Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

So, I have played Fallen London for years, and am especially fond of Sunless Seas and Sunless Skies. I also did my dissertation in geometry and am a fan of Flatland. So I definitely think I was the target audience of this game, which is essentially all of the important locations of Fallen London but flat.

The game is quite large, and has a Zork-like structure where you put treasures in a trophy case. There are plenty of locations, people and items.

This game is centered on parser structure, Fallen London lore, and geometry. I want to talk about what worked well and less well for me personally in each area.

What worked well with the parser: The puzzles are clean and solvable, usually, with few red herrings. I had a couple of disambiguation issues (especially with books and with the chess set) but very few if any genuine bugs. Interaction with NPCs generally worked well, always a hard thing to do. The piano puzzle was great.

What worked less well with the parser: The puzzles could use a little more creativity. Many of them are just ‘take the object’ or ‘follow the instructions here’. On the other hand, the chess puzzle was, as your testers indicated, perhaps too hard. It might have been worth giving a visual interpretation or even having a scrawled note in the chess handbook that says what the ‘real meaning’ of rule 1 is so people know they’re supposed to translate the rules and use them.

What worked well with Fallen London: This was clearly written by either a fan of the game or someone a lot of time to browse the wiki (or both?). Locations seem true to form, from poking around in the banks of the river to the exhibits in the Labyrinth of tigers to the expeditions in the Fallen Quarter.

What worked less well with Fallen London: Fallen London relies almost entirely on atmosphere and on the idea that there are forbidden secrets just around the corner. This game reveals many of the secrets of Fallen London, so many that I would almost recommend people not play it if they plan on getting into Fallen London and want to have more surprises. This has a second negative effect, which is that by revealing so much of the secrets at once, they’re deprived of their power, and the impact of the setting is lessened. Likewise, the game lacks the lush descriptions of Fallen London.

What works with geometry: Things like the elevator shaft work very well and the endings. But otherwise the 2-dimensionality is not used very much. How are murals drawn? How do locks work? How can the sigils be drawn as (presumably) 1-dimensional paint? How can you bridge a river without blocking its flow?

So I think this game has a lot of positives, but that it could make use of its three sources a little bit more.

+Polished: Mostly so.
-Descriptive: The writing is, well, somewhat flat.
+Interactivity: There was generally always something available to do.
-Emotional impact: I didn't feel emotionally invested in the game.
+Would I play again? After I've had enough time to forget the solutions, yes.

So I’ll just say that this is a great ‘first attempt at an IF story’, as the author put it. I’ve developed theories over the years on what parser games do well during the comp, and they’ve worked pretty good, but recently I’ve been coming up with theories on what makes choice-based games successful. One of the biggest things, in my theory, is allowing a great deal of freedom, either freedom of characterization of the PC or freedom of movement, as well as allowing the player to come up with and execute plans. Having a rhythm or pattern to the game can help too, where similar events repeat with a buildup to something big (like the days in Birdland or the memory episodes in Will Not Let Me GO).

This game has a lot of that freedom and it has that rhythm. You are a cave man, basically an ape, naked in the forest. There’s a small ±shaped map that you explore over the course of the game, gathering brown mushrooms. Each time you find one, you ‘level up’, which increases the verbosity of descriptions, the kind of tasks you can complete, and the mini-puzzles (of which there are three) that you can access.

The mini puzzles are well-done, and Mancala looks fun to play in real-life.

I’m pretty skeptical of the hypothesis of the game (sounds like Lamarckian evolution) but this game is definitely presented as fun and not as an evolutionary biology text.

The two things that hold it back from greatness, in my opinion, are the relatively small scope (although a shorter game is nice during such a big comp!) and the fact that you can only work on one task at a time, lowering the difficulty and making it feel railroaded. But outside of that, I think this is a very strong first game and would love to see more from this author.

+Polish: Mancala and tick tack toe were really cool.
+Descriptiveness: The several layers of intelligence in the writing works great.
+Interactivity: The gated structure doesn't work for me, but the games and combat work well for me.
-Emotional impact: I don't know why, but although I enjoyed the game, it didn't impact me on an emotional level. Not sure what the reason was.
+Would I play again? Yes, I think I would, taking notes.

In Contrast to much of Chandler Groover’s earlier work, this game is written in unity, with Tom Lento providing art and programming.

As someone who’s been working on a Chandler Groover-themed amusement park parser game for years, my initial thought was ‘Where do I fit this in?’ (maybe the food truck?)

Beyond that, though, this game definitely fits into the pattern for Groover’s recent IFComp entries, which tend to be much more experimental and less formulaic.

In this case, we have a complicated UI system that involves dragging and dropping tiles while a Clippy-like goldfish provides helpful tips in the corner. Doing so unlocks additional tiles with additional features, which raise and lower stats by various amounts, with the goal of reaching an arbitrary number for three of those stats.

Having played through most of the comp by now, my mind brought up umprompted comparisons to other games. The drag and drop visual system reminded me of Saint Simon’s Saw and its unity card system, also involving dragging rectangles into rectangles. The complex mechanics and arbitrary number goals reminded me favorably of Ascension of Limbs. The fishy religion reminded me of Call of Innsmouth. And the overall elaborate strategy guide and overly helpful fish reminded me of the controversy surrounding Amazing Quest.

So maybe this game lies at the core of the whole comp in a weird sense that oddly ties in with the game’s own themes. The main idea here is some kind of bio-mechanical-theological construct that is malfunctioning and emitting brine, and which you must patch up through various rituals which have an unintended transformative gestalt effect (just throwing random words together here and hoping they mean something).

Is it a good game? Is this complex combination of art, interactivity, words and design actually fun?

Well, it really annoys me how the top 2 boxes are almost the same color, and that on the little save disks the colors are switched. I finally realized that I could hover something over the middle box and if it looked ‘transparent’ due to the colors matching then it matched. I’m not sure the little disk’s middle color was the exact same shade as the big stack’s top color or not.

I don’t know, you can throw together all sorts of things and little UI decisions can matter more than all your careful preparation. But after I got over that hump, and once I realized that brining could be good, I enjoyed the game and actually quite enjoyed the ending. I was assigned a specific ending style (dominant), but since there’s no guide to endings and I’m not sure how I could play differently (except maybe brining myself to death or completing the rituals in a different order?) I think I’ll leave it right now. This isn’t my favorite Chandler Groover game if, for nothing else, the fact that I admire quick text games that can be resized in any window and allow blindingly-fast play (some of my reasons for preferring parser and non-timed Twine games), and this game doesn’t have those things. I don’t view moving from text to unity as a positive progression for my own personal interests, but I can 100% say that this is the best use of Unity I’ve seen for telling a narrative.

+Polish: Eminently polished
+Descriptiveness: Many, varied and unusual micro-stories
+Interactivity: By the end I liked it
-Emotional impact: Not really; the game structure and UI mechanizes the gameplay and alienates the player from the story, I believe intentionally.
+Would I play again? Not till I'm done with the other games, but I want to see if there are more endings.

Well, my personal shuffle lined up for me three pretty hefty games that I beta tested all in a row. But fortunately they’re all fun to play.

This is a big game, longer than 2 hours for me (I only replayed the first 2 ‘acts’ for this review). It’s basically the ancient rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries (as far as we’ve recreated them) retold in the style of P.G. Wodehouse.

The game is split up into 4 or 5 acts. Each is large enough to be an IFComp game in its own right, especially the first act (which involves searching for items in an expansive map) and the last act (which is a madcap action scene set in a single room and involving a form of optimization).

The game provides a ton of jokes and just text in general, with full-screen text printouts being a regular occurrence. Overall, it’s a masterpiece in terms of total content and polish.

Structure-wise, I found the open-world segments more effective than the narrowly constrained 2nd act. Quite a few of the puzzles were more difficult than I could handle, as well, with my typical loose and easy playstyle. For the thoughtful and methodical player that examines every item, carefully checks exits and works through every takable object, this game will exciting and rewarding. For everyone else, like me, the hints are quite good and let you see the witty writing more easily.

+Polish: For a game this large and complex, it is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: The witty writing is a plus.
-Interacivity: For me, the puzzles were too hard to figure out easily.
+Emotional impact: This game is funny, for sure.
+Would I play again? After the comp is over, I'd like to revisit this.

I beta tested this game.

This game is about a private detective hired to track down a woman, and features a number of unusual animals (for instance, it starts in a petting zoo with an aye-aye and an iguana).

Robb Sherwinn is an incredibly funny writer who makes games that involve bizarre logic and creative situations. Mike Sousa is a talented programmer who also has a knack for humor.

So this game is a tag-team effort that warms my heart. When I beta tested this, I laughed out loud several times. Parts of this game are so funny to me specifically. It really depends on what type of humor you have. For me, the thing I think I like best is that it’s good-natured humor; the people might be weird, or violent, or non-human, or troubled, but they’re inherently kind to each other. I’ve always been averse to games with strong profanity and sexual references, which featured in early Sherwin games (not in this game, though), but the inherent goodness and kindness in the stories overpowered that for me. Because isn’t that more important? Isn’t doing your best and trying to help others more important than the way you talk? I still felt uncomfortable with the content, but this game is like ‘clean’ Sherwin and I can’t say how much I appreciate that that exists.

I also enjoyed the references to Mike Sousa’s earlier games, like the computer sports news about Jake Garrett the baseball player (from At Wit’s End) and the garrulous taxi driver from Fake News. I also appreciated (of all things) the smooth elevator in the game. I did some ‘Inform tutoring’ with someone and we spent an entire week of lessons working on his elevator extension he was trying to write, so I confidently say that this game has an excellent elevator, the kind of elevator I aspire to write.

Finally, I love the art in this game by artist asteltainn. So I definitely plan on revisiting this and playing it again in future years.

+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional impact, Would I play again? This game satisfies all 5 criteria for my star rating system. It's great for my tastes!

I beta tested this game.

This is one of two games this year to be co-written by Xavid and which implement the fun map-building extension used in Xavid’s earlier game Future Dreams. It looks good in both games!

This game is wildly ambitious, and the concept is clever: you take people’s intents (and even more, later) and move them around to each other.

This concept has been used before (most clearly in Delightful Wallpaper) but never on this scale. This game is very large, with three sections that easily could have each been their own IFComp game.

The game expands in the middle so that it has cubic complexity. You can apply any of one category of object to another category of object to each person in the game.

This creates an enormous state space unlike anything I’ve seen before (except possibly Andrew Schultz’s Threediopolis with exponential complexity). In my experience, even quadratic complexity can be crushingly painful (I wrote a murder mystery where any topic can be combined with any other topic).

This is both good and bad. On the good side, it provides freedom, and that’s imperative for most parser games. On the other hand, without careful guidance, the complexity overwhelms the player and the game becomes frustrating.

For me, the game had generally enough hints so that solving puzzles wasn’t too hard (I replayed much of it before this review). The final act, though, I find very difficult indeed, and it was beyond me.

I enjoyed the writing in this a lot. This game is verbose, and riffs on things from quantum mechanics to religious symbolism. It’s clever and witty. As an IF ‘historian’ I’m very interested in its placement; the nice graphical elements are the kind of thing that, in the past, have raised the scores of games a lot, while the complexity may or may not have an effect on the outcome. In any case, I’m glad I played it, and feel inspired by it as an author.

+Polish: The game seems bug-free, and the map is nice.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is really solid.
+Interactivity: The mechanics are clever
+Emotional impact: Parts of it are very funny
-Would I play again? The increasing complexity and overall size of the game are fairly intimidating!

I enjoyed playing this game after hearing about it from many others.

A shortish Twine story, its main strengths are in its well-wrought writing and its numerous special effects, which include responsive graphics, elaborate text animations (especially the title screen!) and sound. I especially like how it integrated the sound test.

As a story, I was frightened enough by this game that I considered stopping playing (it was close to midnight). As it was, though, I’m glad I’m finished.

A few people talked about the ending not being as strong as the rest. I’m not so sure; horror generally has two endings (hopeful and victorious but at what cost? vs defeat snatched from the jaws of victory), and while this game kind of mixes the two, I don’t see that as a bad thing. It’s a game I could definitely recommend to horror fans.

+Polish: Great effects
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid writing
+Interactivity: I loved how responsive the game was to your actions
+Emotional impact: Felt some fear!
+Would I play again? I plan on it.

This game uses Unity (and possibly Ink?) to give you a series of choices as you progress on a journey to avenge your master who has died. His spirit now inhabits a sword.

You pass through many interesting situations such as a pirate ship, a minotaur battle, etc.

I found the writing interesting and the concept charming. The text is typed out but fairly quickly, although that still hampered play somewhat The occasional use of graphics worked well.

In structure, this game reminds me of nothing more than Chandler Groover’s game Left/Right. In that game, you can either choose left or right over and over. One direction will kill you or end the game, and you never know which. It’s partially (I think?) a lesson in the inscrutability of that choice structure.

And it’s that way in this game, too. You have to guess the author’s mind on each choice. It’s possible to see the logic in each choice, but usually only after you’ve attempted to go through and die. I think it stems from a desire to make interesting decisions with only binary (or occasionally trinary) choices. But I don’t think having frequent deaths is the best option; it’s much more interesting to have old decisions affect future decisions several turns later and then to add some hinting to the game so that people have a general idea of what’s expected of them. Even better is adding multiple conflicting goals.

Overall, I had to stop at the cat-woman’s den because I was dying too often. But I found this fun.

+Polish: The game runs well and seems generally bug-free.
+Descriptiveness: The use of dialog made the game more interesting to me.
-Interactivity: Not a fan of 'guess which path is life and which one is death'
-Emotional impact: The characters didn't sink into my soul, so to speak.
-Would I play again? Not unless there were a faster way to replay.

This game is written in Quest, and I engage with Quest games differently from Inform and TADS games.

Quest games tend not to come from the culture of ‘implement everything smoothly’ that other systems have, which is both bad and good. Bad because there’s less immersion, but good because you’re less likely to miss important things.

This game uses a lot of fancy features, like the parser voice and the player being separate entities; different worlds; timed text (used sparingly); and some clever writing tricks.

The style of the gameplay was difficult for me, so I went to the walkthrough and followed it all the way through. Overall, the writing is fairly solid; I don’t think I could do better myself; but it could be improved. I didn’t get a lot of the hints behind the big reveals, and the gradual reveals about the narrator flew over my head. I know that’s on me as a reader, but I wonder if we could improve narrative flow.

I do think the whole key thing is pretty neat, and I’d love to work something like that into a game into the future.

+Polish: For a Quest game, this is pretty smooth.
+Descriptiveness: The writing was creative and interesting.
-Interactivity: I struggled to engage with the game as intended.
-Emotional impact: The big reveals didn't land with me.
+Would I play again? I could see me trying another time.

Man, I stayed up a couple of hours later than I ought to have because I wanted the best ending to this game.

I beta tested this game, but I didn’t see it all at the time. This is a very unusual parser game with limited actions. Instead of moving around and manipulating things, you have a fixed set of verbs and a fixed set of nouns, and they interact with each other in weird ways.

The verbs have normal things like EXAMINE and TALK but also things like WRECK and PROMOTE. The nouns include SELF, people, STORE, MIND, etc. Yes, you can WRECK mind to make yourself go a little less sane and in fact that’s a great way to find more endings.

You have a set amount of cash and it goes down each week. This is a hard game, unless you hit some random luck. Once you get going, things build up: promoting rare objects brings in customers who become regular customers who give you cash. I also recommend TALK CATALOGUE early on to get a free item.

Because this is a horror game, things go wrong. Your employees may be possessed. Once, to satisfy an ancient relic’s thirst for blood, I murdered a customer. But another customer came in before I could discard the body, so I had to murder her, too, and then more customers came in. Fortunately, no one escaped and I cleaned everything up before the police became involved. But it was touch and go.

I decided to try to reach all endings. I’ll say right now that the final ending, Ascension, is different from the others and may not satisfy you (although if you played this far it very well may; I felt content with it). As for the second to last one, it can get a little weird depending on your choices (Spoiler - click to show)(for instance, mine involved ritualistic bathing in chocolate).

But overall, I think this game is great. It’s heavily RNG based, so it will be either too hard or too easy on most playthroughs, but the depth of the interactivity is what I love here.

+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? This is exactly the kind of thing I like to see.