Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Twine game that alternates between academic treatises in one set of styling and a life-simulator in binary choices in another set of styling. You progress through an entire life while simultaneously reading about the (fictional) author's thought processes and research.

I thought the life simulator part was pretty fun. It has a certain unusual perspective on the world that to me captures a lot of the weirdness one feels when transitioning from one age group to another.

The scientific part seems intentionally obfuscated. Some of it seems like a reference to way the 'inner' game is structured (for instance the scientific part talks a lot about duality and the importance of a fixed binary, while the game consists of yes/no choices). I think that one phrase from it describes itself well: a “verisimilar facade of truth, a frightening pastiche that serves only to bolster the supposed intelligence of the person writing it.”

The game has some meta (or is the word extra-diegetic or something fancy like that?) parts like completing a survey about the game, downloading an update, etc., a part that looks unfinished.

Overall, I liked the opportunity to think about my life, and I liked the way that the game poked fun at personality tests and the kind of vapid summaries they give.

So I think I'll rate the game on that impression. Witty, nice-looking, poking fun at obtuse academic language, introspective.

Outside of that, someone mentioned that this is a parody of Alter Ego, a very old choice-based game. I had heard it mentioned once or twice and had looked at it in the past, but I revisited it as part of this review. I think that this game definitely suffers from the comparison. This game lambasts the over-emphasis on binaries; Alter Ego has more than just binary options and gives quite a bit of freedom in exploring the game; this game is self-conscious and tries to show the absurdity of life, but Alter Ego does so as well. I've heard it said that the best parodies are by those who have a deep love of the subject material, but I didn't get that feeling here. Now, I don't even really like Alter Ego and this whole reference idea isn't stated by the author, so I'm not including it in my rating, but it would be like parodying a hamburger by putting roast beef in a hot dog bun: just revisiting the same basic concept, making it a little more absurd, but not essentially adding anything or doing anything significantly better. (whereas a burger-lover's parody of a burger could make a really tall burger to make fun of how hard it is to bite into a restaurant burger, or include 20 patties and 25 slices of cheese and sparklers on the top to make fun of supersizing, etc.)

As a final side note I liked how smooth the animations were, (the two I remember are the picture of Conway's game life and the loading bar).

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)This Twine game was much more substantial than I expected and much less.

You play as a spirit summoned by a woman called Baba, a fortuneteller, as you are ripped from nonexistence into existence.

You have the power to hop from vessel to vessel, both non-living and living, and it gives you the opportunity to learn gossip.

And such gossip you learn! A cold princess loves a dashing, straightforward man who may hold a dark secret. A monk does not believe all she says she believes. And so on. You gather secrets like scores in games.

Eventually, you also gain the ability to make dialogue choices, allowing you to wreak havoc in others' lives.

In the end, before plot threads resolve, [spoiler]you become one with everything, and then nothing[/spoiler].

I would like to see the rest of the threads. I did recently teach a class on Hinduism for a few weeks as part of a World Religions course; I didn't know too much about Hinduism before (besides reading the Bhagavad Gita), but why don't I try to apply a superficial understanding of Hinduism to this game that may not actually be influenced by it at all?

We can see this game as a representation of the karmic cycle. Existence is suffering, and the endless cycle of new vessels and their attachments, both the good and the evil, and the happy and the bad, are not good. Only true detachment from everything allows us to exit the karmic cycle and escape the cycle of rebirth.

(My apologies for the limited understanding of Hinduism and the game).

Overall, I'm reminded of the game Riverside, which similarly starts out as a normal, promising game and then is abruptly derailed in a shocking, out of world fashion. You can peek at the walkthrough or reviews to see.

This is a game made using, I think, RPG maker, not the first IFComp game with that engine (the same author made Quest for the Sword of Justice).

The idea is that your teacup has been stolen and you want to retrieve it. You can opt not too, getting a bad ending. In fact, there are a lot of bad endings!

Most text games don't have the features found in this game, so when I rate it in ifcomp and on ifdb I'll focus on the features it has in common with text games, which I'll describe next. Then I'll describe the features not common to text games.

The writing is witty, some of the funniest to me in the whole competition. The lampshading of the silliness of the quest, the banter, is just great to me. The characters and settings constantly escalate (I like the 'Swamp of Instant Death' or whatever it's name was). There are enough options to feel like I had at least some freedom, some opportunity to express my personality.

For the non-IF parts:

The ultra-HD tileset used looked weird to me. It was kind of in the uncanny valley.

Having to wait for the character to move between each interaction drove me nuts. I blanked out and five minutes later I had been scrolling through Twitter, and tried to remember what I was doing, and realized I had clicked out of this game a while ago to wait for the animation to finish, and came back to it. I steeled myself to continue, but after accidentally picking the wrong option in Satan's house due to relentlessly hitting the 'skip' button (which for some reason is the same as the 'choose option' button), and running into two long combats in the forest in a row, I quit, since I had already seen 2 or 3 endings. I am completely uninterested in games incorporating long animations between text like this. I don't think that would make the author feel bad, as Damon Wakes is brilliant and has done a lot of different media, often to provoke specific responses from readers or judges, so I think getting a strong reaction to the game's techniques would be a positive thing.

Very funny text though. I would definitely read the rest of the game if I didn't have to watch any more animations.

I didn't actually understand this game, so I'll try to summarize it. It's a twine goal filled with surreal, non-sequitur type descriptions.

An artist named Leben is stuck in a dead end job due to losing inspiration. They hire a detective to find it, using a raven to communicate that message.

Hmm, there was also a part at the beginning about a heist. I'm going to go replay that part...

Yeah, replaying it didn't show anything. There's indication of meta-narrative travel, so maybe the different stories will unite at some point.

Honestly, I've really got no clue here. I wasn't able to construct a mental model of the game's structure, intent, or world. I will try to do better in the future.

This game uses a choice-based format I haven't seen before, where clicking on highlighted words opens a pop-up window with both more text (which can have its own highlighted words that open more pop-up windows) as well as action options at the bottom.

This system is genius, and could become a very popular choice if it were easy to write in and implement.

Unfortunately, I think this game was not a good choice to showcase the engine.

The game is about trying to dispose of toxic waste near a creepy forest.

You aren't really told what to do, except to find a manual. But you can't read it since it's dark; there's a flashlight, but it dies after a few turns. So I ended up with no light source before finding the manual.

I got out and explored, and couldn't find anything but an empty forest and a truck, as well as some background things that run away if you look at them. I found a hose, but nothing to attach it to. After a while, I restarted the game and used the flashlight right away on the manual, discovering that there was a valve somewhere.

That's when I found out, by looking around, that the truck is in multiple locations, and which location you're in changes what you see on it. There was no hint of that given in the game, and that behavior is different than the vast majority of parser games I've played. Innovating isn't bad, but I'm not sure how I was supposed to guess that examining the truck in multiple locales gives different responses.

So I eventually figured things out, and was close to doing my job, and then I died. But that's okay, because that's one ending and an achievement.

A lot of the game involves waiting for a long time, but there's no way to just 'wait'. I found out you can just talk to Bill dozens of times.

Overall, I think this system is fantastic, and the author's writing has a lot of highlights, and there aren't any bugs. I just got frustrated with the gameplay style. I would absolutely love to try a wider variety of games using this system and/or written by this author though.

This was a pleasant accompaniment to the last game I played in IFComp, Birding in Pope Lick Park. Both games are outdoorsy, real-life games inspired by a love for nature.

This game, Campfire, is written in Ink and doesn't use images. Instead, it describes a camping trip in words that are often vivid and descriptive, at other times enthusiastic, and at other times merely routine.

You get to buy stuff for your trip, pack, and pick different activities. I enjoyed fishing and fireworks the most.

I ran into a bug where popping popcorn made my game just hit a deadend. But I was very close to the ending and saw the endtext in the game file. Overall, a pleasant, short experience that could be spruced up a bit with more feedback from players.

This game is a murder mystery (one of several in this comp! Which isn't bad, there was one year where the 1st, 2nd, and 4th games were both murder mysteries) written in Twine, and fairly short to finish. It makes use of colored text, with red indicating closed off options, yellow with options to return to, and green for things found.

The idea is that some time ago, a girl disappeared, with her clothes being found in your uncle's basement and her body found eaten by crocodiles. Your uncle is convicted of sexual assault and convicted to death by crocodiles.

The gameplay consists of you searching around various locations in town, gathering clues and talking to individuals. You soon discover that things are far different than you might have been led to believe.

This feels like it might be a first game or a game of a newish author, as it has some classic mistakes new authors make (like having links that you can click over and over that repeat events like finding a key). If it is new, it's actually pretty good.

I didn't like the part where (Spoiler - click to show)we look under a 12 year old girl's bed and find something undescribed that makes us aroused. I did like the religious background we learn more about.

This Twine game feels very independent from other Twine traditions, with a gameplay style, styling and structure that seems derived from TTRPGS and gamebooks more than other past IFComp twine games, for instance.

It's a class police procedural murder mystery. Three bodies have been found, and you have to find the suspects! As an FBI agent, it is your job to investigate, interrogate, and accuse.

The game makes use of skills, which are set for you based on archetypes like 'Negotiator' or 'athlete'. This skills boost d20 rolls, which determine whether yo you fail or succeed.

This gives a random element to the game, and, according to the walkthrough I read after my playthrough, there are other, hidden random elements as well. This makes the game amenable to replay, but makes it difficult to win on the first try, especially without outside knowledge about the game.

The characters were generally interesting. I liked the family members most, then the suspects. The cops seemed fairly generic. The town and college had a vibrancy to them.

Overall, the game seemed very polished. I didn't agree with every gameplay decision, but I felt like I was playing a quality product while I was in the midst of the game.

This is a Twine game with inventory and world model that has a pretty compact map set in a mine. The idea is that you are a mage who teleports into a collapsed mine with the goal of evacuating everyone inside.

It's a classic low-level dungeon crawl, with spells, treasure, obstacles, commerce, and even the eponymous 'dragon'. All of these ingredients are added in small amounts; most of the game only uses one spell, for instance.

The game doesn't last too long. Much of the plot is about 'just in time' happenings; no matter what thing you need, you just happen to counter exactly that thing.

The game has charming and funny moments, and the text is descriptive. I think I would have liked to have an extra space between paragraphs to more easily distinguish them.

The inventory system was simple to use. I made some mistakes early on, but once I understood how it worked it was great.

It's odd; when I started this review I had in my mind that the game was lacking in some significant way, but I can't really point out anything. It has custom CSS, it had good pacing and interface, it had dangerous and safe moments, it has some Chekhov's guns that go off in satisfying ways. So I'd say it's a pretty good game!

This game's list of author's includes every published Choice of Games author who has been nominated for a Nebula Award, which is pretty neat.

This is a real-timed murder mystery. You are a sentient AI running a ship, named Pearl (both the AI and the ship, who are one). You have blacked out for 10 minutes during a jump into hyperspace, only to discover that your captain is dead.

You are ready to investigate, but there is an issue: hyperspace can cause hallucinations of distorted realities. Without some kind of consensus of the beings on the ship, reality could be stuck forever; with consensus, it could be permanently altered (or at least resolve into one or more paths).

Gameplay consists of moving from room to room, interviewing suspects and picking up pieces of evidence. Almost everyone gets the same set of questions.

You have a murderboard where you can adjust your suspicion of others between Low, Medium, and High. Once you adjust it to high or accuse someone, the game ends and you get an ending.

Here's what I liked and what I struggled with:

**Likes**
-The variety in characters was nice. That's probably the best part of having this many authors. While all characters had different backstories, I liked Primus's story (my first ending), and Ceri's was completely bizarre (does she (Spoiler - click to show)exist in the same reality as anyone else? is she (Spoiler - click to show)real???)
-The interface was smooth, and I found few bugs (only one I can remember is a stray close-bracket at the bottom of one ending)
-The game is relatively short and easy to replay

**Things I struggled with**
-Having the same conversation options with everyone was really hampering, especially as they weren't 'really' choices, in a way. The game said not to anger anyone, but your choices or 'do thing' or 'do thing in a rude way'. It feels like playing a game where the options are 'sword that does 5 damage to enemies' or 'sword that does 5 damage to players'. So it really felt like I had one choice at a time when talking to characters, and those choices were all the same, making them feel less individualistic. Maybe that's the way the writing was done? (sending out a spreadsheet with a list of the same murder-related questions to everyone and asking them to create a character and their responses to those questions), but I think it would have been neater to have questions tailored to those individual characters, especially when they had obviously interesting or suspicious behavior you can't follow up on.
-I'm not sure why we can set Low, Mid, or High suspicion levels, since you can only up a level when you get more evidence and the murderboard already tells you how much evidence you have.
-The nature of the endings means that (Spoiler - click to show)there's not necessarily a cannon (outside of one special ending). I teach a class called Theory of Knowledge, and we do murder mysteries each year that students right, then discuss means of obtaining knowledge, perspective, and ethics. We just performed this year's mysteries today, actually! But the first time we did this, one student wrote a table top murder game where the murderer was chosen by dice roll, but nothing changed about the evidence. The other students were outraged by this (despite liking the rest of the mystery) because it took away agency and made the knowledge obtained earlier unreliable and useless That's kind of how I felt about the alternate endings.
-The timer didn't work well for me. At first I felt rushed to hurry, but I got enough evidence for an ending in 10 minutes, so I felt bad for not giving the game as much attention as it asked for.

Overall, this game was fun. I noticed the download was just a redirect; I hope some version of it is stored in the IFarchive, because it would be nice to preserve it for future generations (and also because IFComp is about making games that are freely available forever); and there's nothing preventing it from being downloadable from the site it's hosted on, I was able to save a local copy and run it just fine.

The thing I'll probably remember longest is Ceri, as she's still a mystery to me.