses of action when presented with tough decisions. The plot is gripping, with quite a few twists and plenty of drama, commedy, horror and romance involving quite a charming cast of characters. In fact, this is a game about movies written most likely by a huge movie fan, well researched, fully to grips with the language of cinema and with classic movie tropes. Some scenes in the narrative look straight out of some of those movies, yet are never lacking in originality. In fact, Aaron seemed to hint not only at them, but at classic IF too: a whole scene plays like an old treasure hunting text-adventure (minus the parser) and the magazine that influenced Adam Cadre's Photopia is here too.

Now, let's get to the real meet of the game, a political statement of sorts. Somewhere along all your decisions, you'll meet quite a few communists and will learn about how they're being prosecuted at the time by congressmen for anti-american behaviour. This is part of USA's history of course and very factual. Then, (Spoiler - click to show)you'll eventually be summoned to Court and there congressman Creed will lambast you and those of your brethren - all the small indie companies that took from large the studios the right to be screened in large movie exhibition chains - as losers, anti-americans who couldn't get along with the real deal of large corporates, and commies. Rings a bell? Yep, thought so: this is gamergate all over again and Aaron indeed makes a very good job of drawing parallels between the paranoia then and now, between indie B-movie makers and indie game developers subject to derision for their beliefs. So, the whole game comes to this crucial moment and it is a marvel to behold by itself. How it concludes is up to your morals.

Once this is over with, you get your movie released. Will it be a success, a failure or something in between? That's where all your efforts as a game player rest.

I'll conclude by saying I've never been a huge fan of CYOA and CoG's brethren. As a fan of parser IF the lack of immediate agency, of being there in the fictional world and messing with it at my own pace, is not quite my cup of tea. This one was remarkably engaging, though. The storytelling, prose and characters - specially Fish, so alive - got me hooked, the decisions were engaging and puzzling enough to me to keep me from merely tapping away any of of those choices and just read next - which is how I inadvertedly come to play most lesser CoG and twine games. I guess the fact that this is a story about humans - so full of sweat and joy and tears, rather than the usual vampires, skeletons in suits, ninjas and aliens that are the bread and butter of the genre - made the trick to me. The curtains are drawn, the lights are lit and I clap my hands vigorously. well done. I'm willing to replay it at least once, there are quite a few secrets and paths to uncover.

This relatively short CYOA of sorts was really cheap last year on the PS4, so I picked it up for closer inspection. Does it even deserve to be on ifdb? I believe it does.

Polygon's kinda spoilt review covers it much better than I can, so I'll only go on about what makes this apart or close to text-only IF.

Aside from using a retro pixelized interface for presentation and interface, this is a pretty heavy text game. Blocky pixels are immense so that whatever it might convey by graphics alone is kinda lost - thankfully, the text is a lot more precise. The real reason for using it, I guess, is so that you don't have to type "go direction" or "examine this" or "take that", because that's all you do in the game and with this presentation it can be done with a gamepad rather than keyboard.

Anyway, it relies heavily on the much abused amnesic trope, but does a good job of making a kind of inverted CYOA to the last consequences. Creepy, but not quite horror, there's no combat at all and no cheap horror tricks. It plays with your mind on the choices you made. Good game.