Reviews by namekuseijin
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IF Visionary, January 22, 2016Aaron 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.
Galatea Retold, January 17, 2016A 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.
a short metacircular IF, January 13, 2016I 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...
thought-provoking metaphor for investigative journalism, January 10, 2016Very good twine IF about investigative journalism disguised as a detective game in search for The News. Lavish presentation in 50's style radio news, a compelling story and solid prose. Interactions are about delving deeper into the story and places, looking for clues of the missing news monster. In between, sarcastic commentary about the meaning of life and the deeds of our protagonist by the game narrator, the very news announcer back at the radio station...
It's very good to see once in a while a very bright and polished IF out of the dozens of halfsketched static fiction propaganda or short diary entries that seem to be the bread and butter of the twine community...
yet another SJW game FTW, January 10, 2016just as the title says, the author goes to a game jam and sees almost no woman and, to make it worse, all of them are colorless. What a bummer! I hope she never goes to a game convention in japan and only sees japanese otakus and cosplayer women in bare suits. At least they got a shade of color, yellow.
really, just get on line behind all the genderbender complainers that make up IF scene these days...
story is dumb and interaction is "flip paragraph", that's a 1 star to me
sinful bastard til the end, January 9, 2016This game is a spoof of the raif community in the 90's. It draws from Curses, Jigsaw and the classic Roger Sorolla article Crimes Against Mimesis, as seen here:
http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/iftheorybook.pdf
despite building upon these sources, it's a whole short game on itself. Indeed the goal of the game is to commit some sins against mimesis, as observed by an ever watchful demon (or should it be a unix daemon?). Some fourth wall breaking jokes are at place and a few red herrings abound.
Not a difficult game, pretty straightforward fun for an IF beginner, even if unaware of all the context.
creepy little adventure, January 7, 20163 kids find some ancient ruins and one of them, you, is unwillingly set to explore it. Too bad it is pitch black and you might be eaten by a grue.
This is a Twine game paying homage to Zork and the Enchanter trilogy, that were incredibly popular text adventure games back in the 80's. Inurashii did a good job of emulating traditional parser-like gameplay in a hypertext setting - including moving around, and even featuring one puzzle!
The writing is very good and is able to stir a lot of tension in that constrained environment, where you're fighting to keep whatever light sources you may find lit until help arrives - or else that sinister zorkian presence in the dark might eat you right away. Worthy of note is that the author seems to set the Zork universe sometime in our future and magic is possibly technology.
too short, but (Spoiler - click to show)At least you got a souvenir (perhaps a zorkmid)
interactive haiku, January 6, 2016Or almost it, as the prose is pretty economic and the game very short.
I have mixed feelings about this one. The story and setting are as fascinating as any japanese youkai stories, the writing goes through pains to emulate that archaic japanese narrative style. Thumbs up.
However, I fear Inform was not the right tool here: this clearly is a fairly linear twine game in disguise. The action is simply typing in the "advance" link or typing the "examine thing" links. There're no puzzles but the puzzling short story. So, the interaction is pretty much just a glorified "next paragraph, please" link, like much interactive fiction these days.
I don't want to bash it because I see good will here and I liked the story. Go read it and have a blast...
Grunk as a beginner IF player, January 3, 2016I believe Lost Pig is the ultimate IF for beginners. When you're new to it, you could care less for story, setting, good prose or well rounded characters: all of that takes second place to just poking around and reading the fun responses to your inconsequential actions, even as senseless and puerile actions such as taking the moon. IF Beginners love to act like a dumbass of sorts and Grunk indeed is a spot-on character depicting just that level of caveman thinking intelligent people seem to resort to when first confronted with IF. As satire, Lost Pig works great. As a game, it's a highly polished short title, a zanny first foray into IF.
Some think it helps draw people into IF and kind of glorify it. I don't think the kind of people who immenselly enjoyed all of its well implemented whackyness around a simple goal would be willing to play a more serious IF title where you're required to behave and think as the protagonist would and, thus, being told that most of your senseless actions don't work as that first title promised. Thus, the one IF marvel for short-attention-span people who'll never come back for more.
a 2-star is born, January 3, 2016This is a "game" about birthing a child, or many children, perhaps twins, perhaps lots of curbs. I'll never know, because this anti-cesarean piece of propaganda employs such generic prose that you're never too sure of anything - as far as I know, this could be about a transzombie bringing new baby transzombies into an apocalyptic future world. I'm fond of stories with well-delineated characters where you get to be somebody else rather than filling all the generic blanks lazy authors leave to you. This is supposedly autobiographical, but when it says you are at work, or sword playing or whatever, it's not really.
As for interaction, most of it consisting clicking "So..." and reading the next paragraph. There are a few choices, sure, but they seem to be irrelevant and lead into the same next plot point in an essentially linear narrative.
but, hey, if it's really autobiographical, be sure to lend a few pennies to the author's patreon. Baby needs are expensive.
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