Ratings and Reviews by Ruber Eaglenest

Disclaimer: (Spoiler - click to show)Hi, this are the reviews I did in the the IFComp 2016. I’m Ruber Eaglenest. Co-author of The skyscraper and the scar, and entry of that year. The review is posted without edition, and need some context about how I reviewed and rated the games. So, apart of my bad English I hope to be constructive. I will point to the things I don't like of the game, but I hope to be helpful. The structure I follow is this: Title, one line review, two to five word; Mobile friendliness, overall, score phrased based on IF comp guidelines. I had back ache and so that’s why I played most games in Android mobile, I looked closely at how games behave on mobile and review and vote based on that.

Mobile friendly: almost there. It is playable but the view must be panned to enjoy the images.

Overall: This is a virtual tour for some places of Cleveland. It is well written in a light tone that is slightly funny. The game is a branchy “try to get the hidden winning branch” combining the resources at your disposal. In the end that’s feels somewhat to random luck, or “read the author’s mind”, but because each branch fell on the short side, you can replay easily.

My main caveat about this game is some dissonance in the loops. Just, the game doesn’t track the state of the game and adapt itself properly for a looping passage, instead it just repeats the same text again and again, and that is not narratively correct.

It is ok, but it is not of my tastes.

Score: Recommended, because maybe someone could enjoy this more than I.

Disclaimer: (Spoiler - click to show)Hi, this are the reviews I did in the the IFComp 2016. I’m Ruber Eaglenest. Co-author of The skyscraper and the scar, and entry of that year. The review is posted without edition, and need some context about how I reviewed and rated the games. So, apart of my bad English I hope to be constructive. I will point to the things I don't like of the game, but I hope to be helpful. The structure I follow is this: Title, one line review, two to five word; Mobile friendliness, overall, score phrased based on IF comp guidelines. I had back ache and so that’s why I played most games in Android mobile, I looked closely at how games behave on mobile and review and vote based on that.

Mobile friendly. Not too much, but playable. Save system, but no autosave.

Overall: The game grow on me. Half world modelling, half hypertext, with ellipsis and such. But in the end is not consistent enough, and has lacking for it.

The start of the game and the first chapter are more consistent, the last chapters and ending could benefit of a better structure and developing. I found some actions to be problematic against my motivations as a player. I think the game could benefit a lot from an editor or a confiable tester who could said what works and what not works in the game. And then rewrite. But for a future work. What’s done it’s done.

I like the trying to make a consistent world in twine, but the authors has done some loops, and those loops are not variable enough. Take the example when you arrive at the cottage. The scene describes you arriving, but if you enter, and go out, the scene is describe again as if you were arriving for the first time. That is a huge problem for me, it just breaks the immersion.

Some scenes are rushed and make a poor work on building the narrative of surviving day to day on the forest. For example, in day two where you must take care of feeding yourself, you go out, get some food, and when you return, the day is over and you go to sleep. Too rushed.
This repeats in later chapters, overall, all the plot feels a little rushed, I would like a more modelled implementation of the forest, more tangible and less abstract. Definitively this game would benefit of being a parser one. So I could enjoy, explore and know the environment as my home. But in the end that sensation was only in the very first chapter.

There’s a growing relationship with the wolves in the game, but again, it is rushed, there is no room for really building that relationship with the mother wolf, so it is not succeed in that either. This is not like in Princess Mononoke where all the implicit existence together is evident, or like the relationship in Dancing with wolves or just the play with the fox in A change in the weather. So in the end the game doesn’t nails the story, topic and setting.

However I liked the writing and tone. I think the author is someone to look for in the future.

Score: Recommended with reservations

Disclaimer: Hi, this are the reviews I did in the the IFComp 2016. I’m Ruber Eaglenest. Co-author of The skyscraper and the scar, and entry of that year. The review is posted without edition, and need some context about how I reviewed and rated the games. So, apart of my bad English I hope to be constructive. I will point to the things I don't like of the game, but I hope to be helpful. The structure I follow is this: Title, one line review, two to five word; Mobile friendliness, overall, score phrased based on IF comp guidelines. I had back ache and so that’s why I played most games in Android mobile, I looked closely at how games behave on mobile and review and vote based on that.

Mobile friendly: almost there, it just needs autosave, some optimisations on intelligent focus when hitting a button (that it gets you the proper section by context), and some bug fixes. The sounds breaks in android mobile. I miss a more large buttons, or an option to size them up. However it was pleasant to play and very funny.

Overall: I love the world model. I LOVE UI design. I love the style. I love the implementation. I know Robin is very proud of his landscape design for the game, but It works better for me in portrait, in mobile. It just need a further iteration in the UI to be just a perfect responsive IF system. And in landscape my eye jump too much from the left panel to the right panel, so I prefer to resize the window on desktop. Again, for me, portrait with this IF system, is perfect.

The game, as Draculaland, falls on the humor pastiche sub-genre genre (sic). I’m not very fond on detective stories, and definitively I’m not into pastiche humor pieces, but Robin is soooooo fun, he is so smart doing it, that I laugh out loud several times. Just take attention to the office of the Player Character (PC) and later read the Detective book 1001… so funny.

I like that the just plain silliness of Draculaland goes here to another level, and that it works so well. It seems as if Draculaland were the first draft of what is coming, because the pastiche silliness is there, the UI is there, both games has the same CSS visual design, but in Detectiveland it simply all makes click! together. Thanks to the improvements in multimedia, the music, the portraits, and of course the magnificent cover, everything works towards the goal, that is to have great fun with a solid modelled puzzle game.

The better of it is that the model system works. This system remembers us why modelled worlds are so funny to play, and in a world that goes towards hypertext and CYOA domination, this feels as fresh air: the old made new again.

Returning to the use of multimedia, however, the music felt repetitive. It seems the author is not comfortable yet with the silence, and the space around it. I think the game would benefit a lot from a more discrete use of the music, doing only a 2 or three times loop, and then stopping until another change in the ambience of the scenery. With that, short bursts of music, would serve as a perfect cue to the new ambience instead of fill every space with an eternal repetition.

On to the structure, it is somewhat open: you have three cases to work, but you have to choose one. The world organises itself for the case at hand. Once the player has solved the three first cases, the games gift us with a fourth case. The initial puzzles for each case are very easy and straightforward, but I found some of the final ones too difficult without learning curve or a progressive difficult curve in the middle. Probably that’s because the nature of the comp, but for a future releases of this kind of games could benefit a lot of a more expanded play time, and a smooth difficult curve.

In one of the final puzzles for one case, the solution was … almost "read the mind of the author", but I think it was very well implemented, with an exemplary design on trial and error. But as I'm not accustomed to this nowadays I made the decision to go to the police station; I had the motivation to do that, but, of course the location was not prepared for me for that concrete case finale, so I got stuck. I think for those occasions the game could benefit of a little more railroading or adding dynamic clues when the player has the motivation to look for in other places when he has failed the puzzle and failed to notice that he has to return to the problem at hand in the same place. But… this is nick picking. We don’t need perfectly round games to enjoy them, isn’t it? Because this is a game of 9. Ooops, I said that... agh, forget it.

Score: Excellent.