Ratings and Reviews by namekuseijin

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.

A short but incredibly polished remake of Galatea featuring Snow White and you as the huntsman. This is the zeitgeist of parser conversation IF and it works marvels.

This is also Snow White retold, as we're presented to a very different Snow, grim like the Grimm Bros couldn't quite paint it. It's incredibly effective.

In conversation IF we don't set out to go walking to explore a region and conquer its secrets, no, we set out to walk down a conversation tree to explore characters' motives and secrets. When it's as engaging as here, it feels very rewarding.

While very original in its twisted plotting, once you know its secrets, replay value is a bit lowered. But getting a "good" ending can be tough, as it depends on both unveiling secrets and how well you steer the conversation. Besides quite a few actions you need to take. BTW, the conversation system works by regular expression pattern matching and thus is very easy to type out what you want. I also recommend typing CREDITS or ABOUT to see the options. And turning off tutorial mode.

I can't thank the authors enough for this.

I didn't know about this one until quite recently and was positively surprised to realize it's not just Zarf's easiest IF so far as it's also a good short story on its own: strong characterization and a puzzling narrative in the form of an unexplained ouroboros.

At the outset, it looks like a plain old-style text-adventure - despite the polished prose and implementation. It features a farmer going on an adventure after his lost axe. It's pretty straightforward and polite, the narrative voice of the protagonist giving hints of what to do next. Some actions may look like puzzles, but they don't demand much and I don't quite consider them as such. Compass directions in the game are pretty pointless except at one point.

See, our farmer is a bit of a superstitious guy given to bouts of imaginative speculation and often draws parallels between his deeds as he goes and past stories he's read on an old book of folk tales handed down to him by the Reverend Pearson. As his quest reaches the end when he finds an old axe-head, a subtle change of perspective takes place. Here the story shifts and meets its self-fulfilling ouroboros status that left some head-scratching. I enjoyed it.

As far as I can tell (Spoiler - click to show)the PC has always been the old reverend, wandering through the woods like a lost Dante, living his reveries as he pictures the simpler days of the past beforing commiting them to his tales book...