Reviews by namekuseijin
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short, easy and mean satire , April 9, 2022I was surprised the implementation was pretty rough and lacking verbs and understanding, unlike previous works by the author. It is in fact written in the historic ZIL language and compiled with tools Infocom authors used. Not sure going back to the past is that great.
This is a simple and short satire. There's pretty much exactly just one "play mechanic" and there's no real need for any walkthrough. When you see it, you'll know exactly what to do to impress that ogre...
As far as satire and short, entry-level works of IF, this is pretty good.
Guess-The-Symbols!, October 6, 2017guess what? I very much prefer the interactions-dialogues via graphical symbols - quite easy actually as you only have to choose between 2 pairs or so, in contrast to old time guess-the-verb - in this game than the actual text, spelled-out in god-slow typing animation, which seems made for small children or retards and really goes like:
The TV is droning. The front door is closed.
You look at the clock.
You look at the door.
You wait.
Grunk would be pleased. I didn't and gave it a 3 for the originality in the new take on guess-the-verb... and guess what? 3 there might well be about 2 or 1 here...
seriously, each year IFComp comes shockful with kids more illiterate than in previous years. Why even try to make a text game in the first place when you can't or don't like to write or read?
How about dropping the games and reading a good old book to learn how to actually write?
delete the wand, get my verbs back!, October 6, 2017here's this game's blurb:
"Explore the wizard Bartholloco's castle with the help of a versatile magic wand. Can you overcome his challenge? Can you levitate a rock? Can you slice a baltavakia?
(Puzzle-oriented and family friendly.)"
sounds cool, huh?
no, no it is not cool. At all.
You see, there's a whole generation of players, and now authors too, that have never played text-adventures before. And yet, they try to make one - perhaps for some kind of retrogaming kink. One or another author may however surely have played one of these cool CYOA things, where you just tap/click your choices away (if any, that is, instead of just a disguise for click-next) to move the story forward.
But still they try to make ye text-adventure of ole. So, the first thing they do is to get away with verbs - it's a depressing trend really. In this game, you can only go directions, examine stuff and point a wand at things. No inventory-management (taking stuff makes the PC receive a shock).
Now that it is constrained enough that even Grunk or cyoa players can play it, it's time for real meat of the "gameplay": the wand comes with 3 colors in the shaft and by changing the color-combinations you can really make things go exciting! You have a color combo for OPENING THINGS and possibly many other useful actions!
Now isn't that ingenious and original? Instead of boring the player out of finding some key to a door or something, you make the player tinker with the colors in the wand until they find a combo that works for OPENing a door! Wow, isn't that versatile wand something? It really made it worthwhile to delete all the standard verbs and make it so mindnumbly dull to make simple things happen! It is almost as ingenious and versatile and constraining as that char-removal device in Counterfeit Monkey, right?
seriously, get a grip...
so, not interested in the gameplay, writing is kids level, setting is as generic as possible, yadda-yadda-yadda. I'll give one more star because I feel it's written in good will.
BTW, I didn't enjoy DiBianca's walking simulator last year either... my suggestion is to play some real older parser IF (because new parser IF is all fucked up) and to get back to the drawing board...
twine empowerment against the system, September 13, 2017poor guy uses twine to write out his inner rage against those lucky few economic elite bastards
this clickable static fiction reads so single-mindedly and plays so linearly that even the author seemed to get bored with it and thus finally offered one more choice, one that seems central to the plot:
Emma takes a "gap year" after graduation in order to find out what she really wants to do with her life.
> Travel, vacation, shopping! London, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York!
> Compassion and volunteer work. Helping the poor in society and striving for a fair and just world.
it was obviously very out of character for Emma, thus I chose the latter and guess what?
It was tedious and uninteresting work, and she decided to find something more useful to with her life instead.
sure enough, there was no real choice in the single-minded rage propaganda with a 1-dimensional character about as deep as the author's mind... so much for choice-games... the only real choice here is to keep churning and filling ifdb with 1-star clickable static fiction...
Kill or be killed in a manichean fictional setting. is it possible to even get killed? Perhaps it's random or just happens to be one of the possible static outcomes in this hypertext
Seriously lacking too in breadth of action: got to a single finale by just linearly clicking single choices offered, like opening a drawer. I wasn't impressed enough to try other paths.
Frankly, last year's IFComp title 16 Ways to kill a vampire at McDonald's is just way more polished and better executed game of the same genre and theme.
A joke, not a game, September 11, 2017And a very good one at that. Then again, not everyone gets jokes...
BTW, the author is now listed as Anonymous. But I remember very well it was by Adam Cadre.
Pokecraze satire, September 11, 2017This is not interactive fiction. It is a humorous satire of an immensely shallow mobile game/spyware that took the world by storm a few months ago and that pretty much faded into oblivion ever since. And while I did enjoy the satire aspect and humor very much, it still plays out just as shallowly and repetitive as the game it took for inspiration, so I just couldn't bother to go on and catch'em all let alone go into the Nyantech HQs and do whatever it was supposed to happen.
Didn't like that excuse for a game, didn't dig this excuse for an IF. :)
perhaps I'm missing something extra, like in Cadre's Nameless, Endless? if so, I may well revise it, but I won't hold my breath...
OK, REVISION PENDING:
ok, almost a year ago it seems like I reviewed it before even entering the Nyantech HQ. Since I hate Pokemon, I ended up hating this one too just for its subject matter, but I should know better to expect sheer brilliance from the same duo from Rover's Day Out, Hoosegow and others. Game's well worth it, just laugh your way with the satire until you get more proper IF from inside the building.
sorry for the initial rant
joke's on you, joker, September 11, 2017click your way through this short linear single joke to find out
(Spoiler - click to show)YOU'RE THE GREEEEEEEEAAATTTTTEEEEESSSTTTTTTTT TTTTTTHHHEEEERRREEEEE EEEEVVVVEEEERRR WWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSS
kids, don't try to write when high, ok?
for thumbdowners: it's an extremely short review for an extremely short piece of barely interactive crap induced by cocaine. Click on the "Twee" link over there to see what I mean... seems like fame is not doing our favorite alien IF writer much good.
funny, but not IF, October 31, 2016no, it's not interactive when it demands a "page turn" for each new word in the text. text effects don't turn it more interactive either, nor does the parser-like text links
screw you, bear sonny
static fiction with bad fonts, sketches and possibly sound effects or music, October 26, 2016I don't play IF with sound on, so I wouldn't know. Presentation is terrible with horrible cyan fonts over a background the color of dry blood.
Not IF: you read (bad) prose and click a link in the bottom to "flip the page". The story is about some boy with bad haircut who wears a shirt reading "fight the system" and doing it by revolting at competent literature by writing shitty literature I didn't care enough to read.
but I did give one more star because I think it's done in good faith and the author is probably just unaware about what IF is about.
hypertexter outcast gets revenge on her text-adventure elder pursuers, October 22, 2016As much as I hate to give this thoughtful piece of a fiction just 3-stars, I can't reason how it could be any different: it's not quite interactive, but its fine prose and imaginative setting deserves something. Actually, by the end it turns out to be pretty evident that some kind of metacommentary on the IF community is at the heart of it all and that kinda ruined it to me.
(Spoiler - click to show)A girl is outcast from her village. The eldars actually wanted her dead, but she flees and survives her pursuers, eventually settling on an abandoned hut in the forest. Day after day she lives the miserable life expected from freedom: hunting for food (actually, choosing this or that link), customizing her hut (choosing this or that irrelevant link) and surviving some random encounters with past acquaintances who want her dead and either killing them or fleeing. She also finds a pack of wolves who were supposed to eat her, but don't feel like it and learns not much from it. Then some inevitable day one such encounter with villagers get her nearly killed, but she's helped by some ancient being and cast as some kind of undead. She now can hear spirits and have her vengeance on the village, by destroying the token of their traditions. She's really shown them how not to mess with sacrificial women, bastard eldars. oh, I got end 1, but no achievements unlocked, too bad.
anyway, I really liked the beginning and I liked the prose. Good writing is always scant in IF these days all with twitter fiction fans and all. But I felt that second person singular did nothing to me here. I was never under the illusion I could actually do anything, it didn't engage me into it. And while prose is good, there's not enough of a story there. The prose goes all about into trying to set the mood, to set you in the shoes of the character by lots of sensations, smells, tactile feedback thrown at you. It was almost like text VR! unfortunately, did little to me. Which is weird to say because I took quite some time with this one, so in a way, I was pretty engaged.
But now I've seen most of it and felt like I accomplished little here. I did have 2 parallel playthroughs with it, so I know there's lots of text you only see one way or the other, if one enjoys multibranching hypertext.
BTW, I truly loved the visual style of it. gorgeous and mood setting typography. at least that twine gets right. or is it plain css? anyway...
the primordial user agency verb taken to a whole new level, October 15, 2016I started playing this one and it felt like Midnight Swordfight - let's call it MS - all over: a weird setting not immediately recognizable that takes a while to digest with a constrained verb list. I hate this "modern" take on parser games to be constrained to a few verbs, perhaps a sinister plot by twine jihadists to constrain parser to "clicks". But here, as in MS, it works. Apart from that - and from swordfight - they are very unlike each other. And I quite enjoyed this one. my somewhat spoilery review follows...
In MS, I never felt quite connected to the story: you kind of view the whole thing from an audience's point of view, being able to interact with scenery and "script" your way through some kind of play. Here, something ironic and strange is going on: take is the primary verb, but it's not used in its usual and traditional parser-IF agency-setting way, but it's supposed to be your take on things happening around you. You don't take things, you write your take on them to some mysterious audience eager for some kind of perverse reality show. Who are the audience? why, certainly we, the players. The protagonist keeps us enthralled by his descriptions and we write back and with our feedback, he lives on. something metaphorical here...
Despite lacking apparent user agency, your take on things is what keeps you alive: you're some kind of clone or android - with the audience always in contact to you via some monitor (probably text-only) installed between your ribs. Yeah, the setting is kind of disturbing. So, either you keep them enthralled by your takes or you're history. Choosing your takes is the challenge. So, ironically, this is choose-your-own-takes in parser form to great user agency effect. :)
The story goes from the point of view of what looks like a gladiator in his late years, a fading star in his profession still into this for his skills in taking anything - including opponent blows. It seems there is indeed nothing he can't take and taking it graciously to his audience to keep them enthralled is what the gameplay is all about. I found the setting pretty fascinating by itself, and the narrator is clever enough to keep it gripping. Finely crafted prose at work here.
The pacing is quite linear and although there are a few physical locations with their own props, you don't move with cardinal directions, you're moved through the scenes in time. Like most other games in IF Comp this year, it looks like a short game because they forgo long linear plots with single solutions in favor of a multibranching solution space, where many paths may be rewarding in their own. It has quite high replay value and you keep playing to see where other branches might lead you. Not quite a puzzlefeast, but still got enough beef to keep you wondering...
one of the best this year, hands down.
Btw, earlier I called the player character a "he": it's not quite that and it's only when we take the point of view of the adversary that we can understand the meaning to the empty sheath and fragility of the old gladiator. There's quite a lot to digest in what looks like simple uncompromised fun here. Some playthroughs are a must.
And btw, my personal take on it: (Spoiler - click to show)it's an ironical description of hetero sex, with the player character being a female whose only role is to take a beating from the sword from the male adversary. She doesn't seem to enjoy it nor take it lightly, thus it's never a win. You only win when you can USE the sword, as the point of view by the male protagonist reveals. So, yeah, a single joke, but a well thought out and executed one.
roadtrip, conspirations, twilight zone, October 7, 20163 girls on a roadtrip stop by an old motel in the middle of the desert to spend the night. Once the neon flower is lit, the hotel comes to life with a plethora of eccentric characters reeking of nostalgic times. Should the girls move ahead, should they stay? Do they even have reasons to go on? What's going on? I thought it might hide some horror behind it, but instead it treads along a Twilight Zone path.
You know, the setting and writing are pretty solid and really captivated me, despite being a bit too much of the short prose style and link-exhausting side. But then, as I kept playing to see where it leads, there it comes, tucked away in the literal middle of the road, blunt as a slap on the face: (Spoiler - click to show)the scene where they're walking to the phonebooth and they pretty much SCREAM OUT LOUD THAT ALL THIS FANTASY SETTING IS REALLY JUST AN EXCUSE FOR YET ANOTHER GAY COMING OUT SIMULATOR. just like Birdland last year and the myriads of twine output that make up most of IF these days. guess this is what we get for decades of puerile dungeon spelunking abuse...
5 stars despite it, thanks to gripping, vivid setting, lush presentation with fine typography and color schemes, some memorable characters, fine dialogues and storytelling, good dosage of drama, comedy and conspiracy... I don't know what to tell without giving out much, only that this is a must-play and well worth it.
amusing short vignette on Buffy the vampire slayer, October 6, 2016So it seems Buffy can't take a short break from vampire-slaying even when ordering some burger. Her trained senses and keen reflexes know all too well when there's danger around. And thus, in the limited confines of a famous fast-food chain we have to deal with these bloodsuckers as best as we can without our usual tools of trade.
This was fine enough and gives you enough ways to get things right and wrong too. Fun game, finely crafted and polished.
Some have argued about that vampires are too cunning to 1) trying to hit on a McDonald's employee and 2) getting slayed so quickly by an underpowered slayer, but frankly 1) he may just be too thirsty (and plus they were alone at night until player enters) and 2) he may not be quite such old and cunning vampire. Buffy was able to slay plenty of them with the brains of a 90's cheerleader...
anyway, good game, specially great since it's a cyoa demanding more player agency than usual...
very short, surreal and fun, October 6, 2016From the outset it looked like a real stinker, but although very short and straightforward, it was quite a fun ride. Nothing major or earth shattering, but definitely worth some 10 minutes for a good laugh.
favorite line:
(Spoiler - click to show)"I'm being held hostage by God!" you reply. You hear the sound of someone hanging up, sounding pretty pissed off.
so, I got a few bad endings, the good ending and tried out a few outlandish actions for laughs. There's more detail and the outline of an actual story there than immediately perceived. Some playthroughs are a must.
wanders off in many directions and goes nowhere, October 6, 2016Many sightseeing and characters and paths in a deeply unfulfilling experience. You read a paragraph or two of text, drag your verb into the relevant word, rinse, repeat. There seems to be no narrative arc whatsoever and the whole thing plays like a rushed marijuana-fueled egotrip without purpose and no two elements ever adding to each other.
flawed but gripping speculations upon gaming legacy, October 3, 2016This felt more like plain reading a short story than playing a game, which is ironic given its subject matter. Which is a meditative and imaginative speculation about emergent narratives and behaviour in games eventually evolving into something else.
Pacing doesn't help either, as the protagonist stumbles upon new characters in a hurry and seems to care too much about them by the end. Despite that and the lack of true agency, I kept going just to read more.
At first, it seemed just a cheap shot at the traditional parser-based community, but it delved deeper than that and thus was quite satisfying.
not IF proper, but fine short story, 3 stars in my book. got ending 2
Dracula for IF n00bs, September 28, 2016I'd easily put this one among the best IF for novice players. It's quite short, doesn't bog the player with compass directions and still offer plenty for the diligent player to dig. Some solutions to puzzles require some leap of faith, out of box thinking or willingness to face one's fears. An all around very polished entry-level IF.
It is notable that the author doesn't really enjoy some IF conventions - notably cardinal direction navigation and intricate puzzles - and thus get rid of them in one way or the other in all his works. Here, Amaranth doesn't look feel a physical place, but a dreamland - or should it be nightmareland? The protagonist is able to instantly go at will from place to place regardless of being separate by great physical distances. He does this by EXPLORING places, or x place, which is really a smart device to just examine a map with hidden sublocations. One could say it is a dreamland that the protagonist visits by spirit alone, but the villagers in the tavern certainly think otherwise. Talking to the prince and reading one of his books may explain that in a way.
The puzzles are pretty good for an author which usually despises complex contraptions. Instead, exploring and overcoming our fears seems like the motto here.
Plot is lacking, yes. It sounds more like The Count than The Horror of Rylvania in its nostalgic nod to old games, perhaps even Castlevania: SotN. But nonetheless, a quite fit for intro IF.
fine first try, September 23, 2016but polish the little details, because:
In that game you scored 65 out of a possible 25, in 26 turns.
the bell always scores and I guess other actions too... :)
manipulative and barely interactive, September 13, 2016Almost like Photopia, but lacking enough fiction as well. Narrative goes as nothing but brief dialogues between dad and daughter and the tone is such that from the very beginning you know the outcome.
I usually don't care much for the outcome. The end of all things hardly is surprising. So, if there's not enough substance for thought during the journey itself, I'm left cold.
I sadly suspect twine is used more for blog entries and steaming off real life hurdles than for real fiction. In which case it's not only barely interactive as also barely fiction at all.
"You jackass, this is emotional, it empowers people to share their personal drama"
Perhaps, but so do blogs. And with comments for feedback and support.
simple demo for a pretty cool new system, August 2, 2016so this is just an IF favorite time-travelling setting to show off Texture, a new IF engine out there it seems. Slick presentation and works flawlessly on a desktop web browser, but not sure how the dragging and dropping would work on mobile where mere tapping is the standard. edit: just tested, works fine.
You read text and are given courses of action as buttons on the bottom of the screen: you drag them over the appropriate highlighted word on the text to makes things move forward.
I enjoyed it. (edit: I did enjoy as a demo, but seemingly it's just a slice-of-life game) Hopefully something more substantial may come up. Not so sure it'll be used for more than slice-of-life IF: text has to be big for the drag and drop thing be effective, as well as having few options. so, interactive twitter fiction for people who like this kind of thing...
turkey simulator, March 28, 2016after 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.
clickable cyao about music duck and a lemon, February 22, 2016nuff 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...
Pirate Adventure, February 13, 2016not 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...
priceless, February 12, 2016(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...
a casual puzzler, January 24, 2016ok,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.
short scifi, January 24, 2016This 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.
Delightful IF, January 23, 2016This 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
somewhat obscure little gem, January 22, 2016This 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.
Powerpuff Sailormoon, January 22, 2016This 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.
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.
not game nor IF at all, December 29, 2015This is just an opiniated and propaganda piece of shit trying to pass for a game in quiz format.
I did enjoy the name of the author trying to mimick that crazy japanese dev Suda.
btw, the correct answer for 4 should've been "ever since turning into a nation of whiny crackhead kids treating everything as a game"
bland, boring, pointless, December 24, 2015Plenty of procedural generation seemingly of places to explore to find items to feed into the mainframe to explore more and rinse and repeat. Bland prose (hopefully generated too, but guess not) in a stereotypical something-went-wrong-in-the-space-station-and-youre-amnesic. yawn...
if someone wants a more interesting game with similar setting, try Babel, by Ian Finley in his teens...
funny short story, February 24, 2015This was a fun and entertaining short story. Why spoil it by calling it a game? Though it indeed seems to offer quite a few choices that don't affect outcome much - just more text to explore. Enjoyed the witty prose, concept and characterization - a demonic parody of any high school jealously gig. Genuinely funny. The only thing I didn't really enjoy was the dynamic text: sometimes you'll just miss it as you go clicking links. This IF also reminds me of Hunger Daemon. :)
these meta-comments me laugh real hard: (Spoiler - click to show)The reader is invited to employ imagination to simulate elaborate special effects such as multicolor text, and shaking, glowing, sparkling, or glittering words. (Spoiler - click to show)Oh, if only it were as easy as clicking a hyperlink, you would have done that long ago, and you wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. and (Spoiler - click to show)Don't go crazy searching for a winning ending. There are no alternate endings.
wacky it is, with some strong and slimy imagery. You begin vengeful and turn out to have all your plans spoiled and end your days very humbly...
BTW, whatever music there is (implied by a text), it went mute on my PC, thankfully.
It also ostensibly reminds that it was created with some AXMA Story Maker, a commercial tool. The "play" mechanics and interface are just like any other twine thing, though: click your way through wads of links...
kill or get killed, February 20, 2015You have until he reaches your apartment.
sorry, I have what?
10 Second Defence
oh, thanks for clearing that up in the title. So far, this looks like a sparsely implemented one-room defense game with bad prose. yes, it indeed is.
The prologue text doesn't really mention what Kiernan is about to do, so I just took 15 turns waiting for him - perhaps he's the PC's boyfriend or boss? He enters the room and I'm blasted away. ah, good, so it really is about defending yourself against some lunatic.
Well, gotta say, it's a finally crafted small situation you've thrown us at here, worthy the few replays it demands. It evidently requires some trial and error before a good ending - which evidently means (Spoiler - click to show)your ex-lover dead while you draw a shaky breath and head off.
It's already 3 stars for being a proper game, but the short length, sparse prose and implementation got the better of me and I took 1 away. :/
Now let's look at some implementation fails:
wow, I have a sensory enhancer implant! Let's try putting it to good use:
>listen
You can't hear anything.
:/
>smell
The air of your apartment is so familiar, you no longer notice it.
>smell Kiernan
You can't see any such thing.
I know I can't see him, but I assumed the implant would give me wolverine-like powers. Perhaps I could smell his stink or fear miles away :/
>throw knife at hitman
You lack the nerve when it comes to the crucial moment.
:/
I had a laugh, February 17, 2015yet another clickable-static-fiction-passing-for-game. Like many of its brethren, this one too being a political manifest about some poor minority group being morally harassed - in this case, women. Everywhere they go, they are closely followed by those terrible monsters - the men.
anyway, one of the strong points of IF is putting you in the shoes of another self - the Player Character, in this IF, you take the role of one such poor harassed woman. You really feel sorry for being the object of desire of those damn bastards.
this snippet made me smile, so I gave the "game" one more star:
You're eyeing up the chocolate biscuits when a man starts tutting at you. "It would be a shame if a pretty girl like you let herself go."
Surprise! You've been sexually harassed. You feel so embarrassed that you have to go home and cry to your cat.
IFComp 2014 wikipedia entry with comments, February 11, 2015what game is here? It's nothing but text and links. Is Wikipedia a game too? The tag for this "game" is "Nonfiction". If it's got neither fiction nor it is more interactive than a regular book pageflip or linkclick, what is it doing here? I read in that text something about IF evolving. If this is an example of that, it's actually devolving. Perhaps next people will go back to pen and paper rpgs and then to poetry rapsodhies... Why is it that people these days just refuse to call a story a story rather than a game? Is it to lure youngsters in, so they can think of reading as something more exciting? Whatever it is, IF it's not.
what IF people actually got a clue about IF? Then we'd never have to cope with idiocy like this short static page. Perhaps I should list Wikipedia on ifdb...
what a piece of crap, February 9, 2015I seriously fear twine because by lowering any entry barriers whatsoever it's getting all kind of loonies loose...
this is not fiction, static or otherwise, it's a hyperlinked Q&A thingmajig about the author's particular obssessive view of the universe he wants us to swallow. whatever, I decided to give it a chance after seeing it scored so low on IFComp14, but that's what it deserves...
charming enough, January 6, 2015Fine prose and setting as well as organic puzzles in the form trade-this-for-that make this a charming little IF work. I have to agree with the reviwer for BAF's that characters are very underdeveloped, leaving you watering for something while you hunger just as much as the protagonist. Still, one IF I'd no doubt recommend to beginners.
interactive angst poetry, March 18, 2014ok, I may bash lame twitter fiction to death, but not so much poetry -- I like it. This is poetry, and good one at that: carefully woven verse interplay between what is said and what is meant. And that it is interactive and allows you to be in the shoes of the poetic persona is fascinating.
It seems Porpentine, when not in the mood for blatant puke-inducing passages, is able of showcasing fine word craftsmanship. The short poetic prose is quite excellent, and the metaphors creatively apt. Each verse pulsates through the screen vividly, each given proper screen estate as you usually don't find in static poems.
There are quite a few game-like aspects -- the few lock-and-key puzzles, a few tasks to complete -- and a few meta-game aspects -- like chosing this or that setting or your personal features -- but the poem really shines in the writing and message.
On the whole, an enjoyable renunion of fine presentation choices (including the loveable font, font effects and sound effects). Even though what it presents us is a bleak story of (Spoiler - click to show)rape, abortion and dehumanization. Poetry that matters, after all.
kudos
a simple way to end wars, February 24, 2014You're a general sent by the king to help out the defense at Swineback Ridge against the barbaric hordes of the Phartipu. Only once you get there, (Spoiler - click to show)the troops have deserted and the leader has commited suicide. It's up to you to come up with a way to revert this terrible situation.
The author seems to think this is a good beginner IF. And indeed it has many good points going for it, like a built-in hint system and, best of all, the PC won't take actions that should deem too stupid, effectively canceling possible dead ends. There's also no timed puzzles so you can go at your own pace at solving them and the puzzles are mostly fair and sensible enough, though a few require careful attention to the surroundings. Except that to win the game you need this item from (Spoiler - click to show)close to the beginning. :) but even this makes it clear you need to come back later with another item by the description to a failed action.
It features no NPCs but still tells a sensible tale of warfare and courage against adversities wrapped in finely crafted prose. I've gone through it this evening and though it doesn't let you get stuck, I had a replay to see if I was following alright.
meh, February 17, 2014As 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.
extreme go horse, February 17, 2014This 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.
fine fantasy text-adventure, February 14, 2014Our 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.
nice poem, February 13, 2014Genuinely 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...
hypertext perv poetry, February 13, 2014Not 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.
clickety clickety, February 12, 2014Seriously, 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...
glittering ecstasy, February 10, 2014This 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
gripping short horror story, January 30, 2014A 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 to enjoy it, January 30, 2014I 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?!
A gracing gem among many rough stones, January 29, 2014Fine 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...
a computer geek tale about nothing, January 29, 2014A convoluted hypertext geeky fantasy story about nothing. In it, interaction is all about clicking links and inputing a not so much smartass code into an annoying numpad by clicking repeatidly on the numbers. I get to the end of it and learn nothing of a plot or motives, it's all hazy and undescript.
Seriously, these web tools are creating monsters in some weird ego trips. perhaps if I was on crack I'd see the beauty and genius in it...
Summing up: I don't really believe CYOA and hypertext belong to "interactive" fiction. They are about as interactive as reading any book out of order. And this particular "book" has no story to speak of. Perhaps (barely) interactive (bad) poetry, if such...
bye
wtf, January 29, 2014What is this thing even doing here? The only interaction is clicking next until the end of this short linear narrative about a couple having, huh, sex?
at least the naked 8bit-like graphics look funny
Solid puzzlefeast with poetic prose, March 12, 2010Not much of a review, just a few thoughts about it.
This time around zarf tried a more "normal" pseudonym, but I believe his writing style and ingenious mastery of the form are good hints at the real author.
You end up trying a few arbitrary actions, even though they are mostly solidly logic and fair. Pretty much all actions provide sensible responses (my favorite being trying to (Spoiler - click to show)burn the books).
I like how the theme of the game ("metasemanticity") is a meta-interpretation for IF itself and the PC likely to represent zarf rushing to build this world against the deadline of the JayIsGames competition. Clever. :)
All around, a very satisfying entry. I didn't play many of them because some by n00bs were pretty lame...
Disconcerting?, February 24, 2010What is disconcerting about this game is that it makes no effort whatsoever to provide any coherence to the narrative: it flows like regurgitated text completely oblivious to what came before and the ending is abrupt and as non-sense as the rest.
This puzzleless game is very short, it was entered in the JayIsGames IF Escape competition. It is all about tinkering with some of the things described until the next scene comes up. One particular tinkering is non-obvious and, *MINOR SPOILER AHEAD!*, involves the player wanting to know more about herself.
I hope the author takes this as constructive criticism and provides a far better experience the next time.
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