Reviews by Nusco

If C.E.J. Pacian keeps churning out little games of this quality and consistency, I'll have to go back to his other games and rate them all up one notch. As usual, Walker & Silhouette sports the author's trademark mix of pulp space-opera fiction, relentless pace and deliciously flawed characters.

In this game, Walker is an inhumanly smart crippled police detective specialized in solving freaky mysteries by sheer force of logic. His counterpart Silhouette is a passionate anarco-feminist bad girl with a big hearth. Together, they solve a case involving as much steampunk staples, English understatement and freaky accidents as Pacian can cram in a one-hour game. Both characters border on gender bending, and their nuanced mutual attraction works very well to keep this short game together. I'm regularly bored by romance in games, but Pacian's unusual approach to the topic actually works for me. You can feel that the author really likes and respects his characters.

Like Gun Mute, this game experiments with restricted input: in this case, you move the game forward by typing keywords rather than relying on the usual (semi)-free form IF commands. Although limiting, this device works well for such a short game, smoothing out the experience and preventing you from getting stuck. Pacian even manages to build a couple of puzzles around this limited parser, which gives you the feeling you're actually playing a game, although very linear, rather than reading a short story. The result is a small polished game that doesn't last long enough for you to suspend disbelief and actually question its calculatedly naive absurdity.

Like other games from Pacian, this one feels like the author was smiling constantly as he wrote it. I also carried that smile throughout the experience.

A confession: I really liked The Ascot.

The Ascot is one of those cheap Choose Your Own Adventure games - and a particularly constrained one, for that. Apart from a few special exceptions (like meta-verbs and the nearly useless EXAMINE), the game's parser only understands two words: YES and NO. As a result, the game feels extremely limited in scope. You can finish The Ascot in just one move (by typing NO at the first prompt), or invest a few minutes and work your way to a somewhat positive ending. You could even argue whether this is actually IF. However, I'll take a short constrained game that's actually fun over a boring game with a good parser.

Another reason not to like The Ascot is that this game belongs to the dreaded "wacky dorky humor masquerading as generic fantasy" club. That genre is usually populated by first-attempt games by teenage authors who then proceed to submit their bedroom experiments to the IF Competition, and force the poor judges to suffer through streams of lame jokes and random narratives. However, for some reason, the humor in The Ascot really worked for me. The narrative voice is consistent, if deliberately silly, and it even managed to make me laugh sometimes - especially when it self-reflects on the game's own limitation, a device that usually falls flat in other games. Here are two (mildly spoilery) examples:

(Spoiler - click to show)
[...] the old woman clucks at you. “[...] Are you ready to finally claim your family’s fortune, young master?”

> no
Oh, so you wanna go home, then?

> no
So, you’ll accept your quest, then? (I can keep this up all day, by the way.)

And here is how the game forces you to accept one option over the other when you enter a dead end in the story branch:


“Let’s try the other way,” whispers Gertie. Are you gonna listen to her?

> no
Okay, so... you’re standing around and... standing around... and...

Gertie asks you again if you wanna go down the other tunnel.

> no
Gertie stares at you. “Are you going?”

> no
Gertie stares at you. “Are you going?”

Oh, man. You have no chance at winning this one! She’s good, she’s good...


It might be cheap humour, but it made me chuckle. I'd rather take this game's honest tongue-in-cheek approach over a linear game that attempts to give you an illusion of freedom and fails.

Overall, I'd probably give The Ascot three stars on a very good day. But then, of course, there is The Ascot's main claim to fame: the infamous "smart puzzle that you can easily overlook and actually turns out to be the game real raison d'etre". That's why this little harmless game was nominated to a Xyzzy (that it arguably deserved to win) after being very harshly dismissed by many IF Competition reviewers. That puzzle changed my perspective on the game's strictly constrained mechanics, and it probably justifies investing a few extra minutes to get to the optimal ending... And that's where the fourth star comes from.

Ecdysis is underimplemented, extremely short and linear, heavy on directing the player and very limited in scope. However, it makes up for all of its shortcomings by being a very disturbing small piece of IF - even more disturbing than Lovecraft's average work. Not for the squeamish.

Giant laser-firing robots, steampunk-ish western bad guys, radioactive mutants, badass gay cowboys with an attitude and a lot of shooting at people - this game has everything you need. You can call it an experiment on the form, because it purposefully limits itself to just a few verbs (of which "shoot" is the most important by far) and declares itself "an IF shoot-em-up". Experiment or not, this is one of the funniest short pieces of IF I've played in a while. Its unassuming attitude, approachability, shortness and blatantly linear gameplay only make this spaghetti-western-meets-mad-max-meets-doom pastiche more of a pleasure.

I tend to like single-puzzle games, so I had high hopes for this one. The concept is very good: take a classic puzzle and twist it by making the standard solution impossible.

The game itself is a bit underimplemented, but the strong concept makes up for that in part. I had a good time playing it, but unfortunately I ended up winning easily because of a bug. I didn't even realize it was a bug, so I headed straight for the hints and ended up surprised and somewhat disappointed. Overall a nice effort, but wait for a post-comp release.

IF Comp 2004 seemed to be filled with games about astronauts awakening from cryogenic sleep. This one is really good, though. It's a funny take on Infocom's classics, with the same gentle humor and fiendish puzzles of its
models. Great sidekick.

A short, nearly puzzleless, anti-war familiar drama. Very competent use of the medium and an interesting story. Too rhetorical and deliberate to be genuinely moving, but it gets close. It deserves to be played multiple times.

A short, light-hearted fantasy adventure about a squire on a mission to kill a dragon. The humour is not always spot-on, but a couple of clever puzzles make up for it. One of the puzzles is a bit guess-the-nounish, though.

A number of funny and pretty smooth mini-games tied by a loose narrative about a young arcade gamer. Geeky humor transpires throughout.

A sci-fi story about meeting an alien culture. It can't seem to decide wether it's partly serious or not. It feature a sidekick with its own emotional reactions. I missed a essential item, and I was stuck without a walkthrough.