Reviews by MathBrush

Death at the Rectory

Felicity Banks and I got into interactive fiction at roughly the same time in 2015, when we both entered IFComp (though we had both done a little IF earlier in the year). I associate her with Australia, Steampunk or 'magic in modern setting', and including muslim and queer characters.

This is a short game with some significant branches, so a playthrough was pretty quick for me. It's a classic murder mystery with a group of people who meet up together at a kind of bed and breakfast for a writer's retreat.

While there, a murder happens (of course!) but also, all participants gain powers based on the genre of story they are writing. I was a crime writer, so I had the power to tell if people were writing.

The mystery was interesting, and my initial guess was wrong, but I pulled through in the end and had a successful ending.

The stats were a bit opaque for my tastes, though, not being easily telegraphed. I felt like I was mostly making roleplay choices, and then suddenly I'd get things like 'try to have an insight' but I'd fail because I hadn't raised a stat for that. I'm sure it would go much smoother on a replay now that I know what to look out for.

Overall, a fine addition to the Banks cannon, and a very quick play.

I liked this better than the first game, though it did something I see a lot in sequels and which sometimes I love and sometimes I don't:

It presents the gameworld as a real living place and lets you inhabit it with the people.

The plot arc isn't as dramatic as the first game since we aren't being introduced to new things and concepts. There are challenges, but they largely mirror the first game. Instead, I felt the focus was more on just existing, on piling up consequences from earlier decisions, on digging deeper into mysteries, on finding resolution.

I feel like Wayhaven and Soulstone War have both done this in some episodes. Samurai of Hyuga doesn't do it quite as much, since that usually introduces some really compelling plot point each chapter that you are anxious to have resolved.

In any case, on to other parts. I was romancing Astrid, and I had tons of time to spend with her, lots of opportunities to interact, and she was important in a lot of scenes. I don't know how much other ROs are included, but this one had a lot of depth.

I also saw just how big replayability was in the series, as I used a premade character instead of importing one from the first game (I swear I didn't see an option to import, but I probably didn't look hard enough). In my first game I was an ice elemental with two human parents. In the second game I was a human magician with one human mother and one estranged supernatural father. It felt very different, including in combat and classes.

There were some twists and turns in this story, and while I predicted most it didn't feel cheap or bad in the reveals. The writing felt substantially stronger, or perhaps I had grown accustomed to it after the first game.

I would definitely purchase/play the third one, I think the series is fun and I'd like to see how it wraps up.

Uninteractive Fiction 3

I finally got around to playing this with a group of people today.

It kind of reminded me of Hard Puzzle 4. Hard Puzzle 1-3 each had a single puzzle with a hilariously complicated setup which ultimately could be solved by a single command or similarly simple strategy. Hard Puzzle 4 was a full-on game.

Uninteractive Fiction 1 and 2 were one-note games that were tiny jokes.

UI 3 is a larger-scale game that attempts mechanics and plot, which means I'd prefer to compare it to other games that attempt mechanics and plot.

There is a timer on the screen that counts down from 60. Once it reaches 0, you can hit PLAY and tap a drum. This increments a global counter. As that global counter increases, you get different text. Once it reaches a multiple of 400, it starts over and increments a red number at the top of the page.

I recruited several people to help me today, and we got through the whole game in 1 hr.

The writing kind of reminded me of Swigian. When I wrote Swigian, I originally was trying to prove that any polished parser game that isn't repetitive and last 200 moves or so would place highly in IFComp. I just wrote random filler things, having a tree to chop and an axe and a flint. I didn't know what to do after that, so I had the character fall asleep and wake up somewhere else, and then decided to throw in some Beowulf references. But the stuff was just there to fill up content.

I kind of felt like that about the text here. There were some parts I thought were really cool, but I didn't really feel compelled by a narrative arc, it mostly felt like filler. I did enjoy spending time collaborating and talking with others. I've seen Damon write some fantastic stuff (I love the candy detective games), but this wasn't as strong.

So where does this leave the series? This entry is a very slow timed-text vehicle for a semi-randomized mostly-linear narrative without strong plot points and only the occasionally gorilla gif to present variety. Making it more fun makes it more interactive. It's interesting.

It'd be fun to see the code for this afterwards, the secret-keeping parts like having the text not be highlightable would be especially interesting.

IF Derby

An amusing concept. This game simulates IFComp and other competitions by having randomly named horses (with names drawn from a database of mashed-up real IF titles) race against each other.

Text is almost minimal, but occasionally a horse will appear in the lower right corner indicating an option to talk. Those options are infrequent, but interesting.

The winner appears to be truly random each turn. It's a good reminder about how pure skill alone can't win a competition, that even though you can reach near the top, there are always unexpected factors that can sway things one way or another. But supporting each other, even the 'losers', can build meaningful connections.

I do appreciate the author giving us a way to ensure we get a lot of money, but in the end, that, too, doesn't matter quite as much.

High School Reunion

This is a well-done texture game with a lot of short, branching paths. You go to a high-school reunion and decide whether to go in or not. You can leave right away to get a "coward's ending", or experiment with varieties of deception or the supernatural. My favorite path ended with me beat up in a Wendy's parking lot.

There's not a lot else to say about the game. It's short and doesn't have an overarching plot, and there's no real bugs I found either. A platonically neutral game, like a 7.0 pH solution.

Residual Income

This is a vampire heist tale with vivid imagery and a clever twist. Except I'm not fully clever enough to understand the twist.

You break into an apartment to find a writer in a future set in a technological city. The writer escapes into his panic chamber in the center of the house while you circle around, looking for information on him. You don't show up on cameras, which made me immediately think of ghost or vampire, thought it soon becoms clear.

The main big twist, which I won't write here, is about the vampire's method of feeding. What I am still pondering are the other facets of the game, not spoilers, but worldbuilding. It's not necessary to answer questions about that (ambiguous worldbuilding is often better than clearcut!) but I wonder how the place into the game. For instance, the author claims to have written a thousand or thousands of stories, and talks about not getting 'come-alive chips'. In our day, even the most prolific authors struggle to reach a thousand books (except, of course, Corín Tellado), so that combined with the idea of needing a chip to come alive made me wonder if this were an AI author, but that doesn't fit at all with the other themes. Maybe life is prolonged in this future world?

I'll try running through the game again real quick and see. Hmm, just noticed that the very first link is a different voice we tell to shut up. I'll have to see if that recurs. I also see a flower saying it looks like it comes from a virtual render, which would fit with my ai idea. I find a minor typo in the name of the writer's love; I remember the first time being surprised at the discrepancy but thought I had just misremembered (unless the typo is also intentional). The story says the guy has been writing for 50 years, so this isn't an expanded lifespan situation, this guy is really cranking about a book every few days. And the game says that his books were selling millions of copies, so is this guy a billionaire? No, because someone has his residuals, his 'owner'. So he's forced to make books in a book sweatshop?

That's why that original idea popped in my head. Couldn't the vampire be a reader, someone who desires interest and fun, so they turn to an AI that cranks out books, but finds it intellectually bankrupt? I doubt that's the intended story, but it was fun to analyze.

Anyway, I thought this interesting, fun to read, good to have in the competition.

Black Thumb

This is a brief parser game that reminded me in positive ways of Baby Tree or Out, parser games that are short and symbolic and which may be a bit buggy (although this game is more optimistic than Baby Tree and Out was better coded). It also reminds me of Map with its direct metaphors (an empty house with a big growing plant in it).

Your parents are gone and your house is empty and lonely, so you stay in your room with your succulent and your dust-covered desk. I almost wonder if we're a ghost or dead or something.

Anyway, your instructions to care for the succulent quickly become unhinged, and we enact great symbolic events.

There is friction here because the parser is underimplemented and trying to figure out the author's intended solution is often puzzling, especially for the final action. But this story 'clicked' in my mind.

Logic Land

This is a game played on an Atari emulator. I had a little fussiness with keypresses; sometimes I overshot the action I wanted (you hold arrow keys or press arrow keys and push space).

It's a game like the famous Chinese Room by Joey Jones and Melvin Rangasamy, full of logical paradoxes brought into 'real life'. You try to TAKE in most rooms, gaining random items, then you find the right item to USE in other rooms, like using OCCAM'S RAZOR on a COMPLICATED THING.

It's almost entirely surface-level philosophy, mostly riffing on the names and/or definitions of things without looking deeper, but it's charming and I enjoyed the setup to the very end. With the very limited constraints, there was less room for bugs, and I don't think I encountered any.

Live and Get Pie

This was amusing. It's a short parser game where every line rhymes (i.e. the middle of the line rhymes with the end).

I wasn't sure what to do at first, but I liked the rhyme scheme (I like rhyming poetry more than non-rhyming poetry) and I found the implementation responded fairly well to a few things I chose.

When I realized what the actual commands to win were, I smiled, I thought it was great. Reminded me of Hard Puzzle by Ade McTavish, games 1-3 (the solution isn't the same or obtained the same way, but if you've beaten all 3 you'll see what I mean).

Everyone's Invited

This is a downloadable window executable that ends up having some different branching choices selectable by keyboard.

My first impression was, 'Wow, the art's really cool'. It felt like a real dreamcore/weirdcore style of art and music, very weird, glitchy, unsettling.

The story is about going to a party (after a brief surreal opening) where everyone is a kind-of person, a glitch in the universe, not really real. You wander around trying to find any shred of personality or reality. There are several endings, 2 of which are documented in the walkthrough (with a third described more generally).

It reminded me of p-zombies, which Magnus Archives covered in its 'Zombies' episode. The idea is that we can't tell if other people have inward existence or 'qualia' or whatever or if they're just really good imitations of humans. I don't know if that was the idea behind this game, but it fit well.

This game is a short downloadable window executable with music and sound and timed text, many things I typically dislike, but I liked this.