Reviews by namekuseijin

As far as I understand it, this guy doesn't seem to enjoy IF and IF play mechanics. So he writes a bunch of whiny IF to get his point across. Guess I should try that out with twine.

Anyway, while his pee-simulator was kind of fun (2 stars for bringing me a LOL), this one shall receive just a lone star, because while it starts out great and promising (as in fine prose and setting) it quickly turns to a mediocre and lame ending.

This is a short hypertext story with bits of stats thrown in to make you feel like you're accomplishing more than just turning pages. It's already 1 star in my book for not being IF proper, but I'll reward an extra star for the fine prose.

As for the story itself, it's about a junkie seemingly getting into horsebreeding. The narrative initially seems to hint at a delusional crackhead going nuts and losing all in his life while his "horse" grows steady. But after building up tension for long, in the gran finale, the competition, he then (Spoiler - click to show)kills the horse and that's about it. He wins, no further explanation.

I thought the competition would be (Spoiler - click to show)a kind of setup by government officials to detox the population of delusional crackheads by making them face their vices and combating them (the horse then being a token for the crackhead delusions), and indeed one may read the finale like a parable of sorts, but nothing in the text makes it clear cut and I may just be reading my own preferred ending.

in short, the finale felt rushed and there's really no significant choices and the stats seem to have no effect. It's a work of static fiction in small chapters for tinyscreen/twitter readers, not IF.

blame Emily Short for this review. She was the one to recommend this.

Our kind host over at intfiction has provided a fine and fully working textbook example of an old-style fantasy text-adventure in Twine. It plays precisely like any other work in the genre, except it doesn't require a parser, relying solely on links and variable state. You have inventory management, an auto-map feature, score and more.

It avoids the usual problem with links in IF -- that it doesn't require much thought to mindlessly click your way through the story -- admirably: there simply are far more links than what really matters. Most of them are just scenery bits that help with characterization and setting, but are not essential to get through.

Hallowmoor is Halloween-themed and features a spirit protagonist trying to get back to the land of the living. You learn of a dark potion that should grant this wish if only drank in a particular date, which just happens to coincide with a battle between the skeleton army and the sisterhood of witches. You initially inhabit one of the skeletons thanks to the Specter Shift skill and it's up to you to go in and explore Hallowmoor Castle, the HQ's of the witches.

This is a honest interactive fiction, not some barely interactive experiment in reader depreciation or poetry. It proves that Twine is no excuse for plain hypertext.

Genuinely nice. Presentation is fine too.

I just question: why, why clicking links when I could just read it all in a single page? what gain is there in this clicking and short bursts of text obsession in this age?

it inspires me a haiku


corvidia
somewhere high up there
jays rule the moon


hope it's not too long to the twitter gen...

Seriously, can Porpentine write real prose for a change rather than submitting players to click away through hundreds of irrelevant small twitter posts depicting an essentialy linear plot? Are readers these days really these obsessive compulsive clickers/touchscreeners? Is it fear of paragraphs and pages of text? clicking to reveal more text doesn't make it *interactive* fiction.

at least this one got a small plot... it still doesn't feel like a game, even a repetitive arcade button-basher with all that nervous clicking...

This is a hypertext poetic experiment as far as I can tell. You click away through it until you feel the all the glitter pounding in your veins. yeah

summing up: a stinker trying to pass for IF

A gripping short horror story in Lovecraftian tradition that is not interactive at all. It's not even barely interactive like the web-CYOA with their pseudo choices, being pretty linear. So here I am, at IFDB reviewing a little nice piece of fiction that offers no choice nor interaction at all. I'm giving it 1 extra star only because the story is interesting, but if you want a better Lovecraft setting with tons of interaction you'd be better off with Anchorhead, The King of Shreds and Patches, Ecdysis and many others...

I'd really want to read it on my Kindle as a straightforward ebook. Because it's no more interactive than if I were to read Huckleberry Finn chapters in no particular order.

This "interactive fiction" fad for smartphones should go. It's making people crazy on their assumptions. I feel like people don't like to read anymore, they are just compulsive touch-screeners and mouse-clickers anxious for the next brief twitter message... so, breaking up a short (nowadays too long) story in clickable chunks is, like, the best thing ever...

I tried really hard, because at least this one feels a bit like a traditional CYOA. But then, the prose consists of nothing but foul mouth ramblings against a clichéd student's life, boring and poor.

You want far better and more interesting college (real) games? Try Ditch Day Drifter or Kissing the Buddha's Feet.

yeah, they are most likely not like college real life. Probably because real life sucks and is very uninteresting for a game. Who wants to play (or read) a depressive ranting about how college life is so boring and sucks so much?!

Not fiction nor interactive -- other than clicking links to get more text displayed. This is not even CYOA: what choice is there? reading the poem out of order?

I seriously believe hypertext authors should start their own HTDB...

*edit*
I gave it a second chance. It's actually pretty good in using the static nature of hypertext to psychologically constrain the player the way the mean plot demands. The plot is intriguing enough, though obviously derivative of 2001's HAL which in turn influenced Portal's GLaDOS. There's also a hint of Battlestar Galactica new series...

that said, it's mean and nasty for no other purpose than being mean and nasty. didn't care to submit to this fetishism and go through to the end.

Fine prose, a real story with locations and characters. I'm really impressed to see a web-CYOA handle it as gracefully as a traditional parser-based IF, so I'm giving it four stars.

The story is by itself gripping. Still into it...