Reviews by MathBrush
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A short linear Twine game about wormholes popping up, April 15, 2024This is an example of dynamic fiction, where you have no interactivity (although there is one instance of cycling text) and the entire purpose of the links is to pace the reading.
I’m not really against dynamic fiction. It’s useful in shorter stories to hide the total length of the story and keep you guessing where the end will come. It’s less useful in longer stories, as players get frustrated. Thankfully this is pretty short.
This game is about wormholes opening up and taking away things and people, with the reasons for it slowly revealed. I liked it, and I appreciated the sentiment it was trying to impart.
A music-enhanced goofy night in a cemetery investigating aliens, April 9, 2024There have been a couple of polls over the years for 'games that need more reviews' and this has been on all of them. I loaded it up once a few years ago, but it seemed somewhat overwhelming.
But I'm glad I've finished it now!
This is a goofy, intentionally silly game in the vein of Escape from the Crazy Place. You are a police officer dressed as a Go Go dancer. Your partner is Donald McRonald: clown, pyromaniac, and overall goofy character.
The game map is split into about 9 main locations with a couple of extra ones. Gameplay revolves around bringing items from one area into another and getting Ronald to cooperate with you.
The plot is that something mysterious fell out the sky and crashed into the graveyard, and now so many of the dead and buried are rising up out their graves!
There is background music, which I thought was well-chosen; it felt like the soundtrack to one of those movies within a movie you see when people reference fake black and white horror films, like the werewolf movie in the Thriller music video. It has a lot more character than much of the music I've seen in other IF games.
However, I also found a lot of bugginess. The jelly doughnut was a major problem; I found it in a grave. I took it. Then I took something else in the grave, and it said I took the doughnut. I later gave the doughtnut to Donald, and it said he ate it, but then I still had it in my inventory. Similarly, the hints just went blank when first entered the (Spoiler - click to show)spacecraft. There were also a lot of interactions which may have been bugs and may have not; like when I opened my purse, and (Spoiler - click to show)tried to get something out and died, so I tried giving it to Ronald and told him to open it, then when I had it again I could take stuff out and not die, even though the boa was in there. Similarly, with the main nemesis, (Spoiler - click to show)I first tried doing nothing, and died; then breaking the machine, and died; then going through the light, and died; then talking, and that just gave a normal response. So I tried attacking the dog herself and got mind controlled away. So things were kind of chaotic. There are also several typos, mainly missing quotes when a sentence has a dialogue tag in the middle.
The characters and writing are funny and high quality, and the music really helps the ambiance. I enjoyed a lot of the puzzles, too. I wonder if that's why there are so few reviews; the game is good enough that no one would give it a 'this sucks, don't try this' review, but tricky enough to finish that people who like it often aren't able to see the end. However, I should note that as of writing this in April 2024, this game has a lot of 4-5 star ratings, while I'm giving it a 3-star rating, so my experience may be atypical.
An expansive and engaging magical puzzler with images, April 8, 2024I was talking to someone about Quest games, and searched for the top rated Quest games of all time. It brought this up as number 1, a game by two-time IFComp winner Steph Cherrywell! I had seen it before, but never got around to playing it.
I strongly recommend downloading Quest to play this. Online, it gets slower and slower and eventually halts altogether. Offline, it worked great.
In this game, you play as a magical student coming back to your academy after a break. This is a small-scale school; less Harry Potter, more like X-Men school sized.
You have a spellbook with you, but it's blank! You can encounter up to five different spells.
Gameplay revolves around rescuing your friends (and maybe some not friends) who've been struck by various magical curses. I remembered Jenny Yoshida from Brain Guzzler's from beyond, and then Mary Jane, before looking it up and realizing that the two games share much of the same cast (though they are set in different universes). Each student comes with a well-drawn profile picture.
The puzzles were tricky for me. All were well-clued, and generally revolved around finding uses for each item or spell you find. But a lot of error messages aren't helpful if you almost get the right answer but not quite. The hardest part for me was (Spoiler - click to show)carving the jack o lantern(Spoiler - click to show). I tried (Spoiler - click to show)CUT PUMPKIN, CUT PUMPKIN WITH KNIFE, CARVE PUMPKIN, etc. So struggling with the parser adds to the difficulty. I ended up consulting a walkthrough several times.
The writing and setting is very charming, making this game overall very fun to play, despite my struggles. I'm glad the author went on to make hit after hit.
A game about looking back and looking forward, April 6, 2024I generally like Bez’s work, as my view on creative writing is that it’s a way to share parts of our experiences and feelings with others, and Bez’s work is generally very effective at communicating how they feel.
This is a shorter game, drawing on some of the cozier seeds. It uses a warm color palette and a background sound of (I think) a fire crackling.
It has you sitting and thinking about all the bad things in your life, picking over the negative thoughts with a fine tooth comb. I remember playing it for the first time, feeling like it was going to be a downer game, but then I was pleasantly surprised to see things turned on their heads.
Overall, a good game and one that had a positive impact on me. I do think I slightly prefer Bez’s longer games, but that’s about it.
A game from many perspectives, set at a work party with drama, April 6, 2024This was an intricate and surprising game. It uses a seed for color palettes and another for ‘one click=one change in perspective’.
So the way it’s structured is that it has a setting and a list of dramatis personae. All of the people’s names are linked, and clicking on them gives you a view of the soiree from their perspective, as well as links to the three others.
So, I thought, ‘Ah, I get it. There are just four story passages, and you can pick what order to read them in.’ But, it was actually a lot more complex than that. Each link that you click takes you to another person’s perspective, like I thought, but it also advances the time. So there’s actually quite a bit of complexity in play here.
At first, I thought there were 8 or so people, until I realized that every person had a first name and a last name and that which one was used in the text depended on the familiarity of the person who was speaking. This introduced an almost puzzle element for me, as I had to go back and forth between the dramatis personae list and try to fit together the different perspectives into a unified whole. It made me feel like this was a lot of worldbuilding for one game, so I checked the ‘about’, and saw that this tied in with the author’s earlier game Structural Integrity.
Overall, the writing felt natural and the scenario was interesting enough that I played through 4 or 5 times (unlocking the ‘faster read’ mode). The basic concept is that you’re at a work party and two male/male couples that have beef with each other bump into each other with a combo of flirting and veiled insults.
I felt like the ending didn’t really end on a satisfying, conclusive note; it felt like there was either something missing left to be told or that room was being left for a sequel hook.
I also think that the extensive worldbuilding and the ‘one click = one viewpoint change’ concepts had tension with each other, because with such fleshed-out characters I would have liked to have more time with one character to learn names from their point of view and get a feel for them and their worldview before hopping over to the next character.
Finally, the styling looked nice, with well-chosen colors and backgrounds, and a fancy dramatis personae list. I thought early on ‘I wish I could just bring up the list of people more easily’, and then I realized there was a button that does exactly that, which was good design.
Fake game listings for games that could have been, April 6, 2024This game has a genuinely funny title, which I like.
In ATGIWHMFSIIHTTWIDNOWTANN, you are provided a list of game seeds the author was interested in. You can click each one to see the seed itself, either visual or text, which honestly was great; in the actual seedcomp planting round, you have to download the text prompts individually which can get really annoying, so copying the structure of this game to make a ‘hub game’ could be really nice.
Anyway, once you select a subset of these, you can push a mysterious-looking ‘alchemize!’ button. Now, there are a lot of seeds here, so there would be hundreds of combinations. But the game automatically culls things to combos the author thought of, so clicking one box deletes most others.
I was delighted to see that the function of ‘alchemize!’ was to make a fake ifdb page for the game! It comes complete with summary, reviews, and votes on those reviews.
It was really fun seeing what someone’s perception of IFDB was as expressed through the various voices they invented. It was pretty funny seeing things like two-word negative reviews that got a single 0/1 helpfulness vote.
I found it interesting that the fake reviews quoted or summarized large portions of the game explicitly. I know the reason for that was to communicate to us, the people reading this, what the games would have actually been like. But actual reviews tend not to include so much stuff (like a ranking of characters in a game), probably because people read reviews before playing and don’t want to get spoiled. It made me wonder, what if we did include more stuff like that? In spoilers, of course.
The one thing I didn’t really like was the color choices. The fake IFDB page had black text on a dark grey background (I tried two browsers just to check). I could read it but only barely, so I went into the console and edited the text to be easier to see. Might just be a me-getting-old thing, though.
Very fun to see IFDB represented this way.
Go on trial with several poets, April 6, 2024This game uses a seed where you have to stand on trial before four famous poets.
It’s written in Dendry, one of the first Dendry games I’ve seen not written by Autumn Chen, making this pretty unique.
The game presents each of the four poets (Sappho, Tagore, Milton, and Khayyam) as characters each having themes, virtues, and vices.
The concept is that you are on trial for plagiarizing their work. Each one accuses you of having plagiarized certain themes of theirs. Your own identity is kept secret.
At first, I thought the game would have very little interaction, since clicking on each poet gave me three pages of non-interactive text.
But then, I found out that that was just the intro! You then reveal your own identity which was a powerful moment for me (I got mild chills on my arm hair).
Then there follows a combinatorial puzzle. I found it tricky; I just randomly clicked for a long time and didn’t understand the mechanics. After about 10 minutes I started thinking more about it, and finally came up with a solution. It was pretty complex; it reminded me a bit of an Andrew Schultz puzzle.
The game inspired me to look up more about the poets. Due to my inexperience, it was hard at times to see the differences in their themes and their values, so I had trouble distinguishing between them. I look forward to learning more about them and am glad for Onno and Rovarsson (the seed author) for bringing them to my attention.
Make some sad food after a breakup, April 6, 2024This Adventuron game was pleasant to play. I was able to grasp what was going on, make a plan, carry it out with some exploration, and get a satisfying conclusion. It relies on the central core of parser games: take, drop, examine, open, close, etc.
You’ve had a bad breakup with a woman and she’s taken a lot of things, and you need to break out of your depressed languor and feed your very hungry stomach. Unfortunately, some of the food you have left is a bit weird.
I ended up making the tuna and tangerine pizza, which is pretty weird but not too weird (my favorite food when I was a missionary was green beans, tuna, shredded cheese and noodles).
Overall, short and satisfying. I did have some parser struggles, which I’ll DM the author as the particulars don’t matter for the review, but they were pretty similar to ones I’ve gotten reports for for my own game (little synonyms and such). It didn’t really detract from the enjoyment, and fortunately the game offers several layers of help to ease any friction with the parser, up to a full walkthrough, which thankfully I didn’t have to consult.
Manage conflicting social demands during a DnD game in a fantasy world, April 6, 2024This game consumed a lot of my attention and thought process.
You are a dungeon master/game master having a night with a classicallly-sized 4 person party, complete with fighter, rogue, cleric and mage.
All of the participants, though, are magical (well, mostly), including a fox spirit and a golem. Also, many of them are neurodivergent in different ways (including you).
The gameplay loop is that you advance the campaign a bit (which seems like its own fun story), and then an issue arises either in-game between characters or in-person. You have options to resolve it, which vary but often include taking gentle action, taking firm action, or doing nothing.
There are three ‘negative’ things that can pile up (or, occasionally, go down) that I found: you can get more and more distracted; the individual people can feel hurt or disconnected from the game; and time can progress.
I wasn’t sure what each of my actions would do or what the consequences, if any, of the above would be, but I had some idea and formed a strategy. It was very similar to a real-life stressful situation; it reminds me of my day-job as a high school math teacher (do I continue the lecture when everyone’s bored and the only topic left is really obscure but has a 5% chance of appearing on the end of year exam and ruining their life? Do I focus on the engaged students and let people talking in the back keep going? etc.)
I ended with time running out in the climactic fight, and that seemed just fine to me. I didn’t feel a need to replay, as there aren’t any perfect TTRPG sessions in real life, and ending without any major meltdowns seemed a big plus.
The characters were very distinct and their individual personalities mattered, making this work well as a character piece.
Short illustrated dreamlike game, April 6, 2024This was a nice game to end the comp on. It’s a relatively brief and poetic Twine game that uses sound (which I believe comes from the seed being used) as well as line drawings to convey a story.
The idea is that you’ve found a journal that talks about someone missing someone else, and the journey it’s taken them on. I can’t tell if it’s metaphorical or literal, but either way it’s interesting.
The game is very short, but it serves its purpose well.
A surreal horror game about a friend group and their relationships, April 6, 2024This game starts off very strongly with a nice animation of tv static, good styling choices and a creepy intro. I was ready to be scared and felt a bit nervous/excited going in.
Four friends are going to watch a famously bad movie that has previously been edited, but now they find the original director’s cut.
Unfortunately, one of them is killed. Even worse, it’s the friend that was keeping the whole group together, the leader.
The game then takes a quick turn and opens up to the main gameplay, where each friend must confront the death of their friend and what that means for the future. This was a unique and fun part of the game.
There are a ton of different endings, and I played through to see 8 of them, but after the first two you have to re-see a lot of the game so it petered out eventually. But the endings I got were very strong.
The beginning was a bit hard to follow; I thought they were going to a theatre, then to pick up something, then a concert, then they were at a gas station. I eventually realized it was all one story, but the jumps were a bit confusing. That’s my little nitpick for an otherwise very solid game. I like surrealish horror with two worlds/realities, so this was fun.
Relationship drama at an older university party, April 6, 2024This choice-based game is inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128, as well as the Reverse a Poem prompt (and the surprisingly popular Color Palettes prompt, which has been used in at least 3 of the games I’ve seen.)
I enjoy Shakespeare (although his sonnets and other poems are the works of his I’ve studied least), so I was interested to see where this goes.
It’s split into 4 pieces, each reflecting part of the sonnet, and inviting you to compare the storyline with the sonnet itself as you go.
You show up at a Valentine’s party for older singles, some of whom your friendly with and others less so. Interaction comes from choosing who to talk to and how to interact with them.
I tend to immerse myself in characters as I play and to suspend disbelief, imagining me to be the character myself. Obviously characters sometimes do things that I wouldn’t do, like theft and murder. But I had to pull myself out of immersion in this game, as I was presented with a woman, told that she is married but separated, and given a chance to put my hand on her thigh. An extramarital affair is something I’ve seen happen multiple times in real time and they have cause the majority of pain I’ve experience in my life, so I had to eject my immersion and puppet the character like an astral projection the rest of the game. I don’t think that was the author’s intent at all, and they certainly can’t anticipate every person’s reaction to different themes!
Fortunately, I could simply just not click on certain options and the game came to a satisfying conclusion. I found myself intrigued by the drama and drawn into the action.
The best parts of the game to me were the characters who are painted in vivid detail. I felt like I already knew Jack and Henry and Aline, like I had met them before and could picture them in my eye (I saw Henry as a younger Robert Redford).
A few times I felt like the pacing could have slowed down a bit to explore some of the more interesting moments, like a certain violent moment with a bottle. This is an author who I think would do equally well with long form fiction as with short form fiction.
The styling was well done and the overall presentation looked great.
The horrors of mankind, now in two flavors, April 6, 2024This game is about someone experiencing the worst the world has to offer: isolation, hunger, infection, homophobia, perpetuating cycles of abuse, and, worst of all: cryptocurrency.
It’s a short game, well-designed with animated background transitions and varying fonts and colors.
You play as a recluse without stable unemployment who has recently fled a discord server where they were picked on and called various slurs. They find hope in a new discord for a cryptocurrency.
While all of this is happening, their house becomes increasingly moldy.
I didn’t put it together until now, because while playing I thought these two storylines were disjoint, but the spread of mold and the cycle of crypto’s crash and boom have a lot in common and those parallels must be what the other was on about.
There are several kinds of creepy moments here, from strange questions to plenty of physical horror. The slurs made me most uncomfortable; it was clear, though, that their use was not positive and was reflective of the ill mental state of the character.
Overall, a thoughtful game. Reminded me a lot of when crypto first got really big; I looked up how it worked and couldn’t figure out how it would be sustainable due to the need to keep long lists of past transactions in each interaction, so I tried to code up my own and got it to work, and my dean decided to use it as fake currency for his econ class (we made proof of work really easy so that it wouldn’t destroy the environment). I thought it would make it clear to the students how silly crypto was, but they got really into it. But the mining was annoying so they eventually abandoned the crypto part and made it fiat by putting it on the dean’s spreadsheet, which pretty much sums up the usefulness of crypto in real life (it’s not).
Anyway, a good horror game but definitely check the trigger warnings.
Long, complex and creepy story about a private cinema showing, March 31, 2024This is a pretty substantial Moiki game with a creepy atmosphere, in French.
There is a book you love that is finally getting a movie adaptation! And your friend has a friend who knows someone who has an early bootleg copy!
The book is about a woman who reincarnates throughout history, including as various animals, but who can take control of some of the reincarnations given the right ritual.
Going to the movie takes you to a dark and frightening theatre where everyone behaves strangely...
The game gives the impression that there are many branches, although I only played through once. There are numerous quick-time events, which were difficult for me as a non-native speaker.
The use of background images, music and occasional voice were very effective, and I was impressed both by the technical skill and the storytelling.
I was left unsure of how the final events of the game where I learn more about myself were connected to either the book or the movie; perhaps if I had played more, I could have seen the truth.
An alchemy parser game on a retro platform, March 30, 2024This French game is designed to run on an Amstrad CPC emulator. It comes with pixel art.
This was tough; I often struggle with old-school games, and playing in French wasn't helping! I did find 2 out of 5 endings, and feel satisfied with that.
You are asked by an oracle in your village to explore an old chapel and find a monk named Hermes. You must solve a series of puzzles to figure out how to save your land!
The biggest puzzles revolve around creating potions. I never found amanita mushrooms, one of the ingredients, so I likely missed the best ending. But I managed to brew two of the others.
I enjoy games that have two worlds, and this game does that. The pixel art is interesting. The only thing that was grating was the slow fake 'loading' the emulator does every screen. Yes, I remember playing games in the 90s where the PC would chug and slowly load each screen. It was nostalgic the first 50 times. But as the game goes on it certainly loses its charm!
Apparently there's a way to win the game in one move, which is interesting!
The intro to a longer game about revolutionary radio, March 29, 2024This is a prologue to a humor sci fi game written in Moiki.
In it, you play as a radio repairman in a futuristic world. A transgender celebrity comes to visit you, and more importantly, a strike is going on and the radio station that supports it is in trouble!
The text comes in very short bursts, just a sentence or two per page in many cases. There are several character portraits designed with, I assume, AI art (many games in this comp have used it and it has that kind of style, although I could be wrong!).
The game has a kind of animated feel/vibe, like the Jetsons mixed with characters from the Spiderman newspaper comic.
The story's not complete, which makes sense, as I felt like it kind of jumped around and was a bit confusing at times.
A surreal game set in a dream, March 29, 2024In this game, you fall asleep, and wake up trapped in a strange dream world.
The game is choice-based, using Moiki, but it has a strong world model, with most interactions based on finding and using items, movement, and working with NPCs.
It's pretty short, but took me a while to work through, as there are many options. The writing was a highlight, with humorous quips, strong metaphors, and some just straight-up weirdness (like licking the horizon and discovering it is yogurt).
Overall, it was nice to have a short, kind of goofy break. There are almost certainly parts that went over my head; I bet if I were a native French speaker I'd appreciate it even more.
I did find a portion that resembled a parser game pretty funny, especially since it was a 'prairie informe', where inform can either mean the language or, in this situation, 'shapeless'.
A databse search game with revolutionary poets, March 29, 2024This game took me a while to figure out. There's a text box to enter stuff, but hitting enter just goes to a new line.
Eventually I realized it was a search feature with a bit of a delay; you type in a word and it brings up all elements in its database that match that word. I think the game Her Story might be similar (?)
The stuff that comes up includes text message conversations, journal notes, images, schematics, interviews, etc.
It was written in four hours, but there's some impressive stuff here. The idea is that two women who live together have been arrested after police suspected them of dangerous revolutionary activity, and you have to determine on a scale of 0-2 how dangerous they are.
Pretty neat stuff! I wish I learned just a bit more about them and what was going on, since the worldbuilding was so fun.
An easy-to-play and intriguing IF mystery set in a small town, March 27, 2024This Ink game was fun. You play as someone who received a note to come and investigate a town on behalf of a countess who has had to make herself scarce.
Most links involve either moving to a new location or performing an action in a location, most commonly talking to someone.
There are a diverse cast of characters. To me, the most evocative parts were the location descriptions; it's really nice to think of the bar with a back patio that is set on stilts overlooking a river. Sounds really beautiful!
The investigation was slightly tricky for me, being in French, but the game keeps things simple and it's not too hard to solve just by clicking around, although you may get stuck if you don't stop and think things through just a little.
Definitely enjoyed this one, and easy enough for a foreigner like me. I wondered about the motivations of the characters, though; I feel like they were as detailed as the settings were. Except for the priest, who I felt was very well characterized. Overall I like this, though; this is just some little nitpicks.
A fantasy mystery traversed through a map , March 25, 2024This is my first time playing an OpenAdventure game, and it was interesting. I didn't get it at first, so I tried a tutorial game, and then it made more sense.
This game at first appears highly non-linear, but it becomes apparent that everything is laid out for you step by step. The way the game works is that you have a map, a list of places on it, a list of people, and rumors on the bottom. You can click on many of these things. Each time you do, you get a paragraph or two of information. Very occasionally, you can click within that paragraph to unlock more areas, or type in a password of sorts to get to a new area or even an entirely new map (there are 2 maps in this game).
At the end of each map there is a self-graded quiz where you type in the answer to various questions. Then, instead of checking your answer, it tells you the truth. I've seen this way of doing mysteries before and it works fairly well here, although it limits your opportunity to correct yourself when wrong or to work on improving a partial answer.
The storyline is that a goddess has a magic cauldron in your village that has an awful curse put on it against any villager who steals it. Yet, it has been stolen. You, a bard, have to figure out who did it and why!
There was a lot of text in this game. I try to avoid using google translate but leaned on it at some points. It seems well-written in french. Due to the quirks of language translation, I had to laugh at google's attempt at translating this (to no fault of the author):
Original: "Il semble que vous allez devoir mouiller vos braies pour continuer la traque..."
Translation: "It looks like you're going to have to wet your pants to continue the hunt..."
Overall, this format seems like it has some clear advantages for mystery games. I'd be interested in seeing how it would work for other genres.
Solve a splitting headache, March 25, 2024This brief Inform game has you waking up with temporary amnesia in a medical research facility with a door that has recently been welded shut.
It's a small game with about six rooms. There are two major tasks to take care of: getting some quiet and making things dark.
It is possible to lock yourself out of victory unwittingly, I believe. And one major puzzle requires some intuition that is not in the room description and which doesn't make sense based on earlier responses. In particular, (Spoiler - click to show)you have to turn off a radio, and TURN OFF RADIO says you can't turn it off and BREAK RADIO says you can't do anything to it, and it's too big to TAKE or PUSH. The solution is apparently to UNPLUG radio, despite the lack of a plug being mentioned.
Overall, it works as a small game to make to get used to Inform, but I prefer Sidewise by the same author.
Play a low-key roleplaying game while hanging out in a youth hostel, March 21, 2024This is a fun game with a little bit of recursiveness in it.
You are a youth and are trying to get into a youth hostel. Unfortunately, the person in charge is on break, so you're stuck hanging out with a bulletin board, three wild young men, and an intriguing girl reading a book.
The main part of the game is discussion with the girl, who wants to play a role-playing game with you where you challenge concepts about the real world, creating a fantasy world that is different.
The contrast between the wild fantasies of the game and the grungy, mundane but exciting (for a travelling youth) details of the youth hostel was fun. I imagined an antiseptic-smelling cold room with tile floors and a green color scheme.
The character you play as seems a bit hesitant, someone not used to the world (at one point they speculate on the ethnicities of someone's parents, and you can choose whether you find it odd or not that they might have parents of different races). Overall, I felt like I was exploring an urban world that was new to me.
This has good writing overall, more like what I'd expect from a published short story author.
I had some trouble figuring out how to progress, and at one point was worried I'd have to lawnmower everything, but thankfully I didn't, and I managed to have some fun. I still don't know exactly what triggers the ending, but it came at a good time.
Fight zombies in a game set in the real-life Vigamus video games museum, March 19, 2024In Rome there's a video game museum called Vigamus that's been around for a while. This game, which is an illustrated and translated version of the English game I originally played in the 2016 IFComp, is set in that museum and includes photographs of the actual museum.
The gameplay is intentionally simplistic. You start off in a room of the museum where zombies have poured out of an arcade machine. The game offers you items one at a time, each one solving a problem at hand. There is some non-linearity in that you find things before you need them and you have some choices in what order to use them. You use many items from video games, like the hammer from Donkey Kong, to win the day.
I had a little trouble figuring out what to do at times in French, so I had to play the English version to figure out how to get through some parts before coming back to French.
The game has a few small errors here and there (like not capitalizing 'salle' in one of the room names). Some of the parts that felt objectionable in the English version felt a little less so in the French, as the language barrier gave me some distance from the material. There is a lot of silly things here, but it makes sense as a game intended for visitors to Vigamus to play.
A sci fi (?) metaphor game for relationships, March 19, 2024This was difficult to understand as a non-native speaker. It's a story about a fictional spacefaring society that is written in a way that's meant to be obtuse and indeterminate at first before resolving later on.
Everyone has an 'ors' or 'orsimonous' that is visible that lets you understand certain things about the other person; what that is is up to interpretation, but can include parts of their past, their current feelings, etc.
Your father's ors has disappeared.
It happened after a big natural disaster.
The intent of this piece is to discuss how that happened.
At least, that's what I think. The writing is very indirect, saying the same thing multiple times but never outright. It's possible there are many allusions I missed here (is the 'shock' a metaphor for something like Covid? Is the 'orsimonous' a term used in other works of French fiction). But I liked the way the choices were presented and the work made me feel contemplative.
A symbolic adventuron game, March 17, 2024In this Adventuron game (which reminded me in some ways of Andrew Plotkin's Shade, but is sufficiently different), you play as a figure in a medieval castle who is tasked with staving off a great army. Unfortunately, you fail, but you 'respawn' the next day.
You must explore a castle in a vast wasteland of sand, watching as mysterious figures appear and disappear.
I got stuck a few times, but exploring everything helped (a tip I saw on the itch page by manonamora). One thing that really threw me off early on was that the room description is at the top but events occur on the bottom, and often an event occurs before moving to a new room, but you are intended to read the bottom first and then the top, which I found confusing.
Overall, I liked the story and the multimedia was honestly neat! I like surreal horror-ish games so this was fun.
A longish Moiki game about guarding a door that no one returns from, March 17, 2024This is one of the bigger complete games in the French Comp this year (2024).
You play in a fantasy world with two main races, one of which is white and in power and the other dark skinned and with less power. You are part of the latter group, and you have been called to be the guardian of a mysterious Door.
No one who goes through the door ever returns. As the guardian, you are given seven rules, including that you should try to dissuade anyone from entering, but can't physically prevent them.
The game has two main modes of interaction. One is recurring visits where you talk to a person and make decisions, some substantial. The other is exploration, which seems to stay roughly the same. There is a part where you need to solve a code; I made a guess based on my weak french and got it right on my first try (Spoiler - click to show)I thought 'ice, flower, sun, leaf' and put in 'hfsf'. I either got it right or it accepts anything.
I did get engaged over time seeing the evolution of the kingdom and the strange people entering the door. In the end, I chose to go through.
It said I only found 2 of 15 objects, and I only saw 300 or so of the 900 passages, so I assume it is very replayable.
An incomplete game based on Machiavelli's The Prince, March 16, 2024This game has you play as a prince-in-training at a prince factory where everyone must read and study Machiavelli.
It's not finished yet, but it has a money system (where you earn money by correctly identifying quotes from The Prince). You can spend that to hear tales from past princes or to buy witty retorts.
The combat system needs some fleshing out; it's very difficult not to instantly die and thus be locked out of combat forever. There is a non-combat ending which I didn't find but received copious in-game hints for (Spoiler - click to show)something about the flower you can buy giving voice to something and also 'ailleurs' being the magic word?
Some really cool ideas here, just needs some fleshing out. But honestly very innovative.
An unfinished gardening game with a twist, March 15, 2024This Moiki game puts you in the role of a young gardener (who I imagined as a woman, although I don't know if it's stated), living in a cottage in a clearing in the winds.
You have an old, mossy well and a loyal dog companion, as well as a neatly organized life, with a shed, a book on herbs, tools, etc.
I thought it might be a kind of strategy sim, but I found that I had time and energy to just about everything.
Later on, the game changes dramatically. I was intrigued with it.
There's still a lot left. I wonder if having some more significant choices in the first day might be fun (but if not, it's totally fine leaving it as just a story lead-in if more exciting stuff happens later). In any case, I found this well-written and easy to follow even for a non-native speaker.
A city-building and storytelling game with a deep mystery, March 14, 2024This is a long and complex Twine game with some interesting mechanics.
You come upon an abandoned place with a single resident. Together, you rebuild a mighty city, primarily by telling stories to attract new residents. This lets you build new buildings.
At night, you visit another city, one that is grand. But there is trouble...
The storytelling mechanics have you pick a genre, a format, and some sliders of emotions. You then get what seems like a randomized mini-review from one listener and then an overall critique based on your choices, as well as 15 money.
It was hard to find new genres at first, and money seems to never have any use, despite me building a bank and a marketplace (it said I needed to make an account, but never had a chance). So those parts seemed underdeveloped to me.
Overall, this is a rich story. It uses written French dialect, dropping several vowels, and has some circumlocutory tendencies. So I'm sure I missed a great deal of nuance. As far as I can tell:
(Spoiler - click to show)There was a large town dedicated to immortality through knowledge. They had a library that was a temple to a God, and one day that God and its sibling decided to destroy the city while its leader was out on a trip. They sent a dragon whose flame condemned the city to the dream world. Some of that flame lived on in the house of Luv, who tended it in their fireplace. Due to the flame's continued existence, the dream city was still falling apart, in due measure as the city grows. Luv represents something--maybe a reincarnation of the dream-city's leader, or maybe the dragon, or maybe a god, or something. Eventually you get the choice to extinguish the flame and return the city of old, or keep it).
It's one of the better games of the year I have played so far.
A reincarnation story that is hard to follow, March 13, 2024This French game has some problems. There is only one available choice on each page; some pages have other links but they are red/unclickable.
The text flows from thought to thought and it isn't always coherent. There are 'episodes' but it jumps from 1 to 6 and then back to 2. The point of view and names change frequently. After a few smaller passages there is one very large passage with no options.
The overall theme seems to be a person who has been or will be reincarnated many times over and over again, and who struggles with or against Gods.
Overall, it's possible this is an abstract, intentional art piece. If the author has some additional intent that I am missing, or a reader sees some hidden beauty in this gem, I'd be happy to rate it higher, but for now I'm giving it 1 star.
A richly described series of love letters set in the 1800s, with a mystery, March 12, 2024Whew! This game strained my poor Anglophone brain, as it is written in a fancy style of French and a cursive font. There is a very large amount of text as well, so I had to use all my forces to persevere!
But the story itself was interesting enough to carry on. It consists of letters written between two women, although I believe every letter is from the point of view of Isabella, a woman who became a doctor in Paris before being ejected and forced to return to the village of her home. Her lover, Olympia, is left behind. Isabella must face the disapproval and suspicions of the villagers, as well as Olympia's jealousies when the pale, anemic, and beautiful Alice moves in next door.
Gameplay is a bit curious; as at least one other person noted on the forums, it bears some resemblance to The First Draft of the Revolution, where you select different cycling variations before confirming and moving on.
However, there are very large chunks of text between choices (large for me, maybe not for native speaker). These large gaps, and my suspicion that the choices didn't change much of the game, led me to assign a mental score of 4.
However, I had early on, in a separate window, clicked through quickly to see how long the game would be, and received an ending with a clear choice (to (Spoiler - click to show)destroy your letters or not). I was surprised when, in my real playthrough, I never encountered that passage. I used saves and found 2 endings in my own playthrough, and they were quite interesting. So when it became clear that this was actually fairly complex, I upgraded to five stars.
Beta version of a very large potential fantasy gamebook-style game, March 10, 2024This story is based on classic gamebooks and fantasy tropes. You play as a dwarf in a village of dwarves, and can choose which class to play, which affects your stats. I chose to be a miner with high perception.
This game is already quite large, requiring a couple hours of play, and it's largely unfinished, with only two of three cities available (and, beyond that, there would likely be even more in a full game). There are a lot of randomized checks and things.
The art is, I believe, AI art, as zooming in on some scenes revealed oddities like three legs. However, it is unobtrusive and aesthetically worked overall (not discussing here the ethics of AI). Edit: Nightcafe is listed in credits for artwork.
The one currently finished city has a ton of different districts. There is a map, but instead of being used for navigation, it just serves as a visual cue while you actually select from a list of districts adjacent to your current one.
As you walk around, mini-stories fire off, providing you with new encounters like whether to chase down a missing guardsman or not.
Two things I would have preferred to be different: the map takes a while to load, making movement slow. I would have preferred the map to be optimized to load more quickly. Second, every time I entered the front gate a thief stole my purse and fighting it would just kill me, even if I loaded and tried again. It was really frustrating not having any chance to keep my money on me. And I found it difficult to find ways to heal; I thought maybe resting at my quarters could work, but couldn't find any. I eventually healed as the story progressed.
Overall, I thought the mushroom-brain thing was an interesting storyline, and the political aspects gave the game some complexity.
A powerful story of coming back for a funeral, and of post-Franco Spain, March 9, 2024This game is set in Spain but written in French. It's a powerful story; it made me glad that I still play interactive fiction, because I wouldn't have experienced this excellent story otherwise.
You play as a young man (I believe) who arrives at the funeral of his grandfather. However, you have decidedly unkind memories of your grandfather, who was part of Franco's army and committed numerous atrocities.
The story unfolds as you run into your family, deal with their awkward situations, talk to your partner, attend the funeral, or maybe not do a lot of these things; after all, there are several paths.
The only thing missing, I felt, could have been a little more personalization in the graphical presentation, or perhaps some more involved interactions. But the story is very well done, one of my favorite of the year so far.
Classic Cherrywell with a strong dose of spirits, March 7, 2024This game is the kind of thing Steph Cherrywell is known for: smooth humor, a large, easily navigable map, genre tropes pursued to their logical end, plenty of polish, and vivid characters.
I found this game's puzzles more logical than some other Cherrywell games, though I had trouble with one particular artist. Looking back, I ignored many, many, hints.
You play as a flapper (with all the 20's lingo) who's desperate for a drink. But it's all been soaked up by ghosts, so you have to hunt them down one by one!
I really enjoyed this game, and I think that it has a great chance of wining this year's comp.
An unfinished but ambitious visual novel, March 7, 2024This visual novel in French has you play as a character named Erika Wolfenstein. From what I gather (my French is imperfect), you have been sent by a spacefaring organization to visit a planet abandoned by the gods to retrieve a divine artifact. Along the way, you encounter vampires, etc.
I had about 2 or 3 choices in this excerpt from the unfinished game, and a lot of story. There were a few different backgrounds, and one main character sprite.
Overall, the unfinishedness made it difficult to know how to feel. A lot of plot options are set up but never finished (some even say "I will tell you later" but can't because the story ends). It's possible it could be finished into a great game, but what we have now is only the possibility without the proof. I would have liked more choices early on, even if they didn't matter, but I know that visual novel conventions differ from those of Twine or Choicescript. Alternatively, if it became a kinetic novel, it might be nice to explore some of the plot points more deeply instead of hopping from thing to thing quickly. In any case, the character seems interesting and the worldbuilding could turn out good.
A micro game containing six micro-micro games about loss, February 29, 2024This game was designed to fit into 90 kb, a tiny amount of space even for an interactive fiction game.
It has 6 small games with similar themes in it, each from different time periods or genres of interactive fiction.
I'll put the description of the games in spoilers, as I describe some things you might prefer to find on your own. I'll put the description of the final game in separate spoilers, as it's slightly different and more of a spoiler.
This is a complex game, and while I felt and experienced many things, I had the sense that I hadn't grasped everything, so this review may neglect some core themes or content.
(Spoiler - click to show)First: A choose your own adventure book, which goes a bit beyond pure branching by letting you perform actions through addition of numbers. You are exploring a mostly empty desert, and you must overcome your fears and think cleverly to find your true goal.
Second: An adventure in the style of Scott Adams, set in the same desert (or is it the same?). You have found an oasis city, but you can't get in. Themes include unachievable goals and building your own happiness.
Third: A classic-style text adventure. This one is quite complex, as you are able to enter and explore a large city. The tone is darker here, as you are either constrained to slog for the machine or to be punished for your individuality. The items of key and shovel, which appeared in earlier iterations, take on new meanings in this world, emblems of money/greed and (fruitless) labor.
Fourth: A hyperlink game (but without hyperlinks, requiring you to type instead). You have become powerful and have many people to help you, but none of you can withstand a storm that is withering and destroying your city. Here and in the last game or so, you begin to get glimpses of the real world person behind the games. This story and the last also mention a beautiful male lover.
Fifth: A Quality Based Narrative game, like Dendry or Storynexus. You have stats, and your available stats determine what scenes you view next and what actions you have available. The story is one of a wanderer, as if the ancient emperor in the Ozymandias poem was stuck in the landscape of his ruin. The real world bleeds in explicitly in the end.
Sixth (stronger spoilers):(Spoiler - click to show)This isn't a world, it's just deleting a bunch of files, but you can't since some have unresolved issues. You choose the writing block by block, using text from earlier in the game, almost like Aaron's earlier game 18 Cadence. In the end, you get the option to delete or save the poem you have created.
There is a strong sense of loss in the game, of futility and helplessness, but also of the desire to create something beautiful that doesn't remove the loss but provides comfort. It's almost a Quixotic point of view, which also ties in with the use of mirrors and illusions.
I found it a beautiful game. Like I said, I don't think I grasped it all. I may need to replay. But I also admired its technical work.
Reconstruct the memories of a shattered mind in a short Twine game, February 27, 2024This game is a short Twine game with glitch-like animations and moody background music. It is designed to be replayed.
In it, you play as a computer program whose job is to interface with damaged humans and sort through their memories, deciding what should be saved. As the title says, Whatever isn't saved will be lost.
So the game is reaching for a poignant picture of humanity, and in a way it can be a projection for you, the reader. If you could only keep a few memories, would you pick the most painful ones, to learn from? The best ones, to treasure? How would you decide?
The words in the text (mostly the pronouns) glitch and shuffle themselves as you try to understand what's going on.
In one playthrough, there were only five or so memories to work through the whole time. In other playthroughs, I unlocked more somehow. Maybe I also did the first time and just didn't notice?
Overall, this is strongly written. The size of it felt a little weird, almost that it would make more sense to be slighter or more substantial but that it was caught in an awkward spot between the two. But the feelings of melancholy and nostalgia are powerful.
A sci-fi world hopping puzzle game, February 24, 2024This is a compact sci-fi game where you hop between dimensions in order to keep all universes from being destroyed.
The gameplay is classic Inform 7 style: wander a mostly empty building and pick up different objects on the way, unlock a safe, operate a machine, meet an NPC or two, etc.
The story is that you have been newly hired at a tech company when an explosion goes off. Going in to investigate, you soon learn that the company has quite a bit of unusual history...
The game makes references to the (Spoiler - click to show)Mandela effect, with famous examples like the (Spoiler - click to show)Berenstein vs Berenstain bears.
It's fairly polished, even including images and sound. There are occasional punctuation errors, like quotes being left off at the end of dialogue.
The overall gameplay is pretty satisfying. A few puzzles I thought were underclued, especially (Spoiler - click to show)opening the research door. That one I had to string dump the game for, discovering I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)use the magnet to open it.
The game has multiple levels of ending success. There are several ways you can lock yourself out of victory, but those are well-clued. Getting a perfect ending is a little underclued, though, and may require a few attempts.
Overall, I'd recommend this game to fans of classic-style parser puzzlers or to fans of time travel games.
A linear tale of memory wiping , January 27, 2024This is a visual novel with no choices that deals with a race of beings called Harvesters that take away people's memories.
You play as one such harvester, and you meet a young redheaded single mother who has given up her child for adoption and wants you to wipe her memories.
You end up meeting another person who is entangled in her story, and you learn his past.
That art and music worked well. The writing was interesting, but seemed off, not following the conventions of plot and morality that I'm used to. I think I started thinking how very odd it was when someone said "You didn't just banish me to the friend zone or I wouldn't have sued you". There isn't any suing in the game; it might be a translation issue but I'm not sure it makes sense in any language.
Similarly, the endgame is that (Spoiler - click to show)You wipe the memories of her and her lover and then tell her you'll become her lover, which is kind of weird ethically.
I don't think this particular game is AI generated but these issues are similar to ones I've had with AI stories like Character AI (which my son plays), where the overall thing looks good but if you poke at it a lot of stuff just doesn't make sense. My guess is that it just needs some more time and attention, as it was written for Ludum Dare which doesn't give the author much time, I think.
A brief murder mystery with computer-generated voice acting, January 27, 2024I played this game as part of the short games showcase.
This game is a murder mystery, but a condensed one. It has 4 locations, each with their own person of interest (although one is mobile).
Each one lets you ask a long list of questions. You can then gather from them what information you need. Upon leaving the manor, you can guess who the murderer is.
There isn't too much replay value, as the true murderer is pointed out to you upon the first guess. There is voice acting in a way I haven't seen much in IF; I think it uses various text-to-speech voices, including a stentorian butler voice.
Overall, the system feels smooth. I do think that a more drawn out game, with some choices you must carefully consider (like things you can say that cut off other options) might increase the overall value if a longer mystery were to be made.
A short sci fi game, January 27, 2024This game reminded me of the first Star Trek movie in many ways.
It's a Strand game, a system that's been in development for some time. This game uses 3d-art custom made by the author, much of it quite good, especially the character art.
The game itself is short, with a nice core concept but somewhat rushed-feeling prose, kind of like a tech demo. I almost felt like this was a way to show off the Strand engine more than a stand alone story, as there's not a lot of time to get to know the characters before the big ending.
Overall, there are a lot of strong parts here, but it could have benefitted from more people, more places, more things, and more time for the plot to develop.
A short, branching visual novel adaptation of Jabberwocky, January 27, 2024This game seems, from its itch page, to have been made as part of a doctoral program.
It's a bipsi/binksi visual novel and includes the original poem with some of the original drawings that Lewis Carroll included in his book. It also includes a branching portion where you explore the world described in the poem, with multiple endings.
I got two bad endings; I think I know how to get the good ending, but I was hitting the arrows fast to get through the text quickly and ended up treading dark paths.
Overall, its competently done and reworks a poem I loved as a youth (I liked it when I was older too when I saw how translators translated it). I think I might have liked more long-term effects of choices to allow strategizing, but overall this is pretty good.
A riddle whose exposition is given by world exploration, January 27, 2024I played this as part of the short games showcase.
This is a fun little game, reminding me of the Northnorth Passage or Out or Ad Verbum, all in good ways, but it is it's own thing and not a copy of anything else. It's a direction-based puzzler where each stride can take you to different kingdoms or even different corners of the earth.
I enjoyed the puzzle, although I kept thinking the solution would be (Spoiler - click to show)tang even though it didn't work and it didn't fit any of the clues. So I don't know what was going on in my brain. At one point I also thought the solution would be (Spoiler - click to show)literally typing out 'the opposite of east' since it starts with a T. Pretty fun!
A game about passing a bill in Congress, January 26, 2024This is a pretty straightforward interpretation of 'a game simulating a bill getting passed'. There's not a lot of characterization or strategy. It was useful to see exactly what all goes into it.
The US House Representative for my district visited my school I teach at recently and mentioned that around 10,000 bills were proposed last year of which some small number (like 27, googling says) actually got passed.
This game simulates that; I failed the house vote, got amendments, passed, passed senate, had president support, but got vetoed and lacked a supermajority.
Oh well. Lol
The game seems like it was made for a government event and it seems well suited for an educational venue.
Cute micro idea, January 26, 2024This game was entered in the short game jam.
At first I thought it was that weird Ink game that turns on your camera and notices when you blink. But it's not that at all.
It's just (Spoiler - click to show)a game that ends instantly.
A cute idea, but not much there.
Graphical game about closing doors and chucking them out, January 26, 2024I'll grade this on my (usually internal) 5 point scale:
-Polish: The game is very dark on my screen and hard to see.
-Descriptiveness: The poem in game is very short and minimal, but also not very clear
-Interactivity: It was hard to know what to do and, do to lots of looping, to know if there was more game or just the same.
-Emotional impact: I didn't really feel anything.
-Would I play again? Probably not.
Old story, new pictures, January 26, 2024This is a fun short story by Ambrose Bierce which has been converted to Twine (without choices) and had multimedia added. The original story is about an abandoned, 'haunted' house and the new multimedia is about an abandoned, overgrown house that bears a remarkable resemblance to the one in the story.
So it's mostly choiceless, and all the text comes from previously existing material.
But it's good material, and the matchup between the two looks good. So there's not a lot of 'interactive', but a lot of good 'fiction'.
A dungeon of sorts explored through...powerpoint?, January 25, 2024This game is made in a powerpoint format, which is pretty neat. It has two formats, one in portuguese and one in english. I played the english version.
The text is minimalistic, with 3-10 words per page, and usually 1-3 choices. It was hard for me to piece the story together; it seems like you are a knight that awakes in a dungeon, in captivity. With some effort, you begin to explore.
I found someone (or something) to accompany me, found an area of horror, and made a choice...but I'm not sure of what.
There were several noticeable typos, which I think a pass through some online spellchaecker could help (I also get lots of typos in my own games). I did find the game confusing, including the title screen...what does 'soom' mean?
A short branching game about trying to get into a sci fi movie, January 25, 2024This is a short humorous twine game about trying to crash a screening for a new movie.
It uses 'copyright safe' versions of famous movies (for instance, your character is holding a 'light saver').
There are a lot of branches, and while there is some continuity between choices, each one is pretty random.
Overall, the game is pretty brief. Most of what's here is funny, but overall this felt more like a light snack than a substantial work.
Collect ingredients and bake magical foods, January 25, 2024This game is interesting; I went back and forth a lot on what to score it.
It's a cozy type of game, and more of an unfinished prototype (at least, several plot threads are left hanging). It's visually lovely though, with a rich background texture, pleasant fonts and colors, and icons of food.
The gameplay is simple, even (to my feeling) overly simplistic; while there is a little bit of planning required, just clicking every link one at a time generally solves things.
But it looks good, and feels good, so I'm still giving 4 stars. Feels kind of like an ascended tech demo that turned out better than expected, or a planned large game that had to be cut short.
Short joke game, recounting a famous story, January 25, 2024This game is a little bite-sized Inform game. Such games can often be underimplemented or full of bugs, or hard to follow, but I found this one was pretty reasonable and made effective use of its small size.
You play as a gentleman waiting for a train, with no one around but one other passenger. Things progress from there.
There was a review I read once for the game 'Fine Tuned' that praised it for how the humor was participatory, not just descriptive (I can't find it now, unfortunately). That's what makes this game work for me; everything that's funny about it is something that you personally take part of.
The author encourages not knowing the plot ahead of time, so I've omitted that.
Pain, both of body and mind, mixed with magic, January 25, 2024This game has you play as a kind of spellcaster desperate to reconnect with lost memories and lost people. I think. It's kind of hard to know what's going on; it reminded me at first a bit of Dreamhold, where you're an amnesiac in a magic place. But here, the character seems to know what's going on, even if we don't.
The game includes gore, the type that would be horrifying in real life but in text has looped around to be something cold, distant, and removed from emotion.
It's a short game. The main choices I saw were that you can pick from several different potions to toss in a bowl, each of which provokes a different memory. The ending itself did not seem to vary for me, other than one very brief early alternate ending.
The world of humans as seen through a single word, January 24, 2024This game has a bit of a different setup between the reader and the protagonist.
The narrative voice of the game is a sentient word. It addresses 'you', but 'you' doesn't mean the reader, it means a person in college that the word traded bodies with for a month.
The word is intrigued and obsessed with the human world, especially with things like color and visual stimuli.
The concept is clever, and there is a lot of enthusiasm that comes across as appropriate for a visitor from another world.
The longer it went on, the more I saw it as the story of someone who truly despises what they are; someone who does not like themself whatsoever. Because the word likes text least of all; it doesn't enjoy visual things more, it actively despises text.
There were two things that were a little weird about my interaction with the game. The first is that I felt like it was apologizing for itself a lot, which is weird because do you as a reader agree with it that it's non-ideal or feel sympathy for it? The second is that there was a wide range of interactivity which never fell into a rhythm for me; it went from wild combinatorial explosion to mostly linear.
Overall, I think it's a solid concept and that the game is just the right length for what it's exploring. I didn't click with all of it, but I did like parts and others might like all.
A restricted life in twine game form, January 24, 2024I played this game as part of the short games jam.
It's designed to show what life is like when you're part of conservative Christianity. You are given many options, but your options aren't always things you can actually do.
This reminds me a lot of families I knew growing up. I remember one family that banned The Little Mermaid because her outfit was inappropriate. Another family I know banned soda pop and trick-or-treating.
That level of restriction was generally ineffective; the people I knew that were most straight-laced as kids grew up to be the most wild when older.
So the game is very relatable in that sense. It's also pretty brief, which can often be effective in this type of message, but for me, I just didn't feel a big impact. It's completely subjective, someone else might feel very differently.
Unfinished choicescript crossover game, January 23, 2024This game has some good potential in it, but is unfinished. It's the beginnings of a choicescript game mingling characters from Megaman X and Creme de la Creme, the choicescript game.
I hadn't played Megaman X but played the earlier megaman games, so that part wasn't too hard to follow. But it's been years since I played Creme de la Creme so I don't recognize the names off-hand; seeing what their characters look like or act like would have worked better for me.
I liked all the things built up around the game. If finished, I would probably give it around 4 ratings, but not all projects need to be finished. Great work needs a small series of 'aha' moments, which you can kind of force if you need to but are better left around. If nothing 'clicks' for the author with this concept, it would make sense to leave it alone. But it's definitely neat!
Strong writing, minimal interactivity, mlm romance, January 23, 2024This is a short game entered into the Bare Bones jam.
It has no real interactivity and a stripped down interface, but that's kind of not true as it uses text alignment which gives both some variety in link clicking and is visually appealing.
But overall there's really nothing here except the writing. As a lifetime woman stan there's really nothing in mlm stories for me, but the characters were well-written. There is a big focus on concrete details like clothing, appearance, etc. The dialog feels natural, with a back and forth more like what you'd expect in real life or in a back-and-forth part of a play.
If I could turn back time...I'd take back all the things that hurt you, January 23, 2024This is a kind of medium-length Twine game with some nice styling.
It starts out with a 'my parents don't understand me' kind of vibe and has the kid running out to have an argument with their current partner, which gave me lots of flashbacks to my most recent creative writing class I taught in high school, as that's the kind of story the better writers would write (the bad ones involved Ninja from fortnite and lots of helicopters). Still, I didn't have high hopes.
But then it pivoted into a thoughtful and interesting story involving (Spoiler - click to show)time travel that made for an excellent game. You have the chance to try a lot of different ways to stay with your partner. Your character has real flaws and strengths and felt like one of the most real people in a game I've read recently.
I thought the ending didn't make sense in-universe, but makes perfect sense as a metaphor, so I'm leaning more towards the second point of view in my personal interpretation.
There's some fairly frequent strong profanity.
Bitsy game with graphics and a mishmash of sensory experiences, January 23, 2024I don't say this often, but I really just didn't like this game. It shows talent in making, and is almost certainly the game that the author had envisioned when they set out to make it, but that design is not something I enjoy.
It is primarily visual and graphical in nature, with text added as flavoring. The beginning is set up in a way that the controls are unresponsive, playing a harsh dissonant sound with blinking lights while nothing you do does anything, followed by a blank screen for such a long time I thought the game had crashed. Then there are some graphical mazes with some light text.
The writing is scattered and surreal, which can be an amazing effect, but I couldn't find any thread to connect it all. It reminded me of nothing more than hearing Captain Beefheart Trout Mask Replica for the first (and only) time.
In no way does this take away from the author's skill; they seem perfectly competent. But their intentions and my reception were at cross purposes in this instance.
A powerful game told through poem translation, January 23, 2024This game is framed as homework for translation in a Russian lit class (or similar).
You are given the poem ( a famous one: Он любил три вещи на свете by Анна Ахматова unless I copied it down wrong), and asked to translate it.
The issue is that, like most poems and most translation, it makes use of idioms that don't naturally have a unique counterpart in the other language (in this case, English).
Choosing the meaning to stick with can drastically change the meaning of the poem.
I though this was well made, and powerful.
A nice, brief love story about summers and what goes unspoken, January 22, 2024This game was entered in Shufflecomp.
It has beautiful styling, with an easily readable font and nice color choices.
The game plays naturally, and tells you upfront what stats are being tracked, which made it easy to plan out overall paths through the game while still maintaining agency. I liked that.
The story writing is very strong, talking about a young person and the strange boy they fall in love with at a young age. Only during summers can they meet, and as the player ages, they soon must part.
The two paths contrast each other well, and overall the story is scoped just right, with a nice narrative plot arc that rises, has a climax, then falls to a denouement. I had chills for one ending. Very well done.
A brief but fun musically-inspired magic game, January 22, 2024This game was entered in ShuffleComp and inspired by Charlemagne by the Blossoms.
It's a fun game with both strong character building and strong world building. There is a magic system sketched out, even coming with a separate 'spellbook', and multiple modes to play in.
The game itself is small, easily consumable and not enough to show off a greater system or world, but it works as a whole, paced especially well through the use of chunks of the song lyrics. This allows you to get a feel for how far you are in the game, something that is missing from so many IF games.
The worldbuilding is a mix of spacecraft and sorcery, with heartbroken people running a heist together to stop some tears of gold. Pretty fun!
A strong story about a coin-operated confessional, January 22, 2024In this Shufflecomp game, you play in an alternate reality where the Catholic church has eliminated both priests and Pope and has gone to use coin operated confessional booths that are resolved by computer.
Except you are 'computer' in this case. It is your job to absolve others.
The aesthetics of the game, both video and audio, are very well done, restrained but effective.
The writing is evocative and clear.
I only wish the scenarios had been a bit more daring. Few if any of the characters had done truly wrong, almost as if the game is about moral greyness, the lack of a need for confession.
But everyone knows someone who has done another wrong. Truly wrong. What about confession and absolution in those cases? There can be no forgiveness if there was no wrong. No reconciliation if there was no separation. The elimination of true regret and punishment is also an elimination of true happiness and redemption. So to see such a case would have been interesting...
A meditative and peaceful story about father and child, January 22, 2024This game had a few surprises for me, and I liked it. It was entered in Shufflecomp.
You play as a child come to visit your father. There are a few customization options for yourself, which I thought were nice.
What makes the game work for me is the reflective and meaningful (to me) choices you can make. They aren't really black or white, but instead give you a chance to roleplay yourself and your own relationships.
Nice writing, very thoughtful, not too long, and with nice visuals that I was trying to figure out how to emulate for my own future games.
A collection of stories, on shuffle, January 22, 2024This game was made for Shufflecomp.
In it, you play as someone on a train who is approached by another passenger. He wants to tell you stories of the six other travellers who had spent time on the train before getting off.
The game uses Decker, and has a fixed width retro font.
The stories are very diverse, and build towards the ending stories, those of you and the storyteller. Each story seems to focus on personal relationships, either in pairs or threes.
The writing was solid, and the stories made sense, but something felt missing for me that I can't put my finger on. Almost like buying a box of legos and finding that most of them are already one big molded piece, like bionicles or something. After reading each story, it was hard to say what each one was about. Maybe it was because people were acting in them not as real, flesh and blood people, but as archetypes, like reading a story about tarot cards or astrological signs.
An atmospheric game about inescapable destiny, January 22, 2024This game is surreal. It was written for ShuffleComp.
In it, you find yourself compelled, no matter what you do, to approach (Spoiler - click to show)the unholy city.
The best part of the game is the feeling of dread and the awful feeling of (Spoiler - click to show)waking up from a bad dream to another bad dream.
Overall, I don't know if the ending had enough of a buildup to support it, but I liked this overall.
Inter universal storytelling, January 22, 2024This game is a participatory game, an MMO masquerading as an MMO.
The conceit is that you are playing an old, defunct MMO which you discover is (Spoiler - click to show)connected to multiple universes. As you play, you find messages left by others. You have the option to leave a message, and doing so lets other people really see it.
I saw messages from real people I know, but they all soon disappeared. I wandered through an empty maze, seeing messages by people that could be real or fake. I left a message everywhere I went. Overkill, maybe? Shouting into the void? It's hard to know.
Very fun concept. Large game.
A cool looping Twine game about a temple and some helpful friends, January 21, 2024I liked this game. The presentation was neat, with real-time smoke in the background over at-your-own-pace text (I'd love to see more of this in games that use real time elements, letting me read as fast or slow as I like while other live stuff happens in the background).
You play as...well, you don't really know. It seems you're in a kind of group, at first, with text represented in different colors and alignments.
You have to escape a burning room in a temple. Everything is chaos.
You can play multiple times, and it can take quite a while to figure out what's going on. But everything built on each other, and I found it quite clever.
I was debating between 4 and 5 stars, as I usually use the 5th star for 'would I play again?' but technically I already played twice, so I'll give it 5 stars.
Elliptical writing about an encounter between a sorceress and others, January 21, 2024This is a Texture game entered into Shufflecomp.
In it, you see a variety of characters in a fantasy setting, talking about witches, wards, dragons, and rangers.
I had a great deal of difficulty understanding what was going on. That's not necessarily bad; a lot of games use metaphor or surreal settings to convey a specific emotion.
But I was at a loss for most of this story. I'll show an example from the first page. I'll put it in spoilers because it's long and my analysis may not be interesting to most people:
(Spoiler - click to show)"The sorceress picked a stone from the fire and put it in the pitcher. She poured the hot water over Strider's cup of leaves, who wrinkled their nose in rote protest.
Over the course of tea, a design uncoiled across her red skin, all imbrication and tedium. The flick of a wrist described this creature's forked tongue.
Strider watched Rahel work until the cone went dry. Was she afraid her right hand would spoil the work of her left?"
The first paragraph mostly makes sense; picking up a stone from a fire would burn someone, but presumably this is her magical power, which is cool, and it seems she has a friend with a goofy relationship.
But in the second paragraph, what does 'over the course of tea' mean? Does it mean the meal 'tea' that British people have? Over the course of brewing the tea? Over the course of Strider drinking?
This is a magical setting. Is the design literally uncoiling over her skin? Is her skin red from picking up the stone, or bright red as a fantasy setting, or is it a callback to older racist notions about native Americans?
'Imbrication' is a scale like pattern. So the design is scalelike and tedious. So is she bored making this? It's a weird contrast with the luxurious metaphor of a dragon uncoiling itself. 'The flick of a wrist'--does this mean she's drawing this? Someone else? What is the cone that goes dry? And 'worried the right hand would spoil the work of her left'--what does that mean? If she's using one hand to draw on the other, then it sounds like she's drawing on the right with her left. So how would her right hand spoil anything if that's what she's drawing on?
The whole story was like this to me. I never knew what was going on, wasn't certain how many people were present or what their roles are or if they're aware of each other.
I think there's interesting worldbuilding here, I just hit a brick wall with my personal interaction. It might just be my own personal reaction, it'd be interesting to see how other people felt after reading.
Reminiscence of lost friends, January 21, 2024This is a brief Twine game with a single branch, giving a tale of grief and loss.
Each of the two branches gives a slightly different story, although the beginning and end are the same.
The story is about a pair of couples, Emmett/Harry and Juno/Bell, who were friends in high school. Juno and Emmett meet up years later to discuss what they have lost.
The writing is emotional and descriptive. There's not much going on in the way of significant choice; the two different branches are meaningful, though.
A visual game set in an apartment with surreal elements, January 21, 2024This game was entered in Shufflecomp, and I played the French version.
In it, you play as a young adult/teen living in your parents house. This is primarily a graphical game, like Myst, with some interactive audio and visual elements and with your thoughts and feelings expressed through text.
It's a kind of opaque game, with two segments. In the first, I felt like it was a psychological exploration of the young, unsatisfied mind. Roaming the house, trying to find snacks, avoiding your parents' friends, doing chores, reminiscing about the girlfriend you broke up with.
The second half is more disturbing, as you (Spoiler - click to show)encounter a stone that lets you see a different side to this world, or perhaps another world altogether. You see different messages, and in the end...
Overall, this game has many exceptional elements; however, many of the best parts of the game are things that I personally am not very interested in (the graphics, some text on a timer, videos and music, etc.), as I am mostly drawn to text games due to their inconspicuousness, the ability to play them quietly and at your own speed without drawing a lot of attention.
I do love the two worlds vibe, and will try to remember this game when the next XYZZY awards for multimedia come out.
A mid-length retelling of Beauty and the Beast with musical magic, January 17, 2024This mid-length game is a story-focused Zorkian type game, where you explore the Beast's castle, trying to understand his history and take action.
The game features a magical system focused on (Spoiler - click to show)bells. Different bells have different properties, which you must decipher by experimentation and by searching records.
The game is a more cynical version of the fairy tale (or more world-weary).
This game is intended to be accesible to beginners, with a tutorial mode and ways to access hints. I found the game frustrating when I tried to treat it as an open, nonlinear game. When I did what the game told me to do, it was much more enjoyable.
A short take on Goncharov, the fake Tumblr movie, January 16, 2024This was written for the single choice jam.
In 2023 (or maybe starting 2022?) Tumblr started pretending that there was a movie called 'Goncharov' based on a misprint on some merchandise for another movie. Together they collaboratively invented the main characters and plotline.
This game spends a few paragraphs summarizing that plot, and then gives you a single choice. That choice only gives a couple paragraphs more of text, but leads to very different endings.
Getting more detail on Goncharov was definitely interesting, but it felt like this was just setting up a lot of background info for a story that itself was quite insubstantial. What was here was good, just not a lot of it.
Rob a witch--but keep only one thing, January 16, 2024This game was entered in the Single Choice Jam.
In it, you play as a robber who has picked the absolutely wrong house to rob--or maybe the absolutely right house.
You've found a witch's home, and there's a lot to grab. But you only have time to pick one item.
What this turns out to be in the end is a series of witty short stories, essentially, with each option giving a page or two of some dramatic development.
Fun overall, but fairly brief.
Nice characterization in a cosmic story, January 16, 2024This entry in the Single Choice jam works as either a short story or a part of a broader setting.
In it, you play as a human witnessing the end of the universe as an inevitable, encroaching force approaches and begins to slowly devastate earth.
There's some nice storyline and characterization here. Given the brevity of the game I think the surprising revelations didn't have time to build up quite enough, to provoke investment in the characters. To me, while the story was good, I felt more like 'I would read this book!' rather than 'this feels like the whole story'.
A poetic image of echoing worlds featuring you, January 15, 2024This game has disjointed and poetic imagery of you as a person that exists across multiple worlds and dimensions.
It was written for the Single Choice Jam, so it only has one choice at the end, deliberately in(?)consequential.
The imagery evokes kaleidoscopic existence and hints at a deeper backstory for the 'main' protagonist (if there can be said to be one).
A card game takes a dangerous turn, January 15, 2024This game was part of the Single Choice Jam. It features a low stakes card game that suddenly becomes much more dangerous when a stranger walks in.
This is a classic story, and I've seen at least two other takes on the general concept this year. What I like about this one is its nice character development, showcasing well-thought-out people with interesting traits.
It's short and kind of cuts out, a straightforward but well-done implementation of the 'single choice' prompt. Would read more by this author.
Fun minimalist interactivity in an endless tower with neat effects, January 15, 2024This game was entered in the Single Choice jam, but it has some surprising depth.
Visually, it's a stack of cards representing floors of a tower. Every time you go up a floor, a card gets added to the pile. You can hover over older cards to see where you came from, and there's an inventory you can hover over.
There are no actions you can pick except to, whenever you want, fall, an option listed at the top. At one point, you're explicitly forced to choose to fall or not.
You can turn on game hints for the game, which I did out of idle curiosity at one point, but I'm glad I did; the ending was fun, once I realized what had truly happened.
I wavered between 3 stars and 4 and even 5, and settled on the latter, as I liked the originality and the implementation.
Mobile-optimized game about establishing contact, January 14, 2024My feelings went up and down as I played this Single Choice Jam game.
It looks really nice, with good pictures, transition, etc. I felt like it was setting up a pretty cool scenario.
Then it turns into kind of a tech demo sort of thing; the game has you click at exactly the right time. There's also timed text; I found myself doing other stuff in real life while waiting for the game to finish, until I found I could click through...most of the time. Other times there's more requirements.
To me, the story never really broached established tropes, or really defined what was going on. I don't think it was AI generated, but it had a similar vibe, a cobbling together of pre-existing ideas without specialization into something unique. As a tech demo for the engine it's advertising, though, I think it's successful; it looks easily as powerful as Twine, and works well on mobile. I wonder if it works good for screenreaders, as I've heard complaints about Twine related to that.
A silly single choice game about making toast, January 14, 2024This game was entered in the single choice jam.
There is only one choice, of course: make toast, or not?
Each gives you a pretty silly story, each connected to the other. Each is very short. It was pretty funny, but there was at least one typo (windowcill vs windowsill).
A dinner party invites self reflection and a choice to be made, January 14, 2024This game was entered into the Single Choice Jam.
The concept is that you are invited to a dinner party where you have the choice to win an inimitable item, one that can change your destiny forever.
Your only choice is whether to participate or not. Doing so requires some self reflection.
There are strong scraps of worldbuilding and an interesting thought experiment, although I felt like those two facets didn't mesh very well. The interesting parts of the worldbuilding were the individual human stories and their mundanity, while the 'twist' of the game invites more personal introspection. I'd be interested in seeing some more of the setting/people in another game.
A surreal dream landscape, January 14, 2024This game is written for the Single Choice Jam.
It depicts a single passage from which many other links branch out, each giving a disjointed dreamlike narrative.
I think the game succeeds admirably in its design, being dreamlike and disconnected. However, that very disconnectedness works against its lasting impact, for me. I almost wish that either things had been more connected (hidden narrative) or much more disconnected.
A game that teaches about a certain kind of trauma, January 14, 2024This game was entered into the Single Choice Jam, and uses the format well, I feel.
It's a beautifully styled short Twine game with one choice at the beginning followed by 'dynamic fiction' (just click to get to the next part).
It talks about a certain kind of trauma, specifically (Spoiler - click to show)secondary traumatic stress. It hit home, for me.
The concept is a big part of different cultures, including mine. In my religion, we believe (Spoiler - click to show)Jesus basically experienced everything in the game, but willingly, as a big sacrifice that was extraordinarily painful(Spoiler - click to show). When it's not so willing or the person doing it not so capable, it can be very painful. Very interesting read.
Murder mystery in a polar tribe, January 13, 2024This game is part of the single-choice jam. It has nice presentation using a very old school Hypercard system (or similar).
You play as a member of a polar tribe in the wake of a nuclear war. Your shaman has died, and you have ritually been chosen to hunt down the murderer.
There are quite a few options at the end, making this basically a murder mystery where you choose the ending.
It is in both French and English, and I played in both. Overall, I liked it. I'm not sure if it was 'authentic' to current native tribes or invented, but the characters were, I believe, well-written and I was invested in the final choice.
Knight's tour with 3 variations, January 13, 2024This game was made for the Single Choice Jam.
In it, you play as a knight on a chessboard (with a framing story), and have to do a knight's tour. The path is completely predetermined; all possible movements are highlighted but only one is clickable. However, you can choose initially between three such paths.
The paths basically teach you how Knight's tours work. I enjoyed the 'stick to the edges' one best.
Realistic simulator of overbearing adult talking to kid, January 13, 2024This is a Twine game in the Single Choice Jam.
It's based around a single gimmick, where an adult is lecturing you but (full spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)he gets mad if you click too fast, because you're just rushing, and mad if you click to slow, because you're not paying attention.
To me it feels like a real conversation with an abusive or at least just grumpy/self-involved person, always looking for something to nitpick and always trying to leave you with the feeling that you did something wrong.
The main mechanic did leave me scrambling, and I had to do several retries, so I'm still on the fence on how I feel about it.
An exaggerated version of the classic trolley problem, January 13, 2024This game is an entrant in the Single Choice Jam, and makes that Single Choice one of the most famous ethical dilemmas: the trolley problem.
Taking this basic premise, it pushes both choices to their logical (or rather illogical) conclusions, imagining all sorts of after effects.
The writing is amusing, but it goes by quick; it only lasts a few seconds while sounds play before moving on, with no option to pause or adjust speed, which I found detrimental.
Short and pretty funny.
A gourmand's tale with some twists, January 13, 2024This is an interesting game in the Single Choice jam.
You play as a desperately hungry person at an exclusive restaurant where you just can't wait for each course, but, unfortunately, the courses are tiny and they do not sate your anger.
The text here is rich and, unlike the meals, benefits from slow reading/savoring.
I did feel like the game was initially setting up something slightly longer (I looked forward to a description of the main courses), but it still made sense as is. I was wavering between 3 and 4 stars, but I see from the description that 2/3 of the original game was lost and this is a smaller part, so I'll gives 3 stars for the game that is (here on IFDB) and 4 for the game that might have been (in my heart).
A simple but stylish fortune telling game, January 12, 2024This is a French game entered in the Single Choice jam. It has some nice presentation and look overall, with multiple play modes and a long explanation.
However, there's not much there. You pick a description from a selection of rhyming couplets, and then a dice roll gives you a 'fortune'.
It's short, replayable, etc., and plays a role more similar to, say, a Tarot deck then a traditional narrative.
Repeat to win, in a one room game, January 10, 2024This is short one-room, one action puzzle game entered in the Single Choice Jam.
I interpreted it as a short coding exercise designed to be an brief but enjoyable game without further pretense.
At that, it's completely successful. It is nice and repeatable, each action uncovering more about the world but forcing you to think laterally to solve them.
I only had to use one hint, and that was for an item that's not in the room description but could be implied. Otherwise, this was short and satisfying. I didn't feel any strong emotional connection to the game, but I don't think that was a goal.
Short story about card game and luck told with 3d graphics, January 9, 2024This is a game entered in the single choice jam. It has animated 3d graphics, but is used to tell a text-based story, the images serving only as a (helpful) backdrop.
It sets up a big choice through a 3-act story about a group of friends in poor circumstances that are trying to get one of the newest, rarest cards in a trading card game.
There is some realistic-sounding dialogue and some nice character dynamics in this game. Overall, I was drawn into the scenario. I also liked the little touches like all of the fake cards the author had to make for different scenarios. Seems like the game could be pretty fun in real life.
A one-move game set in a subway, January 9, 2024This is a surreal one-move game entered into the Single Choice Jam.
You start in a subway, but something feels...off. Every choice that you make gives you deeper insights into the world, sometimes through explicit dialogue, and sometimes through dreams.
The setting and ideas become increasingly surreal. Somewhere along the way, I felt like it became disconnected; at least, I found it hard to thread together the various experiences I had had along the way into a coherent world.
I had a little trouble figuring out some of the actions to take, but thankfully there's a comprehensive hint system.
I didn't find any bugs in the game itself; on itch I had some trouble with the game not recognizing input halfway through the endgame sequence, so I thought I was stuck, but downloading it worked fine. This seems more like a weird interaction between my browser and not something due to the author.
A glimpse into humanity as seen through the eyes of soda, January 8, 2024This was part of the Single Choice Jam.
It's a well-written surreal-ish game from the perspective of...
soda pop.
Apparently, it can talk! And it can read the mind of people that are drinking it...and it know all about you and your past.
This absurd setup is used to tell a touching and sad story about family and, possibly, something larger in the world.
There is only one choice, but this game rests almost entirely on the strength of its writing, which is strong in this case.
A deadly game with urgency: a ship in true emergency, December 31, 2023This game features you as a crew member on a ship that has undergone a catastrophe. You have to race against time to survive and to save others!
Gameplay revolves around physics and physicality: pushing, pulling, using forces, temperature, gas, etc. There is a great deal of attention to physical details of things, such as inventory limit and 'recipes' requiring specific objects in specific orders. Everything about the game demands doing things precisely and in the proper way, like following shipboard directions only; even the proper way to name a spanner is provided!
The game starts under a timer, and I had to restart many times before finding the solution. After that, it opens up more.
It contains a cryptography puzzle, using standard codebreaking techniques and even with a provided password. I found that I preferred doing that with online software rather than working through it directly.
Overall, I didn't really find any bugs. The game's atmosphere reminds me of 70's to 80's action novels that my dad had lying around the house by some guy that was kind of like Tom Clancy but not (less military stories, more stuff like boat crashes).
Funny game about making emergency clothes out of office supplies, December 31, 2023This game was very funny, and pretty short and simple. It's Hawaiian shirt day at work, but you've forgotten to wear one! And, in fact, anything else but underwear!
You have to grab anything and everything you can to make clothes, starting from the most primitive to the less.
I only encountered a couple of minor bugs (no paragraph breaks sometimes where it seems like there might be some, and Mo is improper named so is referred to as 'the Mo' sometimes).
This is honestly a very funny game to me. I enjoyed every action I took.
Short PunyInform game based on 80's miniseries., December 29, 2023This is a relatively brief PunyInform game inspired by the start of the TV series Otherworld, and 8-episode miniseries that takes a family to another world.
Only the intro and a few puzzles are implemented. Most of it is implemented fairly well; I saw few typos. The game is a bit sparse; I imagine that having watched the series allows you to mentally fill in a lot of the missing details.
I had some implementation issues, as shown in the two following segments:
(Spoiler - click to show)
> x tools
Mostly made of wood, are now useless.
> search tools
No need to concern yourself with that.
> take tools
No need to concern yourself with that.
> take all
There are no things available that match “take all”.
> x corner
It’s very messy. It might be worth searching through the mess.
> search mess
Sorry, I don’t understand what “mess” means.
> search corner
You search through the mess in the corner and find a crowbar.
(Spoiler - click to show)
> pry sarcophagus
Using the crowbar you manage to push the lid aside so you can search
the inside.
> search sarcophagus
The big sarcophagus contains a box.
> open box
You can’t open that.
> take box
Taken.
> look at box
It consists of a wooden box. It feels like there’s something inside.
>
Besides this sort of thing, this was well-scoped and not too hard to handle. It would kind of be fun to see a one-room game from this author; they have the sort of writing and puzzle style that I think would work well with a single room with a lot of little puzzles.
A complex underwater salvage mission in a larger universe, December 28, 2023This game, as its name suggests, is part of the same universe as A1RL0CK.
It's set in an underwater wreck that is enormous and filled with strange biological material. You have a special suit designed both to let you interface with the technology around you and to keep you under control.
The gameplay is partly exploration and partly puzzly. I enjoyed searching out parts of the ship, interfacing with technology and so on. I had some trouble with the parser when trying to deal with wheel valves, but I realized I had been using the wrong verb (SET is right, TURN works sometimes but not as often).
There is frequent strong profanity in the game. It makes sense in context. The story is very violent, kind of like 80s sci fi action like Alien, Predator, or Terminator.
Overall, I found the story strong. At times I got stuck, like I said; this is not an easy game, and careful attention to detail is basically required to pass through. I had a good time with it overall.
One of the richest magic systems in IF games, packed into a compact map, December 23, 2023This large and multi-faceted game has you start off trapped in a closet in a motel room--not an auspicious beginning for a game of great mystical power.
The idea here is that you are someone possessed of magical powers. This power can be exercised through the use of amulets representing different animals; however, the amulets are not enough. You also need gemstones to power them.
And that's where the game really opens up. There are a lot of amulets; there are a lot of gemstones. Each combination gives you different powers, and each power can be used in different places. This gives essentially cubic complexity to the game!
Which means you may want to experiment a lot and take notes. The game is kind, giving you a lot of leeway and plenty of optional paths.
I first played this as part of Castle Balderstone, and then played the newer version. While it was probably in the original, I didn't realize the first time that you can (spoilers for very end) (Spoiler - click to show)open portals to tons of different dimensions. I thought it was pretty cool, to be honest. Really loved this game.
A fun, short meta-game about beating a game by switching versions, December 22, 2023This game has a clever meta concept: you have to switch between different versions of the game, installing and uninstalling upgrades to progress.
In early versions of the game, you can see things like objects with can't be interacted with or placeholder text. In later versions, you get more advanced things like NPC conversation.
This idea of being able to switch back and forth between the two modes and explore outside the bounds of the game is brilliant!
It just doesn't last very long, and it can be hard to figure out when you can use these abilities or why. So the concept has great promise, and this version is okay, but I didn't feel that it filled out the measure of its promise.
Excellent world-hopping concept with some rough edges, December 20, 2023I had a great time with this game, then a bad time, then a pretty good time.
This is a PunyJam game, written using PunyInform, a variant of Inform designed to fit onto small devices.
It has one of my favorite game tropes, multiple worlds that all play off of each other. You start in one, but the game shifts you every few minutes into another, and you have to solve pieces of each one to figure out what's going on overall.
It uses nice color changes.
Where I had less enjoyment was a puzzle I got very stuck on in the CPU world. I turned out that there was one object I had overlooked in a paragraph, and so I spent over an hour trying over and over again to figure out what was wrong. I decompiled the game, used all in-game hints, got help online but had to ask for multiple hints. I don't know why I got so stuck! Most of it is my fault, but I think having some gentle nudges on what to focus on could help. And there were a few items that didn't have any descriptions.
So, overall started out loving it, got frustrated, but I still like the concept and most of the gameplay. Very fun.
Cinderella gone wrong, December 12, 2023This Twine game is a retrospective from an alternate ending of the original Cinderella story.
In this version, the stepsister won out. By cutting off her heel to fit in the shoe, she married the prince.
But...
She knows she isn't the one he fell in love with.
This is part of the Single Choice Jam and, as such, has one big choice in the middle, which is a nice complex option letting you choose an adjective and a noun. Each one gives a different branch.
The game is not too lengthy, but has several poignant points. At times, it felt a bit repetitive, before the choice, while after the choice each branch seemed unique.
There are text effects adding to the overall appeal of the game, although one passage was all shaking, which was a little distracting.
I enjoyed playing this overall.
A limited parser game about slowly gaining power, December 12, 2023This was a fun treat of a game to experience. You are a violent death machine, used as a pawn in an interplanetary war.
And you love slime prince, one of many duplicates of a true prince. The duplicates are made of slime, mere imitations designed as fodder for assassins like yourself.
The game is a limited parser game, and consists of slowly gaining capabilities over a map of around 20 (?) locations. Most capabilities are motion based.
The worldbuilding is both extensive and light; it's clear that a great deal of thought has gone into developing this world, but we mostly get hints and light touches of it, through the window of the slime prince's thoughts.
I did get stuck at one point, but the HINT command is gentle and helpful. I didn't use it at first, and ended up 'lawnmowering' for a long time. I wish I had turned to help sooner!
Overall, the writing is strong, the game is enjoyable. This is something that can be picked up and played relatively quickly, but is long enough to be substantial.
Fallen London fan game with a single choice, December 5, 2023This game was written for the Single Choice jam. As such, it is designed more as a short story, adding interactivity only to punctuate important feelings.
As such, this game relies heavily on the writing quality and the styling of the game. And I felt that this game pulled off both of these very well; having played Fallen London (and finished the Nemesis ambition, although with a different choice than the author), it was clear that this was an author's depiction of her own character and the features/items they possess, but the descriptions were skillfully woven into the story rather than being dumped all at once.
The styling is nice as well, with gentle colors and subtle animations that I thought were just my eyes tricking me at first.
The overall story is a monologue of sorts from an interesting perspective. There are several stories, for decades, of (Spoiler - click to show)'they came back from the dead, but wrong', but this one gives the viewpoint from the other side. Maybe the reason someone else feels (Spoiler - click to show)you came back wrong is because they changed, not you. A lot of food for thought.
It's hard to know how much playing Fallen London affects the feel of playing the game; the ambitions are hard, and it's likely that < 2000 people have completed it. But I think this story has some elements that everyone can appreciate.
A constrained parser game with a family dinner, December 5, 2023This is a parser game entered in the single choice jam, which requires that games only allow a single choice throughout the game.
This takes a clever spin on things by making you only capable of one real action at a time. There are many small things you can do: looking around, taking inventory, etc. But only one action really works.
It took me a bit to find what it was, which was frustrating at first.
Once I did, the game took on new dimensions, basically showing everything that could go wrong with a family party when your values and self-concept don't align with theirs.
Short and constrained, but impactful.
An illustrated trippy game about finding meaning, December 5, 2023This game always shows up on lists when I'm searching alphabetically, due to its use of parentheses, so I wanted to review it.
It's a Twine game that makes heavy use of 3d isometric perspectives. You play as a little rabbit whose world has suddenly gotten a lot larger.
The game has a kind of mix of cynical and dadaist worldviews. The characters make rape jokes and use strong profanity, drug use is mentioned frequently, and there is a long quest to see the color of the sky, which can break your mind.
The visuals were very nice. The overall philosophy reminded me of late stage Beatles. I think the game is well put together, but it didn't move me emotionally.
Orpheus and Eurydice, with a single choice, December 4, 2023This was made for the Single Choice Jam, and it takes that format in a straightforward way. The game has a linear text that spools out until the single choice, upon which the ending spools out.
The styling is done well, with a moody background color and font (as well as well-chosen graphical icons) that add a lot to the flavor of the game.
The story is about Orpheus and Eurydice, told in an engaging and dark style.
Most takes I've seen on this classic story are subversions, so I was expecting the twist in the first ending I saw. But I didn't expect the second, and overall felt this was pretty creative.
The interactivity was the weakest point, but that is severely limited by the jam.
Live a semester of a young woman's life, November 29, 2023Having played many recent Autumn Chen games in the last year or two, I saw a lot of references to Pageant, and thought, 'I don't really remember that game well'.
Turns out, I never played it! I mixed it up with another game and never even tried it.
Having tried it, it's pretty great. It's clearly influenced by Emily Short's Bee; both use the same system (one from when it was a semi-commercial system and another after it became Dendry). Both are based on quality-based narratives that play out over several weeks, both are about a certain type of rigorous, conservative upbringing, one by fundamentalist Christians and oene by Chinese diaspora parents.
However, this is certainly not just a retread of familiar material. Our main heroine, Karen (whom I recognize from several other games) has a unique and complex approach to life that makes choices not straightforward. Karen is thoughtful and compassionate but also is under enormous stress and has social anxiety at times that makes intended choices (like responding and so on) impossible to actually carry out.
One fundamental aspect is that Karen is extremely competent but does not see herself that way. She does 95% of what a human is capable of doing, but only sees that 5% gap. She works with adult research scientists but only sees her ineptness; she is told frequently she is beautiful but only sees awkwardness; she is loved by others but only fears rejection.
But the key is that she acts in spite of these fears; she just keeps on trucking.
Having played other 'pageantverse' games I immediately narrowed in on interacting with (Spoiler - click to show)Emily as much as possible. This game explores young trans interactions quite a bit: what does a trans relationship look like? Actually, that's not true; this game isn't about 'trans relationships' first; it's just about relationships, and what happens when someone being trans is thrown in the mix. Some of the tensest moments in the game for me were switching between private moments with my friend being able to express herself however she wanted and public moments with her family where the expectation was 'be normal or get punished'.
Overall, I'm glad that this wasn't a 'downer ending' game. I was able to succeed in my goals (being close to someone and doing good in pageant + research while being mediocre in science olympiad and basically ignoring family).
A strong game, and it's clear why it spawned several good followups.
Defining the relationship in times of covid, November 27, 2023This game takes place in the same universe as Pageant and New Year's Eve, 2019.
This has one of the best mechanics I've seen used in the Single Choice Jam, which requires that players can only make one choice of any important.
What this game does is have many choices in a short-but-not-inconsequential game, but almost all of the options are greyed out (something I've seen in games like Depression Quest, but not recently). So you get lots of 'choices', and can see what you could have tried, but can only make one choice. This is great at giving the illusion of choice in a positive way.
The story is messy, like a lot of real-life relationships are. You have someone you mutually confessed attraction for months ago, but covid has happened and you haven't seen each other. Now you're isolated and it's so lonely. You contact your person and...well, the rest is what the game is about.
Some strong profanity, which seemed to fit the characters and situation. Overall well-written.
The hatching of a creature, November 27, 2023This is a brief Ink game entered in the Single Choice jam.
You play as a creature newly formed, emerged from a chrysalis. Being exposed to the brave new world, the creature must adapt quickly, especially since a human approaches.
The game is very short, but the writing is solid, from an alien perspective. Despite the single choice, there is real agency, as all of the endings give logical but not straightforward.
Brief but enjoyable.
Story through documentation, November 25, 2023This game unrolls as you read through the documentation of a certain piece of software, digging into its API, its pipelines, its documented users, and, at the end, its chat logs.
The dry format allows for contrast with the futuristic setting and the drama-filled true story.
It's surprising this game was able to be made in less than 4 hours, but less surprising if the author already had experience in creating such documentation. Either way, it's an amazing feat.
Very well done. The format did keep me at a distance emotionally, but the story was effective.
Creepy telephone message game, November 24, 2023In this game, you call your son to apologize for not picking him up.
The reason you didn't pick him up? That's...complicated. The actual answer depends on your choices. You have a few 'main' choices and then a chance to add details.
The system is interesting, with realist options on what to do with the voicemail once you run out of time.
I played about 3 or 4 times and liked each of them. An expanded version of this would be fascinating, but a lot of the appeal here is from the wild branching, and that would quickly get out of hand.
Build a movie, but do it your way, November 24, 2023I like this game, the kind of inherent symmetry it has.
It starts with introducing you to a young trio who have recently escaped from a cult and want to do what anyone would do in that situation: start making a movie!
You have several options on what to spend the money on, like a better monster or better set.
While one early option will lock you out of victory, others will lead you onward to greater glory. I had one ending I loved and another that was pretty good.
There's not a lot of game here, but it has plenty of character.
A clever twist on haunted house games, November 24, 2023This parser game for Ectocomp was written in 4 hours or less.
This game really surprised me. I started it up, liked the writing, and decided to start poking around. I found a lot more things implemented in the first room than is normal for a speed-IF, which intrigued me, but I had trouble doing things.
Once I realized the twist, though, I found it to be clever, reminding me of some enjoyable games from the past. Just when I thought I couldn't do any more, I reached the ending, which was a satisfying conclusion.
So I'm not saying more because of spoilers, but I thought this was a good game and a good choice for the scoping and size issues that usually come with having a time limit for writing, like Ectocomp' Petite Mort division does.
A linear, illustrated bitsi story contemplating the nature of writing, November 24, 2023This game is a Bitsi game, a platform which has art with minimal palettes and simple responses to movement keys, as well as text. This specific bitsi game provides a new image for most (but not all) lines of text.
There aren't any choices as such. It's just a narrative essay about writing; what is the gap between characters and their author? How does fan fiction come into play?
The writing is good, the art was inscrutable at times but also well done. There wasn't anything wrong with the story/game, but also it lacked many of the elements I most enjoy about interactive fiction without providing a substantially exceptional experience to make up for it.
Overall, short and well done.
A powerfully-written body creation simulator, November 24, 2023I like short, ritualistic Twine games like this. You progress, in any order, through five different sets of body parts, choosing how you will present yourself to the world.
The choices are both physically meaningful and symbolic. Tree arms, for instance, are bad for physical defense, but all growth through painful pruning.
The styling is nice, with a background that is both visually interesting but non-distracting, and good color choices.
Overall, I found the writing strong. I didn't feel a strong need to revisit it, but my personal experience was positive and I would happily recommend the game to others.
A sweet short story about a tasty afterlife, November 24, 2023This short Twine game was entered in Ectocomp in the Petite Mort division.
It features a father running a food stall who sees his daughter after a long separation. There are supernatural elements, as well as LGBTQ elements.
The food stall descriptions are delightful, with sounds, smells, and sights described with a complex preparation for a meal. The supernatural elements are varied and interesting as well.
There seems to be an Ah Lim Chicken Rice in Singapore, but other aspects could place it in Malaysia, perhaps. There are names that sound Cantonese and names that seem to have Muslim origins.
Overall, a nice blend of culture and human emotion.
Deeply moving game with deeply flawed implementation, November 24, 2023This game is based on the emotional true story of the author's mother having deep dementia, causing her to lash out at those around her.
I can't even imagine what that would be like. When I was young, I lived with my great-grandmother in her 90s who had dementia, but she was rarely violent, just forgetful, sometimes thinking she was a little girl, and only occasionally lashing out. I remember it being scary as a kid, but she seemed nice. Now, as an adult, thinking of that for my parents, and much more violent, is terrifying.
As a game, the mechanics are simple. You explore the world around you, which is hostile, and you try to get rid of that which is causing you pain.
I immediately came in planning on giving a score of 5 just from the opening scenes, and despite the typos and the difficulty with implementation, I thought of keeping it there. But I had more and more problems interacting with the game; many commands repeat text that doesn't make sense; many commands return nothing at all, especially when the darkness covers the door. I tried to find a guide, but everyone's comments only talked about the story, so I had to decompile it to find what to do.
In a way, the difficulties with typing commands can simulate the frustration and unfamiliarity of dementia, but I don't think it was intentional.
Storywise, of course the game deserves a really high rating, but this author is of such a high caliber I think that she would prefer a rating that reflects the whole experience (but feel free to message me if I'm wrong, author!). I think this game could be helpful to others in the future who have similar experiences, and smoothing out a couple of the bugs could enhance their experience.
A brief scary poem game with multiple endings, November 24, 2023I enjoyed this poem-based choicescript game that was entered in Ectocomp, and was made in 4 hours or less.
The poem is written in verses of 4 lines each, with the 2nd and 4th lines rhyming.
The topic is a haunted wood with a deep and evil pond. You can get various achievements by delving into the pond's mysteries or exploring the woods.
I found deciphering the meaning of the poetry added an extra layer of interaction with the game, which I liked. A lot of poem IF games are very obtuse, but here the meanings were clear enough to understand.
The meter of the poem kept throwing me off; at times it seemed like it had a pattern, so my brain would set it up, but then it'd go off pattern. The number of syllables and the emphasis of syllables varies a lot. Here's an example:
Deep must the pool be,
For its exterior to be black as pitch
Strange the wind does not disturb,
The mirror smooth surface that seems to bewitch.
And another:
What lies 'neath the water,
Where the wind fitfully blows,
Undisturbed and dark with an algae scudded facade,
Surface unreflective in the sun's dawn glow.
There aren't any rules in poetry, of course, and I liked this quite a bit. But I wonder if it might have been good to either lean in harder to a rhyme scheme or meter or to just toss out the rules and go full free verse. But, given that I liked the game, I'm not sure either of those are necessary. Pretty fun!
A heartwrenching story of saving a child, November 24, 2023This is an Ink game entered into Ectocomp, written in 4 hours or less.
It's story-focused, with a well-written tale about a father who has to get up in the middle of the night to help his son get to sleep.
The emphasis in this story is on details and emotions. Little reactions from people, the way that your mind picks out different things, the emotions that don't quite match up with what you'd expect.
There are multiple endings, which is interesting, but I didn't replay because I found mine satisfactory.
A sad game, but a good game.
Morality test on an alien ship, November 23, 2023This parser game was written for Ectocomp.
In this game, you have been abducted by aliens for 3.5 years and are currently being held prisoner by them. They require you to do 2 tests: one with yes/no questions about historical views on morality, and then a practical test.
The yes/no questions are about scenarios from Cicero and Nietzsche, with a fictional viewpoint thrown in.
The practical involves a tense conversation between four characters pitted against each other.
The conversation in this game uses ASK/TELL, but I had trouble knowing what topics could be asked or told, and mainly just asked people about themselves.
Apparently it is possible to win, but I had difficulty doing so.
Interesting concept. It is a speed-IF, and could use more polish, and it is a little depressing, but it's also thoughtful.
Compact, spooky Adventuron puzzler, November 23, 2023This is a neat little Adventuron game that is highly constrained but manages to fit a real puzzle in.
You are at a campfire with three friends, and you are about to tell spooky tales. One camper tells the tale, and everyone else participates, including you.
The other campers and a book serve to add complexity to the game, each giving you more options to edit the final tale. Only one tale gives a good ending...
This was highly polished (bug-free as far as I can see) and, thought slight, was enjoyable, especially seeing the effects of your actions on the story.
A long fantasy parser game about elves and a witch with some bugs, November 23, 2023I played this game because it was a ‘longer than two hours’ parser adventure, so one that I would consider might be difficult to complete.
You play as an elf in a village that has suddenly been kidnapped en masse by a witch. You have to look through all the elves’ abandoned houses and workplaces and get the tools and items you need!
This game can be pretty tricky. I made two attempts in playing. In the first, I carefully explored, and discovered some locations where timing was essential. For instance, there is a mine with a lamp, and the lamp has a limited battery. I had to save and undo several times to get that right. Then there were a few other ways for objects to get lost forever.
Increasing the difficulty was a carrying limit, so I had to drop things at different times. There were a lot of containers I could throw things in, but those too had a carrying capacity. Sometimes containers got weird (I had a jug of mead and at one point I was carrying the mead outside of the jug). I’ve had my own issues implementing liquids in containers though so I know how it is!
Unfortunately, after I had escaped and got a bit stuck and turned to the walkthrough, I couldn’t find something mentioned in it while I was wandering up and down the river and, to my sadness, I hit the turn limit and died at about 50 points.
The turn limit seems like a fixed limit, around 600 moves, and so there was no way to undo far enough to keep going. I had to start over, and, fearing similar problems, followed the walkthrough precisely this time.
Before using the walkthrough, I encountered a maze that was actually pretty neat. It’s a ‘twisty little passages’ maze (i.e. a maze where all rooms are identical, or almost so, and going back the way you came doesn’t always take you forward), but the only directions are UP and DOWN, so you have to navigate your way through. I reminded me of the cramped/claustrophobic area in Andrew Plotkin’s So Far a bit.
Some of the puzzles after turning to the walkthrough seemed really hard to solve, especially the finale; I wonder if there are hints you can find elsewhere that can help you with them.
I’ve attached a transcript. It has some bugs in it I’ve marked here and there. Overall, I was glad to beat the witch!
Complex and puzzly one-room murder mystery, November 23, 2023This game is an Inform murder mystery by thesleuthacademy, who has written numerous reviews for mysteries on IFDB in the last year or so. It’s nice to see a game by them!
Mysteries are one of my favorite genres of game, so I was interested to see how it plays out here. There are several standard ways to run a mystery in interactive fiction:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.
This game is a mix of 3 and 4. You have to collect enough physical evidence to proceed to a quiz, and then pass the quiz to beat the game.
The storyline is simple. A man was found alone in his room in a pool of blood with no visible wounds. You must examine this single room to discover the clues.
This game boasts a large number of beta testers, which is nice. I struggled with some of the setup, however. Many of the ‘standard responses’ for Inform were not helpful. For instance, there were some ear plugs that I tried to take and it said ‘That is not portable’. Some commands that might have had useful responses didn’t work; for instance, TALK TO didn’t have any message like ‘Conversation in this game is handled by ASKING’ (although that was mentioned in the help system!) and PLAY PIANO had no response.
There are some very helpful responses, though, like SEARCH and LOOK UNDER saying you only need to ‘examine’.
At the quiz at the end, I really struggled with the third question. I guessed it but then decompiled the game to see how I could have gotten there. It seems that the conversation system is a lot larger than I had expected. I had gotten stuck since SHOW (something) TO (someone) often didn’t have a response, so I assumed asking about those things wouldn’t be helpful.
There is one puzzle of a type I haven’t seen before in a parser mystery, involving a grid. I thought that was pretty clever.
Overall, I felt like tightening up some of the standard responses and adding more synonyms and actions like TALK TO and PLAY PIANO would make this an excellent short mystery adventure.
Twine and TADS combine to evoke nostalgia and care for a child, November 23, 2023This is another game I tested, a hybrid of Twine and TADS.
The idea is that you are an adult (or teen) woman with a boyfriend/partner. Your father is dying of cancer, and could go at any time. You find out that your partner has been working with him on a game (written in TADS) to present to you, years after he started.
The TADS game consists of a house filled with materials for a party. You have to gather up enough stuff to enter the party: a costume, a thing to share, and an invitation. There are 5 ways to satisfy each category. Parts of the house additionally contain journal entries reflecting real-world issues the father had over time.
I really liked the concept of sandwiching a TADS game between twine games, and I like that it works both online and in downloads.
As a beta tester, I’m not sure how effective I was. I found 1 or 2 of the paths (I especially focused on the board game in testing), but that means I neglected 3 or 4.
And that’s both the blessing and the curse of this game: the multiple paths are very clever, allowing people to bypass a lot of puzzles and get to the end, contributing to a more relaxed atmosphere and helping casual people play.
On the other hand, that means that players (and inadequate testers like me) will only see 20-40% of the game. I’ve written before about how having ‘hidden bonus content’ in your game can make the game very very rewarding for those who find it, but overall tends to drag down the score as most people don’t see the hard work you do (Hanon’s game Transparent I think is a good example, where it’s a beautifully complex and rich game that hides most of it below the surface).
I enjoyed on this second playthrough figuring out the computer/radio problem, although I used hints several times. There was a minor hiccup at the end. I did find the puzzle fun and like the solution, though.
The twine scenes are, I think, descriptive and emotional. This kind of writing, with end of life care, can be really hard to write because everyone mourns in a different way. It’s almost impossible to provide options that meet everyone’s way of dealing with grief; one alternative is to write a strong personality for your protagonist and just provide options that are believable for that personality.
I feel like this game leans towards the second choice. Our protagonist has been deeply impacted by the trauma of cancer, and many options hover between ‘soldier through stoically’ and ‘allow sorrow to briefly overcome you’. This provides a contrast to the upbeat, cheery and often child-like TADS game. I think that the reactions of the protagonist are realistic, for a certain type of person and personality; yet at the same time, there is, in me, perhaps a longing for a positive and direct reconciliation and expression of appreciation that the game does not afford. There is in me a desire to have happy endings for games, but also to write games that do not have happy endings (my original ending for Grooverland was to have the main character frozen as a statue forever in a theme park, but CMG talked me out of it as too depressing).
Overall, I find the complex systems and puzzles of the TADS part and the dialogue and descriptiveness of the Twine part to be the best aspects of the game.
Standard, classic mini-RPG, November 23, 2023This game was an attempt to make a dungeon crawler in 4 hours, and I think it did a pretty good job in that timeframe. I used UNDO a lot, and had to peek at the string dump to get the tiny key, but it might be fun to go back through without UNDO at some point.
You have weapons and armor, and you fight enemies in randomized combat, with damage and hit/miss chances affected by your weapons and armor. Defeating enemies gets gold (which doesn't seem to have an in-game use) and more weapons or armor. There's one puzzle that doesn't involve fighting.
As a game, it's okay, but as a prototype, it seems you could build something fun out of this. In a larger game I'd like some way to heal and more to do with the gold. But it can be fun to prototype systems in Ectocomp; I did that my conversation system and have used it for years, so hopefully the author got something out of this game.
A short, linear game about cannibalism and Vietnamese food, November 23, 2023This game was entered in Ectocomp.
It's essentially a long villain diatribe, first discussing how Christianity justifies cannibalism, then going off on a very long message with slow timed text that explains how they use traditional Vietnamese recipes to cook what is implied to be human meat.
The game has some great music in the background, and a cool (albeit somewhat busy) visual background.
It's hard to identify with straight-up villain stuff like this. When something is one-note, it's hard to feel invested. There is some variation in emotion; it swings between sadness, gruesomeness, and mundanity, but I think having a spark of light or hope, or some indication of true happiness, could have increased the contrast with the horror.
I didn't get frustrated by the timed text because I downloaded the file and edited it out.
The Vietnamese food and culture were the best aspects of the game, for sure, along with the music. Also I'd love to have this quote framed in my kitchen:
ANYTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING RESEMBLING "BREAD" IS BEYOND MY CAPACITY, NOT AS A CHEF BUT AS A "HUMAN BEING" WITH "LIMITED PATIENCE" and "THINGS TO DO, VASSALS TO KILL."
Witness the decline of an Empire!, November 23, 2023This Ectocomp game takes the form of a series of pamphlets which describe the current state of the British Empire.
Each one presents a conundrum, which you can solve in several (usually 4) ways. At first, your options are to Acquiesce (which guarantees a moderate stat loss) or to attempt to fix it using one of your strengths (which gives either a slight stat loss or a strong stat loss). Eventually the option to acquiesce disappears.
There doesn't seem to be any way to improve stats; it seems to be a simulator for the long death and decline of the British empire.
I had a couple of sticking points with the game. There were several typos; I myself am prone to them, but if this is in Twine you can print out a 'proofing copy' with the 'proof' button and run a spellchecker on them.
The other issues were mainly taste; I would have liked the stat decrease to remain on the screen a lot longer, as I couldn't even see it as first, with my eyes near the top of the screen. Second, it's hard to figure out what true effect your losses have. I ran through part of it a second time and there didn't seem to be any changes in the pamphlets that depended on my earlier failures, although perhaps there were subtle differences here and there that escaped the eye.
In any case, turning the many negative actions of the British empire into a horror game by just printing what happened is pretty amusing.
A grim game about torture and abuse, November 23, 2023This ectocomp game was written using Twine.
It's a fairly short game about a man who has kidnapped a woman and a child and hurts them repeatedly. The game indulges in his verbal and physical abuse, almost reveling in it.
There is a slight supernatural element to the game which is stronger in some endings, but mostly this game just seems to serve up unpleasantries, and not in the service of some greater narrative; the torture seems to be the point.
It is polished and descriptive. However, the interactivity is a little bit weird; after one ending I looked around at the code, and it's pretty hard to figure out which action will lead to which result.
Emotionally, it was affecting, as I had a strong negative reaction to it.
I believe this author has a good writing talent, but different people have different tastes, and I'm not the target audience here.
A haunting story about evil in a church, November 22, 2023This is a brief but replayable Twine game. To me, it felt like a speed-IF that was polished up and made nice, and from the About page that's exactly what it was.
The styling is really nice, with a dark textured background and legible light grey serif text.
The writing has a thoughtfulness to it I appreciated. You play as a non-believer exploring an abandoned church, and a lot of people would just put random thoughts in about how the person hates religion and so on, but this game provides a more balanced approach; the narrator is an interested outsider, looking in but aware they will not ever take part.
Storywise, the game is brief, so much so that its narrative arc felt underdeveloped, which is the main drawback I found; I liked the story, there just wasn't much of it. You are investigating the church with a loved one, and things go wrong in a bad way.
The interactivity has quite a bit of depth, with many endings and achievements despite its short length. I wondered how they could fit so many results into such a short game, until I realized that the game underneath is tracking more variables than you'd think.
Overall, an impressive effort, but one I'd have liked more of.
A haunted family has a frightening Halloween, November 22, 2023This is a medium-length Twine game about a family that lives in a haunted house...but all the monsters in it are friendly with them, from the voices in the basement to the ghost children.
It has a nicely written and pleasant atmosphere, and kind of reads like books I'd read as a kid. I liked the homey feeling and the way the monsters worked together.
There was some real agency, where you could choose between different paths.
However, the game ends in the middle of the story; I would have given a higher rating if it were finished. Also, many of the background images had large patches of white, which made it moderately difficult to read some of thee white text.
Otherwise, cute family, nice worldbuilding, fun monsters.
A creepy night of programming, November 22, 2023This game is (hopefully partially) autobiographical, describing a long career in a game company. A lot of it was familiar to me; my father owned a video game company growing up and I spent a lot of time at work. The arcade games, chill out areas, lots of sketches and endless cubicles, mixed with frustrating bugs, all sounded about right.
The main point of the game is two-fold: fix a bug, and find a 'peep' to hide in someone else's office.
There is a lot of narrative momentum, with parts like fixing the bug being an effective story, and the strange happenings beyond the janitor's closet...
On the other hand, I often found myself fighting the parser, especially when dealing with a certain unreachable thing I found.
Overall, there is a good haunting story here.
Unofficial sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, November 22, 2023I beta tested this game a couple of times, although I only did a part at a time and never completed it, while on the other hand the author did a lot of testing for me, so I definitely owe him a lot!
This game is wildly ambitious in its concept: take the work of Douglas Adams (one of the best humorists of all time) and the work of Infocom (one of the best group of IF writers of all time) and write a sequel to their works with a lot of original synthesis and do it all in ZIL (one of the less-known IF languages) and make it roughly comparable in scope to the original (within an order of magnitude).
Oh, and do it as your first game.
To produce anything in this scenario would be a feat. I think that the end result is much more than ‘anything’.
You start this game right where the old one leaves off, on the planet of Magrathea, with the other ship members from the Heart of Gold. Your end goal is…hmm, I’m not quite sure. Explore? In the end it involves a lot of exploring Milliways and trying to gain access to a fancy ship.
In the meantime, the game is centered on a hub-spoke structure, with a central ‘darkness’ room imitating the first game, where different senses lead to different areas.
The game is intentionally hard. In another thread, the author laid down the following rules:
*NPCs are hard to get right, include less of them but make them worth it.
*Story comes after puzzles. That’s how my cookie crumbles.
*DEFINITELY make the game cruel. It’s more interesting that way.
Randomisation? Obviously! Otherwise it becomes a follow-the-walkthrough-if-you-get-stuck kind of game with no brain involved. I usually end up becoming that kind of person.
This game features all of these things, although it actually has several NPCs. The game is quite cruel, and has many randomised codes and things that make a straightforward walkthrough impossible. Just about every area has some kind of randomization, from randomized exits in a small maze to a game of hide and seek with a randomized shapeshifter.
The most frequent way this shows up is the darkness thing. I never figured it out while beta testing, just flailing around until I got out of the darkness, and then with the walkthrough playing today I realized that you have to wait a bit first and then perform the appropriate action, but was frustrated when I kept getting sent to the same area over and over (due to randomization). I finally realized that you can just ‘wait’ until you get the area you want.
For me what shines the most are the settings and the big set-piece puzzles. The settings include Milliway’s itself, Dirk Gently’s office, and other areas from Adams’ writing. The game of hide and seek I mentioned earlier was a lot of fun, as were some of the interactions around disguising yourself and walking around Milliways.
There is some trouble; my game very frequently crashed, often after examining something, when using the Gargoyle interpreter. I took some notes at first but it was so frequent that I just started saving a lot. I’m sure it’s something ZIL related, as I have almost never had Inform games crash. It could be due to window size or something. Edit: No one else seems to be reporting this, so I believe it may be an interpreter issue.
Other than that, the main thing I would have liked more of was a guided conversation system that suggested things to talk about.
Overall, this is much better than it could have been. I remember someone entered a text port of one of the graphical Infocom adventures into IFcomp many years ago and it was a real slog to get through. Pretty much most of the unofficial sequels to Infocom games I’ve played have been bland, outside of some highlights like Scroll Thief. So to see a game that is vibrant with interesting puzzles and which follow in the first games footsteps in many ways is quite impressive. I don’t think it achieves the heights of the first game in terms of polish or writing, but that’s like saying that my work as a mathematician didn’t achieve the heights of Newton or Gauss. This game aimed high, and so I’m impressed where it landed. I look forward to any future work.
Gargantuan game about puzzles and a Prince's journey of maturation, November 22, 2023I’m pretty sure this is the largest TADS game ever made and one of the top 2 largest parser games (with Flexible Survival, the furry game, being larger). It has a map and puzzle list rivaling games like Cragne Manor, and actions frequently generate over a page of text, often multiple pages when dramatic events happen.
The story is that you have been assigned to make the young prince Quisborne into a man, basically, instead of the wishy-washy pampered prince he is. To do that, you need to explore the world, chase down dark secrets, and help out a great deal of people.
I tested this game, although I used a walkthrough for much of it. I also replayed part of it before this review, which I’ll come back to later.
I think a great deal of IF taste comes down to the first game you played that hooked you in. For me (and a few others, like Mike Spivey), our first big game was Curses. For people like Robin Johnson, those games were (I believe) Scott Adams. For people like Zarf, Infocom and Myst were big influences; for Garry Francis and others, type-in games and illustrated adventures were big.
Each of these influences leave a mark on us. For me, I like dry humor, exploration with a lot of varied experiences and consistent backstory, literary aspirations, etc. Robin Johnson took principles from Scott Adams games (and others) to make his successful parser hybrid games. Zarf made several amazing games that drew on Myst’s complex mechanical puzzles (especially So Far), and so on.
John Ziegler has cited the Unnkulia games as an inspiration. These were early TADS games, perhaps the biggest/most popular amateur text games that were released while Infocom was dying and before Inform came out. They feature games with lots of gags and names that were puns or jokes. They have a lot of background banter, and feature large outdoor areas with woods, taverns, etc. They have puzzles involving looking behind scenery things or repeating actions, lots of diagonal directions, etc. I replayed a bit of the first Unnkulia game before writing this review and these things stuck out to me.
I find a lot of similar elements in Prince Quisborne. We have an expansive world map that involves a lot of beautiful nature and sweeping expanses. We have puzzles that involve looking behind scenery things or trying actions multiple times. We have many names involving puns or jokes. We have maps with organic, diagonal directions. We have a plethora of taverns. We have the use of TADS. Some of these are stretches, of course, but I really feel like a lot of authors (including me) are perpetually chasing that feeling of the games that drew them into IF.
The craft is, in my opinion, much higher in this game than in Unnkulia. The poems are well-written, the puzzles can be exceptional, and so on.
When I first played, I got overwhelmed by the large amount of text. I ended up having to follow the walkthrough and couldn’t figure out how anyone could navigate the tons of text, many room exits, tons of open quests, etc.
I replayed today, and I got to 75 points in 4 hours, out of 300. I got 50 of those points without hints, which was nice, but I really got stuck on the chess puzzle, which I had never solved on my own before. I also needed hints crossing the ferry, and I got some ‘solve’ help with some logic puzzles because I had already played through them twice (but some I did anyway because I like them).
I found it so much easier this time. What I did was, the first time I played, I read all the text carefully. All the pages and pages of backstory, the little jokes and character building moments of the game.
But this time, I just ignored it all. I just went through and saw the puzzle structure. I spacebarred through all the text and looked twice at each room to get the shorter room description.
With this simpler version, the map coalesced. I realized how much of it was closed off, and the rest was strongly guided. I was able to do a lot more of the puzzles this way.
However, it only made sense to do this because I had read the text once before. Without the text, some puzzles won’t make sense.
Fortunately, I found the NUDGE system really helpful. It helped me know what to focus on, and cut down on the time I was lost so much. It didn’t even feel like cheating; honestly, playing the whole game doing NUDGE a lot may not be a bad idea.
The other reason it’s good to read all the text is because it provides its own experience, its own plot and storyline, much of which is wholly unconnected with gameplay. It tells a story of a young man who grows wiser and older. Many reviews have found parts of this offputting, and I did too at first, as the character seemed so wishywashy. But the later parts of the game really pay off with all of that intro character framing.
I spoke about tastes earlier. Some of the puzzle style isn’t to my taste in terms of difficulty. I have some habits in my own games I do specifically to avoid things I find frustrating in others. I lay out almost all of my rooms in rectangular grids and make sure to clearly label exits, because I don’t like hidden exits; I try to keep my text short and make it clear what matters in each room; I like to make it so that all important text occurs at the end of paragraphs; if a puzzle requires multiple items, I try to keep them together in physical proximity or provide clear markings showing they belong somewhere else (which is something I like about Curses, and something Cragne Manor does in a way); and so on. Quisborne violates almost all of my personal rules, and this makes it, in my opinion, even longer and more difficult than a game of its size would otherwise be.
But I had fun replaying the first 4th of the game tonight, doing it in my weird way of having already read all the text and used a walkthrough and now stumbling through with occasional hints. I don’t think that’s how the game was intended to be played. But I like it a lot. There are a select few other big polished parser games out there and many of them have not gotten the attention of smaller games; I recently have been replaying all IFDB games with 100+ ratings, and the only real ‘mega’ game on there is Blue Lacuna, which is the easiest giant game. Curses is on there, which is pretty big. But the other games, like Mulldoon Legacy, Finding Martin, Inside Woman, Lydia’s Heart, Worlds Apart, Cragne Manor, etc. tend to get few but high ratings. So will Prince Quisborne become popular and well liked by many, or just become the treasured love a few? Even the Unnkulia games which inspired John sit at less than 10 ratings on IFDB each. But I am a fan of this game, love the craft that went into it, and believe it fulfilled the author’s goals of making some exquisite.
Whip up some medicine to cure a cold, and do genealogy, November 22, 2023I beta tested this game.
The Alaric Blackmoon games have a long and storied history going back I think decades.
Most of the ones that I have played have been written in Adrift. They are written in traditional fantasy style; as books, they would have fit fine as a TSR series along with Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance.
The games are usually quite long, often with action sequences, and several of them use similar set pieces (like the castle in this game, which features in several other games).
This one is a stripped down and smaller version. There is just a simple goal: to explore the genealogy of the main characters.
I’ve seen others saying this game felt a little too small; I could see that, but I feel like it’s more polished than a lot of the other Blackmoon games. The only issue I found was with some leaves, where I had some both in my hand and in a cup, but that’s not necessarily bad, as I could have taken only part of it out.
Genealogy is a requirement in my religion and one I enjoy, so I liked this lower-stakes storyline. It can be very fun to track down an ancestor and find distant cousins.
Overall, this is a nice introduction to the series, and can get people use to the style of the other games (like magic, the way the Axe works, etc.)
Italian slasher film where you're the star, November 22, 2023This game is a game with multiple layers of storytelling. In it, you are an actress speaking with the police, telling a story about a film that is set within a film, all played by you, the player, as a game…but is all of that true? Layers shift and change.
This is a giallo story, but due to my inexperience with much of Italian cinema I took it to be a ‘slasher film’. As a meta slasher film, it shares a lot in common with movies like Scream or Wes Craven’s new nightmare, or to games like the recent IFComp game Blood Island. The only real difference between this genre and those is that this game has a lot more reference to nudity and sexuality, but that’s a common difference between American and European cinema. While I tend to avoid erotic games, the nudity and sexuality in this game never felt erotic; if anything, it was just a way to incite more fear and helplessness.
You play as an actress who leaves one movie set to go to another. Along the way, a mysterious figure stalks and harasses you, and can kill you. But is that just part of the film, too?
I received ending 1, which seemed like an apt ending for the game. Overall, just like another game that I mentioned to its author, this game reminds me quite a bit of opera. Its symbolism reminds me of things like Don Giovanni, with the statue dragging him to hell, or Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, where all actions are symbolic.
The game does have several implementation issues though, which I share a large part in, as I tested it. I’ll send specifics to the author, but there are a lot of places where things fire out of order or synonyms are missed. I certainly could have aided with that better!
But I suppose it’s a bit of a missed opportunity; due to the occasionally sketchy implementation, I had to religiously follow the walkthrough. This could have been presented as a ‘script’ feelie (similar to and mirroring the in-game script), adding another layer to the game. But I suppose a new release of the game could also bring the errors in line, which would raise the game to a 9 or 10 in my mind.
Frat brothers cast spells at each other and bond, November 22, 2023I like this game, one that I tested it. Even though it’s longer, I replayed the whole thing before this review, and one of the hardest puzzles in my current WIP was influenced by a puzzle in this game that I really liked.
It’s a Twine game with a parser influence. Like Scott Adams style games, the screen is split into an upper and lower part, but unlike them, the bottom remains mostly static while the top changes. The game has quadratic complexity, as you choose an action and then choose a noun to apply it to, which can be an object in -game or yourself on the sidebar.
Gameplay revolves around discovering and using new spells, which are in a two-syllable format. Over time, the spell system develops some complexity and richness.
Story-wise, you are an initiate in a fraternity of wizards, completing your final initiation: a magical paintball tournament. You have to defeat your brothers while also coming to know them.
I’ve seen some concerns in other reviews about the way you get to know them: by casting a spell that lets you live out other people’s memories, generally their most traumatic. The original version of the game did not include explicit consent for that action, while the most recent does.
From my point of view (which is subjective), this game is clearly fantasy. Not just wizards and spells fantasy (though it has that), but also a fantasy of friendship and understanding. The dream of having a circle of friends so close that you can share anything between you. In fact, there are a lot of clues in the paintball game itself that the whole thing is kind of a setup, a way for people to get to know you; it’s really quite possible that this mind sharing was intended.
Except…parts of the game indicate that the mind spell is newly rediscovered and exciting.
But that’s one aspect of the game I only really noticed now as a player. It’s really trying hard to tell three different stories at once:
1-A goofy game of paintball between fraternity friends with whacky spells and silly pledge rules
2-A dark and serious exploration of humanity’s injustice to those who are different from them
3-A heartwarming tale of acceptance and overcoming insecurity.
So I think part of the problem other reviewers identified isn’t so much that the idea of furrowing through someone’s mind is inherently bad for a story, but that the significance of events and characters takes on really different shades of meaning depending on which part of the story they’re in. Riptide, the frat brother in a treehouse, is a comic individual; Riptide, the oppressed child who essentially experienced torture, is not (I think that was the right character, but I’m not sure).
Overall, though, I enjoyed each subplot separately and found them worthwhile, but I’m not sure they coalesce into a greater whole (something I’ve been concerned about with my own game, which has a similar mix of the flippant and the dark).
Puzzle-wise, it’s outstanding, but also very difficult. I’d likely chalk up the low number of reviews to the puzzles, which are among the most difficult I’ve seen for choice based games of this size, requiring several leaps of intuition and a lot of experimentation. I had to get help several times on my first playthrough, but none this time around.
Overall, I found this satisfying.
Single-key dungeon crawler with increasingly complex powers, November 22, 2023This game by Arthur DiBianca has you exploring a multi-layered dungeon while collecting glowing gems of mysterious power (which are attached to the titular Vambrace).
Its big innovation is that there is no need to hit enter; one key is one action. This isn’t the very first game I’ve seen do this (there was a game in this year’s Parsercomp with the same concept), but I think the execution is great here. I feel like care was made to make the commands easier to remember, and I like the gradual reveal of more and more powers/keys.
Making a game like this takes a lot of talent and skill. I recently tried adding a ‘limited command’ section in my own game, specifically emulating Arthur DiBianca, and it was by far the hardest part to code: coming up with interesting puzzles, doing a lot of timing and such. It’s quite hard.
But it comes off great here. Most of the puzzles involve defeating foes or traps in a multi-layer dungeon, and my favorite type of puzzles in the game is where you come across a foe or trap and think, ‘I know exactly what I need to solve this, but I don’t have the capability.’ Then later, you get a new power, and you can run back to the earlier area and solve it.
This author has a lot of good games, but I’d put this in the top third or fourth of all his games.
Multiplayer mystery with boardgame-style gameplay and characters from history, November 22, 2023This game is not archived, but I’m only reviewing it by request. (although technically it’s open on github so I guess that’s the same thing!)
There have been several multiplayer IF games in recent years, many of them by this author. Approaches to multiplayer IF have varied; there are parser games where codes must be passed back and forth and collaboration is key; twine games where codes are passed back and forth but no other communication is meant to be made; and games like this that utilize a server.
This is a very well written and technically proficient game. I think I’m going to divide my thoughts on this game into three areas: the story/writing, the mechanics, and the multiplayer aspect. Because this game works well and the author is proficient, I’m going to be a bit more critical than I would with a newer author, since I think this author values thoughtful criticism (and I hope I’m thoughtful!)
Story and writing
The main storyline is that you are Antony and Cleopatra, with Antony being the Vice President (I assume of the US) and Cleopatra being the Queen of Egypt (I wonder what it would be like if the vice president in real life was married to a monarch of another state. That’d be pretty interesting!). The two of you have been asked to solve the murder of Marlon Brando. You have around two weeks to gather clues, conduct interviews and investigations, and to make an accusation.
The story has varied suspects with differing motivations and interests. I’ve played a lot of other detective games where everyone just kind of blends together, a lot of rich white british people who have no distinguishing characteristics. But in this game, each character is very different. Interviewing Rasputin was memorable, and Vitruvius was very different from James Dean, who was very different from the General.
You’ll notice all the names are taken from famous characters in history. That’s part of the conceit here; kind of like Clone High or Fate Grand Order (neither of which I’ve watched or played), all of the characters are characters from history, modified to fit into a single scenario. For instance, Marlon Brando and James Dean both work at Raytheon.
This is clever, but to me the influence of the character’s historical figure is like La Croix; it’s not really there, just a hint of it. For most of the characters you could have swapped them with some other historical figure and there would be little difference. If it has been Queen Victoria instead of Queen Cleopatra, much of the game could have remained the same, outside of the Blood Diamonds bit. James Dean could have been Timothy Chalamet, etc. The only character that seemed heavily influenced by their historical counterpart is Rasputin. For the others, it mostly seemed like the name was just tacked on with a reference or two (Napoleon’s coat) with the mental associations meant to be developed by the reader.
But that’s not to say the characters aren’t developed; they’re very well developed! Just not in ways that strongly justify the unusual character choices.
The storyline itself was really interesting, and I liked seeing how things developed out and new storylines emerged.
Mechanics
You’re given a calendar with several blank days, each day with two appointments to make. You can schedule interviews or visiting locations (I thought you had to do one of each at first, but later I doubled up on appointments once I realized you can do so). Once in a meeting, you can mostly just click every link, although there are occasional choices you can make that make a difference. So the real strategy lies not in each individual interview, but in which interviews to schedule.
I found that satisfying in the long run, as time began running out and I had to guess which meetings were most important to schedule.
I’ve mentioned before my informal classification of mystery IF:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.
This is a type 3 murder mystery. At the end you have to pick who did it and why.
I got it wrong, mostly because I psyched myself out about a character I hadn’t had a chance to interview. But the solution was logical!
Multiplayer aspect
I played this game twice, first as part of the Seatlle IF Meetup and then again on my own.
In the meetup, we only got through the first day after 30 minutes of playing. On my own, it took me over an hour to finish.
Overall, I usually play IF around other events in my life like meals, childcare, work, tutoring, etc. and so it’s pretty hard to find time to meet up with others to play IF. That’s why I tend to prefer multiplayer IF that has small amounts of text and short gameplay (like Ma Tiger’s Terrible Trip by the same author).
This game has a lot of text and long gameplay! There was also one time while (when playing with two browsers on the same computer) it said I was losing connection and might have everything reset without saving.
That says to me that this type of game may be more appropriate for a ‘multiple people in one room’ setting, like a TTRPG or boardgame, but digitally.
This feeling was strengthened once I realized that there’s not really special abilities for each of the two protagonists or information only one receives. There are certainly little details here and there and there are some witnessses where you get substantially different options, but by and large most of the multiplayer aspect is ‘do the two of you agree on this course of action’, which again to me sounds better for a cooperative game played by people in the same room.
Overall
This was a strong game, well made, and I enjoyed it. The multiplayer aspect and the historical figures weren’t compelling to me, and I believe the game could have retained much of its enjoyability without either one. But I’m glad it encouraged me to work with others and I’m glad I spent time with this.
Brief texture game about falling forever , November 22, 2023This is a brief Texture game about falling in an infinite void. The setting gives me fond memories of the Magnus Archives, but the tone is very different; rather than using the infinite fall to provoke horror or terror, its used here as a sort of metaphor, although a vague one.
You have a companion in this falling, a mysterious person dressed as a rockstar whom you can learn more about.
There were a lot of real choices in the game, as most options disappeared after choosing one. I didn’t choose to replay because I found my one playthrough satisfying.
Short Twine game about dealing with a dangerous lion, November 22, 2023This is a short branching Twine game with links to other websites and multimedia about a lion.
I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s pretty chaotic; each branch does something really different and then returns. I found a death ending but no other ending.
Parts of it were sweet and parts of it were funny. The writing is a little weird; not in a ‘bad spelling/grammar’ kind of way necessarily, but in a logical flow kind of way. It jumps from idea to idea, kind of like listening to someone spitball ideas about a game.
It had some interesting links about lion diet and a girl hypnotizing a frog, so that was cool. Interesting game.
Brief, unfinished game about school dynamics and friends, November 22, 2023A long time ago I studied IFComp games and noticed games that were marked as unfinished tended to do really poorly in the voting, regardless of their quality. I wonder if that’s changed now? It’ll be interesting to see how this game places, given that it says it will be updated and that several of the endings cut off in the middle of the story.
Your glasses are missing, and you have to find them! There are two key suspects, Minh and Jaime. All of them and you belong to the same book club.
The game branches pretty heavily, with one early ending being peaceful and happy and another ending I had involved organized crime(???)
Overall, it was fun, but just needs some more work. There were some typos (like ‘peak’ for ‘peek’, which is funny because I’ve made that same mistake at least twice this week), but not too many.
It’s interesting to compare this unfinished Choicescript game to One Knight Stand, another unfinished Choicescript game in the comp. This game is pretty minimal with just a few choices, but still manages to branch a lot. The other game has over 400K words with tons of choices for each option. Both manage to be pretty fun.
I liked what I saw of this game, there just wasn’t a lot.
Complex graphical escape room game with Victorian flair, November 22, 2023I really enjoyed this escape room game.
While you’d think there’d be a big overlap in escape rooms and interactive fiction, the two have very distinct flavors (at least ifcomp-style interactive fiction). I wonder if its because escape rooms often rely heavily on visual clues? (like this game does).
In any case, this has the hallmarks of an escape room: a contrived scenario with codes, color schemes, passwords, chains, etc. where its clear the story (while strong) is in service to the puzzles.
You wake up, chained and forgetful, in a room filled with locks, drawers, safes, keys, etc.
Most of gameplay revolves around trying to figure out correct passphrases to type into boxes. The passphrases represent you having ‘done the work’ of solving.
I knew once I started this that it was pretty hard, probably too hard for me. I also knew that for this type of game, getting hints would probably significantly diminish the experience. So I persevered for quite a while, and finally solved it without hints! That was very satisfying.
There do seem to be several red herrings.
I do think this game defies a lot of conventions of IFComp games, with its fairly contrived story and emphasis on visual-only clues and passwords. However, it executed this at a high level of skill, and I really liked it.
Choice-based museum heist game with complex map and goddesses , November 22, 2023This is a heist game, written in Twine.
It has a character selection screen, and then you’re given a problem to solve. In this case, an ancient Cat goddess desires her treasure back!
The game that ensues is almost entirely focused on mechanics, with the story broadly sketched out. You end up in a very large museum that you have to navigate, finding the clues and items necessary to grab the treasure.
I found myself wishing for an on-screen map early on, getting lost pretty easily. Eventually a found a map, right before I won, but it could have been nice to have it onscreen.
There are 16 or so locations in the museum, and each one has only a line or two of description, with perhaps one interesting item to interact with. This strips down the game to its core features, which are primarily movement and object gathering.
I’ve seen a lot of reviews of parser games saying ‘I wonder if this should have been choice based’. Here, I think, not ‘this should be parser based’ but ‘I wonder if the author would enjoy writing parser games’. There seems to be a true pleasure in gathering inventory and travelling that I think could make parser code appealing.
In any case, I solved it, but only with some hints and a little peeking at the code (I was dumb and couldn’t find the key combination on my own).
Overall, I would have liked a little more fleshed out detail in the museum, since it sounded cool, and would have liked an on screen map, but I did have fun. I scored 82/100!
Telegram-based game set in Whale's belly, November 22, 2023This game has a fun concept, using a messaging app to tell a story (in this case Telegram).
I don’t have Telegram, so I played the web version.
This idea has been played around with before; the Lifeline series of games has you texting with an astronaut, and I once was commissioned to write a game where you get a series of texts from someone using a Ouija board to communicate with you.
Anyway, I like the concept a lot. The timed text would fit in with the messaging thing, but I had an issue where every time the next message appeared it would change the focus of the screen, losing my place. So I could either have the text be really slow so I could finish before any interrupt (but then feel frustrated) or fast and constantly lose my place. I generally solved it by increasing the reading speed to 20x, letting it all appear, and then scrolling back. I think in the future it could be nice to have an option to have the messages not ‘bump’ the screen (unless there was such an option that I missed!)
The story is one that seems part symbolic or dreamlike and part lifelike. You are swallowed by an enormous whale, and discover a variety of things inside. I visited around 20 of 90 passages, so my experience was likely very different from others. I encountered and befriended a strange hermit, discovered my past, and attempted escape.
The graphics were really lovely. Sometimes they didn’t quite match what was being said (mentioning baleen but showing normal teeth, describing a bench with a watch and a hook but not showing them in the image), but the quality was high and they looked lovely.
Overall, I like the writing and art and would definitely try more such games.
Short game with unfinished story about a supernatural deal gone wrong, November 22, 2023This is a Texture game, where you drag actions onto nouns.
It also seems to be incomplete, or possible part of a series, as it includes ‘TO BE CONTINUED’ at the end.
You play as a famous and talented musician who has had one of the best years of their life. Leading up to their biggest performance yet, a deal they made comes due.
Overall the characters were interesting and the story a timeless one that has been retold in many ways in many ages. It felt a bit slight; there is a complete narrative arc, though. I almost wonder if it would have been stronger without the ‘to be continued’.
Short, looping love and loss story, November 22, 2023This was a pleasant treat to play, although it was often sad.
It’s a looping game where the same events play out over and over but with variations. Many things are the same: a visit to a flower shop, passing by a statue, etc.
Things change visually as well, with the game getting darker over time.
I liked the writing and thought the loop was fun. I liked the note the game ended on.
I didn’t always see a clear progression between the different cycles. At first it seemed like things were getting worse and worse, and the darkening would imply that, but in many ways that didn’t happen. Maybe it was just about change? It’s okay for things not to have clear progression, but the background darkening seemed to indicate there would be. In any case, this was well written and I’d definitely play another game by this author.
Dark and heavy game about an abusive brother and a way to speak with the dead, November 22, 2023This is a Twine game with lovingly crafted visuals, using backgrounds, animations, and various techniques like mouseover links, cycling links, etc.
I did something with it that is likely bad for the experience, like people who use online recipes and complain ‘I substituted ground dates for the chocolate and it tasted terrible!’. In my case, I downloaded the file and changed all of the timed text links to have a 0 second timer. Some of the original timers were 6 seconds and it was just agonizing to play.
So my experience may not be the one intended.
The story imagines a world where a common parasite exists that can puppet a body’s nervous and muscular systems after death, allowing corpses to speak and to remember.
Your brother has been found, and you have been called in to talk to him.
The main content of the game is divided between the top layer (you talking directly with the player) and the bottom layer (your memories and feelings about your brother). This is not a happy relationship whatsoever. It implies that your brother was extremely abusive; at first I thought it was sexual abuse, and may be, but physical abuse seems much more likely.
The game is effective in its communication of both the bitter anger after abuse but also the self-doubt. Where the writing is most effective in my opinion is that it contrasts scenes of deep hatred and unhappiness with scenes of love and affection. The variation in emotion and tone gives a much stronger gravitas to the scenes of pain and violence.
Game about talking with mom, fixing a printer, November 22, 2023This is a Twine (edit: Ink) game about, well, fixing your mother’s printer. It features some neat UI by Josh Grams in addition to the main story content by Geoffrey Golden.
It’s basically a long troubleshooting call with your mother, trying to fix the printer. In the meantime, she discusses your life and hers.
Mechanically, I felt like I had a lot of options. I could be nice or mean or sad, I could attempt to solve the printer puzzle in various ways, I could bring up topics, etc.
Storywise, the writing was tight, and the characters realistic. But I didn’t connect emotionally much with it. I’ve had fights with my parents before, but I’ve never really doubted their love and care for me, it was always arguments about how that was expressed. I’m not really used to this situation where you’re on speaking terms but there’s constant barbs and negative comments and defensiveness. Even the way my parents were with their parents, there was some negativity and unhappiness (one of my grandfathers was physically abusive), but they just left him alone and were polite when interaction was needed.
So I think that this story would ring true emotionally a lot more to me if I had had a different set of experiences.
It was very satisfying to get the printer to work. I chose the nice options because it was fun, and because that’s almost exactly what I do when I’m tutoring math; you work through things with people patiently and listen because that’s how people learn, and so often the problem turns out to be just the one little thing you wouldn’t even think about.
I don’t know. It was interesting, and I think it was high quality. But gave me a lot to think about and made me want to text my grandma!
Game within a game, with lives on the line, November 22, 2023Hmm, this game is really intriguing! I had a bad experience at one part and good experiences at the other.
The idea here is that you play as a guy who, together with his best friend, enters a high-stakes two-player video game competition.
Except, things are not as they seem…
The intro is generally a linear story, although there are definitely opportunities to add your own flavor to things. There are extensive images and some background music; it seems like your characters are designed to look like anime high school protagonists.
Once the game starts, you have a lot more freedom. I had fun playing a character playing a character (the ‘Gameception’) and felt like I had real options.
But then…the game changed. And man I got really frustrated!
It becomes a ‘gauntlet’ where you have two choices at a time. One is right, but the other makes you die.
I was worried I’d have to play the whole game over. But it just took me to the start of the gauntlet.
But that’s the only checkpoint! And the gauntlet is really long with some timed text!
I tried 9 times and got so frustrated I had to quit. I ended up opening up the code; I guess I was really close to the end. And also there’s an almost entirely complete other game in the code too, which is pretty wild.
So, mostly fun game, with one super frustrating part. If that part just added some more ‘checkpoints’ I could have done better. Literally everything else was fun though.
Game depicting struggles of stuttering, November 22, 2023This piece was good for me, I think. I’ve encountered different people with stuttering over time, and some of them I was kind too and some not. I had a group when I was younger that was both in church and scouts together. I never hung out with them alone but it was essentially my “friend group”. There was one guy who had a strong stutter. As a whole we often didn’t treat him well, and I regret it looking back.
Now I have a student who stutters a lot, due to having a stroke in his youth. I find it a lot easier to have patience with him and listen to his thoughts. He’s also an incredibly prolific writer (having written over 200 scripts each over 20 pages for a tv show idea he has.)
This game presents the experiences of one person with a stutter. They have a day to go through a list of chores and tasks.
I thought it was effective. It does have timed text but I made it work by playing it on my phone during a very boring work meeting where having it long and drawn out was a benefit. And I imagined the game itself as someone with a stutter and practiced being patient with them. After all, a lot of things that you would never do or like normally are acceptable or good when dealing with disabilities (like someone with IBS having frequent smelly farts).
My ex wife and son both use wheelchairs so it was interesting to see how similar some experiences are across disability, especially with other people under or over estimating the difficult of tasks. (Like “come to my house! It only has one step up, a few inches, that shouldn’t be a problem, right?)
So overall, lots of polish and good work and helped me reflect on life and saved me from a boring meeting.
Dreamlike Texture game about a horrifying nautical situation, November 22, 2023This is a Texture game, a system that uses a drag and drop of verbs to pull over nouns. The text was small on the buttons, which is a bug I’ve seen before that’s due to the system, not the author, I think.
I really liked this game. I’m into weird short horror/terror and the author has an excellent command of character and setting and is able to effectively spin a tale that drew me in.
The main commands are APPROACH, REFLECT, and TAKE, and I loved how each of these took on different meaning throughout the game. I also felt like I had real agency; there was an interesting object early on I intended to look at but lost the chance as I progressed; yet there were still interesting things to do. It made me feel like the game was replayable.
I found one ending (The Captain, I guess you could call it). It seems like there are more, but I felt satisfied with my playthrough.
I would definitely read more by this author, good work. It suits my particular reading tastes, and I can’t guarantee that others would have the same experience.
A gruescript walk through a forest with much to see, including dangers, November 22, 2023Pseudavid has been consistently putting out thought-provoking games that are near-historical or near-real with cool UI for a while, so I looked forward to this.
The engine for this game reminds me a lot of Gruescript, and has clickable buttons but otherwise operates similar to a parser, for a parser-choice hybrid.
The idea is that you are exploring the woods at a time you aren’t really supposed to, taking pictures and looking for things to bring to school to show others.
The game has enough nature to feel like a nice walk through the forest, like the game The Fire Tower. But it’s odd enough to feel unusual. Plastic is seen as something exotic and rare. An abandoned hut contains what seems to be evidence of torture…or dental care.
I liked the overall vibes, and thought the game looked great, especially the background changing over time.
The game implied I missed out on something at the end, or at least my character did. I didn’t see any opportunities to do more than I did (I crossed the bridge and, looking at the walkthrough after, I had done everything in it).
Sometimes it was a bit of a chore to have 4 different things to click on every thing (the original click to look, then photograph, then smell/touch, then collect).
At times I struggled to use items. I can’t tell if there were bugs or just my way of clicking was bad. At times I thought that clicking to use an item and then clicking on a scenery object would bring up an option on that scenery object to use the item. At other times I thought that clicking on the object itself would bring up the option to use it on the scenery item. I suspect the latter was the case most often.
Also, it seemed like the map kept getting bigger (which was awesome) but at some point the X got stuck in the upper right.
Overall, I enjoyed this a lot; the complaints above are minor things, while the core game itself was something good and interesting.
Dealing with an indescribable horror in your house, procedurally, November 22, 2023This was a fun little game about an unfun situation.
I think I experienced this game in the best way possible, as I am a fan of the game it is connected to (Ascension of Limbs) and I got the most interesting ending first. If I had experienced it any other way, I’d probably have not liked it as much.
You play as a woman in a house that has been tormented by a thing for a long time. Years, maybe? Maybe not.
Something is in your house, a wretched thing. The game doesn’t really expand on what that is. I imagined something like a mix between a baby, a Slitheen from Dr Who, and a silverfish from Minecraft.
Most of the action in the game is generated on the fly as the wretched thing performs various gross deeds. There are a few keys ways to interact with it, but other than that there’s not much to do.
That’s probably the main thing I didn’t like. Tons of items are in the game, but almost all of them have a message like ‘that’s not important now’ or ‘you don’t need that’. That makes sense from a scoping point of view, but I felt a little sad every time an interesting item turned out not to be usable.
But I liked the writing. And the ‘good’ ending really explained a lot about one of Ascension of Limbs’ main mechanics, so that’s what I liked best about this.
Intense and depressing but polished game about sniping and horrors of war, November 22, 2023I think I can summarize this game for me by saying that it very effectively told a story that I didn’t like.
It is a long twine game about a sniper fighting in Afghanistan, told in non-linear style through different points in his life. It uses a lot of interesting styling, has music, and uses images generated by OpenAI, according to the end credits. The images look almost like hallucinations, fitting for this grim and unpleasant story.
As the author has stated, this story includes scenes of torture and violence. The author writing this has talent, and has used that talent to effectively show the horror of torture. This is not something I enjoyed or wanted.
With multiple wars going on and massive disinformation campaigns causing me trouble in real life it was interesting to spend some time thinking about the game. It does show (and this is something I believe) that most people at the ‘bottom’ on both sides aren’t there out of hatred or desire to kill but because their government or other leaders have pushed them into it. It’s a terrible job where the better you are at it the more lives you ruin.
On the other hand, it depicts the Afghanistan enemies as being particularly despicable in terms of torture and murder. I’ve always thought that in the past, having grown up during the 20 yr-long war in Afghanistan, so I looked up ‘torture in Afghanistan’. The first thing that came up was the long-term torture and death of two Afghani citizens carried out by the US. The second was the torture of a British officer by the Taliban.
I don’t know, this isn’t the kind of stuff I want to read about or really even think about. I would like to help end war, for sure, and I think there are ways I can do that privately and publicly. But I don’t think even people who were captured and tortured want other people to learn to vicariously suffer for them. And I don’t need more convincing that war atrocities are a very bad thing.
So, the writing on the story was very effective, the use of media and nonlinear narrative was expert, and the math calculations were interesting. But I did not enjoy the game and certainly don’t want to play it again.
Egyptian god-themed choice-based murder mystery, November 22, 2023This is a longish Ink game where you are Osiris, recently deceased pharaoh and newly resurrected God.
Most of the game consists of travelling to different locations and interrogating different Gods. There is some freedom (in which Gods to visit first) and some saving of state (some topics only come up after you talk to others elsewhere).
There was one math puzzle which I both overthought (by getting tripped up by the mention of Base 12 beforehand, which turned out not to be important) and underthought (by just not getting it).
The characters were very diverse and interesting. Some gods were nice; Geb was a big loser who smoked weed and acted like a peeping tom.
I classified murder mysteries in an earlier post. This one was the kind (as far as I could tell) where you complete puzzles and the mystery solves itself in the process.
Overall, the setting and characters were the biggest strength to me. I didn’t derive enjoyment from the sex scenes. I did like the reimagination of the Egyptian mythological world, and thought the styling looked good.
Linear thriller about music-based witchcraft, November 22, 2023This parser game had a really strong storyline and distinct worldbuilding, with some pretty fleshed out characters and interesting UI.
You are a beat witch; you see, some adolescent girls wake up one day with the power to be hurt by music and to use music (and other things?) to affect others.
The entire city has been blasted by an EMP and thousands are dead, so everyone’s blaming you, and you have to set things straight.
Music is frequently mentioned in the game, and is included in the game itself through vorple. Color is also used, and there is frequently either timed text or text that scrolls when you hit a button (I think it’s mostly the latter).
The story is at times gruesome and at times cruel, with some kindness mixed in. There is a lot of control, whether through magic or force, and a lot of deception. The villain is a definite villain, and some of the lines are darkly effective, although some are a bit weird (I swear at one point they said (Spoiler - click to show)I’m gonna squeeze you like a fart.)
The gameplay seems entirely linear; at times there are choices you can make which are remembered and mentioned later on in the game, but mostly it seems like the game is designed for you to find the trigger for the next cutscene. Its generally smooth and I rarely had difficulty finding what to do.
So, overall I’d say this is pretty high quality. Something for me seemed slightly missing from the story; maybe more breathers from the intensity of the action? Something to add more contrast to make the dramatic moments pop out more. But the styling is excellent and the writing is very descriptive.
Visually pretty game set on multiple worlds with time travelling orphan assassin, November 22, 2023I’ve seen a few people saying they felt out of the loop with this game since they didn’t play the earlier little match girl games. I can say (having played the first 3 but not the offshoots) that the only thing important from the first games is in the recap. This game does continuity kind of like early Adventure Time, with mostly ‘adventure of the week’ stuff with occasional throwbacks.
The game features some beautiful styling, with nice location descriptions, music, and scrolling text. I missed some of the intro timed text since my son asked me for help with something; timed text isn’t so much of a pet peeve as it is something that just doesn’t fit into my play style of fitting in games around the corners of my life. Fortunately the ending could be scrolled back if missed!
Apparently this game has a ton in common with Metroid Prime. I’ve never played that game, but I looked it up and there are quite a few similarities, even some cameos, if you can call it that.
The overall structure, like most of the Matchgirl games, is that looking into any source of fire (outside of the nighttime stars) will teleport the player to one of five or so worlds. There’s some nice variety here, including space, dinosaurs, wild west, etc. The Pirates of Penzance had a strong presence.
Each area has some kind of powerup that helps you explore other areas. In the meantime, there are different diversions (such as helping a goldfish or doing a time typing game).
I found the structure and side quests engaging and fun. The writing was flawless for me and had its moments of gravitas. I observed how it was done with interest, as my current WIP is structure much like this one, with different worlds or dimensions leading to some emotional moments. I liked how it worked here, so it gave me more confidence.
I did get stuck once. I suspected I had missed some exit. I used location based hints and quickly realized I hadn’t noticed an exit, and then solved the game soon after that.
I can see the weight of a long series making it hard for people to get invested in playing a game, but this one as a standalone might as well be the introduction to the series, as continuity isn’t really a major feature of the games. They can be played in just about any order.
It’s nice to see high quality in the comp. Between Ryan Veeder, JJ Guest, BJ Best, we have three former winners entering well-done games, as well as newcomers producing polished games of great value.
Funny Ikea/cult game about rituals, November 22, 2023This is a great-looking Inform game. Inform has the capacity to make ‘website templates’ that people can share with each other to make projects look nicer, but people rarely use them. I don’t know if this one uses a custom template or just had css/html edited manually, but it looks great.
The concept is really funny, too. What if IKEA instructions were summoning rituals for ancient Gods?
Actual gameplay revolves around following IKEA instructions closely. I found that fun, as I like both assembling and deassembling IKEA furniture. My school had to throw out some cabinets recently that had gotten old/bug-ridden, and I had a hammer and just deconstructed it from memory (remove the thin bar, then pry the back panelling, then remove the edge pieces, then break out the last bit of wood with the hammer, etc.)
Anyway, this game scratched that itch, which was nice. Most of the puzzles revolve around clever ways to use the instructions. The game was a little smaller than I first imagined, but in a good way, as it was beginning to get overwhelming.
I did have some trouble with phrasing. It was hard to find (Spoiler - click to show)an antonym for ‘insert’. The transcript shows my flailing about. I ended up also using hints for what I’d consider the biggest puzzle of the game, but it was entirely fair, I just was getting close to the 2 hour limit.
Complex puzzle game with language barrier set on an airship, November 22, 2023This was a nice, substantial puzzler parser game with some fun hand-drawn sketches.
It starts with a large chunk of made-up names which was a bit hard to parse at first, but that quickly settled down. Next, I got confused by the directions, but fortunately the map made that a breeze.
Then it settled down into a sequence of puzzles. You play as a foreigner on an airship whose brother has been accused of murder. Its your job to navigate the ship and collect evidence!
The game could have easily gotten overwhelming if not for the helpful tablet which kept clues and to-do tasks. I consulted it frequently.
I got halfway through the game without consulting hints. The second half, I had to consult hints for. It turns out that every time I needed hints, the answer was the exact same.
With one last note on the story, I did find it a bit odd how much we can do without getting in trouble. Like wandering into places we clearly should not be. So I had to suspend disbelief a bit. On the other hand, I enjoyed the many layers of information and the multiple endings and plots within plots. So I’ll be rating it highly.
Brief, intense Texture game about a sculptor's work, November 22, 2023This is a Texture game, one of several in IFComp. It’s a game system where you drag actions onto nouns, with different actions having different nouns. Hovering over the nouns can add more info, as well. It’s a character study of the main character, a sculptor who has given up everything to buy one final marble block and carve a sculpture.
The man is deeply invested in this. He focuses on his work despite the loss of things like family, friends, and good health. The writing is highly dramatic, with unusual positioning across the screen and extensive use of metaphor. Here’s a sample sentence: ‘Her words were cascaded venom, and you, their subject.’
It also changes between tenses from time to time, in a way that’s hard to know if it’s intentional or not. I found at least one important typo. In general, the text is ambitious but I was confused from time to time.
What works best for me here is the effort put into descriptiveness. I can feel the author’s enthusiasm for the story and that gives me enthusiasm for the story. But for me, it was hard to sustain that emotion; the whole story was at the peak of intensity, but I think it could have benefitted from having more contrast between high-intensity and low-intensity. But that’s a personal choice.
There is some intermittent strong profanity in the story that, for me, doesn’t fit the abstract and metaphorical text very much, but it may be intended as an earthy contrast to the heights of the rest of the game.
Clever and funny game about out-tricking the devil in a small forest town, November 22, 2023This is a parser game about making a bargain with the devil. I decided to put Der Freischütz 1 in the background for its devil-dealing music.
This game was polished and well-thought through. You are a mad scientist/demonologist in the vein of Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Faust. You have summoned the devil in order to bargain the secrets of life from him. But, the cost may be too great…
Everything worked seamlessly in this game. At no point did I encounter anything I would consider a bug or a typo or bad puzzle design. At times it was leaning a little against my religious sensibilities but it always backed off before getting too harsh.
The writing is funny, with a fake-old-time language for an ancient grimoire that was able to contrast modern tropes with older grammar forms. All the NPCs, including the Devil, were played with a nice mix of intelligence and stupidity, just smart enough to oppose you and plenty dumb enough to fall for your tricks.
The puzzles seemed very hard at first, but through simple exploration I was able to make some guesses on what to do, and so while I had to think a lot, I never needed hints or a map.
The conversation system worked well, with both general topics and individual topics. It felt seamless for me.
So, I thought it was a great game. Very nice work!
Twine based spoonerism wordplay game, November 22, 2023This is a game by Andrew Schultz, an author who excels at wordplay-based games.
But, instead of a parser game, it’s twine!
The conceit of this one is taking pairs of words in pairs (so 4 words total) so that if you switch the first letters or (or chunk of letters) of the first pair, you get the second pair. Just like the name: ‘Trail Stash’, if you switch the TR and ST, becomes 'Stale Trash".
I wondered how effective Twine could be in this format. After all, this is a similar concept to the parser games; would it be less effective here?
But as I played, I thought, ‘hmm, this is great!’. One of the difficulties I often have with the parser games by Andrew Schultz is that it is often uncertain how to interact when you have an item in a location; do you type the solution of the wordplay puzzle, or use a verb with the object?
Twine solves this problem by limiting possible interactions.
This doesn’t make things easy, though! I had difficulty near the end game where just nothing seemed to work. Then I realized that I had missed an important solution early on and missed out on three locations!
So overall, this worked well. The only caveats I had are below:
My one caveat is that there was no apparent connection between some of the items and the solutions. For instance, you have to detect losers, but the object is . Although, now that I think of it, I guess ’ has multiple meanings. So maybe it’s just my lack of imagination.
Rescue muppet-like puppets, each with their own personality, November 22, 2023This is a complex and rich puzzle game written in Twine.
In it, you are tasked with recovering 14 different puppets from a studio that is about to shut down. It seems like a mix of Muppets and Disney, with a studio next to a giant theme park and all the old history about to be demolished.
You, a former puppeteer, are tasked with stealing the puppets with the help of an anonymous accomplice. The twist is (revealed very early on), when you find a puppet, they come to life! Each puppet has different features that can help you in different situations.
Opposing you are evil puppets that stalk through the halls or vents. They can steal puppets from you. I always used ‘undo’, so I don’t know if you can get them back. If you don’t have a puppet, they just kick you out, which can actually be a nice shortcut!
There are four main areas. I finished 3 on my own, getting all puppets, but needed to poke around the code to figure out how to get in and beat the 4th one. However, you can get a good ending even if you miss out on the final building.
While the premise is inherently amusing, the game is more about the march of time and the loss of childhood memories. There is a subplot that you only encounter in the very end parts of the game about the Black experience in America.
I found the ending to be a bit long, with page after page of fullscreen text. That part seemed like it was meant to be a tribute for Jim Henson (like the game mentions in the credits) or maybe an exercise in worldbuilding, but it was a little bit long for my liking. I may be a bit sensitive to that because I have something similar in my current game (a museum at the end describing everything you did or saw) and I’ve been trying to figure out what a good length of time to spend there is.
The ‘true ending’ I got with all 14 puppets worked out well, I think.
I found the random movement of the enemies a bit difficult to avoid at times, but with UNDO it wasn’t too bad. It provided a bit of flavor. The only place I found really rough was the final building, where there were usually only 2 exits at a time, so moving in and out was pretty risky.
I think fans of big parser-like twine adventures (like Agat’s games) will like this a lot. I enjoyed it!
Wandering, branching cowboy game in Ink, November 22, 2023I think I underestimated this game going in. It seemed just like a regular old Ink game with a silly premise that would be over in a few minutes.
Instead, it was a somewhat longer ink game with a pretty funny premise and a lot more state tracking than I’m used to in Ink games.
You play as a cowboy who was been transported to New York City (I read that in the voice of the old pace picante commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi6AFz2fbr8&t=13s 1). Once there, you have to find your cowboy hat!
I liked the tone of the game. It reminded me a bit of old ‘holy fool’ operas/plays where someone’s pretty dumb but is resistant to suffering and oddly accepted by everyone around them.
I had recently revisited NYC after moving out years ago and it was fun to see how his experiences paralleled mine (like wandering through the city and accidentally ending up in Times Square, having wild youths follow you around–in my case, the students I was chaperoning–, a helpful city native who doesn’t really care what’s going on with you as long as you don’t get in their way too much).
There was a kind of stat system. I couldn’t tell if it was actually checking stats or just being goofy, but I liked the stat names. And frequently I had to strategize to try to figure out what to do next.
So overall, this seems just right for a mid-size game in IFComp: not long enough that you get tired or bored, not short enough that you feel like you didn’t play anything. Good middle ground.
Run a bed and breakfast for your grandparents in Bali, November 22, 2023I spent more time and attention on this game than just about any other game in this comp so far, using the full 2 hours and thinking a lot.
This game is about a person who is part Australian and part Indonesian going back to Bali to visit family. To their surprise, they discover they’re running a bed and breakfast for a week!
Like most Choicescript games, there’s a lot of customization here, but not too much. There are stats here, but they don’t seem to be used for pass/fail as much as just keeping track of your choices and giving you a consistent story.
I started out playing a boy, but over time and with the events of the game I started thinking of my character of a woman more, and ended up in a romance with the guy RO.
I think the game had a satisfying narrative arc for me. I read some other reviews before playing, which had expressed disappointment with a certain major arc not being fulfilled, but knowing that helped me be more satisfied with what I did see. The rewards and trials both build up over time in the game, with a satisfying action conclusion.
I enjoyed the cats, as others have mentioned. But most of all I enjoyed seeing a blend of cultures of which I have not previously been aware much of. The intersection of ‘what Australians are like on holiday’ with the intersection of Indonesian and Chinese people and the effects of local religions, as well as the kinds of food available and the transportation…there’s a lot going on here and it’s described lovingly. I don’t know how autobiographical it is, but it either seems that Felicity Banks is describing things from her own experience, and is part Indonesian, or that this was simply just written with a deep love for and interest in the region. It’s possible that, not being from the region, I may be mistaken as to authenticity or tone, but from an outside perspective it seems very nice. I enjoyed this overall.
Comedic pirate game about tossing some trash, November 22, 2023I approached this game with a combination of excitement and hesitancy. To Hell in a Hamper, the previous game in the series, is one of my top 10 IF games of all time, out of around 2900 reviews. That puts To Hell in a Hamper in the top 0.4% of all games ever for me. So on the one hand, I’m sure I’d like more, while on the other the chance of any new game also being in my top 0.4% of all time would be pretty low.
Overall I liked it a lot, I can just say that. I found it more challenging than the first game and with more of a focus on adventure than comedy, though there is definitely a strong comedic slant. It was genuinely engaging and funny and, in my opinion, well written.
The idea is that the captain of your pirate vessel has fled his ship with his greatest treasures as well as you, a young cabin boy. Unfortunately, your row boat is sinking! You have to toss all of the captain’s treasures out to succeed. He’s not willing to help, though, and a dangerous Yateveo tree is out to get you, too!
I mentioned this game being harder than the other, and that’s true. I got kind of stuck 4 times.
I liked the ending puzzle, a nice contrast to the rest of the puzzle style. And the final scene had some quit nice poetry in it.
So overall, I’d rate this as pretty difficult, but at no point in the four scenarios above was I unhappy. It’s hard, but a fun hard. That’s good, and gives the game high points in my mind on the puzzle side.
On the writing and story side, well, like I said, this is different than the last game. That game’s humor depended heavily on the increasing absurdity of the objects you found. In this one, though, almost everything I found was reasonable. Instead, there was a lot more emphasis on the adventure of it all, like the helpful octopus, the dangerous tree, and above all the changing relationship of you and the captain. It was almost more like Violet than Lost Pig; each of your actions affects your relationship with the captain. So it was not as funny to me as To Hell in a Hamper, but I think it has a deeper story and a bit more substance.
Polish-wise, it was great. I found only a couple of bugs.
In conclusion, this game isn’t in my top 0.4% of all time, but it’s solidly in my top 4.0% of all time. Great work, and something I could recommend to people looking for humor, pirates, one-room games or great NPCs (maybe a nomination for Best NPC xyzzy?)
This was my favorite game of the competition!
Brief, branching twine game about fate and the universe, November 22, 2023This is a twine game that uses some simple branching and rejoining to tell a short story. In the absence of state tracking and styling, its stripped down to just the essentials of twine. Such a story can be amazing or awful, depending mostly on the storytelling.
This game has 2 main paths and four different endings. I played through once, backed up and tried another path, and then looked at the code. The code gave me a much deeper appreciation for the game, as I hadn’t checked out the other 2 paths. They strongly complement the other paths, so I highly recommend playing through at least three paths to see how things go.
It’s a shorter game, and all the paths tell of a cycle of rebirth and of timelines in a universe that has gone wrong. It also focuses on love.
Overall, it’s pretty slight and small, but I loved the storytelling trick with the different paths. The game could benefit a bit from more work; for instance, there were numerous typos in the early game, around 1 per screen that I noticed. Other than that, it seems like a complete story as envisioned by the author.
A psychological exploration game, based on song by Dar Williams, November 22, 2023I’ve liked Xavid’s parser games before, so this twine game looked interesting.
It reminded me of an extended version of Astrid Dalmady’s game You Are at a Crossroads, which is the first Twine game I really liked and the game that got me into choice-based games originally. Both of these games involving ritualistic revisiting of locations, unlocking more content by having net items in an inventory.
I like Astrid Dalmady’s game, but it’s pretty small. So this game is nice way to get that same kind of feel, although this game has quite a bit of its own structure and story that is unique to it.
You are packing up, ready to move out of a home, but every in your house are pictures of a man who is someone close to you, a boyfriend or spouse or lover. You have worries and fears and concerns, and you begin to explore those in a symbolic way.
Several helpful people guide you as you go along, exploring memories of the past in a symbolic format. At first there is much you can’t do, which can get frustrating, but eventually your new capabilities give you more strengths.
The feel is almost a parser/choice hybrid, with its extensive set of locations and inventory items. But it manages to tread the thin line between too many options and too few; I occasionally found myself trying to lawnmower all options, but in each case I realized that it would be easier to just step back and think.
So overall, a strong game. The psychology of it isn’t unusually insightful, but the symbolism employed was enjoyable and interesting to me and the descriptions were evocative.
This game was loosely based on 'The Blessings' by Dar Williams.
Unique game with single correct choices and clever mechanics, November 22, 2023This game is one whose development I have followed for some time.
This is a parser game set in a Conan The Barbarian-like world, with a muscular barbarian king who travels about fighting monsters and wizards and generally destroying things.
There is a cast of memorable NPCs and the writing has a strong voice, with complete customization of almost all messages and a rich setting.
This was originally developed in conjunction with the single choice jam; this game, instead of having exactly one action in the whole game, like most other entries, has exactly one correct action in each location (or, more appropriately, only one allowed action in each point in the game, since some rooms require consecutive correct actions).
There is also a limit on available verbs (customized to have clever names), so that means that at any point, to progress, you need to figure out which of the available verbs to use. Theoretically, this means that you could progress at any point just by trying all of the verbs on all of the nouns. The author works around this by frequently requiring unusual or surprising combinations.
Overall, it took me around 1.5 hours, and I found it clever and richly descriptive.
Interactive play in the Russian tradition, November 22, 2023This is a choice game in interactive play format, with the option to act out the play yourself.
It is set in Russia in the time of the NKVD and the period between the two World Wars. One character, a policeman, has to deal with those close to him, some of whom are dangerously too progressive and others that are dangerously too conservative.
While the Russian setting originally suggested similarities to writers like Dostoevsky or Chekhov, I actually found more similarities here with Ibsen’s plays. There is a great deal of emphasis on interpersonal relationships that are fundamentally flawed but with an underlying spark of life; not of hope, or of joy, but simply of a determination to continue existing.
I’ve seen other reviews describe the ending as perhaps weak; I saw a comment saying there was a third ending and tried it as well. I do think that something is missing. I feel like the narrative arc is missing a little more denouement. We build up throughout and get a climax, with the endings all being very climactic, but there’s not enough time to resolve the tension and resolve the various threads. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what’s here, but I think for my personal tastes I’d like a little more. I’ll be rating this one highly.
Escap a crashing starship, November 22, 2023This was another game of interest, as one of the last things I’m programming in my game is a similar scenario to this: trying to flee a ship that is being destroyed and trying to make it to an escape pod. It was interesting to look at this and try to see what worked for me and what didn’t.
This is a timed game, with approximately 100 turns. I found that time ran out pretty quickly for me; I had explored about half of the ship when I first found out the game had ended.
That time is marked by frequent messages from the ship’s computer. The messages start normal but become more and more unusual. I found that for my tastes it was a bit too frequent and intense; I felt like I barely had time to do anything before it was pushing me to go and run and do.
The layout is large enough and the puzzles complex enough that it felt weighty and had that feel of ‘don’t know if I can do this’ before the puzzles were solved and ‘ahh so that’s how it is’ after. There was clear competency in coding; I didn’t encounter problems where puzzles malfunctioned or interactions were misleading. However, there was somewhat of a deficit in polish; many objects are undescribed, and the game could have had more scenery items implemented. A particularly rough example was the holographic doctor, who had no description and didn’t reply to TALK TO or ASK DOCTOR ABOUT DOCTOR or stuff like that.
But the manual was really cool, as was the multiple paths, and it gave me some ideas. The overall craftmanship was high, I think I had different expectations from the author. So I definitely think if the author did another game, I’d expect it to be really good.
A museum display of a non-fictional mental health journey , November 22, 2023This game was good to read. I’ve known Bez for several years, and while I have not been able to be as helpful as some of his other friends, I’ve been able to watch his journey over time and follow along.
This is an interactive museum of Bez’s experiences through several different locations, with one exhibit per living location. There are photos, transcribed documents, and music from several indie musicians, which sounds good.
The museum is a well-written and fascinating look into the life of one individual. It is frank and open about challenges like debilitating illnesses (the pseudo-dementia, for instance), suicidal thoughts and impulses, homelessness, unsupportive staff and family, and so on. The fascinating part is how relatable it is; this is a very specific life with considerations that aren’t universally applicable, and yet for me the writing was relatable and approachable, and I could connect with it and consider similar challenges in my own life.
It’s not all challenges though. There are many successes and realizations and small happinesses mixed together with the hard times.
Bez has written solid games before with interesting mechanics, as well as interactive essays that are more limited in scope and linear. This game combines a lot of the best of both, with a non-fiction emphasis but with more ways to interact. There’s no need to make autobiographical fiction ‘fun’, since it’s just a story of life, but I think that the features like graphics, music, and navigation improve the reader experience and increase the connection between writer and reader.
Twine game about camp for magical children, addressing many social issues, November 22, 2023This game features a magical protagonist that goes away to camp for magic kids.
At first I thought the game had read my mind; I named my protagonist Eduardo, and I was shocked to see Eduardo raised in a Spanish family! But then I realized it was just part of the story, especially when I saw that Eduardo was chosen to be a girl (I had imagined a boy), although gender is explicitly stated to be somewhat flexible".
The game treats many social issues, with a heavy emphasis on climate change and corporations destroying the wilderness, which gave me fond flashbacks to movies like Ferngully and Ernest Goes to Camp from my youth. Many of the NPCs were black, indigenous and/or hispanic, with a wide variety of hair types, skin tones and backgrounds. Mention was made of differing family types, including having two moms or being orphaned. And there was a discussion on how magic had been stigmatized in women more than in men.
So it seemed like social issues were a heavy topic in the game, not as a side tangent but as the central focus.
There’s a lot of promising features in the game but it is incomplete. Only the first chapter or so are finished, and there are some typos here and there, not enough to be distracting but enough to be noticeable. So once things are fleshed out I could see it being pretty solid.
There’s a lot where it’s hard for me to say if it worked or not. The personalities of the NPCs, the voice in the player’s head. A lot of it depends on where this ends up going. So I think my rating might end up a little in the middle of the range, getting bumped up or down if a continuation is made in the future. But overall there’s a lot of promise here, both in the writing and the art.
Metafictional narrative about revisiting the past, using AGT, November 22, 2023I’m going to put on my ‘extra-critical’ goggles for this game, because it’s by a previous IFComp winner (who presumably can stand up to sterner scrutiny), and is in a genre (autobiographical emotional retrospective in game form) that has had several recent start-studded entries (Sting, Repeat the Ending, A Rope of Chalk, and of course the author’s own game two years ago). It also intentionally uses an older format and is mimicking ‘my crappy apartment/house’ games, which has to thread the needle between not being as bad as the source material and being accurate to source material.
So how does it succeed? Overall, the polish is evident. I rarely struggled with the parser, which (combined with the other AGT/AGX/MAGX game this year makes me respect the engine a lot). Teleportation and combat are handled well. Death and being reborn could theoretically have really messed up game state, but it doesn’t seem to have done so, which is really impressive to me.
The game itself relies heavily on the commentary to make it ‘good’, which makes sense, because it was built that way. At first I was critical of the base game as being too basic, given the rich and full games I’ve seen built by children and teens recently (for comparison, look at Milliways in this IFComp!). But then I remembered games like Coming Home 1 which are actually very similar in layout and descriptiveness level to this game (although not in polish), so I guess it is pretty authentic.
Exploration was fun. Sometimes commands and interaction felt just a bit ‘off’ from games I usually play, and this was good; it felt like seeing interactive fiction written by someone who had a different set of experiences than me.
I’m not sure whether the game is autobiographical or not; I suspect not, but I’m not sure that should factor into the overall evaluation of the game. The background story is emotional, and hearing only one side of the conversation really helps here as you can imagine the other side for yourself, with version painting the narrator in a deeply sympathetic light or as a barely-tolerated person stretching others’ patience. One thing though for me is that it was always very clear that I was interacting with a fictional narrative, one held at a distance, and that I wasn’t drawn into. This is a personal reaction and not necessarily one all would hold. That’s actually what made me wonder if this was autobiographical, as real life scenarios are often less believable than fictional (like the fact that Tiffany is a medieval name).
The map is nice, and I wish I had read it first. I solved one puzzle it solves on accident due to my normal direction-flailing I typically do when playing games. It has some messages like ‘Don’t Cheat’ and ‘Listnouns’ that make me wonder if there is some hidden content in the game.
Overall, it was clear from the beginning that this has high production values and includes a lot of elements I like. So the debate wasn’t whether to score high or low, but which high score to shoot for. I’m still thinking about it; in a way this game is more relatable to me than Best’s last game, but on the other hand it’s a slighter thing. The ending, for instance, felt anticlimactic, more of an opportunity to sit and ponder than a neat wrapping up.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for other reviews on this; I feel like there are still some unresolved thoughts in my mind and maybe a fresh perspective can help. But I did enjoy this, and it was easy to play this on Gargoyle.
Twine murder mystery with good art, November 22, 2023This is a creepy game in Twine with well-drawn backgrounds and characters.
You play in a coffee shop where a variety of customers keep coming in, but also several murders have occurred in the recent area and shadowy figures are hanging about you.
The characters were all distinct and mostly believable. Everything is tinged with just a hint of grey realism, so everyone has mildly depressing flaws.
The art was very well done. My only complaint on the visual side is that the very first background image is close to the text color in parts, making it difficult to read.
I played through to two different endings, including what appears to be the final ending. I was a bit surprised by the implications of the final ending, as I’m not sure how the rest of the game would make sense in that context. Although as I’m reading this it just dawned on me how it could all tie together, so hmmm…
Overall this was a game that improved my day to play, so I hope others check it out.
Excellent comedy circus puzzle game, November 22, 2023I deeply enjoyed this game. It’s a well-scoped, polished parser game with a lot of humor.
The idea is that you are a circus clown at a circus that is being sabotaged by a villainous Phantom! You have three friends whose acts get sabotaged and you have to find a way to defeat the enemy.
Most of the puzzles revolve around finding creative uses of items, although there are also some other puzzle types like math.
The characters are pretty distinct and memorable, like the grumpy animal trainer or your ‘dense’ muscle bound girlfriend. There are a lot of hidden details in the game, like a character being trans.
Most of the puzzles made perfect sense, and hit the sweet spot between being non-obvious but not being too hard to figure out. I did get stuck on the rabbit puzzle, but once I got hints for it I realized that I just hadn’t experimented enough earlier. I enjoyed the payoff of the game name.
I like a circus setting for a parser game (Ballyhoo is one of my favorite Infocom works) and the pacing worked great here. Excellent work, deeply enjoyed it.
Lengthy and wordy Choicescript game about modern take on King Arthur, November 22, 2023This is the first chapter of a large Choicescript game. I played past two hours on my phone, saving occasionally, but I lost about 30 minutes of progress near the end by forgetting to save (I got to the point where you can pack your suitcase). I think I got pretty close to the end, from what other reviews have said.
The scope of this game is large. The current largest Choice of Games title is 1.2 million words (while some Hosted games are larger), so one chapter of 400K is quite big. Production seems to have taken a long time, as there is a lot of reference to face masks and social distancing.
The overall concept of this game is that King Arthur and his court were real and still exist in a certain way (revealed later on) in the modern world. Simultaneously, demonic forces are trying to start the apocalypse, and you can help stop it.
There were two main romantic options I saw, a man and a woman. There are tons of different chance to declare your affection, so many so that I felt I had to constantly be turning down the people I wasn’t interested in.
The game has lots of action scenes which I thought were full of descriptive language and feeling like stakes were real. I died in one! (to see what would happen). A lot of times it was over the top (lots of Zalgo text for horror and tons of quip/pun options for humor).
The game is so large, I feel, because all the normal Choicescript stuff is amplified. Usually you can pick a few features of your appearance; here you can pick if you have hair, what length is your hair, what color is your hair, what shade is your hair. Instead of five to ten options, there are 15 to 20. Instead of choosing conversation topics from a repeating list that gets narrowed down, you pick from a list of conversation topics that each open up to their own list of conversation topics and so on.
This provides for a lot of customization but it can kind of interrupt game flow sometimes. I felt a bit of decision paralysis from time to time. It’s kind of the opposite of the problem a lot of games have, where all of the cool branching and decision making is hidden and players think the game is small/short because they don’t realize the choices they could have made.
In contrast, here everything is put on display constantly, revealing the massive amount of possible choices. And some don’t even seem implemented yet, like the fencing club (unless there is a way to get into there!).
I liked the Merlin character, and saw them as a fun RO/mysterious person. The overall magic system seems thought out and coherent, and the worldbuilding feels like it’s on an epic and grand scale. While I did find the large amount of choices overwhelming at time, it seems reasonable given the overall scope. I could definitely see it being popular when it comes out.
Game set in two worlds, with long, complex graphical puzzles, November 22, 2023This game has a few different twists, but I’ll try to avoid spoilers the best I can.
This is a choice-based game, and it is quite extensive. It took me right around the two hour mark to complete. It’s reminiscent of Gruescript in a sense, with different locations you can click to and an inventory to use. However, the inventory only shows up every now and then in-game.
While it grows more complex, it feels fair to say that gameplay revolves around a ship captain walking around the ship, trying to understand a mysterious poem given by ancestors and talking to others on the ship.
Storywise, it’s all about navigation and pushing to the unknown. There are different books that give you lore about the world. The pirates in the game all curse, presumably for verisimilitude, but for some reason the swearing was written exactly the way the 14 yr old boys in my school swear so I kept picturing very young pirates.
Many of the characters have tragic backstories. There are several opportunities to show mercy or justice and to change your relationship with others.
The writing overall was adventurous and dramatic. Near the end, there were a few different narrative threads that came together, but I’m not sure how I felt about the resolution. I was left with more questions than answers.
There were graphical puzzles in the game as well. At first, they fit well into the flow of the story, providing simple distractions along the main journey. Near the end, though, there were so many puzzles of such quantity that by the time I returned to the story I had forgotten much of what had happened. While I do enjoy graphical puzzles from time to time, they lack many of the features I’ve come to enjoy in text based fiction and thus weren’t quite as enjoyable to me.
The level of craftsmanship in the UI and puzzles was very high; the author clearly has a good grasp of visual design and event-based programming.
A game with rich worldbuilding, where you have to gather ingredients, November 22, 2023This game is a brief but lively game in a fantasy world with anthropomorphic animals (although they're apparently not quite anthropomorphic animals) where you need to whip together a few random ingredients to make a creative recipe.
It’s written for the Magx compiler, a variant of AGT, and runs in Gargoyle for me.
The world seems fun and lively. To me it felt like Redwall but with invented names for the various species and fruits. While the game is fairly short, its many locations and NPCs and the worldbuilding made it feel large.
I struggled with some of the language as much of it feels academic and full of complex words. For instance, in a book on science:
"The book explain how the Subtle is the other face of handicraft and
mechanism-making, and how both can, and must, be balanced, being
the natural path of progress and improved living; the example of how
the energy from the lightning bolt spell can be stored in water-filled
glass container with metallic rivestiment on the outside and a central
spike inside is a prime one of this balancing between Subtle and
handicraft, when on the other side, handicraft instruments are needed
in Subtle research and practice, and no astrometry and time can’t be
done without mechanical devices, and illuminating orbs can’t be
produced without Subtle. Indeed an useful text for a creator, inspiring
useful (and not-so-useful, I admit) creations. Thanks, Etuye !!"
This uses complex language like ‘rivestiment’ and ‘astrometry’ and uses elaborate sentence structure, and some other parts of the game are similar, so I was lost at times.
The puzzles were generally well-clued; I enjoyed the puzzle involving the NPCs, as it felt organic and natural to look around the city and hunt for people.
The implementation is weak in several places, though; many things are described but don’t exist, so if something is mentioned in the text (like the ‘tools of the trade’ in the front room) a command regarding them will result in an error message (like 'X TOOLS: I don’t see any tools here). One puzzle says you need to (Spoiler - click to show)immerse a vine in a pond, but (Spoiler - click to show)PUT VINE IN POND, IMMERSE VINE, INSERT VINE IN POND etc. all don’t work. The walkthrough (which I had to use just for this puzzle) admits this is a ‘read the author’s mind’ moment, but I think it might be better just to make the other actions synonyms for the correct one.
So I think this has some solid worldbuilding and interesting puzzle mechanics, but I think the language could be simpler and more straightforward and the implementation could be refined. When I do rate this on IFDB, I will definitely bump up my score if there is a post-comp release. Overall, I think the characters seemed fun and the food sounded good!
Candy-based murder mystery, part II, November 22, 2023Last year’s game ‘Who Shot Gum E Bear?’ by the same author had a deeply amusing concept (hardboiled noir detective where everyone is candy) coupled with some solid writing but sketchy implementation.
This year’s game ups the notch a bit on the implementation but uses a more secluded setting.
You are called to an abandoned factory which is scheduled for demolition and tasked with finding out what happened to a missing husband. You get locked in, and have to use your wits to solve the case and to get out.
I’m going to quote my classification of (many but not all) interactive fiction mystery games:
1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.
This is the first type. Solving puzzles involves collecting evidence as well as escaping and once all puzzles are solved the game is over. Accusations, motive, etc. are all handled by the PC rather than the player, and I think that works well here.
The game has some suggestive/racy elements, enough that I wouldn’t want my middle-school age son to play it but mild enough that if he did I wouldn’t be especially upset, just have to explain the use of certain items.
The implementation is both really neat and kind of bad. The neat stuff is how the puzzles go beyond ‘one item one use’ in clever ways. The bad is that most of the standard responses aren’t changed. It might help for next time to use RESPONSES ALL while programming to get a list of responses and then changing a lot of them. But it’s not necessary; if the goal is just to have a snack-size fun game, that’s already being achieved here. The responses would only be if the author specifically wanted a more polished game. I think I mostly would want that because the writings so good everywhere else that seeing it in the standard responses would make the game even more fun.
War/romance/thriller game where all choices are seen through a scope, November 22, 2023I think the best descriptors for this game might be ‘incestbait’ and '‘unusual UI’.
Let’s talk about UI first. The idea is that you are ‘aiming’ at the screen, with a literal scope in the title page and elsewhere just dragging your aim around. While moving around the page you find text you can click on. So it’s choice based, but with work to discover the choices.
The controls are opposite from what I expected. It all clicked when I realized that instead of panning around the page I was moving the camera.
This is a very long game, and took me longer than 2 hours to complete. Parts of it were difficult; a couple of times I could have sworn the text needed to progress just wasn’t there, so I exited out completely and ‘Resume’ and it worked. But looking back, I likely just had trouble finding the right link. I got very stuck at one point looking for my father, due to the many places possible to look.
The story is one of was and love. You play as two siblings who have had a love/hate/LOVE relationship their whole life. While there is no history of romantic intimacy between you two, everything in the game drips with its possibility, so much that the entire theme of the game seems to be ‘what if two siblings were almost-lovers and sublimated that tension into hate’.
The backdrop is like a modern Gone With the Wind or War and Peace, where a violent war is raging and you are part of a privileged family, the children of an admiral. The countries involved seem to be fictional, but evoke modern tropes: an aggressor country feeding misinformation to others to justify invading a smaller country; corruption at the highest levels, etc.
The game opens with a violent conflict between the two protagonists, and I never really understood the justification for that. Even seeing the messages that spurred the conflict, I don’t understand why the fight happened.
In any case, this really does have the overall feel of the grand war novels I mentioned before, with similar musings on changes in life. The UI was an interesting concept but by the end it started to wear thin. It may be because I was using a trackpad and playing on desktop; I had to click and drag a lot.
There definitely is strong craftmanship in evidence; this is the kind of game where I personally didn’t love it but I’d definitely hire the creator for game work if I ran a studio. So the pros of this game are mostly in the areas of the author’s skill, and the cons are mostly in my personal taste.
Spy adventure set in Italy with good nostalgic vibes, November 22, 2023There’s a tendency in interactive fiction for people to talk about ‘old fashioned adventures’ or ‘old school’ games , but it means different things to different people, usually ‘similar to games I played as a kid’.
I didn’t really get heavily into IF until I was in my thirties, so I don’t have a ton of feelings for older games. But I do have a couple experiences as a kid; one was trying Zork in my teens and failing to do much of anything (quit at the dam), and the other was playing some obscure text adventures with graphics in 6th grade (one called Hacker and another about rhymes in an Alice in Wonderland type world).
This game really evoked for me the nostalgia of those games, like Hacker. I know other Adventuron games are similar in appearance, but this also really got the feel of games of those time down well. It even reminded me of the feel of games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
Anyway, you’re a spy for a secret organization called TURTLE and you’re called in to rescue another spy who is in trouble. Your goal is to infiltrate the enemy’s secret villa and steal back his diamond while stopping his evil plan.
There are a lot of tropes here similar to the 80s and 90s and early bond movies. Some are a bit outdated, but it has a nice overall action vibe. It’s also very Italian (for me the most Italian moment was finding a monastery where the monks wouldn’t let you in without a crucifix). There’s a lot of Italian text in the game. While I’m not fluent, I could understand most of the Italian pretty easily, but it may be useful having google translate nearby (although you can’t copy and paste from Adventuron, last time I checked).
Puzzles were generally fair and well clued, and had fun features like a computer system and a money system. I had to check the walkthrough near the end about three different times.
Overall, I had a great time. Very fun.
Nautical cosmic horror game, with snacks, November 22, 2023I opened this game and I was poking around and thought, ‘Man, this really feels familiar. Where have I seen this before? Did I test this?’
Then I checked, and I realized that I had played it in the German Grand Prix as Fischstäbchen! I really enjoyed that game, so it was fun to see the translation here (something which has only happened recently since rule changes allowing translations of games).
This is a fairly hefty but manageable parser game about exploring a fishing boat in Point Nemo, the point on earth furthest from land. Things don’t seem quite normal; your crew won’t come out of their rooms and your cook spends a lot of time chanting out of ancient books and being surrounded by freezing mist…
I loved the German version of this game, especially since it had a built-in help menu to list all verbs that you need to finish, something that worked really well for me as a noob. This version seems like slightly different compared to the old one; it has some puzzles I don’t remember, and some features like highlighting of exits, which I like.
On the other hand, seeing it in my native tongue makes it easier to be judgmental. For instance, several times, there were ‘double directions’ like saying something is ‘down’ but you access it to the ‘west’. Even though both ‘down’ and ‘west’ are highlighted, going ‘down’ gives an error. I think it would have worked better to redirect ‘down’ and ‘west’ to work the same way.
The map is pretty intimidating at first. I’d recommend just exploring and mapping the whole thing before anything else as several of the puzzles just involve finding people or things.
I used the hints a couple of times, even for things I did in my last playthrough.
Overall the things I liked last time are still here: the Lovecraftian/dry humour mix and the active and engaging puzzles. I also like the guidance it gives you on some puzzles and the restart method for when you die.
Overall, I think I liked the German version slightly better only because playing in another language presents its own unique challenges and gameplay, but I still enjoyed this one.
Puzzly choice-based game about being someone weak helping those you love, November 22, 2023This is a game translated from Russian that has quite a bit of twists and turns in it. Most are discovered early on.
I’ll say that a game with a sleeping woman and ‘16+’ and referring to ‘your mistress’ turned out to be something very different than I was expecting. It turns out to be a grim tale about the effects of war but with a sweet perspective.
More on the setting:
(Spoiler - click to show)The gameplay style is Twine with inventory management and location state tracking. So you can move objects from room to room, and your constant inventory of things like hands and feet change in their function over time.
The puzzles are fairly tricky but logical. One thing I might have appreciated was automatically ‘looking’ after travelling to each new location, since what’s in each location often changes due to your actions. I also had a bit of trouble some times mentally picturing how all the different locations related to each other.
I think this is around a 1-2 hour game, although I used the walkthrough for part of it. I like the concept, and appreciated the dedication at the end. I think there are a lot of strong story elements here and puzzles. There are also some neat images, although playing online on the ifcomp website I didn’t see some of the images, and they were broken. You can still click on them to advance though.
Part of the game is designed to show the horrors of war and for me it was very effective, the way the protagonist just didn’t understand really helped drive home for me how scary it must all be.
Thoughtful interactive museum/psychological piece about artist Francis Bacon, November 22, 2023I have to preface this review by saying that I have always that that Francis Bacon, the renaissance guy, was the same as Francis Bacon, the scary pope painting guy. I thought it was just some kind of über-Protestant thing. This game really cleared that up!
I was excited while playing this game, although perhaps not for a reason the author would have foreseen. I’ve been making an area in my own game which is a puzzleless museum placed adjacent to conversation heavy areas, and I was wondering how many conversation topics would be appropriate, and how large of a museum would make sense, and whether players should be able to lawnmower all topics or have to pick and choose.
So when I saw this puzzleless museum conversation game, I was very intrigued to poke around at the mechanics and see my overall impression. So while the game seems far more focused on story than mechanics, this review will focus a bit more on the latter.
The setup is that you are in a museum with three main rooms, each with a triptych of paintings. The paintings are real paintings by Francis Bacon; I was able to look them all up and see what they looked like in real life.
Examining the paintings and walking around the museum gives you the opportunity to converse with various figures, each of which has their own opinion on Francis Bacon. The NPCs are also adaptable, and you can change their opinion of you and willingness to talk by various actions, in a way I haven’t seen much of since games like Galatea and Blue Lacuna (although on a smaller scale here).
Topics are listed, and as you talk they change, although the change isn’t notified. You can ask about some things not on the list (for instance, I asked an early character about Christ, since the topic of the painting was Golgotha).
There are also several achievements, allowing for some puzzle elements. Some of them are straightforward, while others might be difficult to think about. Several achievements involved exhausting conversation trees, which I honestly did not want to do; not because I didn’t want to see more text, but by picking only the topics I wanted, I felt I had agency, but exhausting the tree didn’t feel ‘agent-y’. ‘Agentic’?
This game has some very heavy themes: sexual abuse and rape, violent assaults, traumatic death, obsession, religion, broken relationships, and so on. But all of it is examined in a thoughtful way, from a distance. None of these things are glorified; instead, different observers comment on it, some finding it deeply repugnant, others finding beauty in pain.
There is a great deal of strong profanity, and some of the language around Christ made me feel uncomfortable (as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but I understand the author’s choices here and the effect they were going for. So while those parts weren’t for me, much of the game was, and I plan on rating this very highly. Beyond just appreciating the game’s messages, I also learned and grew as an author by reading this work, which is the highest compliment I am capable of giving.
Long old-school game with hard maze and complex puzzles, November 22, 2023This is I think the 5th Jim MacBrayne game I’ve played, and I think it’s definitely the most fair and well scoped of them that I’ve played; either that or I’m simply getting used to their internal logic.
These games are all written in a custom engine that is remarkably smooth, as least here. For those new to Jim MacBrayne games, the most unusual feature is that if an object is in a container or on a supporter, you can’t take it; trying to will say ‘You don’t see any…’. I believe this is due to the fact that tracing through the contents of all the supporters and containers is too hard for the engine to handle. Instead, you have to say TAKE ALL FROM ____. There is a shortcut specifically for that (F1).
Anyway, the main idea of the game is that you are hunting through a cottage and adjoining area for a mysterious orb, with clues left behind by a circle of elders.
Most of the puzzles revolve around enigmatic devices that you have to figure out, interspersed with riddles and codes that explain how to use them.
I was able to get pretty far on my own; although I only got 70 points by the two hour mark, when I checked the walkthrough I was about 40% through the game. The puzzles are tough but fair; the place where I got stuck was due to not remember a clue from earlier.
The setting is very abstract, and much like Zork in its mix of fantasy and modern aesthetics.
I was glad to play this game, and hope Jim MacBrayne is able to enjoy coding up games for a while to come.
Long wordplay rhyming game with helpful NPCs, November 22, 2023This is definitely one of the heftier IFComp games; I took a whole evening to look at it, spending two hours playing it and then speeding through with the walkthrough and thinking about it for a while after.
This is the 6th in a series of games that are all based on the same concept: rhyming pairs of words. Progress in the game consists of walking around/exploring and taking the names of rooms or objects and finding another pair of words that rhymes with them (like the name of the game itself).
Andrew Schultz has written many wordplay games over time (more than 40!) but I think this concept has proven the most productive, given the number of games that have been produced with the rhyming pairs.
I’d like to describe what this game has in common with the earlier games and what’s unique to it.
First, in common: This game is set in a kind of abstract land, reminding me a lot of The Phantom Tollbooth, where abstract concepts are taken literally. By removing the need for all items to be concrete or to fit into a unified setting (like a fantasy world or spaceship), it opens up the opportunity to include a ton more of the rhyming pairs.
Another thing in common is that the game is centered on an emotional journey of sorts. with a lot of focus on emotions and experiences. I said earlier that the game doesn’t have a unified setting, and while that’s true physically, each game has a unique emotional setting, a journey of self actualization that changes from game to game. Most games have an enemy that represent negative social traits such as bullying, peer pressure, cruelty, lying, pandering, or other bad traits, which the protagonist can only defeat after a great deal of personal growth. Not every game has these exact ingredients, because there is a lot of variety.
So that brings us to the unique parts of this game. First, its personal journey is quite a bit different from the others; rather than the hero alone reading books or psyching themself up, they help others. You can grab a whole lot of friends to walk around with you, each of which can help you in different ways. You can also find some people who have been wronged that you can bolster and lift up. Your friends’ journey becomes your journey, in a way. Overall, I liked the positive atmosphere.
You’re also provided with a list of items to get, which I found helpful as a way to track my progress in game.
It’s also pretty hard; while you can just go through the alphabet plus some letter combinations, it can be tricky to come up with solutions. I’d recommend one of two different play styles:
1-Taking a long time on the game, with breaks between sessions, to let yourself find everything.
2-Explore for a while to get as many answers as you can before getting stumped, then using the walkthrough to get to a new area and repeating.
This is definitely one of those games that you can figure out early on if you like it or not. The puzzle types and themes are very consistent, so you can try out the first few rooms to see if you feel like playing more or not. I’m glad I saw the end, even if I needed some help to get there.
Small PDF CYOA game about psychosis, November 22, 2023This is a choose your own adventure pdf. The last one of these in IFComp I’d heard of was Simon Christiansen’s Trapped in Time, which was a long pdf and included a system for maintaining inventory through loops.
This game is different. It’s a bit shorter, and focuses on a real-life situation: psychosis. It describes different episodes that can happen in the life of someone with psychosis and ways that it can be treated.
It also has very well-done drawings that add significantly to the game.
Overall, I found it small but interesting and would definitely check out future work by this team!
An old-school RPG with combat and some neat UI, November 22, 2023This one was a bit of a wild ride.
It’s a long game written for windows. At first I wondered if it was another secret BJ Best game (in the past he’s entered a retro game under a fake name). After all, it has a cool animated loading screen and a neat pixel art inventory picture.
But the author has introduced himself elsewhere and it seems to be just a neat-looking original game by a new author.
So, this game is a mix of combat RPG and Scott Adams-style gameplay. The Scott Adams style is a fun one, but it had two features that I wasn’t used to: the location description is always at the top of the screen (unless you swap to inventory view), and if steps or a door are in the location you type GO STEPS or GO DOOR instead of any specific direction. These tripped me up a bit; especially not needing to LOOK, since LOOK gives a pretty unusual response in this game.
The idea is that a ferry you were on crashed and you need to explore. There is some combat, but most of it is with small and/or goofy things. Beyond that, you have to find a way to enter the city of Hawkstone and discover the secrets beneath it.
I played around without the walkthrough for a while, but had to peek at it to find the right command for dealing with the gate early on. After that, I found a lot more interesting things, and found a way to die.
After a while, I started getting pretty confused. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on, due to procedurally generated text. For instance, one action resulted in this (blocking out some names for spoilers, [REDACTED] is by me):
You attempt to unlock the [REDACTED] with the [REDACTED].
object is unlockable. You have a key.
You unlock the [REDACTED] with the [REDACTED]
You roll the dice on your stats and get.. +1 stamina.
Your Stats have increased!
You did a thing!
Something happened somewhere.
Argh!
A kerfuffle!
You are knocked over as a monkee jumps at you.
The monkee screeches as he runs away through the crevice..
You did a thing!
You did something!
Something happened somewhere.
After events like this, objects will be added to your inventory or appear in the room description.
The puzzles were fairly difficult, so I ended up using the walkthrough for a while. Even with the walkthrough, I took about two hours.
There are lots of compelling and interesting elements in the game, like a world you can substantially affect in various ways. There are a lot of silly and goofy things in the game, like buying things on the ‘net’. I’m not sure there’s a major resolution to the game; I followed the walkthrough and it seems to just peter out near the end, with there being some nice resolution to some plot points, but I think the game is intended to either have an open, exploration ending (or there’s more that isn’t in the walkthrough).
A lot of items have a generic description; looking at a woman hanging upside down by a rope says ‘That looks like a normal woman hanging upside down by a rope’. A lot of puzzles get repeated over and over (I’m looking at the bananas here). And, finally, there are several commands in the walkthrough that aren’t really described elsewhere in the game (like Q for Quests).
The overall user interface is great. The animations at the beginning are really neat, and the layout looks nice overall. I also liked the saga of the monkee character the most.
Commodore 64 murder mystery game with independent NPCS, November 22, 2023This was one of the better experiences I’ve had with a custom parser game written for a retro format.
This game was written for the Commodore 64 platform and must be played in an emulator. I played with the Vice emulator.
It is a murder mystery. It comes with a great deal of background material. There are feelies with long, in-depth interviews with each of the suspects. There are also guides on what can be typed. I found it necessary to read every single feelie and command guide and manual to complete the game, as there are essential components you will likely not find without help (such as the important ANALYZE command).
The setting and game style is intentionally reminiscent of old Infocom mysteries such as Deadline and Suspect. There is a single house with multiple independent NPCs moving about and various clues.
I’ll talk a bit about things that were frustrating and things that worked well.
Frustrations came mostly from the engine and parser. The Commodore 64 emulator I had imitated its old clunkiness. Each room takes several seconds to load. If you go the wrong way and want to turn around, it’s 20 seconds just to correct your mistake. There was a ‘speed up’ button which I used, however, it caused the space bar to wig out, making only one-word commands possible in fast mode (great for navigation). At one point while messing with speed and trying to type ‘E’ I made the emulator hang up; I don’t believe it was the game’s fault.
Some commands were a bit difficult to phrase. One must type ‘interior garage door’; ‘interior door’ will not suffice. TALK TO someone and OPEN something almost always returned a blank line with no response at all.
The story and motives were lavishly described but stretched the imagination a bit. I’m not sure the motive found in the game would hold up in court, and some of the puzzles felt a bit arbitrary.
Those are the frustrating points. The good points are that outside of the above-mentioned difficulties, the parser was quite robust. I was frequently able to do what I wanted in an easy fashion. Puzzles were well-clued; I only turned to the walkthrough to speed up after I had the game crash. I do recommend playing on your own first without the walkthrough as it can help explain some of the more unusual action choices. I do think I would have had to turn to a walkthrough no matter what, though.
Other good things are the reasonable scope of the entry. With the slow emulation and the minimal parser, a long game could have stretched patience thin. This game seems well designed and compact, and is more fair (in my opinion) than the original infocom games. All interactable items are listed at the end of the paragraph, so you don’t have to worry about whether scenery contains an important clue.
In the past, I’ve had many bad experiences with custom parser and retro platforms. I’d say that this was genuinely refreshing and was, compared to those experiences, satisfying. For someone unaccustomed to such platforms I could imagine there would be much frustration. I also found the feelies to be very high quality (although there is a ‘images go here’ section that I believe will eventually be corrected). If I could change one thing, it’d be allowing ‘X’ as look at. I appreciate the game and was glad to play it!
A texture game about siblings and loss, November 22, 2023This is a brief Texture game, one where you drag actions over verbs. It looks like several of the Texture games in this comp were written by authors who supported each other, as they retweet each other on twitter, use similar verbs in their games (like THINK and INSPECT) and one mentioned a writing circle. If it’s true, then that’s cool, because having people to bounce ideas off of can make for much stronger games.
This is a compelling game about someone receiving a text about a sister who died. You must go to your sister’s apartment and inspect her things, deciding what to do with them.
While they are unrelated, I kind of saw this as a counterpoint to My Brother, the Parasite. That was a dark and unpleasant game about a brother who was very close to the protagonist but also very violent. This is a bittersweet game about a sister who is distant from the protagonist yet left behind a lot of sweet memories. While you can’t see everything on one playthrough, I most enjoyed the moments about the big red jacket, as it was a striking visual and a sweet way to remember someone.
A difficult, branching Ink game about hostage negotiation, November 22, 2023This is a pretty tricky ink game. I had to play it around 10 to 13 times to win, even using saves. I didn’t realize that one of the keys to winning was (Spoiler - click to show)steadying your nerves with a cigarette. At least I think that’s what happened. But it would make sense, since it’s in the cover art.
This a hardboiled NYC cop thriller, kind of like NYPD Blue (although I don’t remember much of that show as I wasn’t allowed to watch it. One of the first network shows with nudity!). You are a hostage negotiator at a bank robbery and have to find the best strategy for capturing the thieves and freeing the hostages.
After many, many attempts, I was able to free all the hostages, although the criminals went free.
On the one hand, I felt like it was too hard to strategize in this game, as there weren’t many clues as to what path is best. On the other hand, it was short enough that I could try multiple things on multiple attempts.
Escape a cult in the middle of the night, November 22, 2023This is a parser puzzle game made in 4 hours or less for Ectocomp.
In it, you play as someone who has been bound and thrown in the basement of a church, a sacrifice for a cult. You have to escape and find your way out of town.
Like most parser games made in 4 hours, it has some rough spots, some missing implementation. But I found many of the puzzles intuitive; I thought, 'hmm, I wonder if I could use that for...' only to have it work.
The writing was evocative and descriptive. There was an isolated example of strong profanity which didn't fit, I think, with the intelligent, brooding and contemplative hero.
Overall, a good effort for Petite Mort, and something I enjoyed playing, although it would benefit from more polishing if there was a post-comp release.
An altgame for social anxiety, November 22, 2023This is an altgame, like Depression Quest or Will Not Let Me Go, a game that seeks to bring understanding to a mental illness or other aspects of life that need awareness.
In this case, the topic at hand is social anxiety. You sign up for a haunted house tour that can result in cash prizes. Along the way, though, you encounter several social situations that cause you extreme anxiety.
The situations do seem well-designed to cause a lot of anxiety. I don't have social anxiety, but two of my close relatives do, and this really reminded me of them.
The game is fairly short, though, and I didn't get a feel that the ending was strongly connected to the rest of the game; it felt abrupt, perhaps due to the 6 hour time frame for the game? In and of itself, I thought the ending was effective, though.
Other than that, I found the game well-written, thoughtul, and interesting.
A difficult but rewarding dungeon making Inform game, November 22, 2023This game was pretty difficult but rewarding. It was entered in the La Petite Morte part of Ectocomp, which is surprising given its complexity.
In it, you have a large rectangular grid of a dungeon, and you have to make a map for adventurers to wander in. You have to destroy adventurers, but to reach the weapons you need to hit them, you have to make a path that adventurers can also take, and if they get the weapons, they win.
I was baffled at first, and had no clue what I was doing. I found that the adventurers follow close behind you and can kill you the instant they have line of sight. I also found that you can't throw the killing weapon unless you have line of sight.
So I was truly baffled until I read the hints on the Psionic weapon, and then things became a lot more clear.
Overall, this was pretty fun. My only sticking point was how hard it was to get started, but after that I liked the puzzle.
A deeply confusing visual novel about fantasy and strange monsters, November 22, 2023This is a relatively brief visual novel written for Ectocomp in the Grand Guignol competition.
It's a tale about a creature from Hell (a tiefling maybe?) and a paladin who dispute over an apprentice called Strider who apparently was captured by a shapeshifter (or replaced?), although this is never mentioned again.
I've struggled to review it, so I'll use my arbitrary 5-star criteria:
+Polish: The game has no bugs that I can see and looks visually well-put-together.
+Descriptiveness: There is some vivid imagery around things like snakes and eyes.
-Interactivity: You have choices, but it's not clear what effects they have, and the narrative lurches from scene to scene with little connection. I'm all for disjointed or dream like narrative, but I feel like there was no connecting thread binding this together.
-Emotional impact: Because of the 'jumpiness' of the story, it was hard to get invested. They are at a bar...then there is a fight...once the fight is done an abbess enters the same room to condemn a character...but maybe this room is in hell?
-Would I play again? Not at this time. I've played at least one other game by this author in Gruescript, which was interesting, and I would play more in the future, but this one kind of went over my head.
A confusing entry in a rhyming series, November 22, 2023This game has me at a bit of a loss. I'm a big fan of Andrew Schultz and probably have had more total fun playing all his games than almost all authors over the last decade.
But this one just doesn't do it for me. It has an amusing start (reminding me of Five Nights at Freddies), but then it got bogged down.
It uses rhyming pairs; each room name has two words in it, and you must find things that rhyme with those two words and which also are alliterative.
There were two problems for me. The first is that progress seemed to require hitting all of the rhyming pairs the author thought of (at least, some enemies weren't counted as 'defeated' until you had done so), and second, the game didn't recognize a very large number of rhyming pairs that would logically work. This is almost certainly due to the short timeframe of the game (4 hours), so as a speed IF this game is actually quite remarkable, but as a game in general I found it less successful.
The second thing is bugs; the downloaded and online versions acted differently, with the downloaded version not accepting the command that gives access to the east and west areas. The online version didn't accept one command in the walkthrough, and the final area could be accessed directly from the beginning of the game if guessed correctly.
Outside of those issues, the game is pretty great; I love the idea of having a showdown with multiple mech monstrosities. Literally the one thing that could take this from a (for me) two star game to a 4 or 5 star game is more polish, but, alas, that is exactly what this specific competition proscribes.
Horror noir with a lot of investigation, November 21, 2023This glulx game was entered in Ectocomp.
In it, you play a classic noir-style detective (who has, I believe, appeared in other games by the same author, as Castronegro was mentioned) who has been commissioned to investigate a haunted house.
The bulk of the game consists of investigating, first at places like libraries and courthouses and then at the house itself, which has more action pieces.
The writing is elaborate, fully leaning in to both noir style and early cosmic horror style. For instance:
'The house, wrapped in an aura of faded elegance, evokes a
bygone era through its windows and timeworn architecture. As the
wind stirs the leaves, a sense of mystery lingers, hinting at the secrets
hidden within its walls.'
At times it becomes a little too descriptive, where it can be difficult to piece together what's important and what's not.
The implementation is solid along a critical path but sketchy off that path. A lot of unimportant scenery is left unimplemented, but conversation is indicated fairly well through the use of a topics menu and bolding.
I struggled a bit in some of the actions scenes of the game, although the final results made sense. I believe the very end of the game has some randomization.
Overall, this was fun to play, although it could implement some more things.
Edit: This game is also an adaptation of a Call of Cthulhu module, I believe.
Brief Android game about resurrection, November 21, 2023I played this game on BlueStacks, an Android emulator.
This is a short game with a few options, each of which seems fairly strong. It uses a variety of Japanese words, often with explanations. There are several points where it seems like the game gives you freedom to make big choices; I didn't replay to verify.
It's hard to explain the story or to check the interactivity, because the game was really hard to understand. Usually a game is hard to understand because the author struggles with grammar or the story was written by AI and is bland, but this story seemed like it was written by someone with perfect English and unassisted by tools. It just is...weird. There's a lot of elaborate high language interspersed with random curse words. The language used is full of metaphors that didn't quite make sense to me. I think there was an experiment involving reviving someone in a relationship, but beyond that...I'm not sure.
An impressive amount accomplished in 4 hours, but it remains a mystery to me.
A wild adventure trying to use the toilet at night, November 17, 2023This game is a sprawling and varied horror comedy twine game about trying to use the toilet at night.
The style is kind of like a gauntlet but with more branching. You can select between multiple paths, but along each path, there is often only 1 choice that lets you live, while others let you die. The deaths give you many, many different endings, with comedic names and which are listed on the main page of the game after you unlock them.
The story draws on a wide variety of horror tropes, from witches and imps to shadow-creatures and eldritch horrors. It's low on continuity and high on amusing moments and subverting expectations.
The writing is descriptive and funny.
Overall, this game has a lot to like; however, I think for my personal preferences (that do not reflect all players!) I would have preferred some more coherence in the storyline, or more unity in the themes.
Wordplay game with a branching structure, November 16, 2023This game was entered into Ectocomp 2023, in the Grand Guignol division.
It is a wordplay game, centered on the idea of rhyming pairs where you swap the first consonants.
I always enjoy this author's wordplay gameplay, but I often find the words used too abstract or obscure to fully enjoy, or have difficulty knowing what to do.
This game is much more concrete than usual, with vivid imagery: animals, mountains, machinery, buildings, ravines, etc. This made me more invested in the game.
I also liked the symmetrical structure, with a neat trick where paths diverge and converge and you have to approach each problem from both sides.
I got stuck on a few of the parts where you had to use an item elsewhere, and I think I ran into a bug where someone will pursue you once but seemingly (?) won't pursue you after that. But it was only a slight thing in an overall nice game.
The difficulty level was just right for me, with many easy things to do, some pretty easy things, and only a few really challenging problems (I used the treat chunk a couple of times and peeked at the walkthrough for one ending thing).
A horrifying tale of a strange being and a family's secret, November 16, 2023This is an Ink game entered into several competitions; I saw it in the Grand Guignol ectocomp competition.
This game is fairly long and has some nice, rich structure. There are parts where you can walk around a house, examining different things.
The plot is mysterious and frightening. You follow a friend to a town, hearing vague rumors about his past, until you enter his family home and discover his awful secrets.
The setting and concept were, I thought good, and much of the writing is good. However, I felt for the first third of the game like I was constantly grasping for threads of plot or action. So much was vague, it was difficult to see what direction things were going in.
That's a recurring theme with the writing, that it becomes so descriptive it almost becomes undescriptive. For instance, in a library, it says 'You wonder if the hallway's actual walls are the most-likely peeling drywall or columns of thick tomes covering them.' I get what it's going for here, with rich figurative language, but I think that hedging the metaphor with 'I wonder' and 'most likely' lessens its impact.
However, there are also very strong moments; I especially liked the arrival of the Brother, which was a tense scene and written very dramatically and descriptively. So this isn’t badly written, it just has highs and lows.
Overall, I like this story and would like to see what happens next.
Edit: I didn't realize this was intentionally dreamlike, so I'm increasing my score from 3 to 4.
A dark tale of someone who made a deal with the devil, November 15, 2023This is a long Twine game entered into Ectocomp, Grand Guignol.
You play as what I interpreted as a trans man, someone born as a daughter, raised as a son, who killed his father and took his name and identity. I may have misread it, though.
You have quite a few options in the game. In your life, you come across the devil, who makes a deal with you, which you get to pick.
Near the end, you get to choose between four different endings, some shorter, some longer.
The world setting is a dark and unhappy version of the wild west. Towns are dead or dying; men are jealous and violent; women are suffering. The Devil stalks across the land, doing as he pleases with no mercy.
While the opening didn't grab me, being a bit too rich for me (like thick, bittersweet fudge), the endings grabbed me, being strongly written. I had a love ending, and I liked it.
The timed text was obnoxious; when the game trusted to the text to provide the pacing instead of some html code, it worked better, IMO. I eventually discovered that you can speed it up a bit by clicking, but that meant that for both my endings I missed the finale, which is timed text where a single click skips it all with no way to get back. But the fact I wanted to read those endings was a tribute to the strong writing of the finales. A good game for those in a lonesome mood.
Restore a damaged timeline, November 13, 2023This game was entered in the 2023 Spanish ectocomp.
This game has you sitting at a computer, typing away, when your computer program ruptures reality!
As a strange figure announces to you, you must try to restore this timeline.
This game managed to hit all of the things I like. I enjoyed the fantasy style setting, I didn't encounter any bugs or typos, I liked the polish of the different presentations of text (computer, tile, etc), and I enjoyed the small puzzles.
It's a small game overall, but I enjoyed it while it lasted. I may have enjoyed it more because it's in Spanish, with translation adding to the fun.
Sobering thoughts and bittersweet memories on a night of violence, November 13, 2023This is one of the more serious Ectocomp games I've played. It can be hard to write interactive fiction that has gravitas and purpose to it, as giving players agency can take away from overall arcs.
This game handles it well. You are in a hotel room, a haze filtering in through the curtains. War is going on, bombings and violence. And you are confronted with the memory of someone who is no longer there...
The game is short, so there isn't much to say, except that this is written well and was poignant.
A branching adventure about a deadly dance, November 8, 2023This short Petite Mort ectocomp game features a branching narrative written in 4 hours.
Despite its short creation time, it manages to be interesting. You are at a party where things are getting pretty dangerous.
As you explore more, you discover a dangerous group of individuals who have taken over the building. If you can only figure out a good path, you can survive!
This game mostly is a kind of gauntlet structure where there are dead ends at each stage (although it's not totally a gauntlet because you get multiple chances for some things). It can be thrilling at times or disturbing at others. Overall, I found the story effective, but would enjoy if more time was spent adding different connections between paths and variable tracking (which would obviously take more than 4 hours!) Great work for the time it was written in.
Procedurally generated (?) game about students torturing a professor, November 7, 2023Every year when I play Spanish Ectocomp I encounter a game by this author and it's always wild. They usually have 3d models that are in the uncanny valley, as well as choice-based gameplay where you can move around. The stories are always wild, often about crime or insanity.
This game restricts the 3d models to profile pictures, and they actually look pretty good. But the story now is some kind of procedurally generated thing, where 4 students have kidnapped and are verbally abusing and torturing a professor. Every action gets a reaction by everyone in the room (even actions you don't take), and you get the same choices over and over (my character drank at least 7 cups of a mixed drink of three heavy liquors with no ill effects). There are a few more dramatic choices, but overall this is mostly just seeing a wide variety of Spanish profanity interspersed with torture and the decision to drink or not. It's full of drama and mechanically interesting to observe but narratively a little weak.
A Spectrum CYOA game based on a famous short story, November 7, 2023This is one of two games entered in the Spanish Ectocomp Grand Guignol that use a ZX Spectrum emulator to make CYOA games controlled by the Q and A keys and Enter. I thought they were both by the same author, but apparently not.
This game is actually an adaptation of the Legend of the Mountain of Spirits, an older short story. However, it has been substantially expanded. In the original, a girl and her cousin get lost on a haunted mountain, with disastrous results.
In my playthrough, we left the mountain almost immediately, and had an adventure late at night in the city, although there were symbolic elements similar to the original story.
Overall, I found the writing good and the quality high. I don't really like playing ZX spectrum on an emulator (I use FUSE and it's tiny and can't be expanded), but as a game this was enjoyable.
The origin story for a singing traveller and his demons, November 7, 2023Last year, when I played El Virulé (part one), I had a lot of trouble understanding it. It was written in what I would consider advanced Spanish, with very rich descriptions and realistic dialogue, about a guy with an ill-looking eye who sang for money but concealed more.
I rated it lower, but it ended up winning the Outstanding Spanish game award in the IFDB awards. So I reconsidered it.
I approached this sequel with new eyes. It has a lot of neat features, like a food bar you slowly fill up, but the real draw here is the relationship between the child protagonist and his father. Every aspect of the game shows how this child (the past version of the first game's protagonist) is influenced by his father's choices. Left alone, locked in the house, forced to feed himself, getting threatened, handling dangerous items...
I really liked this game. It's not too long, and while I had to think hard at times, most actions were natural and most commands made sense for me as a foreigner.
I especially liked the ending scene, and found it powerful. I didn't get to see the full ending poem because I was hitting enter too fast, but I liked this overall.
Graphical 'gauntlet' game fighting (and dating) zombie Michael Jackson, November 7, 2023I played this game in Spanish.
It's made for the Spectrum platform, and is designed with a ton of retro graphics, many of them consisting of images from the music video to Michael Jackson's Thriller.
You replay the events of that video in choice based form, but with a lot of changes and additions. There are weapons and items to use and the special power of Bollywood.
The story was zany fun, and the images very well done.
The two main problems I had were both related to the game structure. First, the game is 'gauntlet' style, so it's basically 'make the right move or die and start over'. I got very frustrated until someone pointed out that the emulators have a 'save' feature.
The second is that you have to fight Michael a few too many times, it gets a little repetitive.
Other than that, I enjoyed this and found it well done. The trailer is actually even fancier than the game!
The beginning of a big 1800's horror mystery, November 7, 2023This is an excellent Twine game...for a little bit. Then it ends, unfinished.
This game places you in the role of a detective in the 1800s, travelling to a region to try to help solve a series of disappearances.
Children are going missing in a grove of trees, and adults as well. The townfolk are fearful, and there is a too-powerful landlord hovering over everything.
The writing is good, with distinct characters that you can interview. It takes place over several days; unfortunately, it ends after the first day.
Excellent start; it only remains to finish.
Fetus vs mother, plus detective shenanigans, November 7, 2023This is a bizarre little game.
You are a fetus who is superintelligent and a detective. You have a very low opinion of your mother.
Unfortunately, you cannot move or talk. All you can do is kick your mom and crawl around inside her.
This game has a lot of endings; I found 3 and watched several more on a youtube video.
There is wild stuff in this game, lots of using body parts in inappropriate ways, and for some reason a ton of very advanced talk about ontological things and philosophy...I had to use google translate a lot.
Pretty funny; could use some more synonyms for actions.
Uncover a murder on the space station, November 6, 2023This is a pretty complex game entered in Ectocomp Grand Guignol edition. The same game is also entered in Petite Mort, where it was polished less (since Petite Mort has a time limit).
In this game, you are going up to a space station with two others in the shuttle with you. You all are identified by your roles, yours being the Inspector.
You are quizzed on an old case study of law, where an astronaut died on the ISS when their module was released too early.
Interestingly, the game features real life astronauts like Shannon Lucid and Léopold Eyharts, who are still alive, and is essentially fan-fiction about real life people. It's an AU, as the events take place in a fictional 1998.
You read everyone's journal entries then decide on whether the accused is innocent or guilty, and, if guilty, how guilty they are.
Perhaps due to the language barrier, I was confused about one mechanic. Before reading the case studies, you have to decide where the case was tried at. This seems to retroactively make the case have been tried there and limits which journals you have access to. It also changes what the actual verdict was, so it's kind of hard to tell what really happened, although I swear (again, can't be sure because my French is mediocre) that two of the journals literally confess to the crime.
This version has a lot of nice looking links and effects the other version doesn't have.
Investigate a space station murder from multiple perspectives, November 6, 2023This is a pretty complex game entered in Ectocomp Petite Mort edition. The same game is also entered in Grand Guignol, where it was polished more (since Petite Mort has a time limit).
In this game, you are going up to a space station with two others in the shuttle with you. You all are identified by your roles, yours being the Inspector.
You are quizzed on an old case study of law, where an astronaut died on the ISS when their module was released too early.
Interestingly, the game features real life astronauts like Shannon Lucid and Léopold Eyharts, who are still alive, and is essentially fan-fiction about real life people. It's an AU, as the events take place in a fictional 1998.
You read everyone's journal entries then decide on whether the accused is innocent or guilty, and, if guilty, how guilty they are.
Perhaps due to the language barrier, I was confused about one mechanic. Before reading the case studies, you have to decide where the case was tried at. This seems to retroactively make the case have been tried there and limits which journals you have access to. It also changes what the actual verdict was, so it's kind of hard to tell what really happened, although I swear (again, can't be sure because my French is mediocre) that two of the journals literally confess to the crime.
This version has a lot of weird issues with whitespace, all of which were fixed in the full version.
A Spanish game made of 30 nightmares in Binksi, November 5, 2023This game was made in conjunction with Inktober, which means the author made one part of it every day of the month of October. So there are 30 different 'mini games' put into one.
The game starts on a dark and spooky night. Alone in the house, you have to do chores. Once you do, you have such nightmares...
The bulk of the game consists of the 30 nightmares. In each one, you play as a Binksi character (a system allowing you to walk around a minimalistic pixel graphic world with limited 2-frame animations and selective color palettes).
The nightmares have a lot of variety in types, but some are more represented than the others. The most common are ones where there are several copies of the same object scattered on the screen, and you have to pick them all up, each one producing some text which is at first random then eventually repeated, before you can move on. This was good, but became a bit tedious over time. I preferred the large animals who had deep conversations, and I liked a graveyard with ghosts.
The writing is self-introspective, open and refreshing with self insecurities, kind of like the lyrics to Joni Mitchell songs.
The ending caught me by surprise, and I thought the game had broken. I'm still not sure if there's anything you can do on the final screen, but it was effective and different.
A French 'lost game' game with voice acting, November 5, 2023This game isn't the usual sort of thing I review. While it firmly falls into the category of what I think of as interactive fiction (due to being a story mostly told through words where you take part in it), it contains a lot of graphical and auditory elements as well.
It's in the genre of 'lost game', one I've enjoyed in the past; I liked the NES Godzilla Creepypasta before and stories like Lavender Town and Ben Died are all over the internet. More recently I've been introduced to Pets Cop.
This game primarily features Binksi, which is a combination of Ink, the scripting language, and Bitsi, which is used for making minimalistic pixel art games that trigger text when you walk into objects.
But, unlike most Binksi games, this is all set within a CRT screen inside the page, so it looks all warped and weird. Also, there is excellent French narration with captions. Usually, timed text is annoying because I read fast and it's too slow; here, I struggled to read it before it moved on, due to being a non-native speaker.
Like most found-lost-games, the game in the game is unfinished, and you have to experience it through a variety of different levels created at different times. The different levels provide insight into the creator's mindset as he deteriorates over time. Different game elements are specifically pointed out as symbolising certain aspects of the creator's life.
Levels vary; they include an interrogation in a Russian-themed prison; a confrontation in a castle; and a pretty annoying giant invisible maze (but which is solvable fairly quickly). At one point I thought the game had glitched and restarted, only to find that I just hadn't explored enough. The ending was a dramatic shift and seemed to be a suiting climax that brought the whole game together.
I would give this game a 4/5 as it is well made but has many elements that don't suit my interests. However, I am giving it 5/5 solely due to the chunk of English Inform 7 code that was found in the game, since it reminded me of a game I once had to write in a similar format. It was well done.
An Ink game about mystery, life, and death, November 3, 2023This was the first Ectocomp game I played. I played the French version, then later ran through it in English.
It's very extensive for a 4-hour game. It's an Ink game, and you have quite a few different choices throughout the game. The author has used several interesting techniques, like branching and bottlenecking choices, choices that allow users to lawnmower through items in any order, and choices where you have a limited number you can select.
The story is a bit haphazard, as would be expected in a speed game. It had so many elements...there was a jaded romance which I found quite interesting, and then more chance for romance later. But there are also competitive game aspects, and some mystery. To me it felt like three ideas for great games, all rolled into one small game, and so it didn't gel. But I like each of the ideas! Impressive for a work of 4 hours.
A linear narrative of a time traveller in love, September 26, 2023This game was entered in several minimal jams, including the Single Choice jam. It is the author's first game.
It's a visual novel with one main image of characters with slight variation. The writing is intense and earnest: you, a time traveller, have been stuck in a loop over and over again with one person at its focus: your love.
The image used is high-quality and is very stylized, more anime-style. The story reminds me of fanfic in its genre conventions.
Though this is in the single choice jam, there's not really any story choices, but it is rewritten in as a 'restart/quit' option, which I actually thought was pretty clever.
I think if there's anywhere this game could be improved, it's in specificity. Right now the writing could apply to almost any time travel seting and situation: it could be a WWII era drama set in France, a turn of the century New York tale, a futuristic sci-fi set in China. And the lover could be anyone; we meet with only tiny details that fit in every life, like grabbing a cup of coffee or going on the bus. Part of that is intentional and works, in that it could be read as a MC/reader fic that needs to be vague to allow you to insert yourself. On the other hand, those incidents could be expanded on; there could be conversations that were had; there could be specific incidents recalled that are unusual and remarkable. IDK, I felt like I went off on this a long time but only because I feel like this author actually has a lot of talent and so I'm kind of imagining a really good story that could be written by them, if there were some more concrete details in it.
A visual novel about contacting your deceased wife, September 25, 2023This visual novel was entered in the Single Choice jam.
My overall impression of it varied over time, as at first I thought the story was a bit trope-heavy but later on I enjoyed the progression it made.
You play as the husband of a recently deceased witch. After her death, you discover a letter from her telling you how you can contact her spirit.
You adventure through dungeons, killing goblins, to get a spirit orb to contact her with. Eventually, things come down to a difficult choice.
Overall, a lot of the game could have had more specific descriptions instead of relying on implicit common knowledge (like the fact that dungeons exist with goblins who are enemies, who the Lord of Light is, how heaven/hell work, etc.). But I liked the main narrative thrust of the story.
A clever sci-fi Twine game about shapeshifting creatures, September 18, 2023This is a nicely styled Twine game that is digestible in an hour or so. You play as a robot rover helping a damaged ai-driven (fictional AI, not chatgpt ai) spaceship to get repaired.
You discover a world with little slime creatures in it that can shapechange. You also have an inventory of items that can be used to alter the shapes of the creatures and things around you.
It's a fun concept, and the game is designed to be relatively mild and enjoyable. While some puzzles are tricky (I had to use the walkthrough because I got stuck), there's a lot of leeway to help you finish without having to solve everything. I stopped at 150 points.
I like the worldbuilding and inventory here. I didn't feel a need to revisit this game in the future, but I'm glad I played it. I came to try it because it showed up on the Interactive Fiction top 50 for 2023.
A long crafting and exploration-based idle game/roguelike, September 17, 2023I played this game because it was one of 2 on the Interactive Fiction Top 50 poll of 2023 and I had never played it before.
There are a lot of things that can be spoiled in the game, so I'm going to just describe the beginning here and some accessibility stuff, then put some mid-game stuff in spoilers, and leave out the endgame stuff.
The game starts like an idle game like Universal paperclips. You have a 'stoke the fire' button and, on another tab, a 'gather wood' button. A stranger wanders in, freezing in the cold.
Gameplay expands significantly as you go on, adding crafting mechanics and mild city-building. Eventually you do need movement keys and there are some parts I don't think would be accessible to screen readers.
For mid-game spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)Once you are able to craft a compass, you are able to explore a world map. This map contains a variety of outposts, and includes real-time combat that involves clicking, with some battles requiring intense clicking.
As you explore the map, you can make the world a safer place, eliminating threats as you go and establishing outposts. As you do so, you learn about the lore of the world.
Overall, the game is very polished, and while minimalistic it is descriptive. The interactivity worked well for me, although I found some endgame timed events very difficult. I found the game emotionally satisfying and could see myself revisiting it.
Kidnapped by a cruel psycopath, September 14, 2023This is a Ren'py game entered in the single choice jam with some other minimal constraints.
It's go-go-go from the start, with flowery and/or extreme language choices, intense scenario descriptions, harsh music, etc. It tells a lurid tale of someone kidnapped by a jealous rival and tortured over and over.
I only played through one ending, so there were likely chunks of story I missed, but what was there was very descriptive. Aside from the game itself, I'm surprised that ren'py has over 1700 files to unzip when you download a python game.
Overall, a good exercise in writing stressful or tense situations, but the one-note harshness and intensity could have been balanced by contrasting scenes.
A cosplay convention goes terribly wrong!, September 14, 2023This is a game from the Single Choice jam written using Ren'py.
It depicts an annoying situation edging towards disturbing where the main character 'you-chan' meets 'yandere-chan', who is cosplaying as a yandere girlfriend from an anime (here 'yandere' being part of a classification of character personality types, including tsundere and kuuder, with yandere being the personality type that is obsessive and mixes romance with violence and abusive behavior).
There are two endings depending on your single choice. Mine went from a kind of cutish, annoying meeting to a deeply disturbing one, as is appropriate for a yandere situation. I didn't feel super invested in the storyline, but the descent into danger was handled pretty well I think.
A short story from three perspectives, September 14, 2023Although short, this game satisfies all my criteria for 5 stars:
+Polish: This is a short twine game with custom styling and no typos or errors that I saw.
+Descriptiveness: The three main characters are painted vividly, with distinct and well-defined personalities and motives.
+Interactivity: As part of the single choice jam, there is only one option to choose, but it's an interesting one: which perspective to see the story from. It was fun to contrast the different perspectives and viewpoints.
+Emotional impact: I chuckled after the first story, not so much that I found it amusing but that it managed to pack in so much in a short time.
+Would I play again? I enjoyed playing it three times to see all endings.
A story about family, heritage, and changes, September 14, 2023This game was written in Narrat, an engine I hadn't heard of before but which worked very smoothly; this was a visually well-done game, with an appropriate stock image, nice styling/layout and smooth scrolling.
This story was entered in the Single Choice Jam, and features exactly one choice in the center of the story, at what felt like a powerful emotional moment.
Content wise, the story revolves around remembrances of Girl's Day, which I assume is the Japanese holiday, as the imagery used reflects that, and I'm not currently aware of other Girl's Days out there. The protagonist is old now, but reflects on the generations of women in their past. There are strong implications of the narrator's changing gender identity, but nothing explicit.
Overall, a thoughtful, reflective, and well-done piece.
The latest in an ongoing saga of dinosaur related short stories , September 14, 2023This is my fourth TrexandDrago Development game and honestly they're out here doing things no one else is really doing.
All of these games are kind of surreal setups for dinosaur-related mysteries or dramas. None of them seem to lead into each other, so it gives the feel of an anthology.
All of these games are fairly short and unpolished, including this one that has elements of Gravity Falls, dinosaurs, and horror.
I've been giving most of these games 1-2 stars because they generally feel short and rushed, but if they were in one big compilation I'd probably give it 3 stars since it has a whole vibe going for it.
A look into the mind of a person surviving in a bleak world, September 13, 2023This is a Bitsy game, a kind of game that uses arrow keys to control minimalistic pixel images.
In this game, you pass through the mind of someone who is deeply concerned about the world. Passing through the mind once gives one thought, which can stick in your brain (usually only bad things) or pass through. The background images change depending on the person's reaction.
Topics include things like dating, climate change, police brutality, and others.
Overall, the concept works thematically. There's not really any kind of choices, though since it's in the One Choice Jam it might have made sense to have a decision at the end. Overall, everything that was here was well-made, it just felt a bit light overall.
A twine game built with minimal assets and choices, September 13, 2023This game is built around a pretty tight set of constraints, with limited words, graphics, choices, and music. But it manages to do some nice worldbuilding and scene setting in that time.
You play as a character who has been poisoned by their lover, a dashing rogue of a man. You have tracked him down, and have one choice to try to secure the antidote from him.
Due to the constraints, there is only one choice, one background image, one character image, etc. but what it comes up with is pretty memorable. It's not in any way a complete story, feeling more like a vignette from a larger work.
A quick combinatorial game , September 12, 2023This game is about aliens coming to earth and holding the earth hostage until you, an above-average intelligence human, can solve a bomb defusing problem that comes down to flipping a series of switches in every poissible combination without repeating.
When I was a young man, my father helped local missionaries, and one day he asked me to travel with one to an appointment. That missionary got lost and was confused, so he went back home and we both waited for an hour until the rest of our group came back. It was the most boring time of my life. To entertain myself, I tried to tap out every combination of fingers on my right hand without repeats: 12345, 12354, etc. and it filled up the time.
So I already had the solution 'in hand' when playing this game, but it was interesting to see it sketched out.
The puzzle itself is interesting, and the framing story is good, imo. For my personal tastes, I would have enjoyed some physical characterization to compliment the mental and emotional characterization. For instance, the aliens are described as "They are about as weird as you expected, but all the same, they look weird in some unexpected ways and normal in others. They look weird enough to you that you know you must look pretty weird to them as well." This gives a ton of information about your emotional state and your mental reaction, but little on the aliens themselves. That's not necessarily bad; a lot of the best science fiction and horror rely on indescribable things. I just thought it'd be cool to learn more in this scenario.
Last comment is that while this was entered into the single choice jam, it felt like a lot more than 1 choice to me. There are multiple correct patterns, for instance, and the version I played had at least two areas (the 3 puzzle and the 4 puzzle) that allowed those multiple patterns. So I think it's marginal when it comes to the theme, but overall I enjoy this type of puzzle.
A linear ADRIFT game about escaping an abusive situation, September 12, 2023This is the third game I've played by TrexandDrago Development. Like the others, this is a shorter story with a bit wobbly English and an emphasis on cool dinosaurs.
This time the dinosaurs are toys named after characters from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but they are only a side part.
The main character is an abused teenager who is covered in bruises and dried blood. The action is all about escaping with the help of a new friend. It's an Adrift game with each action tied to a single letter command, so the game is 'type C to continue' or 'type B to grab the backpack'.
While this is part of the single choice jam, there don't seem to be any choices other than progressing through the story. The game is written in Adrift, but is only available in a downloadable .exe
Overall, as a jam game this was written in a short amount of time so has rough edges; but overall there is a quirkiness and sincerity to the story that I think works well. If there was more time to take these ideas and polish them, I could see it working pretty well!
A science fiction musing on death and family relationships, September 11, 2023This game in the Single Choice Jam focuses on a single emotional moment. You are on a space station and are preparing for your mother's delayed funeral/burial ceremony.
You are allowed to bring a single object back with you. Most of the game revolves around looking at objects one at a time and remembering what significance they have to you and to your mother.
My father talked to me before about how sci fi is really about everyday human stories, just placed in an extraordinary setting to bring out different key points. This game is fundamentally about the relationship between a difficult but attentive parent and their adult child. The sci-fi setting serves to strengthen some of the emotions, like isolation and lack of self worth.
The reduction to a single choice makes sense thematically, since you are deliberating on a major decision you can't really go back on. I felt satisfied with my choice and didn't feel a need to play again.
An alchemical riddle mystery, September 11, 2023This game was entered into the Single Choice jam.
It's a long choice-based game with an elaborate setup and worldbuilding. You are part of a detective agency, and a couple has reported that something was stolen from their house.
It was stolen by a thief with a clever gimmick: they take an item, and then replace it with a photorealistic painting.
But this time, what was stolen is unknown, and it was replaced by a poem. The couple that hired you was a pair of alchemists.
Overall, the game manages to be engaging despite the 'one choice' limitation by adding a lot of outside-game thinking: what does the riddle refer to? Which clues matter?
On the other hand, it's hard to know what the player's thought process is supposed to be. I made a guess at the end, and it was right, but I couldn't pin down why.
The worldbuilding is rich and detailed. The setting feels extravagant, more like a cartoon than a film, if that makes sense. Could be fleshed out in more games or a revision of this one.
A truly awkward moment, August 7, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
I saw this game from two points of view.
In the first, it's a truly awkward situation. You're running into your ex girlfriend with your now boyfriend. You're nervous it'll be awkward but...(Spoiler - click to show)she barely remembers you dating? That's super awkward. And pretty funny.
From the other point of view, it's kind of a mystery. Everyone has very specific and unusual names. Is it a reference to a show? An in-joke? Some OCs?
Either way, the styling is nice, some good choices for color and font to add to the awkward feeling.
Interesting twist on a well-worn story, August 6, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
There are a lot of Orpheus and Eurydice adaptations out there, from the original stories to the first recorded opera to the platformer Don't Look Back, and I generally like them all; it's a good story.
This game manages to do something I haven't really seen with it before. It merges it with the author's personal history, and it manages to (Spoiler - click to show)gives an ending where Eurydice is reborn, and does so in a way that isn't cheap and unearned but also has its own mixture of emotions. Well done.
Pleasant little dungeon crawl, August 6, 2023This game has some fabulous looking images and nice sounds, accompanying its text size of 500 words for the Neo Twiny Jam.
Storywise, there are several branches here. You are trapped in a dungeon, although your true nature may not be apparent at first.
Freedom is possible for you...possibly. But sacrifices must be made.
This was well-written, and enjoyable to play.
Work on your resume over and over, August 5, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's a Texture game, which I haven't seen a lot of recently. This system has you drag verbs onto nouns (or, here, resume sections), both causing changes when you actually drop it and tooltips when you hover.
The humor (or pathos, depending on how you view it) comes from the self-criticism or uncertainty or Sisyphean task of dealing with all of this.
I found only one ending, but I found it multiple times.
A cute story about different social media, August 5, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It is as far as I can see completely linear, but uses interactivity as you can click to make each line appear.
The gimmick here is that it's a single story but changes every few lines into the format of a different social media site like Twitter or Reddit, showing how some things stay the same the more they change.
Pretty neat. One crude joke that doesn't add much to the story, but overall some tight writing.
A night of troubled thoughts, August 5, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It uses all of its words in one path, a torrent of thoughts that pile on. The narrator lies in bed with thought after anxious thought crowding the mind. Thoughts of death, of unimportance, come endlessly.
There is some comfort in the end, at the hand of a friend. Overall, the feeling is of a storm followed by sunlight, observing the wreckage.
A brief but thorough exploration of two assassins colliding, August 5, 2023This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.
It features 2 assassins who have met at knife point. Will you fight, or romance?
It manages to pull a few surprises while playing with well-trodden tropes. The writing is to-the-point and effective. I enjoyed playing it right after I finished re-watching Hawkeye, which includes a similar assassin-on-assassin fight.
Short, but worth it.
Fascinating and beautiful exploration of a historical work, August 5, 2023This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.
This one was fun to read up on. I was just talking to my son a few days ago about 'automatic writing', where mediums would just let the pencil move and see what writing the spirits produced.
This game is about one such work, a long epic by Sara Weiss detailing the history, biology, and language of the people of Mars. It is accompanied by beautiful illustrations from the original text.
While the game itself provides fascinating insights, reading up on the accompanying material and just searching the original book in general was very fun.
Implacable villain vs unstoppable cat, August 5, 2023This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.
It's pretty funny. A cat has appeared in your evil lair but you, a supervillain, are completely unable to do anything to stop it or damage it.
There is a lot of flexibility, and paths diverge but merge again, which I prefer to pure branching or no branching. Pretty fun!
Pretty words but complex; a difficult life at court, August 5, 2023This is a game that is styled in loving detail, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It describes in elliptic and complex language a person who has arrived at court and must carefully navigate the political systems and other intricacies.
The text is simultaneously rich and difficult to understand. For instance, here are two sentences (not set in stone; both can be changed with cycling options):
(Spoiler - click to show)Overwhelming in its capacity for promises as binding as fingers through water. Bloodless as the art she would learn soon enough to become to survive the court’s pleasure.
These sentences are both descriptive and grammatically correct, but due to their nested phrases and clauses it becomes difficult to figure out the meaning.
Overall, it presents an interesting setting.
A tiny but huge game: one-word pages, but hundreds of them, August 5, 2023This game was entered in the Neo-Twiny jam, written in 500 words or less.
The author has decided to maximize the usage by putting only a single word on each page and making the game branch quite a bit. I played to 2 or 3 endings and found things very unlike the other reviews, so I suspect there's just a ton of stuff out there.
There are references to a lot of stories. Extra nuance is given to the single words by having voice acting for most of them.
Overall, it was pretty funny in general. This is a very clever idea and unique in the comp; I think I saw a few two-word games, but a one-word game like this take a lot of work, especially to make it work out as well as it has here.
Play as Judas betraying Jesus, August 5, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
I'm a fan of Jesus, so it was unusual to play a game from one of his opp's perspective. The game was black and red themed, with a shaky-looking font.
In it, Judas condemns Jesus while also regretting his actions but also justifying it by sorting through and twisting old words. I imagine these thoughts to be very similar to those of someone who just got dumped because they cheated on someone.
Promising start with a few bugs, August 5, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or yes. It actually had a pretty cool setup and I liked the structure and where the story was going. Unfortunately, it had some broken logic that made multiple errors appear on most pages on both Chrome and Firefox.
Seems like the only thing missing here is more Twine expertise. With some more practice with the code, this game could be great (or the next one the author makes). Right now, I don't think it's finishable, though.
Slow-paced mythology game, August 5, 2023This game is about the love between Cygnus and Phaethon (my spelling may be wrong), written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It has few options, but each paints a picture of deep love. It uses some nice color choices to complement the story.
It's also very very slow. I thought a couple of times that the game had broken or dead-ended, only to realize after staring at it for ten seconds that it was actually going to change. I think it could benefit more from 'next page' links for pacing, or from static formatting.
A game about death and grieving, July 31, 2023This is a brief game written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's a slow game, with peaceful sound and delayed text. You have called a taxi (I got a jumpscare which was fairly amusing when I saw the driver, (Spoiler - click to show)the screen shaking and it saying It looks like Grandma ominously).
It's a meaningful story, about grief and AIDS epidemic and an anti-God/religion feeling (the idea that God is a jerk if he exists).
The best part to me was the strong friendship.
An exploration of the frustrations and agonies of comparison, July 31, 2023This was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's an introspective essay, bordering on rant, about how comparing yourself to others can be so frustrating and painful. There is bitterness and seething rage in the words. This is paralleled with dark styling, using multiple colors but mostly black and red.
The emotion feels real here. They mention how they theoretically could just walk away from it all, but the desire to do so isn't there.
Bedtime routine, July 31, 2023This is a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less.
It's basically a bedtime routine. You have a set number of tasks to complete before sleeping, but before each one your phone tempts you, and you have to wait to resist.
Very realistic, but waiting got tiring after a second playthrough. Another reviewer mentioned images, but I didn't see any in this one. Otherwise a nice chill bedtime game.
A brief vampire tale, July 31, 2023This is a short Twine game entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less.
It's a fairly well-written story of a woman on the hunt finding a man on the hunt and what ensues.
The styling is appropriate, with red hues. The story is entirely linear, one link at a time. There are at least two significant typos (especially (Spoiler - click to show)'hater' for 'later') which detract from the overall experience.
But I didn't mind reading it, it was pretty fun.
A physical exploration of a tarot retelling, July 31, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It depict a Tarot deck drawing (using a nonstandard deck), and its main feature is that the cards that you draw can be entered. You don't explore them through links, though, it just describes you going and coming back.
It's not a bad idea, but could probably have benefitted from a larger game size to allow more flexibility. The overall vibes were chill and pleasant.
A space battle in the style of Classic Twine, July 31, 2023This was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
This one reminds me of the classic twine scene around 2015 and earlier, especially the Porpentine/Furkle style. You have bodies that are modified in uncomfortable ways and integrated with technology mixed with a vulnerable protagonist whose interior monologue is at odds with the actions around him. Another similar feature is the blend of religiosity with patriotism in the authority figures in the protagonists life.
That's not to say that this game isn't original; it has a nice poeticism to it and does its own take on things. I'm just saying that I think it benefits from having a body of related work to compare and contrast it to.
This game is about being part of a space combat squadron protecting a payload of a large bomb. It's mostly linear, but has some nice color changes.
Fancy bitsy game about...well, I'm not sure, July 31, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's written using Bitsy (or one of its derivatives), with low-resolution pixel art that looks pretty good here.
The story itself is hard to describe though. I couldn't tell if it was a guy carrying his dying baby through an apocalyptic wasteland or a dating couple walking around the block...the ending is more clear, but earlier parts are a little vague.
The controls can be hard to figure out at first, but some parts are pretty cool as you move a mouse in a virtual device.
Whispers of many possible stories at a hero's death, July 31, 2023This is a well-produced game for the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less.
It looks good, with a nice background and well-chosen fonts and color schemes.
The story is about a hero who is dying, and you are the one to comfort him. You can choose what to say.
It branches a lot; I don't think any of the branches reconnect. But 2 of 3 starting options end the game immediately, while a 3rd has more options.
Most of the stories seem more like intros, like a teaser for a larger setting.
Just two frog buddies chilling in space, July 31, 2023This game was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less.
It's about a real thing I never knew existed, the Orbiting Frog Otolith, which was an experiment thing where they put two frogs in space and measured the effects of weightlessness on them, with no intent of ever recovering them.
I looked up 'Otolith' and it means 'ear stone', which is a pretty weird name for a spacecraft. But apparently there's a part of the ear with that name in frogs (and maybe humans?) and the experiment studied that.
Anyway, this is a short game with a lot of branches; I got about 6 different endings, but all the ones I got were grouped into two major groups. It's pretty fun, imagining two frogs chilling and trying to talk to each other about things that are purely beyond their comprehension.
A self-checking quiz to help you evaluate your day, July 31, 2023This is a feel-good kind of quiz, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's a quiz that you take about your work habits, what you do for fun, and treats.
It presents a few surprises and overall a wholesome and positive message.
It's not very long, but I get the impression that there are multiple results. I enjoyed playing it.
A poem about love and violence, July 30, 2023This is a poem written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's styled nicely, with a nonstandard font and a red and black theme.
The structure involves going back and forth between one major poem that slowly grows and smaller poems on the side.
There's some vague imagery of pain and slurs towards women. It's meant in service to overall narrative, but I wonder if the same point could have been achieved in a different way.
NIcely styled twine poem about turning 22, July 30, 2023This is a poem entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, with 500 words or less.
It's styled nicely, with beautiful fonts and illustrations and transitions and some music.
It's mostly just a poem, the feelings someone has for their 21st birthday, The freedom is in what order the poem is explored.
I liked it overall, but a lot of the enjoyment of a poem is either in symmetry or purposeful asymmetry. But there was a bit of unevenness, like rhyming 'skills' with 'skills' and varying between exact rhymes and almost-rhymes in a non-symmetric fashion; and some of the lines were hard to fit into the meter when read aloud. However, the sentiment was strong, and those features I described as lacking may not even be desired by the author, although I feel like they could be introduced with some mild revising.
Complex coma nightmare loop game, July 30, 2023This game was pretty hard to beat. It was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
At first, it seems extremely short, even on replay. But apparently you have to play 3 times before it changes, which is a bit weird.
It has images that were drawn on notebook paper and scanned, which I actually think look cool!
You have to explore different things in the coma, but you have little time due to constantly dying. Even worse, there's a counter in the corner and you fail the game completely once it ticks down, with no way to undo.
I eventually realized that (Spoiler - click to show)There's exactly one action that can be indefinitely be repeated to raise the counter. Overall, it was pretty tricky. I'm not sure I loved the counter of doom and the initial 3 replays, but it was interesting enough that I wanted to finish.
A poetic story that invites the reader to create the structure, July 30, 2023This game/story/poem was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's all on one page with expandable text. I read it at first, seeing in it obtuse musings on relationship.
Then I read the trigger warnings, which gave me insights into themes I hadn't identified. Then I realized the poem has a different structure that first appears, a sort of meta puzzle.
I ended up liking piecing things together, having to reach for what's going on. Very nice. Vivid imagery.
A brief game about word limits and world's limits, July 30, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It looks nice, with a black/off-white/gold color scheme.
It's a bit of a self-referential story, as you encounter a typewriter that is creating a world but is limited in the number of words it can use.
Unfortunately, it just feels cut short. That's literally what's happening in the game, but even if it's being pointed out it's still a little 'cut-off' at the ends, and could use a bit more of an ending. But that's just my opinion and not a fact.
Effective puzzle structure in a 500-word twine hotel game, July 30, 2023This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.
I manages to have multiple locations, puzzles, inventory, essentially a whole world model. It's brief, and the puzzles aren't difficult, but it was nice to see how smooth everything is.
You end up locked in a hotel room and have to find your way out. The only part I felt was missing was perhaps some final twist or surprise at the end, or otherwise an explanation, just a sentence.
A character study about a person stuck in a tough situation, July 30, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's a simple story, mostly linear, with some hover-links.
But it depicts a part of life that many of us have experienced, when money is running tight and we have to make choices that might betray our values or require us to swallow our pride; the point where we have to admit that we can no long live by our own means.
Not a lot of structure here, but relatable and detailed.
Thoughtful musing on humanity's future, July 30, 2023This game is written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It uses its words more or less all at once, spooling them out into a mostly linear essay/story with occasional expandable text. A lot of parts of it are customized.
It's a piece about humanity colonizing the stars and how it must feel to start processes that will not be finished for thousands of years. About what it means for worlds and humans to evolve. With minimal structure, it's relying heavily on the styling and the text itself here, and I liked both.
A cute and at times frightening story of a Frog, July 30, 2023This short Frog game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.
It's a cute story and written from a frog's perspective in various phases of life, including egg, tadpole, and adult (I think).
Each part is written in minimalistic style. At times I lost the thread of what I was reading, trying to figure out what the terse words corresponded to. The ending was pleasant.
A mysterious science researcher drama, July 30, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It does a great job of getting use out of those words.
At first, it just presents a kind of opaque technical screen that I didn't really understand, and then more of the same. I was so lost, all this scientific research-type jargon about chemicals and samples. It ended quickly but with some mysterious notes.
So I replayed 4 times and got deeper into the mystery. I don't think I ever completely solved what was going on but I got plenty of hints of horrible things going on.
A character-driven story about a high-stakes job, July 28, 2023Some background: I wrote a game for Choice of Games a few years ago, but it did really poorly. I ended up playing and reviewing all the 100+ available COG titles at the time to figure out where I went wrong and ended up seeing a lot of different patterns in their titles and in what sells well.
At the same time, I kept seeing hints of a game by Emily Short coming out, who is one of the most respected IF authors with some of the most well-known games in her repertoire (Counterfeit Monkey, Galatea, etc.) But it was always delayed, and disappeared for years.
So I was excited to hear that it had been finished (with a little boost from Hannah Powell-Smith, another very popular author), I was excited to hear about it.
So for the game itself. My first go-to with a choicescript game is to look at its stats page. The best-selling games tend to have clearly defined and cleary differentiated stats, while the less popular ones often have confusing or overlapping stats. Here the stats are a bit overlapping: discretion vs self promotion, practicality vs daring, loyalty vs idealism, populism vs elitism. If you speak out to a billionaire and say you hate the wealthy (not an actual in game example), is that populism, idealism, or daring?
So in games where the stats are confusing, it can be hard to min/max, so I tend to just imagine a very specific persona and pick only what I think that person would do. This game responded to that very well, and I got a good story out of it, which is a good sign.
You play as a concierge to the rich. Billionaires ask the company you work for to arrange parties, trips, housekeeping, etc. Kind of like a fancy butler. I felt some connection with this theme as I work at a private school, and helped supervise a trip to Spain this summer, something I could not have afforded on my own. I don't work with billionaires, but sometimes with millionaires.
In the game, you encounter a series of challenging or intriguing clients. That's another aspect of this game compared to other CoG games: this is much more character focused than plot focused. I've heard some say it ends early; with a 500K wordcount, that's not really true. I did finish it in 3 hours or so, while I've had some CoG games take 10, but there are ones like Choice of Dragon that are finished in 30 minutes but don't feel like they end early. I think it's because the plot arc is fairly flat; there's not really a sense of continually rising drama with a dramatic climax; instead, there's a rolling succession of parallel character-focused subplots that each have their own rise and fall.
Going into more detail, rather than having dramatic overall events, we have things like examining in great detail the life of a trans billionaire who is uncomfortable with wealth; the life of a rich woman with a troublesome child; the life of fellow coworkers, bosses, etc. Much of the game is about reflecting on your views on them and life in general and on yourself and your feelings for them.
And reflecting is a key concept here in terms of other CoG games. The real big bestsellers tend to have actions have direct and dramatic consequences. Do you spare the life of the prisoner, or execute them? Do you take the evil crystal or smash it? On the other hand, a lot of the lower-selling games are reflective. Here's what you do: why do you do it? It's much more passive. This game is in between. You do get some pretty big choices, but a lot of things just happen to you and you reflect on how you feel about it.
This makes this game not really fit with the power fantasy that most Choice of Games fans look for. You're not stomping around destroying things. You're not constantly winning despite the odds. There are failures and takebacks (like a long sequence about a helicopter near the beginning) where you lose ground, something a lot of fans distinctly dislike.
But the games that do these things often win awards for writing, like Rent-a-Vice. Having the reflection, the failures, the character drama all are associated with games that have won awards. So if I had to predict anything about this game in the long run I'd wager that it will likely have middle-of-the-pack sales (definitely better than mine!) but be nominated for at least one writing award.
My particular narrative arc worked out well. I played a people pleaser who is mildly uncomfortable with the status quo but not enough to do anything about it. I ended up (Spoiler - click to show)becoming the CEO and marrying my coworker. I was interested enough to try another playthrough. I clicked through the first four chapters quickly trying to do bad. A lot of the early storyline was similar in the major plot points, although wildly different in the details (I somehow picked up an aunt I didn't have the first time). Later chapters were completely new material; in my first game I had several chapters about blackmail, while in my second I had a kind of international investigation storyline, which was very cool. Overall though I don't think it sells its branching very well; my first playthrough looked like I had hit up most major content, while the second was quite different. Signposting that more content exists is hard (more greyed out choices than we have here, chapter numbers with subletters, etc.).
I liked customization; I was able to refuse a drink and say it was because I was a latter-day saint, which I've never been able to do before.
Overall, this feels like a story about real people in real life situations. It feels like a biography more than a fantasy novel. I like to think of IF writers as opera composers and I've often thought of Emily Short as like Verdi, finding some similarities in their tones and settings. This is more like Beethoven though, with a clear aesthetic free of unnecessary clutter.
I don't think this will be a bestseller. But after having played more than 100 of these games, I think it's unique and high quality, and worth playing. I got really burnt out after playing them all and have started a few I never finished, but I played this all the way through in one setting, taking it to the library and reading it on my phone there, and even replayed it. I'm glad it was published; it would have been a terrible shame to leave this work incomplete and in storage.
A brief Twine game with a puzzle and a twist, July 28, 2023This Neo Twiny Jam game, written in 500 words or less, has you exploring your father's crypt after his death.
It seems he has built an enormous tomb, and under great secrecy. But you're determined to find out the truth.
The game has a puzzle or two, and did a good job incorporating exploration and mechanics. All of it was a bit slight; the 500 words was pulled thin, having to handle story, puzzles, etc. but all the pieces that are hear are either already good or promising.
Choose from a selection of beneficial wonders, July 28, 2023This game features in a more self-reflective way than a traditional narrative. It was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, and all of those words (save just a couple) are displayed on the page at once.
The self reflection is in choosing which words to keep. There are a dozen or so 'cards' with nice images, good backgrounds and fonts, etc. and they describe magical abilities and items like lucid dreaming or door portals.
It's a fun choice and written well, but there's no hidden depths. In a way it's the opposite of the author's other entry EVISCERATETHISGIRL.com, which is completely linear and nothing but hidden depths. Together they make an interesting study in contrasts.
Sisyphus myth, July 28, 2023This Twine game, written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam, is about Sisyphus.
I've seen a lot of revisionist takes on Sisyphus recently, but this one is a straight-up thoughtful interpretation of the original myth as-is.
The short 500 words get reused a ton as you go through many very similar loops. There is a gradual increase in knowledge, the loops changing.
I found that very effective. But the frequent use of yellow-on-white was a bit hard to read, and it got repetitive (which I know is the point, but an accurate representation of a frustrating thing is still frustrating).
Short story about a glitched out word doc, July 28, 2023This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.
It uses a UI similar to a google doc, and the best part of it to me was the way that it looked and the detail in the highlights and such.
The second best part was the overall writing, which painted a fun picture of having a mysterious officemate who you contact every day but don't know in person.
The worst part was not having enough of it; the premise was great, but it kind of just stopped, presumably when the author hit the word limit.
Cute rat simulator, July 28, 2023This short game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, has you play as a cute rat and to live out your days. You can eat, drink, play, etc.
There's not a ton of variation, so I was inclined to give it 3 stars, but it's sweet, especially the tribute in the credits, and in a way the way it just keeps going on (Spoiler - click to show)could be thought of as a way for Puck to always live on.
A Twine game where words must be preserved, July 28, 2023This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam competition.
It takes the limited word concept of the competition and works it into the game. You have died, but your soul only has 400 words left to say before they perish.
Unfortunately, Charon is a bit of a chatterbox, and you've got to cross the river.
This game was pretty entertaining. I only found 2/3 endings, though, although I tried a lot of stuff to find the third.
Solidly written game about love and prejudice, July 28, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It uses a mild amount of branching and a few other text techniques to tell the story of an Australian who immigrated from Jakarta. While the rest of the family is preoccupied with political unrest, the protagonist is interested in love.
While not long, it is well written and presents some interesting facets of life that I wasn't previously aware of, and it looks good while doing it.
Diverging creepy scenarios, July 27, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It has some excellent tech behind it with creepy music and an SMS-style interface.
It's a branching game with storylines that diverge wildly, each ending in a different reality. I played about 3 times.
I would have played more but the beginning is agonizing slow, seemingly in pursuits of mimesis. For a game meant to be replayed, an option to read at leisure may have been better. Each individual story I read was well-written, though.
A linear story with some strong twists, July 27, 2023This game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, takes a twist on multiple meanings of the word 'correspondence'.
Rather than using the word limit to ration small paragraphs into multiple branches, it unloads it all in one linear story.
There's a nice twist halfway through, which is executed well. But a lot of the phrasing in the letter felt very vague to me. I realize that they may have helped the twist, but I'm not sure. Overall had some strong moments.
Kind of like 'The Normal Elevator' from Roblox, but in text, July 27, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It has two segments. The first is a slow, timed text description of being at a party and leaving. It focuses on visceral details rather than overall storyline.
The second is a series of elevator stops, each presenting the reader with an image (which sometimes requires you to zoom out; I think enabling scrollbars on itch would fix that). You can choose to enter that level, or not.
I replayed twice, but no more, as the timed text was really very slow and all had to be repeated each time. But the atmosphere was effective and moody, which was nice.
Short battle negotiations with some timed text, July 25, 2023This is a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less.
This is a kind of a gauntlet-style game, where a wrong choice can end the game in an instant.
The concept is intriguing: negotiating with an invading force much stronger than yours, with your only options being death or appeasement.
But it's slight obnoxious to play, as it simultaneously types out text a little bit slowly and also urges you to click as fast as you can. Kind of like having an escort quest in a game where their speed doesn't match yours and you constantly have to go in spurts to keep up.
Unhappy vampires at the end, July 25, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
I like Vampire stories in general (original Dracula, Twilight series, VtM and its associated Choicescript Games, Interview with a Vampire when I was a kid). This game plays on the relationship between a vampire and her Creator, and their back and forth pain.
It was well written in general, but there was so much left unsaid. A lot of the descriptions are vague generalities that hit the right notes but might (for my personal taste, maybe not same as author) benefit from having a bit more specificity from time to time. I feel like this author must be good at writing dreams.
Cool spacefighting simulator, too hard for me, July 25, 2023This is a Neo Twiny Jam Game, written in 500 words or less.
This game has a nice setup. You have a variety of alien ships you can target, each with a varying amount of health and damage. Attacking them nets you scrap, with which you can buy upgrades.
It's a cool idea and has some fun backstory, and looks like you can unlock more as you go on. But I will not see those, because it is too hard for me, even on easy mode.
For me, the issue is that if you're hit even once by the enemy, the damage they do is almost exactly equal to what you can heal with the rewards. That means at best you get no upgrades and exist in stasis, and at worst you slowly get damaged each turn. Someone suggested doing easy mode and buying a bunch of drones, but those got vaporized in one hit when I tried going up against a harvester.
So if it's a 'there is no hope' simulator, it works well, although some kind of 'give up' ending would be nice. But as a battle simulator, for me it is not one I can imagine trying more at.
A touching poem in expandable format, July 25, 2023This poem was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.
It's written with a neat interactive structure with little triangle to expand or shrink the text, all nested within each other. Inside the nesting are some other types of links that manipulate the text in various ways.
The poem is a nostalgic one, talking about memories with a friend that have a different shade of emotion looking back.
Overall, it's well executed.
A blend of good old western life and unsettling humor, July 25, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
I played this game the day after Pioneer Day. This holiday is only really celebrated in Utah, where I don't live right now, but I celebrated it by telling stories about my pioneer ancestors to my kid. They journeyed west over the plains in the 1840's and 50's, and lived western lives, like being a coal miner in Nevada or running a farm in Utah.
Growing up in Utah, a state with a religious majority, we were required to learn Utah history every three years but religion was not allowed to be mentioned. So besides the occasional Native American history, we spent almost all of those years learning about Mountain Men like Jim Bridger.
So this game brought back a lot of thoughts. It's pretty short. You play as a kind of mountain man who lives through multiple stages of life, each with a varying amount of its own branches. Each life drives you further, inexorably west.
If this was just a straight-up western, I'd probably give 3 or 4 stars. But little bits of deadpan humor are slid in that really enhance it. Sometimes I had to read it twice before I realized how funny it was. And some of it is almost not humor but just an unsettling inconsistency, a literary uncanny valley.
Anyway, the game itself is quite small and I have a whole cloud of baggage attached to it so if someone reads this and plays it and thinks 'That was it?' yes, that was it, I just liked it.
Fascinating but confusing story about mechanical life, July 25, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It has little in the way of branching or complex mechanics and so relies entirely on its capacity for storytelling and the momentum provided by links.
The links work pretty well; a series of moral dilemmas in the middle and a nicely paced denouement at the end.
The writing is evocative, reminding me of all the old sci fi anthologies my dad had from Philip Dick and Isaac Asimov. However, the writing was very 'skirting around the edges', asking people to fill in the blanks, and I just couldn't fill them in very well. There are some clear and strongly hinted/described aspects, but I didn't see how they gelled together. (Edit: Like (Spoiler - click to show)the dramatic birth moment indicates a story of extreme drama and prowess; the moral choices just seem like a run of the mill utilitarian AI; and the finale indicates unimportance. All of these can exist in a self-contradictory story with no single interpretation, but there's a consistent negative viewpoint on the AI's interactions with humans that makes it difficult to imagine wildly different interpretations.
Micro twine story with a neat structure, July 25, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It has an unusual mechanism for telling the story. It is a page with just three short lines, with two cycling links. Clicking to the next page gives just a sentence. Very barebones...
Except each set of choices gives different results, building up a larger story and eventually providing some differences. Very neat way of utilizing the mini theme.
Accurate sports superstitions simulator, July 25, 2023This is a short game about 350 words, written for the Neo Twiny Jam.
It has two parts. In the first, you pick from several sports superstitions like food to eat or clothes to wear.
In the second, it tells you the results of several randomized playoff games. This is repeated over multiple years, although you can skip a bit if it takes too long.
The randomization is impressive. At first, though, I was not a fan of the interactivity, as there's not really any indicator that your superstitions do everything and my teams usually didn't win.
But then I reflected and realized that that's actually the real experience with superstitions. It doesn't matter if you wear dirty socks on game day. And in play-offs with 16 people, 15 will lose, so losing is a standard experience.
Micro game about neurodivergence and life, July 25, 2023This game was written for Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's a short game with a simple structure, with a binary decision, each result being followed by a binary decision.
The writing is emotional, a metaphor for some form of neurodivergence (depression? anxiety?) as a beast. It takes events from normal life and makes an allegorical version in another reality.
It's well written, but the different endings felt a bit disparate, and perhaps could have been tied together more.
Good art/writing but not much there, July 25, 2023This game was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less.
It has a series of encounters on board a space ship, each with custom art.
The individual paragraphs are well-written and the art is pretty good. Just not much happens, though. Of the encounters, only a couple seem to affect later ones, and there's not really any kind of overarching plot. There is a link to another, bigger game (one I've played before and is actually pretty good). So I think as an ad for the bigger game, this works, but I didn't feel especially strongly about this smaller one.
Bittersweet cat story, July 20, 2023This game, written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam, is about a lost one who still thinks about home.
It can be read in many ways. It becomes apparent (and is in the cover art) that this is about a cat, but the sentiments can apply to a lot of other life relationships.
It goes through month by month, detailing the change, the hard variations between hoping for a return and mourning a loss.
I found it a sweet tale.
Dream looping simulator, July 20, 2023This game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, describes the experience of looping dreams, trying to wake up.
It's a simple concept but executed well. Everyone knows (well, at least people that don't have issues impacting their dreams) that feeling of thinking you've already waked up and then realizing it's not true.
The game branches a lot, at first appearing like a time cave structure, but it's slightly more complex than that, which I thought was cool.
Three birthdays, one mother, July 20, 2023This game is a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less.
It is a triptych of vignettes, each about a different birthday, each about interactions with a mother.
It uses both changes in artwork and changes in interactivity to signal the transition between the birthdays. I don't know if it is intentional, but I liked how (Spoiler - click to show)you started with few options to interact with mom, grew to have more, but ended up having no choices.
I thought this game was sadly sweet, and I'm glad I played it.
A grim tale told in Ink, July 20, 2023This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam, using Ink.
It is brief and linear, but told with appropriate dualities. The design is stark white and black; the game is in either French or English; and love and marriage are contrasted with bitterness and funeral.
The story is of two men, wedded, who fight fiercely. Their story is told in reverse, from the end of the marriage to the beginning.
I imagined the envelope at the beginning to be divorce papers; I remember for my own when it became real enough to have papers to sign. That was quite the day! Overall, despite its simple structure, the strong storytelling shines.
Anxiety vs cat, July 20, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words for less.
It uses some creative styling with black and white geometric figures (although it did overlap the text a bit on my laptop screen).
It presents three visions of anxiety: worry about the future, worry that the present is slipping by, and ruminations on the past.
Each is countered by a cat, though, which is sweet. There wasn't any wrapping-up at the end that I found, just three separate paths. Maybe there was one additional passage before looping, but it was hard to tell.
A beautiful musing on self-concept and family, July 20, 2023This poem was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It is written using a variety of visual techniques, including spacing the poem very carefully using columns, lines, tabs, and spaces, and changing colors for both links and backgrounds, as well as hover.
The poem muses on the author's perception of the self; trying to understand why they look so different than others, which features that don't match the standard of beauty. They look to a distant parent, an 'other', unknown, who gave them these features, and contemplate what seeing their similarities would be like.
I definitely know how this feels! I too have been startled when looking in the mirror, realizing that I don't really look like people in the shows I've been watching or (now that college is a distant memory) realizing I don't look like the 18 yr old I imagine myself to be.
But like the author (except I don't need to imagine), connecting with family really helps. I have a big, bulbous nose that is very distinct. But in family pictures, you can trace the exact nose back to my dad, his mom, and her mom, passed on from generation to generation. When I see that, I'm proud, and I'm glad of this game for reminding me.
Beautiful text styling with a kind of parser like structure, July 20, 2023This game has an amazing concept with a few snags here or there.
It was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
You are a witch facing execution for the death of a boy. Your throat has been cut, but you are able to piece together words from those spoken by others in a form of mimicry.
These words are shown as golden, shinging letters floating in a void. Selecting them is simple, and it looks very nice.
The difficulty is the interaction; you can form sentences from words (and later words from letters) but there are so many possible orders and combinations (I think 1000 or so combos are available on one page) that it can be hard to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Definitely one of the most visually nice games I've seen in a while, would love to make my games look this nice (especially for a title screen or something).
Literally what it says on the tin, July 20, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
However, it contains a great deal of graphics and sound, making it a longer experience than its word count might as first suggest.
It's exactly what it states; you play as a character who keeps visiting a website called evisceratethisgirl.com where you make an avatar of yourself and then stab it.
The idea is to communicate self-hatred, loathing and despair. The graphics continually get more glitchy and dark.
For me, the narrative emotion arc was a bit off. It starts off grotesquely and with distorted visuals right off the bat. There's not much chance to identify with the protagonist because they're immediately displayed as an unusually messed up person. So when things progress, it doesn't feel like it's happening to me. Similarly, the graphics start out shocking and weird, so there's not much room for it to grow. But this is subjective and another person might have the opposite reaction.
Brief Binksi game about a kind stranger, July 20, 2023This game is a Binksi game, which uses minimal pixel art and animations to create an environment for narrative storytelling.
The story told here is about a shut-in whose depression is keeping them from finding enjoyment in any of their previous activities.
But then checking the mail reveals numerous messages from an anonymous penpal. The sustained communication from a stranger provides some solace.
I've seen this effect before in real life; I've definitely benefited from regular contact with people I don't even know that well. So I liked that part. Some of the story really stretched suspension of disbelief though; I wonder if simulating a longer time period might have worked better, even without additional words (like having it get dark and light again each time you get a letter).
A grab bag of different outcomes for a rhyming Spartacus, July 20, 2023This game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, is a bunch of short rhyming stories interconnected by having names of heroes that rhyme with 'Spartacus'. Like 'Farticus' or 'Articus'.
It's a branching story, where you pick one of the heroes then select an option or two in their path, usually getting a poem out of it.
Each page of the poem/story/game has some ai-generated art in it to serve as a backdrop.
The rhyming is entertaining, but there are so many different directions here it doesn't really feel cohesive, either in design, storyline, or emotion.
A little exploration of different baseball seasons, July 18, 2023This short game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam was written in 500 words or less.
In it, you have to choose how your chosen baseball team progresses through the different parts of the baseball year.
It ends up having a little math puzzle in it, which is always fun, and it doesn't take too long to play. I mostly like it for the combinatorics.
A complex text describing an interaction between old and young, July 18, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less. It's a linear narrative that is taken from an RPG setting or campaign that the author participates in.
The writing is very complex. I had to stop and reread it multiple times to understand what is going on. Even the number of people in the scene was unclear until the second or third playthrough. Allusions are made to many things that are not explained or are unclear. All of this combines to make a rich text that rewards patient exploration. The most interesting part to me was the idea of the time of birth in the day influencing expectations for or names of children.
A brief story written as a conversation, July 18, 2023This is a story about a celebrity encounter, written in the Neo Twiny Jam in under 500 words.
In it, you play as a participant in a conversation with a friend who just met a celebrity that knew them in a store and was given an expensive, fancy present.
The main appeal here (to me) is the friend dynamic, the combination of disinterest, jealousy, and support shown by the main character.
There is a feature that crosses off links if they go to a page you've been before (I thought it was just if you've clicked on the link before, but Manon pointed out it's for if you visited a page before). This is a bit weird for the final choice, but otherwise works well. Nice work overall.
Acquire milk in multiple ways, July 18, 2023This is a brief game written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less featuring some cute images of anthropomorphic animals.
In it your character must get milk, but there are obstacles to this, like dealing with rain, multiple choices at the store, and interacting with the cashier. A lot of the PCs reactions reminded me of an autistic student I once had, so I wonder if there are autistic themes here.
Overall, the game is well put together, but the stakes never felt very high for a game prominently featuring stress, and some delayed text made replay a little bit harder.
A brief, meaningful tale of what remains , July 18, 2023This game made me think, in a very unintended but positive way, of a whale fall.
This was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less. In it, a character name Jacob dies, fallen from the Ceiling (a literal ceiling? the top half of Midgar in FFVII? heaven?).
When they died, their bones, flesh, and blood were used for various purposes, detailed in the story.
The writing here is excellent and the story and imagery are rich. I didn't feel a need to replay this or revisit it in the future, though.
An exchange of names...or not?, July 18, 2023This entry in the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less, concerns an encounter with a mysterious spidery being in the forest.
This is a fae-like tale, which a creature asking for your name whose motives may not be everything you think they are...
This is honestly a pretty good setup and mostly good execution, but the limitations of the wordcount bind this story and it ends long before the narrative energy has been expended. A less weighty tale or longer matter might make this stronger.
Amusing barbarian RPG written in Twine, July 18, 2023In the original Twiny Jam, some of my favorite games were ones that used the 300 word count limit to make tiny RPGs.
This game, in the Neo Twiny Jam that has been updated to 500 words, uses a similar concept, but with a barbarian twist. You are a wild axe wielding warrior exploring a small dungeon. There's a bit of a money system, combat, traps, and surprises.
I played through till one ending.
The game is definitely funny and I think I could recommend it. It's pretty short, so you won't lose much by playing it.
Game boy aesthetic evolution game, July 18, 2023This game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, is made in the style of an old game boy game.
Just like other monster raising games, you start with an egg which you can pet or feed, and your monster evolves from there.
By using graphics and understood mechanics, the author is able to create a lot of game out of the small number of words. The visuals and effects are really beautiful and I loved my ending. I played through twice, ending up with Bast the second time, which I felt satisfied with, and stopped playing there.
A short game about getting advice in high school, July 18, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam, with 500 words or less.
It's a take on the short story A Diamond Necklace, which I only learned from Manon's review.
In it, an older student takes you in and gives you a great deal of advice (you can get 20 or more pieces of advice, it feels like). Then you meet them again later, much later, and have the chance to thank them...
The language and wording are unusual. Many of Andrew Schult'z games are based on wordplay and are intentionally written in weird ways to satisfy word patterns. This one sounds a lot like those texts but I don't see any discernible pattern, outside of some 1984 speech.
Reading the short story it's based on helped me understand it a lot more!
Creepy/nostalgic abandoned mall story, July 18, 2023This was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
Abandoned/liminal/nostalgic media has been oversaturated this decade, but this game nails it pretty well and feels fresh. It uses creepy audio to establish the feeling, and it hits the right ratio of wholesome to unsettling that makes for a truly good horror piece.
Short and sweet. Interactivity is slight but used to good effect.
A surreal experience with romanian, July 18, 2023This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.
In a refreshing twist from the primarily (though not entirely) English games of the jam, this game is bilingual, with some Romanian first translated literally and then idiomatically (I assume that's what's going on; if not, it has the feel of that).
The first page had me captivated for a bit, puzzling over the different meanings and words and trying to understand the final message.
Then it was all soon over; another page, and then an ending. I definitely wanted more of it, but it seemed creepy, mysterious, and effective.
Very brief simulation of some private messaging, July 18, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam using 500 words or less.
Someone logs onto a group chat and demands an explanation about a solar panel. It could just be a friendly group of people with nearby cabins, or a post-apocalyptic group, or just some rural people. It's hard to tell.
It's pretty funny though. There's some mild swearing, but overall I laughed out loud multiple times at this, and I haven't done that at a game for quite a while.
A choicescript game about waiting and love, July 18, 2023This game is written for the Neo Twiny Jam, requiring 500 words or less. And it uses the Choicescript engine, which is a bold choice, as choicescript is suited towards very verbose games (there are several choicescript games with over a million words of text!).
However, this uses its text wisely, with a longish loop. The words in the game evoke desperate waiting and loneliness for another. The patient lover, the waiter, who is faithful and won't abandon their love. But when the loop ends...
The tone varies a bit, seeming almost modern at first, then heavily antiquated, then more like 1800s speech. Each style is well done, but perhaps could be consolidated into one? Overall strong writing.
Covid lockdown loop, July 18, 2023This game, written for the Neo Twiny Game Jam, which requires 500 words or less, rubbed me the wrong way at first, with some capitalization errors and using default Twine format.
But I honestly like loops, and I enjoyed the earnestness of this one. I loved clicking on these burning questions like 'Who did this?' and immediately getting an effects-heavy response like (Spoiler - click to show)ME, THE CREATOR. It was honestly fun. The loop had a few interesting variations, as well.
A brief preliminary to a greater story, July 18, 2023This short game, entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, serves as a brief introduction to a greater story.
It has an interesting mix; a dangerous location, a mysterious facility, weird beetles, and a connection with someone you're desperate to find.
All of these blend together well, and the setup looks nice. If it were to continue, I could imagine it being a powerful story. As it is, in < 500 words, it only manages to give the beginning of the prologue.
Brief cannibalistic love simulator, July 18, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam, where entries need to have 500 words or less.
This game is about cannibalistic love. Or hate, you get to choose. You and another, someone who was close to you, or dying on an icy plain. They go first, with leaves you with one option:
to eat.
The game's tone varies from darkly morbid to the chant of 'hungry hungry hungry', and one path provide more effective psychological moments at the end than the other.
An interesting concept buried in the code, July 18, 2023This game has you allocate 100 units of something into 6 different boxes, then makes a poem based on it.
It's a small game (written for the Neo Twiny Jam, which requires 500 words or less). But it just doesn't make much sense; after making a poem, which is you extracting sense from the universe, it 'extracts sense from you' and gives you a number.
Nothing really changes from this.
Well, I wanted to 'extract some meaning' from this, so I downloaded the zip file and looked through it.
Under the hood, it's doing some fun information theory type stuff. Really convoluted things like taking the average of all your past choices and looking at 2-log of the ratios of the differences of you etc. etc. etc. to represent the information the universe gets from your thing.
None of this comes across in the game. Complexity that players never see is the exact some as simple code that the player never sees. The experience is everything!
Solid game with an abrupt ending, July 18, 2023This game is written for the Neo Twiny Jam, made for games written in 500 words or less.
It presents the story of someone who always felt like a boy, even though his mother felt otherwise. It presents a general feeling of malaise, before transition, a feeling that you could never be yourself, and the difficulties of living with unsupportive people.
This story is well-written and has some nice effects. There aren't too many choices, and then suddenly...the game ends very abruptly. It makes sense, and I think the whole game was designed around this moment, but it was intriguing enough that I think more could have been better.
An exploration of alcohol as a monster, July 18, 2023This Neo Twiny Jam game explicitly describes alcohol as a monster that haunts you, your father and his father before him.
The jam conditions require this to fit into 500 words or less, and it does this in part by having choices that more reflect your personal feeling rather than branching the story, and that works well.
The portrayal of alcohol as a monster is a good concept but I feel like this doesn't really add anything to that idea that hasn't been done before. The monster exists, whispers darkly to you, is resisted by love. I think old ideas can work very well without needing to switch them up, but it works best if there is a strong underlying story to graft on to rather than existing alone.
A short story about dueling powers, July 18, 2023This is a Neo Twiny Jam game, written in 500 words or less.
In it, you take the role of one of two primordial powers, meeting endlessly to discuss your opposing roles. It's also a love story.
In a cycle that never ends, what is the point? Do you succumb to despair, or try to change?
I was a bit lost in the first couple of paragraphs, and re-read them 3 times to try to focus, but after that it all clicked and was enjoyable to read.
A relatable poem about drifting apart, July 17, 2023This game was written as part of the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less.
It's a poem, and it's well-crafted, both in its words and meaning, but also in its design; I enjoyed one segment where each line was just a bit longer than those before, forming a pyramid.
It's about a couple drifting apart. One person, the narrator, is always trying, always eager to please, while the other always seems to drift away, no matter how much the narrator tries.
I found this game especially meaningful as something similar to the narrator happened to me during my divorce. I had mentioned (Spoiler - click to show)that we would be having our 10 year anniversary soon and my ex realized that she had spent almost (Spoiler - click to show)a decade of life together, and it was frightening. We ended up being divorced at (Spoiler - click to show)8 and a half.
The folly of Icarus, July 17, 2023This is a pretty solid representation of the myth of Icarus. You play as the fated child, ready for your first flight, but with a mocking crow observing you.
This game is written for the Neo Twiny Jam, with <500 words, so there's not a ton of story, but the author manages to make it feel both long and meaningful by having series of pages with many links of which you can only click one. There's no going back, contributing to the feel of falling.
The contrast between the main text and the 'inevitable' text felt a bit off to me in a way that's hard to express. But I liked the overall effect of this and enjoyed the mythology references.
An expandable essay, July 17, 2023This game is an essay in an expendable format, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
It's an edgy tale, with theme of black, red and white and displayed over a background of what looks like abstract art of muscle cells.
It is one static paragraph with numerous links that expand into their own page, giving it the feel of a children's book with little openable paper windows giving more details. I like this technique and would enjoy seeing i more for short works.
It's about self-harm, and a very different take than Gavin Inglis's game Hana Feels, which was an educational game designed to inspire sympathy. This game explicitly rejects sympathy; to the author, self-harm varies between amusing and matter of fact. It's not meant to be something sad.
The game has a very focused narrative and tone. The narrator wants zero credit or sympathy for both self-harming and stopping self-harming, so in accord with their wish, I will afford them none, but for other readers in similar situations, I do have sympathy for you.
Very brief story about a dinosaur nightmare, July 17, 2023This game was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, written with 500 words or less.
This is just a big text dump; two choices, both leading to a solid wall-of-text paragraph.
The story is disjointed, about a dream about a skinned dilophasaurus. This is the second game by the author I read, and I far prefer the other one. This one just doesn't have enough substance to support itself.
Simple but effective goldfish simulator, July 17, 2023This game manages to fit a lot into its 500 words, written for the Neo Twiny Jam.
You play as a goldfish in your little world, a 29 gallon tank. There isn't much to do, but even your small routines take up the whole day, and soon you're sleeping, ready for more.
I found some nice little surprises, the tone varying from amiable to disturbing to contemplative. Does our goldfish dream of a higher realm, or is it merely troubled by thoughts of other possibilities?
A short twine game about rescue and robot , July 17, 2023This game was written for Neo Twiny Jam, in 500 words or less.
In it, you play as a young captain, alienated from your father and crash landing on a planet. Your sarcastic droid gives you comfort in these last times.
This has some great setup but kind of felt unsatisfying at the two ends, for me. The narrative arc felt like it hadn't reached the climax and so hit the ending running. Maybe a paragraph or two of further narration could help, but that would run into the word limit. Overall these characters could work well in other works.
Autism/alien analogy in Twine, July 17, 2023This is a short game in Twine written in less than 500 words. In it, you play as an alien who has, with other aliens, infiltrated earth, trying to impersonate humans but often failing.
In the author's notes, this story is framed as an analogy to autism, specifically the difficulty in determining what is normal for human behavior.
This is a good idea and has some authenticity in it that lends it strength, but it's a little messy the way it's been put together. The UI is garish, with clashing colors and random icons that don't do much but make a field of blinking eyes, making things confusing to navigate. It may be intentional to express the confusion of autism, but an accurate simulator of a frustrating experience is, itself frustrating. The story seems to be three or four different stories, as it's hard to tell if this is an omniscient narrator infodumping, a person thinking alone, or a party; it hops back and forth disconcertingly.
Some solid ideas here, but their current presentation is confusing for me.
A drunken tirade, July 17, 2023This game is sadly somewhat realistic. It's a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less.
The game is simple in concept. Audio indicates that a door is opening, then a conversation ensues.
This is essentially someone drunk who is tearing down their partner, trying to ruin everything they had together in a tirade.
It's hurtful, but brief. It could fit in to many relationships, not really bearing either a unique individuality or a universal applicability.
A toxic protagonist on the verge of losing it all, July 17, 2023This game uses a simulation of texting. There is some delay between texts, but it is mild and the game is short (< 500 words).
In it you play as a classic example of a toxic person in a relationship. Silent treatment, blaming others, pushing others to invest in fantasies you never intend to complete, ignoring people until they're leaving and love bombing them.
It's kind of twisted to see things from the abusive person's viewpoint, but the game does a good job of being authentic to the style of thinking.
Fan game of a newer cartoonish shooter, July 17, 2023I haven't played Friends vs Friends, the shooter/deckbuilding game this is fanfic of, but I looked up some images of it and it seems pretty fun.
This game is in binksi, and is controlled by the arrow keys to select different text options.
There are some cool graphics and text, and you have a conversation between friends at a diner.
Everything seems set up pretty nice, but I feel like there's a slight lack of nuance. Facial expressions don't change much, conversations lack a lot of details and feel like they could fit in almost anywhere, etc. So everything's high quality, but I could have seen it having more uniqueness.
Twine game with parser-like functionality and shocking conclusion, July 17, 2023I tried this game in French at first but didn't know some words (like damier) so I switched to English.
This is a Neo Twiny Jam game, a game written in 500 words or less. It uses a parser-like functionality in that you give commands by clicking on links, with your list of commands expanding over time.
It took me just a few moments to figure out what was going on, but that grew into a mix of amusement and horror. Trying my options, I thought I had failed, but trying more and more my interest grew, especially as I had just been listening to season 3 of the Magnus Archives, episode 83, which is strongly relevant.
I got a bit annoyed by timed text on replay but it makes sense for the setup here. Very well done.
Pitch a difficult project to investors, July 17, 2023In this brief Twine game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, you play as an inventor who is pitching their project, Sprinklepills!
The game is pretty short, with only an option or two, but presents a whole story from start to finish in a way many of the other jam entries fail to do.
I liked that the story could be read a few different ways; as stoic heroicism in the face of doubt (like The Pursuit of Happyness), as a goofball story of a whacky inventor, or as a deluded individual.
Overall, there's nothing wrong with this story, but I feel like it has a lot of features that could be dialed up. There's some good writing, but it has the potential for being great; the plot is interesting, but could be engaging, etc. So I look forward to future works from this author, but feel like this won't be their greatest work.
Pain and escapism as a child, July 17, 2023I've heard of the name Cressida St. Claire before although I'm not exactly sure where. I guess it makes sense, since this story is written well, but I think this is the first game of theirs that I've played.
It's a brief tale, written for the Neo Twiny Jam. It deals with a child who ponders the constellations they cannot see while waiting for a mother to visit who brings pain.
It's hard to read, because it represents a harsh reality for so many people. Especially the idea that no matter what you do, your abuser will consider something that you did as wrong, anything to justify the treatment. Overall descriptive writing.
Just a crumb of a clever game, July 17, 2023This game seemed almost intimidating at first, like a puzzle box unfolding.
You are outside a palace on a gondola, intent on breaking in. As you explore links, more and more of the text unfolds, allowing additional links, additional interactions.
Once I solved the first big puzzle, the game ended. This, then, is just a prelude, cut short to fit into the Neo Twiny Jam.
This seems like it will be truly great, but for now is quite short.
Deep fear and driving, July 17, 2023This is a well-put-together twine game for the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less.
In it, you play as someone who seems to have a crushing fear of injuring someone while driving. I understand this fear for sure; I'm a mediocre driver and zone out a lot, and have had close calls in the past, like almost getting sideswiped by a semi truck when I was in its blind spot.
This driver's fears are expressed through oblique references and through the use of color and a few other graphical techniques.
The game itself is tense, but the background is hard to define. Parental trauma lingers in the background, but there's something else going on that's hard to define and is left unsaid. Interesting game.
Powerful and evocative imagery: friendship and loss, July 17, 2023This Twine game entered in the Neo Twiny Jam is, like the others, under 500 words.
It uses a pleasing text effect where hovering over underlined words brings up a box with clarification, like words muttered under the breath or mental comments reviewing your own previous thoughts.
I at first thought this was just going to be some edgy stoner thing (as it starts with you passing a joint back and forth with a friend) but it's a lot more meaningful, with a deep science conversation about the sun and a link between that and the situation going on around you that is full of implication but not brought into the open.
The ending is powerful in its own way, but it didn't completely land for me, as I felt like it was slightly disconnected from the rest of the game. Kind of like a differentiable piecewise function that has a discontinuous second derivative; the transition is fairly smooth at the break point but something feels slightly off. But the writing is great, some of the best I've seen in the jam so far.
Touching words in poem form about grief, July 17, 2023This is a short poem entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, coming in at slightly less than 400 words.
It is a poem of consisting of short, staccato sentences of roughly equal size, some using text effects such as blur or cycling links. It covers brother who is not there, a brother who the parents refuse or are unable to see.
It has several possible interpretations, between loss, a change in self-identity, or something sinister.
There are few choices, if any, but the links there are help to guide your own pace through the poem and split it up in good spots, so the interactivity worked for me.
A descriptive and plaintive monologue by a dying vampire, July 17, 2023This game has you, an ancient (I think) and powerful vampire, trapped on a roof, dying as morning breaks.
The author does a good job of evoking feeling. There is some minimal use of quickly timed text, which felt appropriate for the story. The character is portrayed with nuance, both bombastic and arrogant but also stoic and resigned.
There is some appropriate music setting the stage. It was brief, as intended for a Neo Twiny Jam game.
Very relatable story about depression and difficulties of birth of a child, July 17, 2023I identified with this a lot. It's a story about the agonies of feelings of inadequacy after childbirth. I remember that feeling after my son was born and knowing that every second of the rest of my life (at least for a decade or two) somebody had to be watching and taking care of him. I remember panicking when some numeric milestone wasn't reached like weight and I remember the first time he had a serious injury. The protagonist is hit even harder, though, as there seems to be very strong post-partum depression and/or anxiety, so it must be a truly rough experience. The author clearly loves the child but that doesn't make it easier; if you didn't love, didn't care, then things would be great, because you wouldn't have to stress about the kid. It's the love that allows the anxiety to take hold, which adds to the guilt. So it's all very relatable.
A poetic and haunting dance by a puppet, July 17, 2023This Neo Twiny Jam game reminded me of the Magnus Archives in a good way.
You are a puppet made of the shell of a cyperus (which I think is a tigernut? after looking it up). You are forced to dance and dance, but unlike the other puppets, it brings you no joy.
This is framed in the art for the game as a trans story, which it makes sense as, but it also could extend to many things where the reader differs from others around them.
Overall, I found the writing evocative and poetic, which pulled the whole thing together for me.
A discussion about the title, July 17, 2023This is a short game entered into the Neo Twiny Jam, made for games with 500 words or less.
This game features a creepy situation, where one of your classmates admits they constantly want to grope another classmate. In a twist, the would-be groper turns out to be (Spoiler - click to show)a girl. So I guess the moral of the story is that creepiness is not limited in its scope, but all can be disturbing and/or put on watchlists.
Heartbreak in a half-K words, July 17, 2023This game is entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, having less than 500 words.
It's an interesting game, a sequel to an idle game called Literally Watch Paint Dry that I'm in the middle of playing as I write this. It has some interesting plot twists about friends saying cruel things.
This game is split into two branches, one with a friend that is pretty kind; this branch is fairly bland. The other is with a 'friend' who hasn't been there for you since transitioning. This one is more poignant.
Overall, I feel the game made sense without knowledge of the idle game prequel. But both branches felt like they could use a little more 'seasoning', some more uniqueness in either phrasing or plot.
Clever concept but a bit confusing, July 17, 2023This is a well-made Twine game written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam
Rather than attempting to fit a grand structure into that small space, the author has created a linear narrative that is frankly very amusing.
This linear narrative is enhanced by many little animated doodads which react to hovering or clicking. These are pretty cool, but they all seem to advance the story the same as each other; I think. That's the thing, I couldn't tell if they were different branches, little side effects that returned to the main thing, etc. So I liked the overall idea, but my brain didn't comprehend well.
A cute micro story with multiple endings; game about a bird, July 17, 2023There's something about a minimal twine or parser game about a cheeky bird that makes for a great story. There have been quite a few in recent years (like Free Bird or The Familiar or Among the Seasons), and this one is a great addition.
It's in a scrollable format, each choice you make adding to each another in a chain, reminiscent of Inklewriter. The words are minimal, which makes sense as it's entered in a jam for games with < 500 words. It uses this minimality to add 8 different endings, mostly in a branching time cave-type format.
Cute text styling and mild animations/timed effects add a lot of character. Very fun.
A brief emotional goodbye amidst the flames, July 17, 2023This is an entry in the Neo Twiny Jam, written in less than 500 words.
Rather than focusing on significant branching or mechanics, this story paints a picture of two cursed lovers perishing in the flames.
It has some mild worldbuilding and instead focuses on emotion. I felt like the overall story and vibe worked better than some of the individual phrasing. The characters seemed at a distance from each other, having slow, tender conversations while in a situation that would make speech quite difficult. But I think this author is one I'd like to read more of in the future.
A t-rex/tiger hybrid questions existence, July 17, 2023This is a brief Twine game written for the Neo Twiny Jam.
It features an illustration of a t-rex/tiger hybrid called Baron Magmawalker who questions their existence.
The very concept is, in fact, deeply cool. However, this game seems to want to go into four different directions and doesn't manage to get far in any. It's an origin story mixed with an exploration of personal depths mixed with an Aesop's fable mixed with the prologue to an epic quest. I feel like it could do with a bit more focus or a bit more time.
A short but luxurious and desperate dream of love, July 17, 2023This is a short game, less than 500 words, entered into the Neo Twiny Jam.
In it, you recreate a dream of the author where you meet a beautiful individual whom you can try to be with over and over again.
The game is brief, but it satisfies my 5 main criteria for games:
+Polish: I saw no bugs or typos. The lush color scheme and music complemented the story and setting well.
+Descriptiveness: Every word felt like it had a purpose.
+Interactivity: I had the impression of control at first, and when I didn't it felt like it fit the theme.
+Emotional impact: I totally understood where it was coming from, especially as a dream.
+Would I play again or recommend? I did play a couple of times.
Brief but vivid tale of a vampire on the hunt, July 16, 2023This is one of the better Neo Twiny Jam games I played. You play as what seems to be a vampire at a coffeeshop, contemplating your latest prey.
It has customized styling and background music. The words are well-suited to the length of the piece, eager and fast, like they're racing through the protagonist's brain.
It is violent (I could do without the reference to (Spoiler - click to show)popping eyeballs), but it fits in with the theme and the imagery. Overall, this is wrapped into a nice, concise package with consistent tone and strong emotion.
The brief story of a trans fairy, July 16, 2023This Neo Twiny Jam game, written in 500 words or less, is the story of a young fairy that is trans.
The balance here is interesting. There are a lot of games and stories out there about being trans, and even more that are allegories for being trans. Some of these are incredibly effective, while others can be confusing.
This one overall has a lot of authenticity but can be confusing at times as it mixes between the explicitly trans nature of the character and the fantastical allegory for it as a fairy who doesn't feel like a fairy. It felt like the same dialogue twice, once at a whisper and once as a shout, and I wonder if it could have been stronger to structure it in some different way.
The beginning of something great, July 16, 2023Unlike other Neo Twiny Jam games I've played, this one is openly unfinished a taste of a later game to come.
Therefore, it just stops in its tracks, a less satisfying resolution than a full story.
But it holds out promise for a greater game. There is already tension here; you are a young noble, unhappy with your parents, and bound to marry a prince you do not love, while other potential romantic partners are in the air.
Looks like it could be great when finished, but the current amount is just a dip in the water.
Two different takes on curing viruses, July 16, 2023This game was pretty cool; I replayed it about 4 or 5 times.
It's a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less. But in this case that's distributed to two separate games: one about curing a biological virus, and one a technological.
The biological one is basically just a branching tree. But the computer one had a few fun parts, including exposing its own code in a clever way and having a text-entry puzzle that was complex enough to be fun.
Splitting up the text into two games may have been a mistake, though, as each part is almost painfully brief in terms of both descriptiveness and gameplay.
Brief fantasy horror game with high production values, July 16, 2023This game was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, which restricts text to 500 words or less total.
This makes it hard to make a big, polished game. But this author managed to achieve that with background music, complex UI, fancy fonts and styling, etc.
There's not much time to tell a big story here, given the word limit, but there's a lot of world building that paints a bigger picture.
This is pretty good and I'd give it 4 stars, but I think that there's something missing from the story that ought to be there and I can't put my finger on it. I'd like to say it's more emotional complexness or a surprise or something, but I can't say exactly what it is. Very good, though.
The finale of a trio of tiny games, July 16, 2023This is the final game in the series, and while it doesn't pull out too many surprises compared to the first two, it's a fitting conclusion.
Like the others, you put in a couple of names and choose between two worlds. This is a bit surprising, as the main character of the last two games (Spoiler - click to show)died, but it makes more sense as you play.
I enjoyed the small trio of games. It was perhaps a bit overwrought at times, but it works with the styling.
A tale of two people and two worlds, July 16, 2023Like the previous game in the series, this is a very brief twine game that allows you to enter names for you and a loved one, and then cycles between two options, each comparing different worlds.
I always liked 'two world' stories from a young age (I think light world/dark world in Zelda is what got me into it). This is short, but I like seeing the contrasts.
A love letter with brief interactivity, July 16, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny jam, in 500 words or less. It is part of a series of 3.
The interactivity at first appears intentionally minimal, with the option to enter two names at the beginning and the option to toggle between two variations in a cycling word.
But as I went to write this review, I realized that that cycling word changes much of the rest of the story. It's clever and subtle; the piece is still slight, and must be so to fit into the confines of the jam, but I enjoyed this large-scale choice.
A sexual game in the form of poetry, July 16, 2023This game is essentially a love poem about a couple, describing their sexual experiences.
It is written in less than 500 words, and interaction occurs in two ways: clicking arrows back and forth, and mousing over text which expands the legible text.
The wording is poetic, and the UI is well-done and artistic. The game had content warnings, which I should have heeded, as it was much more explicit than most games with similar content warnings.
The beginning of some fun games, July 16, 2023This set of 4 games was a special entry to the 2023 Spring Thing consisting of games written by a teacher and students for their own mini-Spring Thing.
Each game has the theme of Mirror, and I enjoyed seeing how that theme played out. In one, it was an incidental but crucial part of a real-life story; in others, it represented portals; in another, the device used to play the game.
Each game had some imaginative thought, but each could be significantly developed. Many stopped early, only partway through a story; all had a little bit of typos to be cleaned up; many had difficulty figuring out how to branch effectively (like offering choices but some choices are 'fake' and say 'you have to try the other choice'). The biggest thing they all need is time; however, for a school assignment, it is difficult to find such time. But I could see all of them making complex or richly descriptive games in the future.
A chill search for the Lost Ark in a forest, July 15, 2023This game is an Inform/PunyInform game that centers around you, a young priest, receiving a charge to search for the Ark of the Covenant that had been entrusted to your local church for generations and hidden in times of war.
+Polish: Like most Garry Francis games, this is smooth and polished. Many interactions have been anticipated and coded for.
+Descriptiveness: The text is straightforward but detailed. Locations are described both by form and function, with nice little details thrown in about the history you have with things.
+Interactivity: Puzzles were set up in a way that I could form hypotheses and strategize and carry out my plans with just enough difficulty.
-Emotional impact: This game combines two very weighty topics ((Spoiler - click to show)the ark of the covenant and vampires) and treats them in a pretty matter-of-fact way. Dramatic actions like (Spoiler - click to show)unearthing the corpse of a beloved friend and (Spoiler - click to show)burning a vampire to ash are given the same treatment as unlocking doors and climbing ladders.
+Would I play again or recommend? Yes, I think people will like this.
A short, sweet Adventuron story about a mountain race and friendship, July 14, 2023This is an Adventuron game with a forward impetus: no UNDO, no going backwards on the map, only forward, often with a choice or two on how to do so.
The focus is a lot on your companion, a friend you've done many mountain races with who is not feeling as strong as before.
+Polish: The story is well-polished, free from bugs and typos as far as I could see, and responsive to commands.
+Interactivity: The inability to go back or UNDO is annoying in a puzzle game but thematically appropriate for a game about the march of time in our own lives. Good coupling of puzzle with theme.
+Descriptiveness: The locations and people were described in a way that I could easily picture it all in my mind. The changes in the weather and the passage of time were evocative.
+Emotional impact: It made me think of important events in my own life, like a funeral I attended yesterday where I didn't know the person who died but I did know some of their friends.
+Would I play again? Maybe, after a long time, but I think one time is best for now. But I would recommend it to others.
A 'one letter' parser game with some tricky puzzles, July 14, 2023This game was kind of a rollercoaster experience for me.
I started it up, and it looked like a simple tutorial adventure, like a TALJ game intended to be succinct.
But I soon found that I couldn't type, as it looked like it was auto-completing everything I typed, and into weird things.
So I tried experimenting a while but just didn't get it. I saw that ? gave instructions, so I tried typing that.
It turns out that different keyboard keys are mapped to whole actions, and typing that key will give that action. It's not quadratic in complexity, it's linear (1 key 1 action, no nouns as they are context-dependent).
So overall it's an interesting effect, similar to Gruescript or other parser-choice hybrids. Some of the choices for commands were a bit odd, and some (like arrow keys) seem like they wouldn't translate to mobile well (which I didn't try).
Overall, the puzzles were clever and the game was polished. The interactivity definitely threw me for a loop and I'm pretty sure I'm not a fan, although it's hard to say if that's just because I'm not used to it or because it would be perennially awkward. I guess I could compare it to the text adventure equivalent of QWOP.
Overall the charming and complex puzzles are why I'm giving a higher score.
AI-generated plot with ai-powered characters and AI art, July 13, 2023This game combines a parser of its own with some AI-generated responses. The ai-generated text is fairly distinctive, with a very literalist interpretation of things (much like Drax the Destroyer in marvel movies). The plot itself and the 'human written' parts have a strong resemblance to the AI generated part, and I suspect that the plot was generated first by an AI and then pruned. There are riddles in the game that also seem like they were first thought of by an AI.
You play as a PhD student who can't get any postdocs, so they use AI to automatically fill out sweepstakes forms. This nets you some petty cash, but also a ticket to get onto a cruise ship.
The rest of the game involves getting on the ship, making friends, finding a couple of clues, entering some passwords, and grabbing some items, along with a thriller-type story.
The AI provides a lot of responses; interestingly, for me, the actual responses of the AI didn't matter, as it had no 'state' (the game told me a character was looking at his ring and thinking of his wife and kids; I asked him about his wife and he was unmarried). Every character is generic and defined with stereotypes that the AI found most logical (both black characters had grown up in poverty and become army vets; a white guy who went to jail had what looked like a deformed blunt in his hands in the AI image; etc.). But if you talk to them just right they'll reveal their prompt to you. So instead of AI replacing human ingenuity, it becomes a way to use AI to mask the true human ingenuity. What prompt created this? That prompt itself seemed AI generated. What was the original prompt for the game?
The game is slow. Those who long for the days of slow processors and chugging Apple-II's will be thrilled that this game also takes a lot of time to process actions. For me, if ai-powered games are to be common, speed will be an important factor.
I struggled with interacting with the game, and in the end looked up the author's github and found a test/walkthrough hidden in the code and used it (except for what seems to be a testing-only password for one room).
This game has convinced me that AI won't replace human ingenuity any time soon, especially for riddles. I wonder if the CSS and markdown and stuff was also AI, because there were several typos like too many ** symbols and such.
I usually strongly advocate for games to be archived long term and I hope the code for this is stored, but this game probably won't run 5 years from now, given its heavy reliance on an ever-shifting public resource.
Short and sweet ADRIFT game about hunting bugs, July 10, 2023This is a fairly short ADRIFT game in which you command six different soldiers, switching between their viewpoints to find aliens to kill.
Each soldier has their own mini puzzle. Some of these are pretty short, requiring little effort, while others are fairly complex and may need some repeat tries.
I found the writing enjoyable and many of the interactions were clever and well thought-out.
I found a few small bugs. Ducking if nothing is around acts as if something is there; most interactions were bug free, though, and two things I was going to bring up as second examples were actually caused by own error (I kept typing 'pulse rifle' instead of 'laser rifle', for instance), so I guess there really weren't a lot of bugs (except the six you kill haha). I do wish that saving and UNDOing worked even if you had switched your player character though.
The interactions were generally pretty simple, but there is an (optional) hour long timer and a (non optional) 80 turn timer that significantly complicates things. I had to restart several times to figure out a good strategy. But I was invested to do so several times, ask for hints online and switch the version of Adrift I was using because I did want to finish the game.
Epically long murder mystery adventure in Adrift, July 10, 2023Phew! This was a long game. I took a break from playing the other parsercomp games for 4 days to finish playing this one; and that was just by using the walkthrough, which spans 8 pages of 3-columned text.
The idea of this game is that you are at a party at a large mansion where a murder has been discovered. It is your job to stop that murder!
The presentation and the writing are of high quality, which some nice visual effects with regards to headings and fonts, and very incisive and biting wit. There are many characters that are generally well differentiated, although almost every character frequently expresses very strong sexual urges in non-explicit ways, so it can blend together when the 5th or 6th man talks about how hot the widow is.
I played for about an hour or two to get a feel for the game. I got maybe 23 out of the 250+ points, then decided to use the walkthrough.
It soon became apparent just why the walkthrough was so long. The map is large, especially a garden area which is a maze with several almost-identical areas. The vast bulk of the game, around 75%, consists of some character asking you to give something to or ask something of another character. So you have about 10 or 12 moves navigating the garden maze and going into the mansion and finding your target. That character then says they can only do that if you bring them something else. So you type 10 or 12 moves going there and doing that, and so on and so on till you reach the end of the chain. Then you report back to people in reverse order, with the same maze navigation between every chain.
Due to this the plot really kind of stopped taking off. At first I felt like I was really getting somewhere (finding the widow! searching the murder room!) but if you charted the plot intensity with regards to time it would look like a giant snake that had just eaten a string of 30 rats. Flat plot progression for a long time, with a little bump of action, followed by more flat plot progression, with a little bump of action.
The writing was constantly of high quality in the genre it had set out to follow, a kind of bawdy, everyone-is-rotten nobles vs commoners dark comedy.
Outside of the fetch quests, the game consisted of finding objects in random and unusual ways. The kind of thing where touch a glass pane and it reveals a trapdoor which takes you on a chute ride to find an oubliette where you overhear two thieves talking and one drops a potato crisp. (this example isn't necessarily in the game).
When I wasn't following the walkthrough I had a bit of trouble. An early quest needed me to find some cream buns. I saw food on a table and tried X FOOD. That didn't work so I went into the kitchen and tried X FOOD. I figured maybe they were there but not in the description so I tried TAKE FOOD and TAKE BUNS. It turns out I needed to X COUNTER instead to find them.
So given that the discovery of objects was often difficult with the parser, and that seemingly unrelated actions were necessary to find the objects, and that almost each step of each task required navigation of almost-identical maze rooms, and that the game was as long as Curses and other huge text adventures, I think it's no surprise I turned to the walkthrough. There are copious clues though for those who prefer more gentle hints.
Two-player parser puzzler, July 5, 2023I didn't play this game in the intended way (just opened two windows and played both).
I've played 3 or 4 two-player IF games in the last few years, and I think this one definitely benefits from being in the same room or able to talk to each other. The other two-player games I played had a major twist that was apparent from the start and sharing info would have ruined that. This one is different; even having complete knowledge of the other game doesn't really help you in the current game.
Instead, codes are used primarily to move objects from one game to another. When this occurs, you get a code you send to the other player, and they type that in to get an effect in game.
The puzzles are designed to be fairly light, but there were times when I got stuck in one of the games for ten or fifteen minutes, which is why I wonder if it would be better for the two players to talk to each other and bounce ideas off each other.
I loved the humor in the game; puzzles were oddball and events were shocking at times and cute at others. Despite this I never felt immersed in the game world; it definitely felt artificial and made as a kind of puzzlebox; but it was a very enjoyable puzzlebox, even as a single player.
A classic-style fantasy adventure with swords and sorcery, July 4, 2023This game was pretty fun; it honestly felt like an old AD&D campaign module. You have a magic user and a warrior with an enchanted blade, you have to buy equipment like rations, there's a miniquest in the middle with a mysterious city, then a couple of dungeons and a big scaly boss.
The idea is that you are on a quest to exterminate some rampaging lizard men. You have to travel through a long desert to do that. Also, along the way, you have to play both characters. This has a few slight drawbacks (mostly making it harder to save) but feels very dynamic, especially when infiltrating the city, and makes the game more enjoyable.
There is some randomized combat in places (so saving often is very useful).
In general the game seemed pretty fair; there were places where I had to reload a save to grab an item but each 'area' seemed mostly self-contained.
I did struggle with the parser from time to time; for me the hardest parts were the gate doors (Spoiler - click to show)I tried LOOK IN PORT, OPEN PORT, SEARCH PORT, PEEK IN PORT, etc. before the game suggested LOOK THROUGH PORT. Occasionally the game would say I hadn't done stuff that I actually had done; in those cases I reloaded the beginning of the area and ran through it again.
Overall, it was a big game, and one I can only recommend to someone with patience and the time to try and retry. But it was fun, and I would recommend it to such a person.
Complex chess puzzle teaching classic endgame, July 3, 2023Unlike Andrew Schultz's other chess puzzles, this one has a ton of flexibility. You have two bishops and a king, and have to force the other king into check.
This is a famous setup, and there are several paths to victory. I admit that although I could get it penned up in the corner, I couldn't win, so I had to look up a tutorial. But I learned some real-life skills in the process, which was nice.
Compared to the other chess games it let me do a bit more thinking; before the game would prevent me from doing something and I had no idea why. This game let me get myself into a mess. It was harder because of that, but I enjoyed the exploration more.
There were a few minor typos; the opening text could be more easily readable, with indented paragraphs or paragraph breaks instead of line breaks between chunks, and one line of text said "The two bishos drum", so overall very minor issues for a fun game.
A long, complex parser-based visual novel about solving girl's murder, July 3, 2023This game uses a parser that seems to be keyword based rather than grammar-based. It doesn't use a trained AI model, instead using the author's own custom engine that doesn't scrape internet data. I thought that was a lie since when I typed Overwatch it mentioned it was a Blizzard game, but I checked the github code and the author hand coded quite a few video games with their studio because it's the answer to a question in one of his games.
So this is a pretty unique thing. The author previously used this system in his game Thanatophobia.
This game has various background images and a 3d model of a girl wearing a dress. Later on, a young girl in a swimsuit pops up, although you can tell her to go away. The characters generally just perform random animations, usually not connected to the game.
The plot and puzzles are structured a lot like Blue Lacuna. Both games have a core element of key plot details, but they drag them out by making them timed in a sense; Blue Lacuna makes you wait until night, while this game will say 'I'll tell you more about that later', and you have to ask again later. Both games also include a lot of ambient nature stuff you can interact with while waiting for the core plot. Blue Lacuna has the island, while this game has random spots you can visit like monuments or national parks or even the sky. These usually don't contribute to the story, although sometimes they have interesting details. Both games last very long due to these mechanisms, while they could be far shorter without them (which could be a pro or con).
This game includes puzzles in two forms. First, there are random trivia questions. These aren't essential to the game, it's just something that pops up in the 'touristy' areas of the game.
Second, there are clues in the form of cryptograms. You click on a letter then type something to replace it with. It's actually a really nice system for cryptograms, lots more fun than doing it with paper because it allows for quick exploration. I usually deeply dislike cryptograms in games but this was fun.
Overall, I had fun for the first few hours typing 'in character', but for the last hour or so I just typed random junk to get through, like 'yes', 'i see', or even just every letter of the alphabet, although sometimes I commented more.
I didn't really enjoy the child-looking girls in skimpy outfits; especially when a romance option was available. The game even discusses the three forms of love (philos/eros/agape) but kind of picks one for you (I think? I refused at first but then relented later to see if it was story critical, which it seemed like it was).
The actual storyline is pretty good, about a young girl in the late 1800s who had the abilities of a medium, able to consult spirits. I actually really liked this main storyline.
There is a darker reveal later, and it contains some things I'm really uncomfortable with it, specifically (Spoiler - click to show)directly telling the player to kill themself. I know enough people that have (Spoiler - click to show)attempted suicide that I really don't want to see this kind of stuff in games; I think it can be handled in a sensitive way, but this isn't it (from my point of view).
Overall I was very impressed with this game, and thought about giving 4 stars. But I think the interactivity could use some tuning in regards to main plot vs side action. The types of characters I didn't care for but are normal for some types of VN games. And the content in the dark area was a little too dark for me. Technically, this game is very impressive, and I had fun with much of it.
A polished, grungy time travelling adventure, July 2, 2023This is probably the best game I've played by this author.
It's a continuation of the older game Jesse Stavros' Compass, but I found that this game was mostly self-contained and explained the plot of the previous game fairly well.
The idea is that there is are several underground networks of talented individuals who are able to travel through space and/or time. Your friend, the young Jesse Stavros, has gone missing after visiting the Grateful Dead in concertin the 1970s.
The game hops between a variety of distinct and well-described locations, from a lonely motel to a squatter-infested theater to a refined steamboat.
The game has a lot of rooms and a lot of characters. This kind of complexity can lead to bugs or dull repetition if not done well, but this game is very polished for its size. Most people can respond to most topics; NPCs move independently. There were only a few minor errors for me here and there; a steamboat passenger's name wasn't printed in an ambient paragraph about him; a dead body was described as if it still had a gun I took. But in a game of this size and complexity, these are only minor errors.
Puzzles are well-clued. Two or three times I wasn't sure and peaked at the walkthrough, and it turned out I had had the right idea but in the wrong place or that I hadn't tried long enough. I had some trouble with one machine for a long time until I realized I hadn't examined it; once I did there were clear instructions.
Overall, I had fun. It reminds me of Cryptozoologist or other Robb Sherwinn games, although I'd say the overall level of polish is high. I was disappointed it (Spoiler - click to show)ended on a cliffhanger, but I'll definitely be interested in a future episode.
I also appreciated that, while the tone is mature and many of the characters are used to the seedy side of life, the game doesn't rely on any slurs or racist stereotypes or misogyny and instead uses dialogue and ambient objects to establish the atmosphere.
An extended dream in Unity with nominal parser interactivity, July 2, 2023This game is written in Unity engine. It uses Roblox-like characters to tell a brief story of a man sleeping and dreaming and confronting his fears.
This game technically uses a parser but in actuality the game tells you what to type at every step, waiting until you type it correctly before moving on. There are about 10 opportunities to type. In one of them, you get to make a choice.
The graphics are amusing, although the game says they were made in one day.
Overall:
+Polish: No bugs
+Descriptiveness: The text is barebones, but the art helps
-Interactivity: Very little
-Would I play again? Don't enjoy Unreal Engine very much
-Emotional impact: Kind of muted by long slow timed sequences.
Cause havoc as an interplanetary courier, July 2, 2023This game is set in the Hinterlands, which I believe is a setting designed by the author (I've played another game from that setting). The setting reminds me a lot of the Max Blaster comics in Calvin and Hobbes: rayguns, oozy monsters, bizarre aliens, and a daring hero.
This game features a pretty large town with a wide variety of locations, like a farm, a temple, a distant shack, a nearby military base, an apartment building with many individual apartments you can enter, etc. However, everything is designed compactly to be easily traversible.
Your character is kind of a rogue or rascal. In the course of the game, you commit several heinous acts, but with the framing it comes of as more of an anti-hero than a pure villain, more like Rocket Raccoon than Darth Vader.
I didn't encounter any bugs. At one point there was a large rock I needed to interact with that didn't have any adjectives, while I also carried some rocks. So I had to go to another room to drop them; if the rock was 'large rock' or 'heavy rock' that could be avoided, but that's a minor quibble in a very polished game.
I had to use the hints three times, but they're organized pretty well, and each time the solution was fair, just involving more exploring and more talking.
Sometimes the logic isn't clear; you can get away with a lot of things that someone might reasonably stop you from doing. But I feel like it operates with the same kind of consistent logic as a Looney-Tunes cartoon (although darker!). It would make a pretty funny animated short.
A sprawling ADRIFT adventure about a 6 yr old boy exploring strange lands, July 1, 2023I've played several Larry Horsfield games, and I generally have the impression that they'll be extremely long ADRIFT games that require you to look in every nook and cranny and often put you in 'dead man walking' scenarios because you forgot something 400 moves ago.
So I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could solve the game. I started in a magician's room, and I tried looking behind an armchair, looking under a stool, etc. But there was nothing there, so I explored more and found some more reasonable puzzles: a light puzzle, grabbing a book, etc. Then I went to another area, grabbed a lot of stuff; the game even warned me that I hadn't grabbed everything! I explored a dungeon, and got really very far.
I thought to myself, 'Man, this game is awesome. It's a lot smaller than other Larry Horsfield games, and seems more focused on clever puzzles instead of hiding random stuff.'
At one point, the game said I needed a tinderbox, which I hadn't grabbed, so I peeked at the walkthrough, and found out that I had missed it at the beginning. Apparently instead of looking under the stool or the armchair I needed to stand on the stool and it would reveal some stuff to me.
Fortunately the earlier areas were still accessible so I went back to go grab it.
But then I ended up solving what I thought was the final area of the game. It actually ended up sending me to a nexus of areas. The SCORE command revealed that I only had 90 out of 500 points. And the door locked behind me. I thought, 'well, I'll still try on my own'. But getting in a boat told me I should be wearing my war belt. With the door shut, there was no way to get back. So I loaded an earlier save. Unfortunately, there was a bug where going back to get the warbelt meant I couldn't leave for some reason.
I restarted completely, deciding to just blindly follow the walkthrough. But it's missing a command early on and I ended up with a bug situation where there were two 'thin books' in the same room that I couldn't disambiguate between.
So I restarted again, fixed that problem, and just rode the walkthrough the rest of the time. I found out there was tons of stuff I had missed earlier because I hadn't looked under a desk or behind a door, etc.
There were fun things to see on the way, like various foods and desserts. There was also some depictions of East Asian culture that were a bit suspect. There were some words I didn't recognize which wikipedia said are considered offensive (like a name for a kind of Chinese hat). The people are a blend of Asian motifs and generic europeans (they speak the same language as the protagonist and are offended by burping, which isn't very common in east asian cultures). At one point they're singing a sing with the lyrics 'ying tong ting tong' or something, which seemed wildly inappropriate to me, but apparently it's an old song by a group called the goons which has nothing to do with Asian culture. But then why is it featured in this area? Kind of weird.
Overall, if this game had been just the first area up to the dungeon, I might have given it 5 stars; I like the puzzle direction and the writing. But after that point it just becomes so easy to get into 'walking dead' situations.
I'd usually say beta testing could help with these kind of things, but Larry Horsfield has been writing games for fourty years and has been requesting testers recently, which haven't been found. I think the issue is that the core game design itself makes testing difficult; there are so many places to check, so many places to look, so many possible combinations of items. The game is huge but it also includes mechanics designed to make short games longer, like forcing replaying due to missing items or having tightly controlled sequences that are easy to fail. These combined, it makes playing the game without a walkthrough take days or weeks, including for testers. And the games are produced at such a rate (there were three entered in this same Parser Comp competition, although one was withdrawn) that there's wouldn't be enough time to test one thoroughly before the next came out.
The author is aware of these issues; on intfiction.org, there are posts going back to 2014 discussing how this author has trouble getting beta testers and why.
A dramatic adventuron game about war and obsession, July 1, 2023This is the third time I have played and reviewed this game. I first saw it in the Spanish Ectocomp, where I found it difficult as I had to learn new verbs, but I found the story intriguing and creepy.
I then experienced it as a French game in French comp, where it was fun contrasting the two versions.
Now here it is in English, my native language, and it's honestly a different experience this time.
In this game, you play a Russian soldier who is obsessed with writing the perfect letter home, specifically the letter you write to your family in the case of death. You are not confident in your own writing, so you steal the letters of others that die, whether on their own, or with help.
The game contrasts the insanity of war with your own insanity.
Experienced in my native language, the game is still good, but I notice more the abrupt changes in scene, emotion, and motivation. Sometimes others are suspicious of you, while at other times they take your word even in suspicious circumstances.
One difficult I had was technical; near the end, with the tent and the (Spoiler - click to show)explosives, I needed to find a word to (Spoiler - click to show)light the explosives. However, (Spoiler - click to show)LIGHT and BURN didn't work. I had to type (Spoiler - click to show)EXPLODE CHESTS to get it to work.
Overall, it's been fun seeing this over time. There were definitely some nuances I didn't understand until I saw it in English (especially since Adventuron doesn't let you copy and paste text into Google translate). I had fun.
A brief and cryptic gruescript game, July 1, 2023This game is more the hint of a story than a full story. It's written in Gruescript, a relatively recent language that is a parser/choice hybrid, created by Robin Johnson.
This game blends physical objects with conversational topics. What you're holding, you can talk about. If you can talk about something (like a name), you can take it and drop it.
The setting is some kind of alternate mythology, a fantasy world that has echoes of Greek mythology (some kind of box that wasn't meant to be opening, blends of snakes and people).
There's just not much here; I reached an ending early on that I thought was a time limit. I restarted and found out it only comes from asking a certain topic. I avoided that topic but couldn't find much more; downloading the (helpfully provided source), I see that that was the full ending.
So this game is pretty short. The concepts are good, though I had some trouble with figuring out how to do what I wanted. In a fuller game, it could be very fun, but for now, I'll be content with this hint of a game.
A fun magical adventure in adventuron, June 29, 2023I briefly beta tested this game.
This Adventuron game has you searching for seashells on a beach. Pretty soon, though, things take a drastic turn, and you end up (Spoiler - click to show)being able to cast spells!
The game also utilizes two protagonist perspectives which is nice, reminding me of the old Atlantis Indiana Jones game.
Overall, the mechanics worked well for me. I think the design of the game could have supported an even larger game, but it's pretty substantial already and is part of a competition for beginners, so it makes sense.
A pleasant summer carnival game, June 25, 2023I briefly beta-tested this game.
This is a feel-good game (mostly!) about a fun children's competition in a quaint village on a summer's evening.
A carnival is in town and the Mayor is throwing a competition where you have to gather clues. You race around with a bunch of other kids who move from place to place, all of you looking for clues.
The kids running around really helps make the game feel more alive. And the puzzles in the game have a wide variety, a lot of them making use of your ability to customize requests for various items like food and flowers.
There's a vaguely sinister subplot running through as well. Even with this, though, it feels like there's not a strong narrative thread, more just an excuse to have fun, which isn't necessarily bad. Fun for a nice diversion.
A silly and expansive game about making a pb and j, June 25, 2023I briefly beta tested this game.
This is an adventuron game about making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You start in a kitchen and have to combine the three ingredients.
The game manages to add at least 3 major twists to this setup, which is pretty amusing. They aren't all necessarily coherent, but it makes enough sense to by funny.
The main character has a definite idiosyncratic personality that shines through more and more as you play.
Overall, it's pretty solid, but could use a couple more synonyms for things (like JAR for JAM), although it's been improved since I and others tested it.
A short and somewhat spooky Adventuron game about a strange woman, June 23, 2023This is a brief Adventuron game that has a short tutorial at the beginning.
In it, you play as a young child at a hotel who wakes up to find an old woman in your room. She beckons for you to follow.
And that's most of the game; the gameplay is pretty simple. There are a few small puzzles, but this is otherwise mostly linear. The concept has a lot of implicit horror in it, but I feel like that theme wasn't developed as much as it could have been.
Overall nothing is bad in this game, there's just not much: not much story, not much interaction, not much game. I feel like it could be expanded a bit, but as it is, it was fun while it lasted.
A cute and complex game about preparing eggs, June 23, 2023I played the English version of this game as part of the TALJ.
This is a fairly complex Adventuron game. Your girlfriend, a self-conscious milkmaid, is devastated that she forget eggs for her special salad, but you promise to bring some from your farm, in addition to another surprise.
The game is fairly large, with many rooms and also many items hidden within items within each room.
The writing is rustic and fun, with different animals you can interact with.
It's actually pretty hard; I found at least two different ways to completely fail without any warning given that I had failed, making it 'cruel' on Zarf's cruelty scale. But it's short enough that I was able to replay a couple of times to fix it.
This is one of the author's first full parser games. It's far more polished than most 'first' entries, but one kind of bug that slipped through is that many locations describe objects after you take them, like the alum.
Overall, it was one of the most rich and well-written TALJ games I played.
A trippy kind of child's story of a goat, June 23, 2023This game is entered in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, designed to introduce people to text adventures through tutorials.
It's kind of a weird game. EXAMINE and TAKE are disabled for most things. The writing is minimalistic, based on an old French story. And things just kind of happen in ways that are pretty disturbing, like the poor lamb that wanders too close to the hermit.
UNDO is disabled, which is baffling in a game meant as a tutorial that has actions that are non-reversible and can prevent you from winning the game.
Overall, I found the writing style charming and the interaction slightly frustrating. I'm glad I played but like others have said I'm not sure I'll replay the final fight.
A brief tutorial and mini game introducing basic IF concepts, June 23, 2023This is an interesting game. It seems to be the author's own custom system, and uses a multi-pane format kind of like Scott Adams, with a room description constantly displayed and then parser responses in another window, with important items listed in a third.
The first part is very hand-holdy, as it is designed as a tutorial. Each room is a page or more full of text describing how interactive fiction works. It takes you through navigation and basic use of items.
I found this part to be relatively well-polished but also pretty verbose. That may be more useful to newcomers but also may not. I've seen a lot of IF tutorial games (like Bronze, Dreamhold, 'So, You've Never Played a Text Adventure Before, Huh?') and I've written my own, but most people I ask about who got into IF found a big hard game without a tutorial and tried it on their own.
This tutorial includes things like mazes and darkness which aren't quite as ubiquitous as once they are.
It then segues into a main game which is exploring a creepy abandoned house. This part has very well written descriptions. The story and puzzles form a coherent atmosphere but not a logical plot. Overall, though, I thought this part was pretty fun and well put-together.
A high school mystery adventure, June 21, 2023This game has a lot of the hallmarks of Garry Francis' work: puzzle-focused gameplay, polished responses, gentle hints on what to do next, short and easily digestible room descriptions, etc.
The idea is that you're a troublemaker at a school that's going under, and you need to find some treasure reported to be hidden in your school.
Gameplay is generally satisfying, the kind of thing like finding a can and later finding a can opener and using it (not the example in the game). There were a few times I had trouble with the interactivity: trying to leave the room early on (without the tutorial, I would never have thought to do the action, and even with the tutorial it took me a while to find it); and finding the right word for what to do with the (Spoiler - click to show)pencil was hard (I kept trying words like (Spoiler - click to show)rub and (Spoiler - click to show)shade). A couple of the phrases stuck out as odd (I was told many time I thought my teacher was ugly; I think the random chance might need to be lowered a bit).
Overall, I expected a polish parser game and I got one, so it was worth playing. I used in-game hints several times.
A sketched-out game with a vintage engine, June 21, 2023This game was written using ADL, which was the engine Ken and Roberta Williams used for some early Hi-Res Adventures (from what I can gather, though I may be wrong).
The game itself is a downloadable windows executable. It consists of a moderate number of rooms (around 10-15), each with either one interesting item or one interesting NPC. Nothing can be interacted with outside of these singular items (no scenery, etc.). All play consists of fetching one item in one room to get a new item in another room (like a trading-up quest). There are occasional typos, and the storyline isn't really there.
The author has admitted to having run out of time. Having more time would certainly improve the game; the author has mentioned implementing the scenery, more puzzles, etc.
For now, though, the game is lacking in polish and descriptiveness, and due to its unfinished nature lacks emotional depth. I'm giving it one star for its current state, but if the author ever updates it I'll definitely increase the rating, as the ideas in it are good, it just looks like it needs more time.
Technically brilliant game with unsympathetic PC, June 21, 2023Savoir-Faire is a longish game set in an alternate-world version of France. The game prominently features a magic system involving linking items together so that they share certain properties.
The puzzles are brilliant and the game is well-implemented. You can experiment to your hearts content, and most reasonable solutions to problems work. The writing is excellent, and the storyline well-thought out.
I finished the game years ago. Every time I try to replay it though, I lose interest. Why would anyone lose interest in such a technical marvel? Because I really don't care about the PC's situation. He's a wishy-washy wimp; he can't decide if he's investigating his adoptive family's disappearance or looting their house; he can't decide if he's a rake with a million love interests or a romantic with one woman at heart; he can't decide if he's a member of the royalty-hating lower class or a priviliged upper-class man; and he can't decide if he's starving or picky.
Short hasn't written him poorly; she's just very accurately portrayed a disagreeable man. I wish I could have him slap himself, remove his silly white feather, and tell him to just eat the andouilletes plain or stop whining. I don't care about finishing the game because I don't want to go through all that trouble just so his aristocratic palate won't have to endure stale bread and unseasoned lentils. The ending helps a bit, but it is too little, too late. If he really cared about his family, why is he stealing everything?
Others may not have the same reaction.
Edit: I recently replayed it during a long fight, after having replayed a lot of other highly rated games in a row. It really stood out with its craftmanship, so I'm revising its rating to 5 stars instead of the 4 I had before.
A minimalist bird escape adventure, May 17, 2023This game has you play as a clever bird, a macaw, who is trapped in a cage by a kind of illegal exotic animal dealer and has to escape.
All of this is communicated through minimalistic text that primarily uses adjectives and nouns instead of complete sentences. For instance, examining a bird early on gives the response:
sunken eyes. dry skin. depleted energy.
loose perch.
With the loose perch being a clickable link.
The overall style of gameplay is similar to a single-item-inventory text adventure. You get to pick one thing at a time to hold and can use that item in conjunction with items in the game's world.
This allows for some complex interactions that can be fun to set up.
I encountered a bizarre problem on my end while playing (no other player has found this problem and it wasn't on mobile, so I don't think it's the author's fault) where the game had a missing passage or encountered some other problem where I had to hard restart, about 4 or 5 different times. If anyone else encounters this, switching the platform I was on fixed it immediately (from windows chrome to phone).
Overall, the game is very polished and descriptive. I found the interactivity was interesting, and I could see myself visiting this again.
I didn't feel completely immersed in the game, and found it more of a puzzle box than a bird adventure. But I wonder if I hadn't encountered a bug on my end if I would have been drawn in more. So I'm wavering between a 4 and a 5, but I think I'll go with a 4, because while this game was good, I found the author's other games the Good Ghost and Closure even better, by a significant amount, due to their authentic and engaging dialogue.
Working out a writing puzzle, bit by bit, May 16, 2023This is a Python-based game. It asked me to install colorama, which seemed to work, but then in command prompt my colors didn't show up, so I think I had something wonky going on.
This is a combinatorics puzzle framed as writing. Your options are to Write (W) or Reflect (R).
But, there are rules! Some combinations of writing and reflecting aren't allowed. And as you go on, larger chunks of writing and/or reflecting are allowed.
Once you beat the game, there's a second round with more rules.
The text is abstract, focused on the meta-concepts of writing and reflecting and whether you obtained inspiration or not, how difficult this session was, etc.
I had some hints about the patterns from outside sources, but it was interesting to try and work out WHY the patterns were the way they were, which I found enjoyable; one of my favorite math problems in college was very similar to this (if you have N parallel parking spaces and can fill them up with Yugos, which take up one space, or Lincoln town cars, which take up 2 spaces, how many ways can you fill up the N spaces?) and of my own PhD thesis, which was concerned with strings of symbols with local rules like this.
I wasn't drawn in emotionally into the game as I was in 'solve' mode, but otherwise I enjoyed this puzzle.
Cool new system with a victorian detective thriller, May 16, 2023This game uses a custom Javascript system that is similar to Twine or Choicescript in that you click from a variety of buttons to progress the story. It is optimized for mobile, and worked great on Desktop for me. The delay between clicks was just a little too long for my taste, but that was my only complaint.
You are presented as Madame Soo, a Chinese woman who is also a detective. In a classic locked room mystery, you find a man who has been strangled and have to figure out how it happened.
Overall, the writing was descriptive and the characters were fairly vivid.
With interactivity, the main mechanism for progression is to type in the name of an address you want to visit. There doesn't seem to be any way to go back, so its vital that you write down all names and locations as you go.
The clues themselves and all the deductions outside of the names are done by the character in-story. I would have liked to have had more involvement in that deduction, although I know that's a tricky thing to do in a game.
Others have mentioned the presentation of racism in the game. For me, I found it contributed more to being obnoxious than to providing key historical context.
Overall, I'm impressed by the architecture and writing of this game. My quibbles are mainly with the interactivity level and being drawn out of the game emotionally by the depictions mentioned above.
Cool twine world model demo with confusing plot/layout, May 15, 2023This game is a demo for a Twine engine that lets you pick up things, move around, open things, etc.
The system works pretty well for me and looks cool, I think it'd be fun to have more games like this in the future.
The game itself was a bit confusing for me. You kind of pass out and wake up in a labyrinth with nothing but an old man for a companion. It's basically just a big maze, and at one point I thought I had gotten locked out, so I restarted, and ended up in the same spot, but then found something new and interesting, so I went to try it out on a room I remembered, but then it wasn't there any more...I eventually found an ending that seemed 'real' but overall the plot was disconnected and the maze wasn't super exciting. I feel like a lot of the elements of a great game were there, but just needed something more to glue it together.
A vorple exploration of greek mythology, May 15, 2023This is an experimental, somewhat unpolished game entered in the back garden of Spring Thing. As an experiment, I think it works, but it could use some touching up as a game/story itself.
The idea is that you, following the examples of Orpheus and Heracles, have descended into the underworld to follow after the woman you love.
Like other stories about the descent into Hades, you have a guide, Phos, a ball of light that follows you around, and who gives you a guided tour of the afterlife, showing you what happens to people there, etc.
This is written using Vorple, which allows multimedia and hyperlinks to be added to Inform. Most of the game, if not all, can be played by clicking links in the text, typing directional commands, and choosing menu options.
The art is Ai-generated, and looks very good; the model seems well-trained on the style used. Apparently some text is also AI, which makes sense; I had in my review notes that 'the text has strange errors at times, not like non-native English speakers, just strange placement of words'. So if it were AI-influenced, that would make sense.
The game doesn't outstay its welcome, and has some very nice moments. However, there are some stray typos, like double periods or the word 'sturggle' instead of struggle. Sometimes menu items for conversation still appeared even though I had left the area in question. But despite these rough edges, the core game is enjoyable.
Note that Vorple games such as this one don't currently work well if downloaded and played offline.
An undead hybrid tries to kill their mother, May 15, 2023This game is heavily centered on world-building. It's a Twine game and it's focused on you, a person who is not quite alive and not quite dead, who has to stop your mom from destroying the world.
The main attractions here are the characters and world-building. This definitely seems like a setting and a group of people the author has spent a great deal of time thinking about, from the murder-happy girlfriend to the html-breaking Ataxia monsters to the mother figure herself. All of them seem well developed and polished.
I think what's in this game is solid (nice use of text manipulation, too), but I'd love more chance to explore the world and see more of these concepts in play. I guess I'd either prefer a tighter focus with the current level of interactivity or the bigger story with the wider exploration.
Learn to be kind to a cat!, May 15, 2023This is a cute little game made together as a family.
Your goal is to retrieve the Sacred Shovel of Athenia, which is stuck in the road. Unfortunately, you can't do that right now, because you aren't a cat lover, so a kind of restrictive device has been put on you until you are kind to a cat.
That doesn't really make much sense, but that's okay, because the game wasn't made to make sense. It's mostly a framing story to help a kid learn how to be kind to a cat.
I struggled a bit with the parser here and there, like trying to figure out how to use the fishing rod. Overall, the core concept of the game is good, but it just lacks a bit of cohesion and polish.
Enter variations on a single phrase to pass through silly scenarios, May 14, 2023This is a wordplay game centered on the phrase 'Beam me up Scotty'.
You play as Captain Kirk, and gameplay consists of the presentation of some silly scenario involving you, Bones, and/or Spock, as well as Scotty. To get out of the situation you have to type 'B____ me up scotty', where the blank is some word starting with B.
So it's all riddles/wordplay, and mostly centers on finding synonyms for words in the text. You either get it or you don't; if you just can't get it you pass. I got 70.86%, so I had to pass a few times.
At a basic level it's pretty funny, but I kind of found the hints and pass system abrasive. They're basically 'ha you loser you're dumb and didn't get it'. But why would I like that? It's just a made up game and I'm playing it for fun. The author doesn't even know I'm playing it. I'm just deciding of my own free will to have a computer say I'm dumb. I'm not really into that.
The humor is the best part of this.
A brief exploration- and conspiracy-heavy parser game, May 14, 2023The first Marie game, Pre-Marie, was the first Adventuron game I ever played, and it gave me a good impression.
This one fleshes out the details significantly. It's in PunyInform, I think.
I'm giving it 5 stars, but not necessarily because I think most people will adore it. It simply had a nice combination of things I like: a vague conspiracy, a tense mystery setting, logical but kind of sticky parser puzzles and a lot of standard parser gameplay. And the in-game timer provided some tension. So for me that's exactly what I was looking for in a game.
The idea is that you are investigating a kind of conspiracy related to you and your town, but you've been kidnapped and stuffed somewhere. There's just a hint of the supernatural, possibly a fakeout or even unintentional. Most of the game involves escaping from your situation in progressively larger containers/rooms/locations.
Pretty fun, if you just want a brief chill parser game. I fought with the parser a couple of times, but it was overall pretty smooth.
Branching gameplay of goofy stories, May 14, 2023This game is almost a pure 'time cave', a style of game structure that was popular with a lot of paper CYOA books. Basically every choice branches, with each branch having a different ending. I say it's almost a time cave, since some paths end up recombining later on, but there's not a lot of state tracking in the story itself.
The main drawbacks of such a story are a lack of coherence in the storyline and boring repetition of early material. This story addresses the first by being wacky and nonsensical (so incoherence is a plus) and the second by adding a 'checkpoint' system once you find enough endings, of which I found all 26.
I'm usually not impressed by zany humor but I genuinely found this game funny. It reminded me of Simpsons humor a bit. I've seen that it fell flat for some other reviewers, but humor, especially surreal humor, is so subjective that you're always going to have enjoyers and disenjoyers. I liked this enough to play through all endings.
Cat and mouse with varying level of difficulties, May 14, 2023This game has a lot more in common with roguelikes than standard IF gameplay (unless I've deeply misunderstood roguelikes). There is a fixed map with seven important items randomly generated in it, and an enemy that moves around the map and reacts to you; additionally, there are several difficulty levels that basically give you 'extra lives' or make the enemy a bit slower.
I beta tested an early version of this game.
Here are my overall thoughts:
+Polish: The game claims to be a beta, but I found the version I played (near the end of Spring Thing) to be fairly complete; I didn't find any bugs, and objects had a lot of detail.
+Descriptiveness: The map is both overflowing and sparse. Each room is detailed, but many of them overlap in the items they have (filing cabinets, screens, etc.). Items are utilitarian but hint at a greater cause. It's an interesting mix, and I found it fairly evocative. The map is very helpful.
+Interactivity: The frantic scrambling around to find the seven items isn't something I've seen a lot before, and it was a fun change from the usual staid, considered type of IF game I tend to play. There is a parkour element, but it never came into play for me, playing on the easiest non-tutorial setting. Its main effect seems to be to help with escaping, but I only ran into the Predator once, near the very end. Perhaps in harder difficulties it is more useful.
-Emotional impact: I think the writing overall is strong, but a lot of the pieces just didn't fall into place for me. The story has so many intro declarations and warnings and prefacing and guides that it almost felt bubblewrapped, designed to protect me from the game but simultaneously blunting its experience. The warnings on themselves are useful, as the game has frequent strong profanity, which isn't always in service to some overarching narrative goal. In the game itself, there are a couple of strong threads: (Spoiler - click to show)a capitalist society trying to make brainwashed slaves, (Spoiler - click to show)a fellow clone, or some other experiment, hunting you down, perhaps as a test to make you stronger?, (Spoiler - click to show)a siege wearing you down. They all tie together in game, but they feel disparate. Is your pursuer your comrade or your foe? Both are okay individually, but with both as possibilities there was less tension for me.
+Would I play again? The core gameplay loop isn't bad, and the overall polish makes for solid gameplay. I could see myself revisiting it.
An amusing over the top fantasy game, May 13, 2023This game pokes fun at fantasy tropes with a lot of silly dialogue and 4th wall breaking.
You (Elftor the Elf) and your manservant (Manny) have to save a king and kingdom from a terrible plague that makes everyone shout at the top of their lungs.
Along the way, there are plenty of sidequests--sidequests you have specifically been instructed not to fulfill.
There are quite a few endings. Overall the game is pretty goofy but I laughed several times. I also had the issue other reviewers did with the 'stats' part at the top disappearing at inconvenient times, like when it was being referenced in-game.
Overall, I liked the 'good' ending the best. A slight game, but fun for people who like dumb humor.
A goofy game about business networking, May 13, 2023This is a relatively brief Twine game with some silly/goofy humor in it. It seems like the main goal is just to get the reader to laugh, like when you can choose between wearing a suit or a cardboard box for your big debut.
'Aesthetics over plot' seems right, as there isn't much plot to talk about. You're out of work and are going to a networking event, and you just choose how to react to a few different things.
I'm not sure how to approach this review, so I'll use my five criteria scale:
-Polish: The game has some typos, and I think decapitalizes your name when you type it in.
+Descriptiveness: There are some clear textual images that are pretty funny, like your character shouting out their plans at the party.
+Emotional impact: There are definitely some funny parts.
+Interactivity: There are some significant differences on replay, even though it's a short game, and achievements are generously handed out.
-Would I play again? It was entertaining, but too slight to replay several times. I did replay once to see how much of a difference there was.
Entertaining and thrilling art thefts with expanded cast of characters, May 13, 2023This is the third Lady Thalia game; the series in general focuses around a three-pronged conversation system where you take different attitudes, as well as physical preparation for thefts.
This game focuses on the introduction of a new nemesis detective, as well as a resolution of the overarching plotline of your former nemesis, and heavily involves your husband as well.
I had a rocky start with this one. The intro heavily emphasizes your open marriage/lavender marriage, and it brought into my mind a lot of real-world experiences that were quite a bit less glamorous than those implied in the game. In addition, I found myself constantly at odds with the conversation system, not picking up on the social cues that indicate which line of approach would be best; possibly I just have brain fog after just coming back from a trip.
But the quality of the writing and characters is always, to me, solid, and as the game went on I became invested in the string of characters and situations and actions. The involvement of the husband and his lover made the game more interesting, putting you in a teaching role, which is a natural extension of the overall character arc. And unlike some others who reviewed the game, I found Mel's change of heart (Spoiler - click to show)fairly understandable; if your enemy is consistently more encouraging and relatable than your employer, who wouldn't have second thoughts about their career?
I also preferred the later mechanical segments that focused more on varying your approach rather than having 'one true' approach, as well as the 'slow finesse vs brute force' options in the physical preparation.
Overall, this one isn't my favorite Lady Thalia game, but I'd consider it one of the headliners of Spring Thing, and am glad to have it.
Dark secrets on a ship in Google forms, May 9, 2023This was a nice, mostly-grounded thriller on a ship. A lot of games like this with a dark, abandoned ship at night devolve into Lovcraftian horror (which I love), but it was nice to have a change of pace this time.
This game is written in google forms and relies entirely on passwords and, occasionally, branching for state tracking. This means that if you right everything down, you can come back to the game much later and speed through everything. It reminded me a bit of playing NES/SNES games like Mike Tyson's Punchout and Willow; we had a wooden beam near our living room we'd write down passwords on.
Overall, the speed and responsiveness was pretty good; the system doesn't work all that bad, except when I tried to open the walkthrough in another tab and everything got reset. Fortunately I had my notes, so it was very easy to catch back up. I ended up opening the walkthrough in another tab.
I'd say that writing and storytelling is very strong for my likes, with crisp and clear imagery and a slow-burn thriller plotline. Some parts didn't make too much sense, mostly serving as excuses to find more passwords, but there were a lot of dramatic moments.
The final parts really felt like an action movie. I lost momentum at one point trying to figure out how to activate the next portion of the narrative, but overall it worked well.
Love to see experimentation work out.
Dense, rich imagery about escaping a space station, May 9, 2023This game revolves around a protagonist who wakes up in what feels like a wrong body, with wrong memories, and everything hurts.
The writing is very elaborate, dense, and elliptical. The game literally begins with an exposition on the universe, stars, Noether's theorem, conservation laws, and thermodynamics, before it really kicks in.
I kind of felt trapped under the weight of all the words. I was able to piece together something of a story; one of alarms and a space station where you have to escape. But the writing is so elliptical that I had difficulty knowing if anything was real or a metaphor. Is there (Spoiler - click to show)actually another person on the ship, or is it all just a form of self-reflection? Is the main computer room (Spoiler - click to show)really made of flesh and bones and eye sockets, or is it just a metaphor for your feelings about it?
I couldn't really tell. Overall, I found a couple of different possible endings, including one really early on and a few later ones. There is a lot of body horror in terms of dealing with progressively worse injuries.
Overall, the writing was carefully planned and chosen, and the interactivity and story structure were well-balanced, but the overall elaborateness was too much for me to handle.
A sprawling lab, dystopian murder government, and you, May 8, 2023This game is a hefty Inform 7 parser game set in a bunker city in the planet of Venus, with a horribly dystopian government where the greatest good is turning in others to the government.
The game involves numerous factions and parties (with different endings depending on which of two you support) and crossing and doublecrossing.
There's a lot of death, too. This PC's bodycount is one of the highest in games in recent years.
The game is very open in nature, with many actions being able to happen in any order. This leads to a lot of freedom, but makes the early part of the game fairly overwhelming. The hint system is also all available at once, due to the non-linear nature, and it can be difficult to find what you're looking for.
Overall, the game simply needs more polishing, but it is a good game at core, and is one worth having made.
One thing I struggled with quite a bit was the directions, which are INWARD, OUTWARD, LEFT, and RIGHT. It was hard to abbreviate these, as L means 'look' and IN and OUT map to inform's Inside and Outside directions. To be honest, I would have preferred the author just used the standard Inside and Outside directions and made Inward and Outward synonyms for them.
Giving 3 stars for now but would be happy to bump up if an update is made in the future.
A sci-fi action adventure on Mars!, May 7, 2023This is a well-designed parser game, with some nice visuals and a compact design that lets it be played in an hour or two.
You play as Galaxy Jones, crime fighting hero on Mars. Your nemesis has personally invited you to try rescuing a celebrity from his clutches, and you have to fight up his giant tower while facing his taunts.
The game is subdivided into 5 or so areas with roughly similar maps, each one containing its own set of puzzles. Many of these puzzles revolve around combat.
The game has 10 points possible, and each time you get a point, an ascii art GALAXY JONES logo fills the scree. Someone else mentioned they hear a guitar riff every time GALAXY JONES pops up and I have to admit I imagined one too.
I liked the writing and the gameplay. The game is overall polished, although I had a couple of times I felt like I was fighting the parser, particularly with trying to do anything with the cable in the first half of the game (Spoiler - click to show)like I tried to put it on the claw, attaching it to the cables outside on the ledge which weren't implemented, throwing it at another ledge). But I ended up figuring things out. These are just minor issues, and I suspect that most parser fans will enjoy this game. If there were an update tidying up things, I'd probably boost this to a 5 star rating.
A sweet story about a familiar crow saving its witch mistress, May 7, 2023This is an Adventuron game with some good pixel art and intended for beginners.
Your mistress, a witch, has been hexed by a wizard, and you have to help her! To do so, though, you'll have to go through strange lands, frightening areas, and combat.
The setting is reminiscent of Howl's Moving Castle, an industrial area town where magic is common and regulated in a guild while a war drags on in the background.
There are multiple characters with distinct personalities and the puzzles and quests are varied and interesting. On those few occasions were I got stuck, the HELP command listed all possible verbs and talking with people gave gentle nudges.
It appears there is a secret ending, but I did not feel a need to go back and replay.
Great for a beginner or for an experienced player who just wants to play a chill game. Doesn't feel kid-oriented but is appropriate for kids.
A fictional game-within-a-game with fictional metacommentary, May 6, 2023This is a large, ponderous game with many attachments. The image I had when starting was of a gigantic hamburger, one that you'd get at an artisanal place that is far too large to fit in your mouth. You pick it up; it looks good. You eye it, go to bite, hesitate, turn it. A piece of lettuce drops out. You grab it, but an onion is slipping out the other side. So you just start eating, bits dropping here and there, no longer able or willing to manage it all, just enjoying the burger.
The concept of this game is that there was a (fictional) game released in 1996 that was like Photopia ahead of its time, less focus on puzzles and more on story. But it's intentionally made to be like other games of that period, so I guess less like Photopia and more like In The End, which is referenced several times.
Seven years later, someone releases a transcript of the game, which becomes well-known, so a new round of criticism is generated.
This game, in the fictional history, was buggy and received poor reviews. Then, in 2021, the author was approached by some critics/fans who want to do a critical version of it, which he agrees to while they update it (kind of like the Anchorhead update and the Cragne Manor tribute, I suppose).
This game consists of the 'revised version', with an accompanying booklet with the transcript and some art. The revised version has art as well. An in-game guide consisting of critical materials is available in-game, slowly increasing in scope as you proceed.
The art is one of the highlights; the style is unique and well-executed, and the game may be worth playing for the art alone.
The game concept is that you have the ability to remove entropy from some sources and imbue it into others, having been gifted that power by an orange-eyed demon woman in your youth.
It serves as a metaphor for involuntary inaction, similar to ADHD or depression, where you can only use some external impulse to compel yourself to complete some task.
Your mother is dying in the hospital, and you need to go see her. There are several obstacles in the way, though.
Besides the main goal of the ending, there are many mini-deaths along the way. The more you get before the end, the better ending you get!
Except...even if you only get a few, you can see what the ending would have been for the other options. I only got 6 points, but I wasn't super motivated to see the other 27.
And let's talk about why.
This game is very polished. It had numerous testers, and it feels like it. There were only a few times I felt like there were 'bugs', like trying to (Spoiler - click to show)OPEN DOOR while on the roof and having it say that that's not something you can open. Overall, though, I'd say it has a high level of polish for a game in general, especially one of its size.
Where I found some difficulty was in knowing what to do a lot of times. I felt like the game swung between no details and overfull details for clues sometimes. Like finding deaths; I really couldn't figure out the mechanics behind finding deaths at all. There were no exposed electrical lines or broken glass that could obviously hurt me. And things that were dangerous (like a heavy tree branch) didn't respond to what I thought were death-inducing things (like pushing them). The hint menu has dozens of hints, but none of them at all are for the deaths except for an explicit listing of the exact actions you need. In the main storyline, too, I often found that the things I got most stuck on weren't in the hints at all. I suppose I was just on a different brainwave.
It might have helped to highlight relevant features in some way. For instance, the (Spoiler - click to show)AC unit is mentioned early on in the first line of the paragraph, in the middle of a list of a bunch of non-useful material. Given its significance in the story, it might have merited more prominent place, nearer the end of the paragraph.
Fortunately, the game is implemented well enough that even while struggling there are generally good responses to obtain while looking for something to interact with.
The three layers of Drew Cook (the real one, the author one, the PC one) all blend in interesting ways, positive ones, I feel.
It's hard to evaluate the quality of the in-game writing. I think I would like it, had I found it in the wild; however, all of the in-universe reviews, mostly written by the (real-world) author, praise the quality of the writing. They'll say (paraphrase) 'the writing was excellent, but the bugs were terrible'; it came up more than 4 or 5 times. It's kind of like trying to judge the natural light of the moon when someone has set up a dozen spotlights aiming up at it in an attempt to brighten it. Does this artificial praise really affect my perception of the prose? It's hard to say, and it would have been interesting to see how I felt about the writing quality without simultaneously reading a great deal of manufactured praise for it. However, I do see the reasoning for it, for otherwise why would this game have been preserved?
Overall, I think of lot of people when looking for parser games to play are looking for something that's not super buggy, that responds to most inputs in a helpful manner, and that has a nice outer shell of story, setting and/or (in this case) art. So I think most people will be pleased with this. It made me think quite a bit, and I could see myself revisiting it.
A short but amusing pig farming simulation, May 6, 2023I enjoyed this brief respite while playing Spring Thing games.
You play as a mutant pig farmer dealing with bikers. Life is kind of unfair, because if you don't feed your pigs, shovel their poop, and deal with bikers, you're gonna lose your pigs! And there's not enough time to do all of that...
Fortunately you have other options as well. And trying some of them out can give you different fun endings in a short amount of time.
I reached a point where I could pick between two different endings, and I picked a deathmatch, which was pretty amusing.
I liked the game, finding it polished and descriptive, but I didn't feel like replaying it in the end.
Slumber party horror, May 4, 2023I was involved a bit with the creation of this game; it's part of Seed Comp, where people put game ideas out there and others make full games of it.
So I made the seed for this game, and I'm very glad things worked out the way they did. I had heard of the Red Door, Yellow Door game online before and even jokingly tried it with my son once but he got creeped out so we stopped right away.
My issue was I didn't know what kind of surreal dream imagery to put in; that's not my forte.
So I'm glad Charm Cochran picked this up, because it ended up as exactly the kind of game I had wanted to play when I came up with the idea: disturbing, creepy, and unpredictable.
The basic idea is that you're at a slumber party and your sister is put into a trance and instructed to visualize two doors, and then you and your friends tell her what actions to take in the dream world.
You soon find parallels between the dream world and your own, but also bizarre features like giant buildings or creatures. The part with Claire's different voices I found especially thrilling.
Literally the only drawback I see is that there are a couple of things that could be polished up. Most of the game is amazingly responsive, with a lot of dumb things I thought of trying having a custom response with an in-game voice, an effect difficult to achieve. But there were a few things like uncapitalized room names or objects that were difficult to pick out from surrounding scenery (like the (Spoiler - click to show)cabinets in the kitchen). I had a smooth experience because I relied on intfiction hint threads, though.
However, those few unpolished moments actually played up the dreamlike atmosphere to me, so I'm not even certain they need to be resolved. Dreams are often like that, enchanting, full of exploration, but with frustrations and occasional non-sequiturs.
My only regret is I don't have other game ideas I could see Charm Cochran's spin on, because this was great.
A Twine parser game about choosing your career in a futuristic society, May 4, 2023This games has a parser written from scratch in Twine.
Making your own parser is a fraught thing, and many people have tried and failed over the years. The last-place entries of IFcomp are sprinkled with poor parser of years past. The biggest issue is that there is a bewildering amount of tradition in parser games that varies from group to group, all of whom may get upset if your style doesn't match theirs (like GET vs TAKE, X vs EXAMINE vs LOOK [object], G for again, Z for wait, abbreviations for cardinal directions, hitting 'up' for copying an earlier command). A few people have managed to make very robust custom parser: Robin Johnson, Nils Fagerburg, and Linus Åkesson.
This one is better than many I've seen, especially since it doesn't require downloading a Windows Executable and it has fairly quick response times. However, there are a few oddities that got in my way a bit: compass directions are part of play, but the text does not indicate possible compass directions to go in. Some basic actions are not repeatable, although no reason is given for it (generally things that give you one-time info). On the positive side, keyword highlighting is in use, similar to many Aaron Reed games, where you can interact with objects by typing their names. On the neutral side, much of the game occurs by typing Continue.
On the story side, this is reminiscent of books like The Giver or Divergent, where you are in a futuristic society and your role in life is chosen in a big ceremony.
I liked the overall story, and found it fun. I ended with a pretty big surprise in my playthrough, which was good. Some of the individual word choices stuck out as strange to me; one guy was referred to as 'the being' and 'the male' a lot, which made him sound kind of alien, and there were a few other choices that were a bit odd.
An individual's life explained in autobiographical fashion, May 2, 2023For me, I tend to choose interactive fiction that has features of escapism, and feel like I'm taking a break from reality when I play the game. That's one reason games like Violet threw me off at first, since, despite their quality, they reminded me of my real-life PhD pressures.
This game is quite the opposite of escapist. It poses (from my perspective) a single question: if you knew you were going to die, what would you do to be remembered?
Bez talks in honest and self-reflective detail about his experiences with pseudo-dementia, which led to concern that they would soon perish. Now, though, e's in a better place, so now we can look back and see how things were going, and how the game A Single Oroubouros Scale was developed.
Like a few of Bez's other pieces, this is structured not as a game but as a narrative essay, which different chapters broken up by hyperlinks. For me, the hyperlinks brought a definite sense of interactivity to the piece, because it was like finding clues in a mystery game, except instead of solving a crime you're trying to understand a human being.
I thought I had finished the whole project, and felt it was missing just a bit more that could help communicate the author's intent, but when I came to review the game, I found a poem (by the poet that his recent game Hidden Gems, Hidden Secrets centered on) which beautifully complemented the overall experience.
Surreal gothic horror with a spider theme, May 1, 2023I enjoyed this dark game. You play as a young child bartered away to be the spouse of a pale and fitful girl, scion of a rich family.
The text is dark, but themes of light and the color white prevail through the game, with the light presented as being more evil and twisted than soothing darkness.
There are numerous endings to the game, and a variety of conversations where you can choose between topics.
I enjoyed the game's depiction of helplessness in the face of unspeakable horror, as well as its blending of dream and waking.
Surreal gothic horror is on of my favorite genres (such as the game Heart of the House or the book The Haunting of Hill House), so I think I enjoyed this more than most people would. So while I'm giving it a five star rating, I could see other people having different opinions.
A queer relationship in trouble, May 1, 2023This game definitely brought back a lot of memories. I had a long relationship where I had a lot of work-life balance issues, and it eventually ended up falling apart, and this reminded me of that.
There are several endings, so there are likely different versions of this game depending on how you play, but in my playthrough, there were two main characters: a wealthy government official, and a young, poorer-class individual.
They love each other, but there are tensions. The poor one is concerned with fairness and trying to find beauty in day to day moments, while the richer one is trying to 'bring home the bacon' and do well at work.
An argument about one partner staying home late and missing an appointment because their boss corralled them at work reminded me of times that my boss in my first job wanted me to stay home late while my partner was caring for our newborn.
It's a tough situation. So I think there's a lot of emotion in this game. Your choices have a lot of freedom, too.
The only thing missing for me is length; I felt like the pacing in the first half was more drawn out and set up expectations for a longer game but that was rapidly concluded in the ending, leaving me wanting or expecting more.
Just a night out as an eldritch god of horror, April 29, 2023This is a fine Gruescript game, similar to Robin Johnson's own. Gruescript is a parser/choice hybrid, where all actions are done by clicking links, but there are items, rooms, etc, and your actions can change depending on what items you have.
In this game, you are a Lovecraftian god who has been summoned. You go to find a party going on at a mansion, but a strange one at that. People have been locked in the basement all day, but you can't check on them until you fix things elsewhere.
There are a lot of classic puzzles: NPCs that want things, avoiding unwanted attention, codes, secrets.
Even though my German is poor, I found it easy to read (except one time I didn't pay attention and missed an important clue!) and the puzzles had good momentum, not so hard I felt frustrated but not too easy. I used the hints a couple of times, and they were very helpful.
Overall, a fun game that is just the right length for a relaxing afternoon.
Endless boredom in the sand, April 28, 2023Apparently this game is a kind of in-joke parody of a German game from years ago about going south.
This game is about going north in the desert. It requires a great deal of repetitive commands (I found it useful to enter commands like n.n.n.n.n.n.n.n to get through faster).
The idea is you're marching through a very, very large desert to get to the north. The narrator occasionally throws in funny quips.
I got to a point I could go no further, and I decompiled the game to get a hint, but I couldn't figure out how to move on. Eventually, I tried (Spoiler - click to show)take all, noticed (Spoiler - click to show)a shovel in my inventory, and the rest was easy from there.
No bugs I could see, and an amusing concept, but not much else.
For a more serious but still funny take on the idea, you could check out The Northnorth Passage. But I didn't mind this game, it was amusing and very simple for me, a poor German speaker, to play.
A trip on a fishing ship runs into trouble, April 28, 2023This was a pretty entertaining German game. Due to my weak German skills, I relied heavily on the accompanying map for help, so someone who solves the puzzles on their own may have a different experience. I also appreciate the fact that HILFE lists every verb needed to complete the game.
You play as the captain of a fishing vessel where things aren't going so well. You haven't found any fish at all! And so your crew has nothing to do. Maybe that's why almost all the food is gone. And why your dishes are covered in weird slime. And why your first mate seems to be chanting praises to unspeakable gods...or just talking to himself. One or the other.
This game has horror elements but also is self-conscious and amusing about it. I enjoyed the scripted events, active NPCs and adapting environments, and I appreciate that it was more story-focused and not too long or complex, although there were definitely a couple of puzzles that took me a while to figure out. Fortunately, there's a nice mechanism when dying that takes you to a recent 'checkpoint'. Had a good time with this one!
A German Gruescript drama based on WWII and England, April 28, 2023This was an entertaining story with some good puzzles.
You play as a young German person who has received notice that your uncle, who had lived in England since WWII, had died, leaving you his estate. You must travel to his town and collect your inheritance.
With its small town and early puzzles about breaking into a real estate office, I wondered if this would be an Anchorhead clone, but it goes a completely different, more historical direction.
This is a gruescript game, using Robin Johnson's engine, and it's probably the best-coded gruescript game I've seen outside of Robin Johnson's own.
One thing though is that some of the puzzles didn't make much sense to me. Now, I don't speak German very well and some of the puzzles relied on deciphering handwriting and such, but that wasn't too bad because it had some alt text. No, the hard part was with the (major spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)statues, since the hints say they can be differentiated one from another because one is Big and one is Small, but they all have the exact same description!
So, I liked this game, overall fun, just had some hangups with a couple of puzzles. I like Michael Baltes's game Mariel, too, so it was fun to play more of his work.
A combat RPG through multiple worlds, April 26, 2023This game is set in the Little Match Girl universe, which is very different than what it sounds like (to me it sounds like a drab and depressing slice of life series based on Victorian London, whereas in actuality its about a time-travelling assassin).
In this one, you have to take down the Snow Queen and her army of henchmen spread out over many worlds. In the meantime, you can add members to your party (up to 5), gain powerful abilities and engage in turn based combat (none of which were features of the previous Little Match girl games).
I had two experiences with this game, one 'okay' and one great.
In my first experience, I just plopped in and started exploring. I got confused by the large number of exits, especially diagonal ones, and I had forgotten the key feature of Little Match girl games (remember below for anyone in a similar position). Once I figured out how to go to other worlds, I met people but no one would join me. I kept gaining more abilities on my own and I was worried I'd get through most of the game without ever finding someone to help me.
So I asked for help from the author, and restarted. My second experience was much better. The three things that helped me were:
1. Keeping an actual map (I could have gotten a fairly early companion if I hadn't missed a room)
2. Remembering the key feature of Little Match Girl games (very light spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)examining fire takes you to new places
3. Realizing the key to getting companions (moderate spoiler, got from author): (Spoiler - click to show)each companion requires one object from another world, and there's no companion in the first world.
With these in mind, I had a great time. There were some fun puzzles, and a variety of combat.
I'm actually interested in this a lot, because as an author I like to learn from these games, and they cover so many topics that at least something is always relevant to my current interests. The last little match girl game had an escape room that I liked, and I read it right when I was working on an escape room.
I play this game as I'm working on a combat mini-game. I had learned from someone else that having multiple antagonists made combat more interesting, and I was working on a system where you had a couple of robots with you you could program to fight.
So seeing how Ryan Veeder approached his combat was really interesting. Most randomized combat doesn't work well in IF, with Kerkerkruip being a major exception, but I think this one works well, especially with using HP to fuel attacks, even using HP to heal other's HP (but only one person being capable of it), as it can become a kind of resource management puzzle.
Overall, Vorple is working well here, with some surprises with sounds and colors. A couple of times when restarting or right after saving (maybe a coincidence?) the game automatically skipped through some cutscenes (like the very ending one), maybe because I had hit a lot of keys and there was a delay? Not sure, but I had to UNDO multiple times to see the ending correctly as it was just zooming past me. I'm almost sure it's something on my end but I'm putting it in the review in case it's useful for the author or happened to someone else.
I liked the plot threads about Ebenezabeth's overall growth and the ambiguity of her relationship with her father (is he possibly malicious?). I didn't really understand the overall storyline but I felt like it was supposed to have a lot of implied secrets (or maybe I accidentally skipped the opening?).
One of the areas (spoilered discussion about non-game stuff related to one area) (Spoiler - click to show)is a pink hotel in Hawaii, which is fun because I drove by that hotel a lot when I lived in Laie. It really stands out and for me was a big landmark in Hawaii, so I enjoyed seeing that).
Ghosts, suicide and gender issues, April 24, 2023This is a Twine game with some well-done styling that runs for a little over 15 minutes for me.
In this game, you are (I believe) a young Chinese girl at an American high school in Japan. Hannah, a friend of yours, has died, and her ghost is haunting you, but in a mostly positive way, like helping with homework.
Outside of death and ghosts, the games secondary emphasis seems to be sex; although no explicit scenes are shown, there are discussions about the relative attractions and submissiveness of different ethnicities, and of high school girls in general. I felt uncomfortable at times, but it never went beyond talk.
The story centers on finding more about Hannah and the reason for her death, as well as a couple of bullies in the school who do more and more over the top actions.
Gameplay was pretty linear at first; each screen had multiple links, with the last one going to the next page and the earlier ones revealing hidden text. Eventually there were more choices, with two major choices in the game providing the four endings (although the first choice, (Spoiler - click to show)taking the umbrella or not, may not seem important at the time).
The endings vary significantly. Some were about building friendships, but the others felt more shocking to me. One involved (Spoiler - click to show)violently dismembering a girl because she used anti-trans language and revealed she had bullied Hannah prior to suicide. The author in the authors note said that they could have seen themselves doing that to someone in their own life. Another involved (Spoiler - click to show)the bully pushing herself romantically onto the heroine, explaining that all the mean stuff she did was because she was attracted to her.
Overall, I think the interactivity could have used a slight tweak; either having more options early on, or, if it was intended to be read straight through, adding a smooth transition to the link-clicking effect (like a .3 second or less slide-in animation) to give a little more satisfaction with the links.
I didn't strongly connect with the story, but as a roughly 40-yr old cis man I'm not the audience this is going for. I could definitely see someone in a similar situation deeply appreciating and feeling touched by the story.
A fantasy conversation game with a Miyazaki-like setting, April 18, 2023In this game, every 'room' is a conversation with a new individual. Topics that you can discuss are highlighted in brackets or by other means depending on the interpreter.
Interestingly, every topic you learn in one location can be used in another. An important command here is 'GOODBYE', which I didn't learn for a while.
The story is intricate and interesting, told only in conversation. You have returned to a city dominated by a new god and his priest, Salyndo. You try to find a way to overthrow it.
Short, but breathtaking in the images it gives you glimpses of. I used 'help' about 5-6 times.
Strongly recommended.
A charming and low-stakes journey through a dream land, April 16, 2023This game has you enter a place you shouldn't, a portal, an actual liminal space between the real world and the world of dreams.
The main gameplay loop is looking at a subway map, picking a station to go to, and exploring, with items you pick up at one station coming in use at another.
Each station is a pure fantasy, mostly disconnected from the others. It's reminiscent of Miyazaki films like Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro (with their subway/catbus). The locations aren't intentionally scary, although some are pretty trippy.
I forgot which station I entered in and it was literally the last one I went back to. I ended up seeing everything, and it was a lot of fun!
To describe the vibes, one early station has a market run by people made of wood; another is a station almost identical to our world, but subtly not.
There were some spelling errors, mostly in the first few pages (like 'rennovating'). There was a pretty bad bug where trying to click on 'alight upon water' to transfer from the brown line to purple line going north gave a twine code error. You can get around it by going south instead and turning around. I think that one other station was like that as well.
Overall, a pleasant game with a few bugs.
Maddening puzzles personified, March 31, 2023This game really hit me in a weird spot because it coincided with an idea of mine in an amusing way.
In my own game, I wanted to come up with something to 'scare' the player, a horrible device so terrible that every player would run in fear, only for it to turn out to be a joke that can be solved in one move.
My device was called 'hideous contraption' and had random dice, twenty six levers, 8 strings corresponding to elements, Towers of hanoi, goat and cabbage, etc.
But it was all a joke.
This game is just like that. But not a joke. The most horrifying thing I could think of a game having, that's what this game is.
After a brief intro, you find yourself in a room with two switches, fives lamps, rope, a ladder that is movable, an exit, a chandelier, a button, a fitting, a track with fire on it, moveable scales, an egg timer, etc.
You have to manipulate all of these devices, plus far more. Oh, and your verbs are extremely limited to 2 or 3 at a time. Oh, and there's a turn limit. Multiple ones, in fact.
I just refused to play it. Hints wouldn't give the full experience for this game, and I just frankly didn't want to play this type of game. I like games where you don't need to take notes, just learning over time.
I said as much to Mike Russo, a tester of this game, and he said it wasn't that bad.
I drew a very extensive diagram of this game, took careful notes, and got 4 or 5 points by being careful and a sixth point by dumb luck. At that point I looked at the hints.
I don't like this game style and don't want to see games like this in the future, but that's my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the general populace, and should not be an impediment to future games in this genre. However, I do recognize the craft and polish that went into the game, and the storytelling is exquisitely good given the circumstances.
Choicescript game about a bird escaping with other birds, March 26, 2023This game is based on a seed from the first round of Seedcomp about birds escaping from a cage and freeing other birds. Another game, free bird, is in the comp based on the same seed.
I liked this game, and found it fun to build up plans to help the other birds. It reminded me of 90's television like Captain Planet and Ferngully.
It was a bit hard at times to see the effects of things I did. I didn't look in a mirror until near the end, when it let me set my name and stuff, and that felt a bit out of place; occasionally text about releasing a bird would be repeated.
There were moments of tension (did I do the right thing letting the Wren get out when they were anxious?) which helped improve the game.
Overall, I liked it; I do think it could use a little more polish on a few things, but I think this is a game the author can be proud of.
A very complex-appearing game for Walkthrough comp, March 25, 2023Walkthrough comp was a competition that had a bizarre 'walkthrough' posited to have been sent by telegram, and each game had to be designed to make the walkthrough make sense.
This game is very rich and complex-seeming, starting with a bizarre meeting with an occult man deep underground. It moves on to magical painting abilities and a sexually harassing duck.
It interprets the walkthrough in very creative ways, making parsing the walkthrough the hardest part.
The walkthrough itself is here:
HERE IS WALKTHROUGH YOU REQUESTED STOP YOU WILL SEE WHAT TO DO STOP THINK STOP X UPHOLSTER SEAT ZRBLM TAKE ALL N LISTEN FOLKS DRAW SWORD WAVE FAN DANCE ABOUT PAINT FENCE TAKE NEXT TURN SMOOTH DUCK DOWN ANESTHETI I EAT IT UNLOCK DOOR SWITCH PLOVER EGG STAND ON EAST SWING KNIFE LION PRAY GET MOUSE Z NW WAKE FISH SWIM DRINK DRINK READ LOOK UP DRESS BOOK SHIP PACKAGE PRESENT BOWL DROP TOY SLEEP PLAY STRING PICK POLISH APPLE EYE MIRROR POSE UNDO TRIM CORSET PUT GREY ON BLUE STAKE LIGHT FIRE HELP MAN STATION STOP WATCH XYZZY
The one command I didn't understand was 'put grey on', possibly because I dallied around too much in one scene.
As a narrative, it's disjointed; as a game itself, far too complex; but as a walkthrough comp entry, it's fantastic.
An unpolished first game about Emperor Nero, March 25, 2023It is clear that this game wasn't really finished. It even says so in the description, that it is a first game, rushed, etc.
The idea is that you are emperor Nero and that you are furious, because it is the day of your concert, but instead of paying attention to you, everyone is crying about their houses burning!
You have to investigate three different groups of people to find out what's going on, and then try to get your concert going.
The amount of typos and such increases as the game goes on, with errors in Twine popping up and at least one blank spot. However, I do think it's being updated during the comp, since it says only the Epaphroditus path is finished, while I was able to talk to a few people.
The text is descriptive, and the interactivity is actually a bit fun (should you sacrifice dignity and talk to the guards naked?), but this just needs more polish. Emotionally-wise, Nero is a bit too much of a single note--his arrogance just gets hammered over and over again without anything to contrast it with.
From what I've seen, I think this author could make great Twine games with just a little more preparation and time.
A Quest fantasy adventure with a snarky attitude, March 25, 2023I played this game years ago but somehow never reviewed it.
Luke Jones wrote several games in the mid-2010's that had a unique style of humor to them. The games tended to be implemented in kind of a sparse way but to have lots of characters and lots of dialogue. A typical example of the 'Luke Jones' style is the opening of this game, with words like:
You see an apple, a log, and Your Dog here.
But there's also a pigeon that drops a letter at your feet then flies away saying 'F*** you!!'
The goal of this game is to deliver a letter to a king in a fantasy world, although the actual events end up changing over time.
There's a glulx port of this as well, which I haven't tried. Overall, Luke Jones games are just a brand of their own, like halfway between Robb Sherwinn and Zork. If you like one of these games, you'll like his others.
The most-reviewed game on IFDB, March 25, 2023As of writing, this game has 54 reviews on IFDB, more than any other game on the database.
I had a review of this game years ago that was mildly spoiler-y, and it was my lowest-rated review on IFDB by far (like 0 out of 9 people found it helpful).
I thought I'd give it another go.
This game is short but memorable, and its main defining feature is the way that it sets expectations. Funnily enough, this helps it serve as a great introduction to IF for newbies, since each command is hinted so heavily without feeling like handholding.
For instance, in my games, on the first turn I'll say something like 'You can PICK UP the telephone', just holding the player's hand very heavily, while this game simply says 'the phone rings'.
The room prominently displays loose objects, encouraging the player to pick them up; mentions only a dresser, encouraging the player to try OPEN; clothing, encouraging the player to WEAR, which then triggers the need to shower, adding a little complexity.
Driving can be complex in other games, but hear any reasonable actions with the car will get you in and going. Even the (Spoiler - click to show)ID card, usually something people code in a weird way, is hinted nicely with saying the reader has a place for you to INSERT the card.
For most people, at least in the years when this came out, the events in the game are completely reasonable and logical ones that they've either experienced or seen on TV (younger players may be confused you can't take the telephone with you). For experienced IF players, the bare-bones house descriptions are par for the course. So in this way, the author manages expectations in a brilliant way.
In my last review, I dinged the game for its bland prose, but looking back, it manages to add a lot of character in small ways. Like, if you eat the pop-tart, it says 'It's not Sunday brunch at Le Trop Cher, but it'll do.' That's clever. So it's not that the game isn't well-written and punchy, it's more like an optical illusion where it takes good descriptions and interesting responses but puts them into the same overall 'shape' as a bad, first 'my apartment' game so you just gloss over them until you realize they had more depth than you thought.
Overall, an interesting game, and an influential one.
As a bureaucrat play hide and seek with documents, March 25, 2023This was a refreshingly well-designed game. There were a couple of things that didn't work out for me, but this game had the kind of smoothness I'd associate with experienced authors like Ryan Veeder or Zarf.
The conceit is that you are a space bureaucrat in a future technocracy. You are in charge of delivering a technical manual, but it's after hours and every chapter of the manual was assigned to a different subordinate. You have to track down each person's personal copy.
There was a lot of light office and space-bureaucracy humor, some fun romance, and a lot of little niceties (like the 'press anything' button being an ascii art anchor and having exits listed).
One nice feature was having all verbs listed, and once you found something using that verb it was crossed off the list. This was very satisfying.
The author seems to have found the lack of verbs a weakness instead of strength; typing the wrong thing too many times gives you a big apology about how they didn't have time to implement responses to everything not on the list. But constrained verb games are their own genre and are fun, and having the player get repeated errors isn't negative, it's just a fact of parser games; the errors are the 'boundaries' of the world, and having firm boundaries can make a game better.
I had a great experience with this. The main thing I disliked is that 8 cubicles are mentioned but you can only ever interact with two, despite learning the names of the others. I'd prefer it if it recognized, say 'Becher's cubicle' and just said 'that cubicle is boring' or something.
A dark satire of art criticism, March 25, 2023This Seedcomp game is based on artwork submitted to the first chunk of the competition, and this game focuses heavily on the art.
It makes use of Quixe's image embedding features to let you zoom in to various parts of the artwork while commenting on it.
It's tone is intended to mock contemporary art criticism, especially the trope of critics creating entire invented fantasies about what the meaning of the art is, these fantasies having no connection to reality.
It allows for a few sexually explicit actions but only if you thought of and typed them yourself; a few slight sexual references pop up here and there otherwise. There are some few other painful things that can happen.
In a way it reminds me of Exhibition by Ian Finley or the IF Art Shows from years past, because many of them also spoofed the criticism idea. I think this is an effective piece, especially with the images attached.
A short puzzle-heavy game about sneaking into the King's Ball, March 24, 2023This game has you as a humble baker who has a chance of a lifetime: a sponsorship from a King. If only you can get into the ball!
The game has a few major puzzles, the first being getting past the guard, and the second involving hygiene.
The puzzles were a little tricky; the first one was hard to guess what method to use until it was revealed all at once by an item, and the second required careful examination of numerous objects.
Overall, it's a fine game, but it had a little more unimplemented scenery than I expected, like the bread in the shop or the fence in one of the back rooms.
Overall, a pleasant experience.
A game about yeast gone bad and underwater brewing, March 21, 2023This game was entered in a jam using PunyInform, where the theme was using an airlock.
The author came up with an inventive way to do this, having an underwater experimental brewery that is accessed by an airlock deep under water.
Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of this game was rough. Undo is not supported [Note: the author confirmed that this is because I played the z3 version. The z5 version allows undo, so I've updated my review and increased the star score], and its very easy to lock yourself out of victory during the first puzzle. A lot of interactions just don't make much sense (for instance, why can't we see the (Spoiler - click to show)scuba gear before examining (Spoiler - click to show)the hook? Isn't the first thing far larger than the second?)
I ended up going in and out of the airlock over and over to try things back and forth between the two main locations. That, coupled with the sparseness of the game, ended up with less enjoyment than I'd usually have.
Clearly the author has some good talent for programming things like context-sensitive hints and a complex airlock. But my guess is that because this was a jam they ran out of time to fully test and flesh out the game descriptions. I would be more than happy to raise my score if the game was developed a bit further; it's not a horrible concept, it just needs more care.
A choice-based story about an underwater dive gone bad, March 18, 2023This game reminds me of bits of a lot stories--Armageddon, Sphere, Alien. But it's it's own thing.
This is a choice based game where you are a oil rig diver on one last job. You're told that something bad happened down there and you have to fix it. But things get...weird.
The game had a pretty small default font and for me only used about 25% of my screen. Most of the choices were between 2 or 3 options, and I felt like I had real interactivity. There were some weird repetitions in the text some times, like when asking questions at the beginning.
The story didn't really resonate with me the way the choices did. Instead of building up tension it revealed things early, then acted as if you didn't know them, and big plot events didn't have buildup while big buildups had no payoff.
Still, I'm glad I played and had a good time.
Play an artificial intelligence rejuvenating the earth for humans, March 17, 2023This is choicescript game entered in Seedcomp, based on a seed by Slugzuki.
You play as an artificial intelligence that has woken up hundreds of years after humans left the earth through flight or death. It is your assigned task to prepare the earth for humans to return.
However, your stores have been heavily damaged. Your goal is to manipulate several different factors to make the earth whole again. You may, however, encounter opposition...
The main gameplay cycle is to wake up after a year or so, consume a piece of Human writing, handle any alerts, and re-evaluate your priorities.
My game ended after about 4 or 5 cycles; there may be more endings.
The media were interesting; I encountered the writings of Du Fu for the first time, which was nice. Looking him up was fun, and I got to read more of his stuff, although most of it was more contemplative than the active poem featured here. There was also some larger writing not entirely meant to be consumed at one sitting (?) like a tylenol label, and some writing I couldn't find when googling, so either from obscure books or not from published works.
I liked the main overall cycle, I liked the writing and the vibes. I think the only thing I could have wished was either that it lasted longer with more cycles and depth or that it was shorter with a tighter focus on the writing segments. Many of the were poignant but I felt like the game was pulling two different directions a bit.
A brief verbless escape room in Twine, March 17, 2023This was a nice little treat, but was over as quick as it began.
This is a seedcomp game based on the prompt that players do a closed door game without using verbs, just adjectives and nouns.
I spoiled myself a bit here by not clicking the links in order; because I went out of order, I skipped about 1/3 of the game, which was red herrings.
Overall, I like the cute ideas expressed in this. It was polished to me, and descriptive in its own enigmatic way (what does the paintbrush mean? interesting). The interactivity worked well for me, but I didn't have enough time to get really drawn in. I'm glad I played.
Promising start to a bakery mystery, March 16, 2023This was a fun game, as yet unfinished (I would definitely bump up the rating once/if it gets done).
You play as a down-and-out detective who gets a last chance at making rent--a client whose beauty is so great that it overwhelms you, a beautiful baker who has been accused of a grave crime.
You have to go an investigate the 'corpse', and get to poke around the 'murder' scene and interrogate the suspect.
The animations and text styling is excellent. The interactivity, though, left something to be desired for me; for much of it, it is a 'gauntlet' style game where one option ends the game immediately and the other continues it. Undo exists everywhere except at endings, so it leads to their essentially only being one option at a time, since you have to pick the good one due to being unable to back out of bad one (unless you save every screen). This is not the case in every scene as some let you have a wide variety of interactions.
For me, the writing and characters were fresh and fun, and I'm intrigued by the mystery of the client's effect on the PC (outside of the obvious ones). Would definitely play a finished version.
A study in contrasts with vibes of Porpentine, March 16, 2023This Twine game has you enter a beautiful cabin that you can customize to your hearts content. Drinks, decorations, everything is what you like.
There's even a holoscreen, which is nice. And the game can end this way.
Or...
There is an alternative world you can enter that strongly contrasts with this one. It reminded me of Porpentine a bit (mostly the juxtaposition of a pleasant holochamber with (Spoiler - click to show)body horror, so there's a ton of people in similar genres, but I'm not widely read in that area, so I go to Porpentine first).
It also reminded me of a grimdark video my son and I used to talk about called the Rainbow Factory from the MLP fandom.
Anyway, there was good atmosphere overall, the game was very descriptive, and it had some nice interactivity, but I think the overall length wasn't enough to draw me in, and the ending scene for me lacked something I can't really put my finger on. Still, it's overall a well-done game and one I hope is preserved for others to play in the future.
A shattered relationship left behind on the asphalt, March 16, 2023This is a Seedcomp game, where people leave inspiration for others who go on to make games based on it.
This game is based on a poem by Sophia de Augustine.
Amanda Walker is one of the most successful authors of the last few years, having won Spring Thing, the XYZZY Awards, the IFDB Awards, and placing very highly in IFComp, Ectocomp, and Parsercomp. She works especially well with adapting poems into games.
This game is a shattered series of vignettes, mostly on rails but that's the way memory is some times. You are driving down a road--or, were driving down a road--with a boyfriend that you have been fighting with for months.
The game jumps around in time, moving simultaneously forwards and backwards. There are pedestrian segments of daily life made beautiful (or terrible) by the emotions present behind them.
I write this as I'm in a bad mood due to feeling a bit ill, but this game really made me think of the past. I had a divorce a few years ago, amicable in the end, but divorce can't happen with some scenes like that shown in the game. And the gory parts, the description of the blood, remind me of the early parts of our marriage, when I was at her c-section; birth is wonderful but it was terrible to see the doctor's hands bathed in her blood pulling out our kid. The memory stuck in my mind for a long time, together with the rest of the day of course. So this game made me think of that a lot.
I had some trouble here and there. I tried things like (Spoiler - click to show)bind wound, compress wound, tie sweater to wound,etc. before I realized I just needed to do what was in the hint. At the end, I somehow messed up the final action and got stuck. Before I tried to (Spoiler - click to show)answer phone, I tried stuff like (Spoiler - click to show)x phone, x message, x tree, run and then it just gave me a generic message whenever I tried (Spoiler - click to show)answer phone. So I restarted and speed ran to get to the end again.
Overall, I found this game polished (the hiccups were minor), had enough interactivity for me to enjoy, and obviously impacted me emotionally. It is lushly descriptive. I could see myself playing it again.
A lovely fusion of TS Eliot with a clever mechanic, March 14, 2023This game takes several TS Eliot poems and combines them with some original poetry (which fits in quite well and is lovely).
It uses a stressful mechanic: a giant countdown clock in the background ticks down one minute's worth of time. Once it's over, something special happens (and is a pretty neat trick).
I like the overall vibe T.S. Elliot's work, having encountered it once in high school and again in Graham Nelson's Curses!. There's a lot of parts of his work I dislike, but this game has great chunks in it that work well. The frantic race to see things leads to quick reading and moments of 'huh, what was that??' that were fun. I guess it was the opposite of timed text; instead of the author telling me how long it will take me to read a passage, I get to go at any rate I want through the game with just the overall experience being timed.
I played through three or four restarts until I saw everything I thought I could see. I don't know if there's a canonical ending, but my game ended with a lengthy race against the clock with a piece of actual timed text that made me feel like I was some person at the end of their life just watching the last bits of daily existence before floating away.
Overall, the game is polished, descriptive, has a nice interactive twist, drew me in, and I played it several times.
A surreal dream game with glitch graphics and adult content, March 14, 2023This is a Seedcomp game, made with Super Videotome, a branching visual novel/IF engine.
It has a great deal of glitchy graphics that honestly look great and add a lot to the game atmosphere.
You play as someone stuck in a club for hours and hours on end. So long, you can't even remember why you're there.
From there, it branches quite a bit; a feature I really liked is that you can choose to skip a choice rather than choose anything, and that felt really authentic.
Mine ended up in an explicit sexual encounter with a biblically accurate angel. I don't associate explicit sexual content in games with positive feelings, and so it decreased my enjoyment of the game, however it was clearly signalled at the start of the game that it contains such content, together with strong profanity. The profanity use reminded me most strongly of the 14 yr old boys at my high school, so that's how I imagined the protagonist.
The best part of this game is the atmosphere and the surreal world.
I thought the atmosphere worked well.
Underwater sabotage thriller, March 12, 2023In this game, you play as a military person whose submarine is under attack by poisonous gas. Trapped in the airlock, there's nothing you can do but wait until it subsides and hope your friends and crewmates are okay.
This game is compact and has neat and tidy implementation and puzzles. There are mechanisms and locks and keys and some clever puzzle solutions.
This has a lot more twists and turns and is darker than usual for a Garry Francis game, and I liked it. It was polished, descriptive, and the interactivity worked well.
The only drawback to me was that I kept getting this message after I left the command area and returned:
[PunyInform error: 3]
[PunyInform error: 3]
[PunyInform error: 3]
I did have to use hints once, but the solution was reasonable.
Track down environmental criminals in a family friendly game, March 12, 2023I liked this game, and felt it was a solid improvement over the author's previous game.
Here, you play as a member of the coast guard who is trying to track down a tramp steamer leaving a trail of destruction around the Florida coast.
The game is well-suited for children, with needed commands bracketed to be clear, light puzzles, and a generally positive and happy attitude.
Movement is unusual; a single N command might move you one room forward in a ship or send you dozens of miles through Florida. It reminds me of Victor Ojuel's game Pilgramage in that way.
The conversation system is well-presented, with an extra window popping up, although most conversations for me involved just going down the line one at a time.
I appreciate the game running smoothly and well. There were a couple of minor issues like 'an unsecured items', but overall it worked well. I feel like there could have been a bit more polish like replacing 'you can see Bart here' with something more specific.
So to me, it was descriptive, interactive, and fun, but not completely polished and I don't feel like I would revisit it. If the last game was a 5 or 6 out of 10, this one is a 6 or 7 out of ten.
An astronaut experiences bizarre hallucinations , March 12, 2023This is a short Punyinform game made for Puny Jam #3.
In it, you play an astronaut who has to flee because an airlock is leaking. Bizarrely, the door to the space station is a heavy metal door with a key. More strange things appear as you explore the station.
This has some problems (especially uncapitalized room names and generally empty rooms). However, the author clearly was really into their descriptions and the flow of the game worked well with few hiccups (the only part I got stuck was a puzzle that was actually very fair).
So I think this is pretty unpolished and buggy, but I like the idea (I always like surreal/hallucination games). Having the character be (Spoiler - click to show)The Joker is interesting. Is this what the world looks like from his point of view?
A fun little easy treasure romp in a fantasy world, March 12, 2023This is, I think, the third Johann Berntsson game I have played, and I tend to enjoy his level of implementation. The other games I played (from 20+ years ago) were longer and more complex, but this one shares a lot of the good elements from those games.
You find yourself in a strange airlock, and have to go to another dimension of your choice. And you choose: fantasy!
What follows is a simple and complete fantasy story. Rooms have 2-3 exits, and each room has at most one object of importance in it. The next task to do is usually clearly indicated, making this more of a fun, breezy exercise than a puzzly challenge.
I didn't feel super engaged by the game, but it is quite polished and very descriptive, and the interactivity was smooth.
GI Joe-style underwater action, March 11, 2023This game has you go undercover with two different characters in an exciting underwater adventure. First, you have to open an airlock door while floating underwater, and then you have to infiltrate a base using stealth!
There were some problems with implementation. Several actions had no response; I didn't see the control panel in the first room, so I tried stuff like 'turn handle with multitool' (which has a completely blank response) and 'turn handle with me' (which gives a really bizarre error with text from later in the game).
The game does have a couple of cool puzzles and fun descriptions, but overall it really herds you one way and doesn't encourage you to stray off the beaten path. There are a ton of useless rooms, a lot like Planetfall and other Meretzky games.
Overall, I feel like it lacked polish and the interactivity was frustrating, but it was descriptive with fun puzzles. I know this was made for a jam, so the author didn't have much time, but this could be an amazing 4 or 5 star game with enough expansion by the author.
A symbolic contemplation of dreams and serenity, March 10, 2023This is an interesting short game written in PunyInform.
It follows a rhythmic pattern of sleeping, dreaming, breathing, and waking.
It feels like a purposely simple, stripped down game with simple aesthetics and a positive overall message. Puzzles are intentionally light and the focus is on atmosphere.
I found it to be polished and smooth, and the interactivity worked well for me. While intentionally crisp and precise, I did find it descriptive overall.
However, I didn’t feel an emotional connection to the overall story, even though I feel like I should have given it’s nice theme. I also didn’t feel like I’d revisit it in the future.
So, a good game, but for me doesn’t crack the top five of games written by this excellent and prolific author.
Investigate a medical lab after hours, but with some bugs, March 7, 2023This game has some problems, but most of them aren't serious or too hard to learn from, so I expect the author's next game would probably be great.
In this game, you are a genius scientist who is working late after hours, when suddenly things stop working. You have to figure out how to get past airlocks and get cameras to work.
This game seems to show a lack of knowledge of Inform, with lots of whitespace, items not listed in room descriptions, missing synonyms and commands, etc. These are common things for people who are starting out, and I feel like the next game the author makes will likely be much better.
The standout here is the occasional vivid description. But I found the interactivity frustrating, didn't make an emotional connection with the game, found it unpolished, and left without a strong desire to replay.
I do think the author's next game could be amazing, but for now this one leaves much to be desired.
Death and dark secrets threaten a discord community, March 6, 2023This is a great, character driven mixed-media game that simulates discord while also using additional text and pdf files to tell an overall story.
Bez and Josh Grams teamed up on this one, with Bez writing and Josh programming (according to credits), and I think the division of labor worked great, because the writing is on-point and the coding is very smooth and looks fancy.
The main thrust of the game is a Discord conversation between a group of friends that gathered together over the years to discuss an obscure (and fictional) poet. However, the main leader of the group is in a car crash. While this is being announced, dark secrets bubble up.
You take turns as the various members of the discord group, selecting between different variations of how to respond. It definitely seemed like my choices could influence the story heavily, but I chose a particular path of every time to get more juicy gossip.
In between the choices, there are interludes with additional information over the years.
I think this is some of the strongest writing I've seen in a while: a diverse cast of characters, realistic scenarios, people reacting the way they do in real life. It was especially jarring because I've lived through or seen a few different variations of the events depicted in this game.
There were a few quibbles I had; I was torn about the timed text, because it does make it harder to fit a game in during a busy schedule, but it definitely contributes to the overall feel of the game. Also, I feel like the game could have been just a little longer or have a firmer resolution. Otherwise, this is a game that I felt joy to play.
Edit: Apparently the poet Dorn is real. Who knew?
Clever magical spells game...in a tomb...with a donkey, March 6, 2023This game was entered in Seedcomp, and is primarily based around the 'seed' of the same name, a text file by Rovarsson containing a vivid description of a game centered around getting stuck in a tomb with a donkey and a bowl of blood and a cat mummy.
This finished game dropped the altar/blood angle but added the rest nicely. You play as a spellcaster struck back in time during a duel. Your spells have scattered to the wind, and after trying to steal some raw materials from a palace you are forced to flee, eventually finding yourself at a tomb.
The pattern of this game is gentle gameplay, generally finding a spell and using it either immediately or in the next room. Some puzzles add in extra twists for more engagement. I got stuck once or twice and I did need a hint in the room with the platforms (I had tried (Spoiler - click to show)LEVITATE ME and received no strong feedback, so I assumed that levitate wasn't the solution.)
Overall, this was enjoyable. I didn't connect on an emotional level, but I found it soothing and sweet.
Fun amnesia sci fi thriller that needs just a bit more polish, March 5, 2023I always like Marco Innocenti games, they usually guarantee some fun exploration, tricky puzzles and lots of complex backstory.
I also like random games where you wake up on a broken ship with amnesia (like Babel, Trisgaea, etc.).
So overall I was primed to like this. You wake up on a ship as a child and find out that there has been major damage to your underwater base. Huge rocks have broken in parts of the walls and the whole thing is flooded.
Overall, the backstory is slowly revealed in gruesome and disturbing detail. It pulls on a lot of old sci-fi tropes but does so in a relatively smooth way.
The puzzles were fun, but some more coding I think could be useful. Especially I think there should be a more clear response to (major spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)shoot can and put splinter in rock to show that those two are reasonable actions, and just need a little change to make them better.
An entire world and ecosystem contained in a library, March 3, 2023This is a world-building heavy game about an enormous library the size of an entire planet. In it, there are all sorts of bizarre things: living book-creatures, ink serpents, portals and non-Euclidean spaces, etc.
You are exploring it with many other archivists, including your own apprentice.
The structure is essentially a Gauntlet, where you get two choices at a time, one that keeps you alive and one that kills you. I found this a bit frustrating, and most other interaction was either 'next page' or an option to be nice or mean with words. The game ended fairly abruptly after one major event.
All this is balanced by the very cool storybuilding and fun descriptions. So there was a lot to like here as well.
A two-player drama game, March 1, 2023This game is hard to review for multiple reasons, since it's a multiplayer game I played on my own (I've done multiplayer IF before but since this one is in French I didn't feel comfortable asking someone to wait while I slowly read it), and also describing the plot spoils it, as a big part of the game is figuring out the other person's story. So this I could basically rate it really high or really low depending on how I'm feeling today.
Overall, the setting is mostly muted and indistinct. You are at a society dinner (or maybe political dinner?) and everything is centered around that. Unlike most multiplayer games I've seen recently, which tend to have tons of text interspersed with a very small number of possible actions, this game has 30 turns each of which has ten or more actions you can choose.
However, these actions are almost all inconsequential or are only interesting once. I do have to give kudos for allowing players to pass any message at all to the other person. I did feel it straggled on too long by about ten turns.
Of course if I had played with someone else I wouldn't have spoiled the fun of finding out about the other person, which is a bummer. Overall, I'm giving this 3 stars, but it really could be anywhere from a 2 to a 4.
A touching story of a ghost and his pack of young friends, March 1, 2023This is a choice-based entry where you play as the recently deceased ghost Victor who visits his friend Guillaume.
It's the day of Victor's funeral, and all his friends come over. You, as Victor, can only be seen by Guillaume, but can influence others. Your goal: to help your Guillaume win the heart of long-time friend Marie.
In the meantime, you discover a lot about your friends: one has come out recently, one has a new boyfriend from Senegal, some siblings are squabbling, one person gets a little too drunk, etc.
It's a little bit like Delightful Wallpaper (the second half), where you influence others subtly, and a bit like Blue Chairs, with its substance-using, young-people-talking parties.
It's a very long game, maybe too long, but the story it paints is beautiful. It does require (like another reviewer said) a lot of clicking, so I got in the habit of just clicking really fast until it stopped and going back to read over the text.
I really liked this world. It reminded me of the work of Katherine Morayati, of being in 'the scene'. This had more 'youth slang' than any of the other games; I learned a lot. It also has tons of cultural references; my search history has a lot of stuff like Science Po, Francoise Hollande, Knife Party, etc. now.
I like this culture because I was never a part of it. I've never drank, never tried marijuana. I had a lot of siblings and cousins and never hung out with other kids after school, so the idea of a big friend group you spend all your time with is something I saw my siblings do but never tried as a kid. As an adult, now I have a lot of nice friends, but there's not that same element of risk and danger that impressionable young people have when it comes to things like drugs or alcohol or unsafe sex.
Anyway, the story I found was well-crafted and overall it resonated with me. Interactivity felt great; out of all games in this comp, I felt like both choices were okay each time, that both would produce a meaningful story and that I could choose what I really wanted.
Play one person, then a ship, then a city, in Ancient Greece, February 28, 2023This game was pretty fun and fairly long, though it is unfinished.
In it, you play as the child of a king. Your father has been assassinated and you must flee the city. Once you do so, you join a boat and, if successful, start a city.
I enjoy city-building games like Civ VI and multi-stage games like Spore, so I found this game more fun as I went on. Early on, though, it felt a bit unfair at times, almost like random events happening.
There are some nice mechanics, like a prophetess guiding you with several messages for the future and a collection of what essentially are riddles or knowledge tests about Greek gods.
I liked my ending, with the city growing good. I felt like a lot of times the choice was between 'do something honorable and good that will make everyone like you or do something obviously bad', which made it feel like there was often a 'right choice' to click. But I also feel the game became more complex the longer it went on.
This was a big French Comp game, but worth playing.
Cross the ocean while dealing with conflicting groups!, February 28, 2023This game uses Unity and has some visual component, similar to a visual novel (or the game Reigns, which I haven't tried).
You are the second-in-command to a captain on a trans-Atlantic voyage. The Captain, a bit nervous, asks you to handle most of the passengers.
Events are randomly-selected vignettes with different characters (which I'm told is similar to Reigns). Each one gives three options, which are selected by a ship's wheel rather than clicking directly on them.
Each character has their own agenda: a priest who wants to evangelize, a high-ranking and veteran officer who wants the crew to relax and party; a rich socialite who wants to be treated well; and a communist organizer.
Overall, the system is interesting and fun, but the interactivity felt disconnected and opaque. It was hard to find common threads through the interactions and it was difficult to know how your choices would affect the two main stats.
But the images were nice and the writing was very descriptive.
Place your own prophecy upon the world, February 27, 2023This is a brief but replayable game.
You have found the ancient Temple of Destiny. Inside is a prophecy in the form of a poem. Interestingly, the stone it is carved on is movable, and you can alter individual words and phrases.
This allows you to construct the prophecy you most desire!
Unfortunately, you cannot go back to previous choices; what's done cannot be undone (without replaying). This makes it a bit hard to strategize without writing everything down, as you can't just cycle through.
Like others, I found the Good Ending and the Bad ending but not the Worse or Better ending. I also found the 'give up early' ending.
Pretty fun concept!
Explore a space station undergoing a crisis, February 27, 2023In this game, you wake up in darkness on a space station on Mars. The oxygen is getting low, and you have to repair the spaceship!
This is written in the Donjon engine, one I've seen come up several times in French games and which always works well overall.
There is a small map here, and only a few items, allowing the game to be completed relatively quickly with few surprises (except for some fun easter eggs).
Overall, the game is pretty sparse. The majority of each room description is taken up by listing exits. An AI is mentioned but doesn't seem to do much (it is almost implied that the player is the AI but then we put on overalls so it wouldn't make much sense. Unless the reader is the AI?) And there is a little bit of lack of verbs or clues.
I gave two stars to a game by the same author last year and I feel a bit bad giving two stars again, but I think that for me personally (since my rating is just subjective and is only my opinion), if the author did some more testing where they had players try commands and implemented anything they tried, the game would be a lot smoother. But maybe I'm wrong.
Actually, I am very glad there was a walkthrough provided and it made things very smooth after I had explored for a while and got stuck, so I think I will add a star for the good walkthrough and the funny spores.
An excellent twist on a mad-lib style story, February 27, 2023This French comp game has a form of interaction I've never seen before and which I quite like.
It is a mad-lib game, in the sense that the primary interaction is filling in blanks that are then used in the rest of your story. The blanks include things like your name but also more important things like what special object you have.
This doesn't make for very good interaction itself. But what happens is after your choices are locked in, the game lets you pick between several 'implications' of your choices, and that's where the true agency lies. For instance, you can create a kind of menace in the dungeon that causes some negative thing to happen to you (I made an enormous burger that makes you fat). Once you select that, the game asks if the Enromous Burger can be defeated in combat or talked to (I chose combat). I ended up losing the game in the end (my girlfriend from the guild of assassins was killed by the burger so I was stuck later). With different choices, there would be an entirely different story.
The main storyline though is that you are part of a monastery where the prioress wants you to lie to the future queen to protect the monastery treasures. You decide to disobey by finding the legendary ____ of Saint ______ to help you.
Overall, it was fun. Because I made the choices, I didn't get as emotionally invested, but everything else was great.
A cute animated visual novel about an intern solving a difficult case, February 25, 2023This is a visual novel that has some really great animation and overall visuals. The text was in nice little chunks that made it easy to read even though many characters had weird speech things (like one who talked while holding a golf club in their mouth!)
It's not super long, either. You play as a robot-looking character who has done a really great job at their last three internships, but who now is ready for the hardest one of all.
You're invited to a hotel where a dog-like manager tells you there is a conference of traitors going on, but one of them is a traitor-traitor: that is, they're secretly not a traitor at all! You have to figure out who did it and confront them.
There is only one suspect and one interview, so the game is much briefer than you might expect it to be, but it's hard enough that I played through a few times without solving it. It's okay, though, because it's just a fun, goofy game with memorable characters. Definitely worth checking out!
Unfinished Moiki game about a zany robot museum heist, February 25, 2023My enjoyment of this French game went up and down as I played. My very first thought was, 'Wait, Gavroche games? Didn't they win last year with a demo game that was unfinished? Why are they making another demo instead of finishing that game???? Will they never finish a game?"
But this game is, just like last year, very fun after all. If it just ends up having several demos each year, that's not so bad after all.
This game features you as a recently activated robot who has been repurposed to steal from a museum! Your human co-conspirators are designated by card suits and communicate with you via radio, with one being especially foul-mouthed.
Once you get further in, you discover a cast of robot characters that have some humor and some pathos. I got my arm ripped off in a robot arm-wrestling competition, and that was pretty neat. Visually, it's great-looking, like many Moiki games are.
Overall, I planned on a solid 3/5 due to the unfinished, but the exhibit vignettes changed my mind to 4/5.
Clever game about an ancient book that rewrites itself, with puzzles, February 22, 2023This game reminded me of why I have liked the French Comp over the years: the innovation.
You have in this story a book that can flipped forwards and backwards. It has about 8 or 9 pages total (at first). At first, I thought there was a bug, as the book seemed intended to have jewels on the front but they were missing, but as you read, you discover that's not the case.
An ancient civilization conquered all galaxies but couldn't prevent the end of the universe as it was consumed by black holes. Instead, it found a way to encode its entire history and culture into three crystals (the ones missing from the cover of the book), each held by a different guardian.
The book's history fluctuates, kind of like (but very different from) SCP-140 from the SCP Wiki. Different chunks of texts will flicker, and clicking on them changes the story. Change it enough, and you get a visual logiv puzzle you can solve by clicking.
I had a lot of fun with this. There are definitely some areas weaker than others (like Rovarsson mentioned, the story is fairly basic; another thing is the puzzles themselves are simple), but the overall interactivity is nice and the story is engaging, so for me the game as a whole was more than the sum of its parts.
A bilingual game about a menacing therapist and a cup of coffee, February 21, 2023This is a heavily-altered Twine game that has images with mouse-over animations, text that changes in dramatic ways, and other fancy effects. I had to turn on the scrollbar to get it to work on my mouseless laptop, but otherwise it worked well.
The game was written in English and then translated to French, but I played it in French first, an amusing intentional roadblock in understanding between two Anglophones. I then replayed twice in English.
The game is brief, but rich. You have been seeing a psychiatrist and are having lapses in memory, have been hearing voices, etc. At first, the doctor is eager to help you, exploring your past, but things get darker...
Overall, it's a surreal game whose strongest features are it's neat visual effects, its replayability, and its sinister atmosphere.
The story of a soldier obssessed with letters, February 17, 2023This is kind of a happy accident; this game is one I played before in Spanish from Ectocomp, but it happened to match the 2023 French Comp themes of treason and archives, so it was translated and entered into that as well.
This is a compelling story, which involves a soldier that is obsessed with collecting the letters of other soldiers, usually after they die. He wants to write his own letter, the best letter ever, and will stop at nothing for his goals.
There are 3 acts, each one fairly brief with actions that are generally clued in the instructions or text. I found it easier in French than in Spanish, to be honest.
Overall, the obsession here is very compelling.
Pleasant worldbuilding in an intro to an exciting fantasy game, February 16, 2023This is just the very first act of a large story. It sets up the main action and then promises the next story (as shown by the Episode 1 in the title).
It is a choice based game, designed in portrait mode rather than landscape, with either a 'next' option on each screen or a few choices. There are several nice character portraits done.
You are a new archivist at a library in a magical world. People and creatures from all over come and you, an apprentice archivist, must decide whether they should be admitted or not.
So it's kind of a bureaucracy simulator, but has more action in the end. In the middle it has more normal life things like dealing with allergies or finding a cute person.
Promising, but incomplete.
Complex worldbuilding about a world of insects and men, February 16, 2023This game has some pretty awesome worldbuilding. It's a French hypertext game with three main stories and a few incomplete ones.
It has very lovely art and some background music. The idea is that there is this ancient, ruined world filled with gigantic walls and large trees. There are no living creatures except for insects. It reminds me a bit of Nausicaa of the Winds, especially the trees that suck up poisonous metals and excrete them.
Overall, the worldbuilding was fun. You see this world of wild druids and ancient technology through the eyes of a young girl. There are horse-like insects, monstrous ones, insect gods, and insect food.
It's very big even as is. The one thing that I found a bit odd (besides it being released unfinished) is that the structure is kind of like a text maze. There is one main storyline you can usually just click through, with occasional side paths that can be very long before coming back to the original.
Overall, I love this world and art and think it's fun.
A basic introductory game introducing text adventures in an office setting, February 16, 2023This Italian game hasn't had any reviews since it came out 13 years ago, and someone suggested it, so I checked it out.
It's a cute concept although some parts are a little weird. You are headed to ZenSpa, a company that does interactive fiction. But you have to find your way inside, past the secretary, and up to the director himself.
The game highlights the difference between old school and new school IF, although maybe not the way you'd expect. Pamphlets inform you that kissing is all the rage now in IF games (which I don't think is a very strong trend?). Non-consensual kissing is a bit weird, but in most situations you try it in the game, you get firmly reprimanded and arrested. One situation, though...
Overall, the game was short but well put-together and well-clued.
A novel parser game with autocomplete and inscrutable mechanics, February 13, 2023This game is a demo for a new type of parser.
Basically, you type in the first letter or two of a noun on the screen, which brings up some possible words that can autocomplete, which you do by hitting tab; then you hit tab more to cycle through different actions or adjectives for that noun.
This is a clever idea. I did have some trouble navigating the game though. You're basically some kind of goblin entertaining an ogre king, so there were a ton of words that I didn't understand (looking them up, it was stuff like 'burping' or 'somersaulting') and there were some typos that I think were intentional like 'vous être'.
In structure, as far as I played, the game starts with you telling poems to the ogre king, then possibly fighting his executioner guy, then exploring your living quarters, then quoting proverbs, then fighting again.
Interaction was kind of wonky for me. Almost none of the actions have predictable effects; instead, it seems like the author's goal was to come up with funny or nonsensical results for most things. It was amusing, but it was hard to plan what happened. Combat was especially rough, with many actions healing the other opponent. On the itch page, others had complained about this, and the author suggested making sure that you mix up your attacks and not follow any pattern. I couldn't do this, and died during the second duel. There was also a clock that didn't seem to do much besides making you sleep for a while.
Overall the system looks pretty good, and the game is descriptive and amusing, but the actual game mechanics are pretty hard to figure out and could be explained more clearly.
A translation into French of a game with comic-only output, February 10, 2023I previously played the English version of this game in Parsercomp.
In it, you type in words like a regular parser game, but the majority of output is in images in a cartoon style. You are the 'guy' on a guys' restroom door, and the lady on the other door is stolen by a photorealistic hand. You have to rescue her!
I wondered if there would be any big differences in the French translation. I didn't find any. I looked and found a long post by the author after the comp had ended, which was very comprehensive. I learned that 1) the author had thought of many deep philosophical things, including Shakespeare, Brecht, Michael Ended, diegetics, etc., 2) the game was written in around 10 days, and, most importantly to this translation, 3) The author specifically refused input of several beta testers and several reviewers, deciding to stay true to an artistic vision rather than listen to the masses.
I generally find that 'being true to yourself' and 'making a well-respected and popular game' are two different goals for games. They don't necessarily contradict each other (Superluminal Vagrant Twin seems like it satisfies both goals!) but it's not usually to pick both and work on them. If you seek your own true vision, that means occasionally disappointing your fans, and if you seek to please fans, you may lose your own vision.
So this game still includes many of the things that made it difficult in the English version. The author states that almost no one has completed it without hints, but that hard games have both poetic value and it is better for players to play games without hints.
These are subjective positions for which there is no real answer. For my thought though, great games aren't great because they are hard, but because they make players feel smart or accomplished. I could make a game with a 10-digit multiplication problem and it would be hard without a hint or a calculator, but that wouldn't necessarily make it fun. Similarly, games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring could be made so hard that no one could complete them at all. So I think that difficulty itself does not create enjoyment.
Overall, this game is identical to the English one, outside of the French. It is polished, descriptive in its own fashion. I did find it amusing, and I have played it again. I gave the English one 3 stars, but I'm giving the French one 4 stars. Why? I think everything looks cooler in French, and playing in a non-native language adds a different level of complexity that I enjoy. I realize that doesn't benefit actual Francophone players, but ratings and reviews are always subjective.
A cute but brief game about becoming a recipe librarian, February 9, 2023This is a pretty short Inform 7 game in French.
You have been hired as an archivist at a grand library. Coming in, you are welcomed by the Master Archivist, who gives you a grand tour and asks you to demonstrate your capabilities.
The version I played was pretty short, with a lot of size implied (by stairs and locked doors and furniture) but with most of it not open to play (due to being locked or empty, etc.)
It had a cozy feel, like Stardew Valley or something similar. It was fun to look up the recipes and the memories it brought back of using a card catalog were the highlights for me.
Overall, this could be expanded to a larger concept or just serve as a training game for the author to hone their skills. It was written very quickly and not tested much, according to the author, but I like the writing style.
A complex office/historical/sci-fi twine game with colorful UI, February 8, 2023This is a long game in the 2023 French IF Comp, and one with an innovative take on interactivity and on the themes of 'treason' and 'archives'.
My opinion of the game changed around a lot because there are so many types of interactivity. Basically, you have access to a machine depicted as green-on-black, and you can dig through folders of files and applications.
I was in big trouble at first because my French is mediocre and there are parts of the game that are just reading page after page of fairly complex and technical French.
But then I realized that this is just a big game. Interspersed with the documents are images, codes, and minigames. They were well-done and all worked perfectly (except sudoku, which always quit when I put a 1 in).
The story really developed. At first I had no idea at all what was going on, some kind of obscure tale of political protest and treason, but then it became more of a work diary and finally unfolded into a pretty cool ending.
Overall, I'm very pleased with the outcome. It reminded me a bit of Kafka at parts, in a good way, but ended with its own style. Very fun, one of the better games I've played this year over all.
A brief action-packed pony parser game, February 7, 2023This is a parser game where the characters are all four-legged hooved creatures. It of course reminded me of My Little Pony, similar to the Daring Do episodes.
This game is unusual in that instead of focusing on traditional puzzles, it consists of primarily action sequences, outside of an initial investigation sequence.
The author says in the notes that the only way they could think of to make the fights interesting was to have multiple opponents. I have to say, I think it does help. I've played a lot of parser games with combat in them, and some of them are pretty great (like Gun Mute) but others suffer. I think the multiple opponents here help since it allows for strategy, like taking out the strongest one first or the one attacking your ally.
The implementation was actually pretty good. Something about the game as whole, though, felt just a tad thin, and I can't put my finger on it. Maybe it feels like there just could have been more, like using your powers more, more detail about you and your backstory, etc.
Edit: Since I wrote this, the game was updated with a cool little backstory if you are doing well after the first fight. It uses a technique that's very rare in parser games, and which would be annoying if overused, but is actually really cool here and helps fill in some of the gaps.
An unusual epic-length retelling of King Arthur with longterm choices, February 6, 2023I played version zeta-3 of this story.
This review is a bit odd to write, as I'm approaching it from two points of view. On one side, this game is a definite artistic statement. The author writes in the overview:
"It's not a game. It's not interactive fiction. It's not a puzzle. It's not action-packed. It's not fun. If you're a gamer, you'll hate it and should not play it. It's not interactive fiction. If you like interactive fiction, you probably won't like it. The reason such people should not play Le Morte D'Arthur is that it violates all the norms of these firmly established genres."
And so as someone who does like interactive fiction and puzzles and action, I have to take that into account. It's essentially like a vegan reviewing a steakhouse, and so as someone not from the target audience, I wouldn't take my feedback to indicate necessary changes.
On the other hand, I also have to see how I feel about the game just as a game, as if I had found it out in the wild, even though it's impossible for me to be completely subjective.
In this game, you play as King Arthur. Most fantastic details have been removed; though I haven't seen it or read it, I'm reminded of the showrunners of Game of Thrones who reportedly stated that they tried to strip as many fantasy elements out of the show as possible, as 'We didn't want to just appeal to that type of fan'. Here, too, it seems like the author has strived to appeal to a broad audience. There is no magic, and the traditional systems of chivalry or witchcraft or even tragic noble love are generally missing here. Instead, the focus is on a life of poverty, sickness, animals, and decay after the exit of Rome.
Play is based on little storylets that happen one right after the other, with a few choices per page of text. The game is very large and mostly cyclical, with Arthur dealing with local disputes, having family discussions or issues, spending time with his dog or nature, fighting the Saxons, and discussing with Merlin in turn. Each of these elements progresses as time goes on.
The discussions with Merlin are a focal point for the author, and seem to be the central thread of the game. They are posed as Socratic dialogues, with Merlin asking you questions, generally correcting you for your mistakes.
Now I'll take about my five criteria for rating IF (which as the intro says, this game isn't designed for standard criteria, but I find it useful as a way to organize my thoughts):
Polish
The game is polished. While it is still being updated and there are some unfinished artwork, it is a very large game and has few issues for its size, and no bugs that I could see. The ending (Spoiler - click to show)has a surprise use of video, which was well done.
Descriptiveness
The game is very descriptive. It depicts a squalid and lawless world, with crude but humble people. It paints a picture of decay and loss, loss of culture from Rome and loss of life and land from the Saxons.
There were a lot of features I wasn't sure whether were historical or not, so I looked it up. For instance, battles tend to have very high casualties, so I looked up how common that was at the time. There is a great deal of rape and sexual interactions with young teenage girls in the first half of the game, so I looked up how common that was. There is a casual disregard for life and a system of slavery, so I looked up about that. Sometimes what I found agreed with the game, and sometime not, but there is a lot up in the air.
The text uses few archaisms but throws in some celtic curses. The language is brusque and casual, with references to farts and diarrhea but also tender family language. There were a few incongruities (one noble uses modern slurs to insult another as a (Spoiler - click to show)pu**y fa**ot).
Interactivity
The storylets are disconnected. Choices from one are generally not brought up later on. Instead (behind the scenes) incremental changes to overall stats are made, like Choice of Games. You need not worry if you make the wrong choice about who should lead a clan or who should be put to death, as it doesn't affect anything later down the road. That's only at first, though; the last 25% of the game has many important choices to make.
The interactivity does feel better as you go along. At first I felt like I could pick anything and it really didn't matter, while near the end it did matter more.
I had a very satisfying ending right until the last screen, where I was more or less informed I had been defeated (the code for my ending was (Spoiler - click to show)defeatresolution. I support being able to 'lose' in long games, but I think it can be done in a more satisfying way. In fact, the ending was pretty great; I think one or two lines might make it more satisfying. It's rough after playing a 6 hour game that takes quite a while to replay to hear 'you played wrong as a player' rather than 'your character made wrong choices', which are two different sentiments, and I'm getting more of the first sentiment.
As an accessibility note on the ending, (Spoiler - click to show)I had difficulty hearing the voice as I was in a public space on a quiet computer without headphones. Having a text transcription or subtitles of both sides of the conversation could be useful, even if it only appears after.
Emotional Impact
I started this game with a bad attitude, and felt justified as the game was often repetitive at the beginning with low stakes in most choices.
But, due to the slow buildup and epic length of the game, I began to know the characters a lot better, from the local doctor/healer to Mordred and others. It made the ending actually quite satisfying emotionally (outside of the very last few lines), and felt like there were real stakes in dealing with betrayals and friendships and loss.
Would I play again?
I might, although it is difficult to say. The game is very long, and the mechanics are more or less intentionally obfuscated. There is no real way to look at options and think, 'What is my strategy here?' Sometimes being bold pays off, sometimes it hurts you. I think that's a great way to introduce real-life ambiguity into a game, which was why I was so surprised to have 'you played right' and 'you played wrong' as endings. With all the micro choices over the course of the game and no indications as to what their effects are, I think there's room for endings that are equally valuable for the player, just varied in the actual results.
Overall, if I had found this game on its own, I would have thought it was a marvelous game. There are parts of it I don't agree with in terms of treatment of women and some language, but I am often an outlier in feelings of that sort and wouldn't base any decisions off of that. Due to that, and to my feelings about the combination of unclear consequences and strongly delineated endings, I'm giving 4 stars out of 5. I think most players who stick it out through the lengthy game will enjoy it, and I would consider it a success and one I can recommend to others in the future as an excellent historical fiction and military story.
Spy on grandpa in this text game with graphical UI, February 4, 2023This game reminds me a bit of Sweet Dreams by Papillon or of Bitsy games. Basically, you control a character on the screen and you interact with objects by hitting the space bar. Then you get some text or possibly some options.
It's a relatively short game, but well-done and polished. Your grandfather never lets you up into the attic, but you've sneaked in and now you're going to discover the truth for yourself. The relationships depicted are by turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, and there are definite funny moments (like the expressions grandpa makes when you ask very personal questions).
The game's only fault, to me, was that it was fairly brief, giving a limited sense of interaction. I don't think a game has to be long to be great, but I feel like this game didn't fill up the full size of its concept. I did enjoy it, however.
Complex and evocative game about a town and its secrets, February 3, 2023This game grew on me quite a bit over time.
It's a French Comp 23 game and written in a beautiful and evocative style. For instance, you start in a part of the city called the Luna Plaza that has a kind of mirror-like thing that reflects the stars so that you have two night skies.
You are in a medieval kind of town, and lore and secrets abound. I thought I had seen a lot of the game when I found a strange little house where a man talked about things like 'software' and 'photographs' that made no sense to me, a medieval person, but that was just very early on in the game. Later on, I found a lot of worldbuilding, some mythology, etc.
At first the game felt constrained, and then it had paths that branched so much I worried I was missing much of the game. But then it really opened up, and I truly began to understand the scale of the game. It was still manageable (a couple of hours), but quite large.
There are many people in this city, and as the time of day changes, what you can do with them changes.
In addition, the game has hover-over text, which lets you get additional info on things and occasionally provides extra interactions.
Overall, I found the writing very descriptive and had fun finding little secrets. I found one ending early on but stuck around for a final ending, which required a difficult choice. Great game.
An Ink game that turns a round of magic the gathering into a story, February 3, 2023This game was vibrant and full of life but also pretty confusing. I couldn't tell if I was just confused because 'bad french' or because the game was weird.
Once I finished it and saw the attached youtube video it made more sense, and it's kind of a cool idea!
Basically the author played a game of Magic the Gathering: Arena and then wrote a story imagining how all those things could have happened. So, for instance, Ormos the Archivist gets played, so Ormos becomes a character in the story, a beautiful archivist you fall in love with.
Some of this translates well into a story and some doesn't. In many parts of the game, you have a bunch of links with unhelpful names like 'a little chat' or 'call a professional' that don't tie into the story. Clicking them sometimes has no effect, but sometimes has a longer story. Overall they don't seem to affect the main storyline much, as I played a couple of times to see what happened.
So I think the polish and interactivity of the game are a little weird, but I did play more than once and found the MTG idea amusing.
A bunker escape game with nice UI, February 3, 2023This game was real surprise for me. I was looking for something short to play in the French Comp, but this ended up begin quite large.
You are in a bunker during a world problem (something like Covid but bigger, forcing many people underground in bunkers).
The game is split into two sections. The first is a complex computer system with areas like digital libraries, an encyclopedia, archived footage, etc. The second is the bunker itself, which you can explore, including lockers, a library, etc.
The system used is Moiki, and it looks great, with satisfying fonts, click effects, images, and music.
Overall, the story was quite complex. I had to use hints eventually (I didn't realize at first that you can't access later hints without accessing earlier hints). I feel like the ending I received didn't resolve all the narrative threads, but I liked it overall.
Fun, short branching game about defending from treason and war, February 2, 2023This French Comp game uses the theme of 'betrayal' well. An army is coming to your castle at your weakest moment. Someone must have betrayed you, but who?
The game is short but pleasingly symmetric. There are three suspects, each with three possible actions (consult with them, accuse them, and interrogate them). When it's time to face the enemy, you have three choices.
There are a lot of endings, mostly bad ones, of which I received two, but overall it was fun. The text doesn't vary much based on your choices so you can replay very swiftly. Investigating the treason felt interesting. Overall, the game is short but with a fun pattern.
Brief but nice-looking fantasy Twine set in Spooks universe, February 1, 2023I've never read the Spooks series before (called The Last Apprentice in US), but this story makes it seem really cool.
This game is set in the Spooks universe, and follows Tom and Alice, the main characters from the series. You play as Alice, a young woman raised to be a witch who escaped before you became completely evil. However, your actions can increase your connection to the darkness, so you have to be careful.
There is a cool font and some nice coloring on the links. The writing is descriptive as well, and is friendly for people like me who aren't familiar with the book series.
There were two slight disappointments for me: one is that the story was cool, but the ending I found was anticlimactic (it was a 'happy' ending and just ending right after a quote from her father, which sounds like a great ending but it just kinds of cuts off). The other weird thing was that the moon image sometimes cut off the text.
Overall, I was glad to have some real choices; there's at least one choice that splits the game into two very different branches. It does feel a bit unfinished with the endings, though, and has potential for a much larger game.
A rough and buggy but compelling short Lovecraftian game, January 31, 2023Honestly I was surprised to see this game was entered in the Jay is Games Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7, since I associated that with one room games (like the excellent Dual Transform by Zarf or Fragile Shells by Sargent). This game isn't a one-room game at all, but has a large manor to explore.
I love Lovecraftian horror games, so I enjoyed the storyline of this one. You have a cousin that has passed away, so you go to his house in order for his mother, your aunt, to bequeath various possessions upon you.
The horror in the game leans heavily on fossils, a feature I haven't seen as much before, as well as some more normal archaeological finds. Also, fire-building takes a prominent place in the game.
The game is very buggy. Most items mentioned in room descriptions don't exist at all. Four items with similar names cannot be disambiguated one from another. Items often can be read or examined but not both. There are odd spacing issues. I reached an ending and the game didn't end, just a statement indicating an ending and nothing more. I reached things in the wrong order, like reading a letter before opening an envelope or putting things in a slot and then later revealing the slot.
Because of this, I resorted to the (very nice) walkthrough early on.
The highlights to me were the fossil stuff and the cool map you find. The drawbacks were the bugs, which were so prevalent that I didn't feel like replaying to try for a better ending.
Very big, expansive game designed to be played a long time, January 24, 2023This game is a classic in the style of the period between Infocom and Inform. Those few years in the 90s saw the rise of several gigantic indie games, often with obtuse puzzles and nonsensical, Zork-like landscapes. The Unnkulia games were the most popular I know from then, with lots of silly Acme products.
This game seems influenced by the same era, with a lot of ACME products.
You are getting a shopping list for your aunt when you fall down a big hole. There you find a complex web of locations and buildings and teleporters that take you all around a house, a village, and the world.
This is the kind of game that's designed to be played on and off for months, possibly working together with others online and not necessarily designed to actually be solved. Often times the solution to a puzzle is something found far away in a different room.
There are many teleportation devices in the game, including one powered by geometric objects, another with different button presses, and another in the form of a wand. A lot of puzzles are coded messages, as well.
I played this game to clear it off my wishlist as one of the longest-running games on that list, but was surprised to see that this author is the same Jim MacBrayne that has recently released games in IFComp and Parsercomp. Those games are written with a Basic engine (and I think there is a version of this game that does that too), and they have very similar features to this game, including giant maps with many rooms called 'corridor' or 'path', and puzzles involving color-coded combinations and obtuse messages that must be interpreted correctly to pass.
I know several people have greatly enjoyed these recent games from Jim MacBrayne; if you're one of them, this older game has a lot of the same flavor, just longer and more difficult.
Character-driven fantasy drama about chicken murder, January 22, 2023This game has been on my wishlist for years, as it was constantly recommended to me by IFDB's old algorithm. But it's in German, and pretty complex german at that, which my high-school-german brain can't handle well. I also had to use DOSBOX to play it.
But I'm glad I did! The story in this is actually one of the best I've read in a while, not even just in IF, although it is very short.
The game has some worldbuilding you can read up on in a txt file attached to the Zip. It talks about the Boronois, a group of people that live far away that are (I think???) short, non-religious, and with traditions about marriage and competitions, and some relationship with magic.
You're in love with a girl, but to win her heart you have to have the biggest chicken in the competition tomorrow! So of course you break into your rival's house to poison his fat chicken. Unfortunately, you aren't the only one who's broken in...
Beyond one puzzle early on and a basic puzzle later (that is on a timer), most of this game is menu-based conversation, with an interesting cast of characters, including your love, your rival, and his family.
Overall, I really enjoyed this. It was definitely worth the wait. As a non-native speaker of German, the very complex language (for me!) was mitigated by the shortness and the multiple choice aspect.
A long and rich mystery game with wide variety of locations, January 21, 2023I don't know why I forgot to review this one when it came out.
This is one of the best Adventuron games I've played and also one of the most complex and rich mystery parser games in the last few years. You play as a young high school student whose aunt has gone mysteriously missing, and you have to check out her house.
The first half or so of the game is a mystery/drama as you investigate both your aunt's disappearance and a deadly party held at a farm, which is being investigated by your high school friend. Your sister is acting bizarre, as well.
Later on, as others have noted in their reviews, the game takes some decided twists, and becomes both more deadly and more surreal.
I found the overall plot to be the strongest point of the game, as well as the satisfying classic-style parser gameplay. I got frustrated a few times trying to figure out the right action, but overall I'd say this is a very successful and fun game.
A giant, obtuse, puzzle- and pun-filled time travel adventure, January 21, 2023I started going through my wishlist on IFDB, and this game has been on their longer than any other, because it was so intimidating I put it off. I ended up playing the ifarchive version, which uses local browser storage for saves.
I played for a while, using in-game hints and getting < 20 points out of 365, then used a walkthrough and maps from several different sites, including CASA. Even then, it was difficult to follow and required solving some puzzles independently.
If you had to play just one IF game for a very long time and didn't have access to any other, but could talk to other people, this would be a great game, because it's designed for long-term group play.
Many factors make it large. First, it has a giant map with many diagonal connections and cycles in the graph structure, and doesn't list exits automatically (unless I missed a command to turn that on; I just used the EXITS command), and this giant map exists in multiple time periods at once.
Second, many of the puzzles rely on pun-based commands, requiring a leap of intuition that can't be solved with just brute force.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, many actions have long-delayed consequences, and many items are used in scenarios quite different from the ones they're found in.
None of these are bad game-design wise, but they mean that you will spend a great deal of time on this game in order to experience its content, while many current IF games are designed to be completed in one or two sessions with little 'friction', due to the multitude of competing games and other reasons.
The plotline is buried at first but becomes stronger and stronger, especially once time travel is allowed. If the author created the first areas first, it would explain why the game starts with a mishmash of silly things (including a tortoise and a hare on a Moebius strip a suspension bridge that suspends you). Later areas have strong thematic consistency, especially the future world. There are a few other threads of plot that weave through the game consistently, like the use of opiates to expand the mind and a meteorite that makes several appearances.
The game isn't mean; it increases difficulty in generally fair ways. Hints are provided in most rooms, and a helpful friend gives you more and more commands over time that help out in a meta way (I loved FIND [ITEM] because it moves you to that room, enabling fast travel).
This would be a great game for a let's play or other group-based activity, since finding the right phrasing is good.
I don't think I'll play it again, because I just struggle with its style of expansiveness, but I enjoyed my time with it and think many others would as well.
Body horror with skin/flesh, last of unfinished series, January 10, 2023I hadn't realized when I started this series of games based on the Magnus institute that it would just end. As far as I can tell, the creator abandoned social media (under the current name) a year or two ago.
These games were based on the Magnus Archives podcast, which has 14 archetypes of fear. The ones that were missing, and would presumably end this series, are the Web, and, appropriately, the End, or death.
This game is about the Flesh, the fear of body horror and of being eaten.
Your girlfriend is getting a scarification, with some strips of skin removed. She has it bandaged while its healing, but when the bandages are removed...
Overall, this series started out strong and had some great parts (I enjoyed the Dark, the Spiral, the Stranger, and the Eye), but kind of petered out near the end, which may be why they stopped writing it. But I think, if they ever decided to finish it, a strong ending with The Web and the End could make the whole thing kind of a masterpiece.
Dream-hopping assassination through assorted vignettes, January 9, 2023This game is a sequel to The Little Match Girl, a game that was about hopping through various fantasies to solve problems in each of them.
This game is a bit different, with a different premise (you are an assassin) and a different configuration of dreams (nested, rather than interconnected).
Like the Castle Balderstone games, this give the impression of being a grab-bag of passion projects, where some idea or thread was worked on in great detail and then the rest of a game scaffolded around it and polished till smooth.
The first few visions are pretty light and easy, just follow directions and look around. This can be fun, especially in shorter games, and the worldbuilding was nice with fun fake-outs, and there was animation and title sequences and colors, but by the end of the second one I felt like I could use a little more to dig into. The next world had more involved puzzles (with another fun fake-out), and the one after that was incredibly dense, filled with puzzles of all kind, which contrasted nicely with earlier material.
Overall:
+Polish: The game was smooth and worked well.
+Descriptiveness: The settings were very vivid, especially the second and last, and I could picture everything.
+Interactivity: Like I said above, there was a good overall balance of streamlined playthrough and puzzles.
+Emotional impact: I was entertained. At one point I took out my plans for my next game and took down some notes.
+Would I play it again? Yeah, I'll probably go through all the games in order when the others come out.
Survive the aftermaths of a fire in a lonely watchtower, January 4, 2023This is the 11th in a series of games based on the entities from the Magnus Archives Podcast. This one focuses on The Lonely, or the fear of being abandoned or all by yourself.
This short Twine game opens a bit slowly. You are sent to decommission a fire tower in a US national park. With no one around, you can at least take comfort in another nearby firetower and its inhabitant that signals you.
Things pick up a little bit later.
While I think this one doesn't really evoke much fear in me, compared to the others, I think its twists and the overall writing is strong. It has also the most action I've seen so far in the second, 'worldbuilding' part.
Short, sad trans horror game with some overall world-building, December 30, 2022This is the tenth game in the Usher Foundation series, in which each game is centered on one of the primal fear archetypes of the Magnus Archives Podcast.
This one is about the Stranger, which is a fear of the uncanny valley and that people around you are fake somehow.
This story is short. You are trans, and your best friend is trans. You are in high-school. Over the summer, your friend changes somehow. He appears to be detransitioning, possibly against his will.
This game is shorter than the others in the series, but has a more extended 'overarching worldbuilding' segment at the end, which is good, because I felt like that subplot had kind of stalled.
Short, horrifying insect/trypophobia twine game, December 30, 2022This is the 9th game in the series of games based on the archetypal fears found in the Magnus Archives Podcast. This one focuses on the Corruption, which is one that really gets me, a fear of decay, disease, and insect infestations.
You are bidding on storage units to sell the stuff in them, when you find one that has a peculiar insect infestation. Later, you find out it wasn't the only thing that got infested...
The game has some nice (as in very gross) interactions with picking/popping black dots on your skin. Overall, this game made me feel deeply uncomfortable.
Combination twine/parser game with simulated OS, December 25, 2022This is a fascinating Spanish Twine game that makes excellent use of both Inform 7 and Twine.
You are dying during a radioactive apocalyptic war. You are also a researcher at an advanced quantum computing simulation lab, and you have the capability of uploading your mind to the computer.
Most of the game is navigating a complex computer OS system with a variety of folders and subfolders and apps such as email and the internet.
Once you get through that large portion, there is also a small parser portion that represents setting up societal norms in a simulated society. There is also one Towers of Hanoi section, which I honestly don't generally enjoy, but at least there was significant tie-in with the game itself and it had backstory.
Overall, a very impressive work, one that I think deserves a larger audience. For at least the non-parser parts, I think this plays quite easily using google translate.
Madness and minotaurs in a metropolitan subway, December 24, 2022This is the eighth in a series of short Twine games based on the central themes of the Magnus archives.
This one is based on the Spiral, associated with the feeling of losing you mind, as well as being lost.
In this Twine game, you are exploring the subway tunnels under NYC after a hurricane as part of your job, when your crew comes upon a perfectly preserved wooden door deep underground that leads into a well-lit, carpeted hallway.
The game employs some clever mechanics to track the feeling of slowly losing your senses.
My five star rating is not necessarily because I would recommend it to everyone as being an exceptional game, but because it satisfies my personal rating criteria in terms of emotional impact and interactivity.
Civil war reenactment gone terribly wrong, December 16, 2022This is the 7th in a series of Twine games centered around the main themes of the Magnus Archives podcast. This one is based on the Slaughter, or fear of mass violence and death.
In this Twine game, you are hired on to help with a Civil War reenactment, helping fix uniforms, belts, etc. But one of the men has a strange book, and you almost feel like you've gone back in time...
This one didn't pull me as much as the others in this series, probably because the Slaughter has always felt like an academic fear to me, given that I've been lucky enough to avoid direct contact with war during my lifetime, only seeing it in the news. The best parts are linear and the branching parts are rather dull, so I'm glad to see this one go and move on to the next. So far this author's best games that I've seen have been ones that focus on personal connections.
Fight, upgrade, explore, recover memories, and negotiate between three factions, December 14, 2022Inspired by Kinetic Mouse Car's review, I tried this very long Twine game.
It is at its core a cycle of procedurally generated combat, with upgrades that can be bought by the player. Upgrades are earned by fighting, and the more you explore and fight the more areas you unlock, which have stronger enemies with stronger rewards.
You play as a Corrector, a figure with unknown properties and goals, and you have the ability to come back from death due to an AI that has access to a cloning mechanism. Both you and the AI are missing large chunks of memories that you have to recover.
This is done by finding microchips to plug into the computer to increase its capacity and give you upgrades. Small upgrades cost just a dozen or so chips, while the biggest upgrades can cost over 500,000 chips.
The storyline is complex, and reminiscent of shows like Avatar (James Cameron one). You interact with three factions: human, robot, and alien.
There are 15 endings, corresponding roughly to which factions you support. There are some romantic figures, lots of literary references, and some psychologically intense scenes.
Overall, I found it very satisfying, and it took me at least 4 hours to complete, much of which was through fairly repetitive combat. But it was enjoyable combat, due to the constant upgrades and escalations.
Like KMC commented, there are noticeable typos, which can be distracting, and I believe the armor plating doesn't actually work (one version of it does). But these are pretty slight faults in a large game.
A brief tale of a criminal escaping a burning hospital, December 13, 2022This is another entry in the series of games based on archetypes from the Magnus institute. This one is based on the Desolation, which is associated with loss and fire.
Thematically, it works well; it features a burning hospital and a health point meter, and has some complex decisions in regards to human life.
Emotionally, a lot of it didn't land with me; the PC is unequivocally bad, so it sets you up to play as a bad guy, but then presents moral decisions which would be completely straightforward for a villain in distress.
And the 'overarching plot' section at the end felt a bit like an exposition dump, one that is well-needed but could have been dragged out a bit more.
Magnus archive fangame about being watched, December 12, 2022This is the fifth in a series of 12 twine games about types of fear from the Magnus Archives podcast.
This story is about the Eye, or fear of being watched.
Like the others in the series, it is short, with a couple spelling errors. But it does some fun tricks that make you, the reader, feel that your personal space is being invaded or that you're being surveilled, in addition to the regular story, giving a more direct version of the fear than the other stories so far.
Besides these tricks, the main story is about a man selling off his dead father's possessions, including a very large collection of glass/plastic eyes. But he starts to get a feeling that he's being watched.
Interestingly-styled Twine game focused on adrenaline and open spaces, December 12, 2022This game is the fourth in a series of Twine games centered around the Magnus Archive podcast. This one centers on the Vast, or the fear of very large things like the sea, sky, or space.
Except...this one's not really about fear. Quite the opposite, really. This story is about two girls that meet and start to bond romantically over falling, whether tripping on a sidewalk, bungee jumping, or skydiving.
The game implements 'vastness' into its styling, with very long pages to scroll through; it's actually very effective, I liked this quite a bit. It adds a bit of interactivity to an otherwise linear story.
I was a little disappointed that this doesn't really follow the modus operandi of the Magnus Archives. No one is really afraid, here; this is honestly a feel-good love story with a bit of drama at the end. Which could be great, if that's what you're looking for.
A brief horror story about a gay couple and deep snow, December 12, 2022This is the third game in a multi-part series based on the Magnus Archives. This one focuses on the Buried, or the feeling of claustrophobia.
The main characters are a gay couple on a vacation to a cabin in the mountains. One of them finds a disturbing book in the cabin, a copy of a Jack London novel that's not quite as it should have been.
As the story progresses, things get increasingly more frightening. I actually found the writing very strong, feeling visceral discomfort from the horror.
Unfortunately, I found some formatting issues, which others apparently also experienced. At different points, the white links disappeared, until I went to full screen, and even then I had to change the font size multiple times to reach the next links. This took away from the experience somewhat.
Spend a horrible night in a lab, December 12, 2022This is the second in a series of short Twine games centered around the themes of the Magnus Archives podcast.
This one is based on one of my least favorite archetypes from the series, 'The Hunt', and it's presented in a fairly straightforward manner without a lot of twists or turns. For most of the game (spoilers for midgame) (Spoiler - click to show)you are running away from bizarre beast, dodging different directions in a maze-like labyrinth.. It was just so on the nose that I wished there was more subtlety, more build-up.
Overall, the writing is strong; in both games I've played there are occasional typos (I've been guilty of that quite often myself), but the ideas and atmosphere are solid. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.
First in a series of games based on Magnus Archives, December 11, 2022While hunting through few-rating games from this year, I was pleased to see a whole series of Twine games based on the Magnus Archives, my favorite podcast (I've listened to the whole thing at least three times). The organization of the games in this series is based on some of the deeper lore of the series, centered around archetypes of fear.
This one is about darkness, a fear the original podcast writers said they had trouble writing effectively themselves. This one does a great job; at first, it's a pretty mild/boring Twine game about going the bathroom, but quickly gets darker...literally. Warning for those who have trouble reading, (moderate spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)the text gets harder to read and eventually you have to hunt the screen for text that pops up.
The game is pretty short and could probably have been extended, but overall I'm looking forward to playing and reviewing the other games in the series.
Short game with colorful links about an abused prisoner aided by voices, December 11, 2022I've been browsing IFDB by searching 'added:2022' by the fewest ratings to see games that didn't get noticed this year.
This was an interesting IFDB entry: added by an author who only was on the site for a couple of days, editing this post a couple of times, with no other activity.
The game itself is actually an interesting concept. You are a prisoner in a torture chamber-based prison deep underground.
Three voices, (a red one, a blue one, and a green one) urge you to acts of escape and violence.
It doesn't last too long, but looks neat visually. There were several typos (it's possible the name of the player was some special effect that doesn't display, since the subject was missing of several lines). Overall, it could stand to be fleshed out a lot more. But the core concept works.
Completely straightforward ascii art version of towers of hanoi, December 8, 2022One of the old tropes in reviewing IF was to complain about how many people put the Towers of Hanoi in the game, since it was an old puzzle that had a well-known but tedious solution and there wasn't really any mental thought in solving it.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen many towers of Hanoi games recently, so I've lost my privilege of complaining about them.
That's why I'm glad I found this game. It's a perfectly implemented and otherwise completely straightforward implementation of Tower of Hanoi. The only implementation problem I did find was that it was a bit hard to find the instructions (typing HELP is how to start).
Now that I've played this game, I can complain about Towers of Hanoi for several more years. Thanks, author, for your contributions!
Q-Bert in text, December 8, 2022I was browsing through games published this year without reviews, seeing if I missed any good games.
I saw an Andrew Schultz game with no reviews, which is surprising because of his well-known style and positive general audience reception of his games.
It seems this was an April Fools game in the style of the old IF Arcade pack, which had some very funny games and some very traumatic/horrifying games.
This is an optimization puzzle game where you have to change the colors of a board that is an isometric triangle of cubes, but presented in text form. Your goal is to change the color of every square on the board.
It's a fun challenge, and I appreciate that the game doesn't punish brute-forcing things. I found some fairly simple solutions, but they took a ton of turns, so getting faster would be hard.
Overall, it was polished, pretty descriptive, I had fun and liked the interactivity. This is a small and simple game, but I'm giving 4 stars because it achieves what it sets out to do in a smooth and forgiving way.
An optimization puzzle set on a derelict spacecraft, December 8, 2022I played this game during the testing period.
In this game, you run into an old, abandoned spacecraft. It's a large and confusing ship, but fortunately a clear map is provided. Your goal is to grab as much of the loot on the ship as you can before it is pulled into the black hole.
This game is similar to other optimization games like Captain Verdeterre's Plunder and Sugarlawn. The main differences are that this one has an adversary, and that there is much less 'easy money' in this game than those. You can wander for quite a while before getting anything really worth something; the good stuff is all locked behind puzzles.
The adversary is interesting, strategically. You both have to prepare weapons and also deal with the effects its acid has on the terrain; it can both destroy useful items and open areas or containers that were locked.
In my best run, I made 1,755 dollars, including (Spoiler - click to show)taking the ship AI and a gold drone.
As others have noticed, the game is heavily influenced by the hit movie (Spoiler - click to show)Alien, featuring characters and the same setting as that movie.
A biblical tale with a dark retelling, plus alchemical magic, December 8, 2022I helped beta test this game.
The idea of this game is that you are part of an alchemical society that possesses the ability to travel back in time. It is your job to go to the very beginning and discover the truth about Cain and his Mark.
The alchemical system in this game is rich. It consists of the four humours (blood, phlegm, etc.), their 'poisons' (substances that counteract them), and a host of other substances. It is accompanied by a gargantuan book with many pages, dozens of them. It's too big to just read straight through, so I strongly recommend NOT taking the book as soon as you get it and looking up every topic you see; the game will guide you in using the book later on.
The main gameplay is unlocking memories of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel through alchemical means, gathering more ingredients, and learning the mystery of this early world. Often you will told a formula you need, but for which you lack an ingredient or two and must find them.
There are some tricky puzzles I struggled with as a tester, including mechanical puzzles and flashes of intuition.
The game has a darker tone to it; this is an unhappy and grim retelling of Cain and Abel's already grim story. It doesn't conform to my personal beliefs, but it's clear this is a work of fiction and a well-written one at that.
A long, well-fleshed out fantasy adventure about saving your brother, December 8, 2022I beta-tested this game, so I won't post a score until after IF Comp.
This is one of the longest games in the competition. It's a Twine game with 7 chapters, and it has quite a few choices that have a major effect on the game.
I beta tested it a year ago, when it was unfinished, and it has been substantially improved and extended since then.
You play as the young princess of the kingdom of Vestria. Your brother has taken ill. You have to go on a quest to find how to save him while also dealing with the political fallout of a failed marriage and disastrous rebellion many years prior.
The pacing, writing, and interactivity are all imperfect, but come together in the way that really good games do (for my taste; everyone has different styles they like). The genre might theoretically be described as young adult (a young protagonist, no profanity and little sexuality or gore), but the game does allow you to be frequently ruthless in ways typically reserved for adult games. There is a family-friendly version for people who want to play with kids.
This game is noticeable for having several choices that affect big chunks of the game. When I beta tested, I killed someone early on; in this run through, that person ended up as my companion for much of the game.
There is a timed section in this game which can be rough; it gives you 10 minutes, though, for a single puzzle, and you can save and reload if needed.
Adjust to life as both a werewolf and a high-society young lady, December 8, 2022This is a branching stats-based Twine game that is fairly brief, split up into 4 or 5 segments that each last an in-game week.
You are a young woman from an upper-middle class family who has recently discovered she is a werewolf. You must learn how to deal with that while simultaneously maintaining your lifestyle.
The presentation is well-done, with good font and color choices and cleverly-named stats (like ILL vs VIM and GAL vs FUR). I didn't like the typewriter/slow effect, but hitting any key skips it so it wasn't a factor.
Overall, the things I most wanted more of was more satisfying endings and maybe a little longer game. I had one ending that was just a stat getting to 0, but another one seems like I got to the end but didn't really wrap up anything (Spoiler - click to show)I ate my date at the ball. I liked the writing.
A classic story with a small addition involving reader response, November 23, 2022This game is part of a group of similar stories. Other such games by this author have consisted of a classic short story with modern additions by the author where people comment on the story, including a text box where the reader can type something which the game then interprets using sentiment analysis to change some subsequent text.
This game is no exception, although it is smaller than the others. It is also different from the others, in that its 'meta-commentary' is no longer a separate, modern story; instead, it's an addition in-universe, still with the sentiment-analysis text box. However, due to this being a speed-IF, only one text box is included.
The short story chosen this time is obscure; I only found one 'hit' when searching, on an internet archive of an old magazine.
My view on these games has certainly changed over time. I went from believing they had no interaction to believing that they are excellent at hiding all the interactivity.
A game that makes you think its responding to your actions, even if it doesn't, is a game that is very fun to play, if only for one time. (For instance, see Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies). But the converse is true; a game that does extensive work, but leads the player to think it does none, is not fun to play. Simply putting a message next to the box that is, as the author once said, metaleptic (or maybe extra-diegetic???) saying 'positive sentiment detected' in green and then highlighting the subsequent changed text in green or using red for negative sentiment would instantly improve reaction; this is just one idea, there are many ways to make it look like the game is really thinking.
Like a character says the movie The Prestige:
"The trick was too good, it was too simple. The audience hardly had time to see it[...]he's a wonderful magician; he's a dreadful showman. He doesn't know how to dress it up, how to sell this," and I think that applies to this whole series of games.
A light snack of a game about reviewing zombie brains, November 14, 2022This game has a pretty simple concept and executes it well. You are a zombie who has just completed a tasty meal of brains, and so you write a yelp review.
You pick the number of stars, describe its connection with past meals, discuss how you approached the entree/victim, etc. It's all pretty brief, but I didn't see any bugs, and it was descriptive and funny.
Overall, a nice note to end playing the ectocomp games on.
Assemble your super team and fight, November 14, 2022This is a speed-IF written in 4 hours or less. It's written using Dendry.
Basically, you're at a party and need to assemble a party of fighters to take on a coming entity. You have both telepathy and future-telling abilities. You can use your telepathy to talk to others and know what type of arguments will convince them most.
There's still some puzzle elements, despite the mind-reading, as you have to figure out how best to implement what you learn. I always liked Divination specialists in D&D and this game seems to show exactly why being skilled in information gathering would be an excellent power.
This story is brief, but has easter eggs from the author's other works, including A Paradox Between Worlds (referenced in on friends' costume and favorite book series), and The Archivist and the Revolution, referenced in encoding data in DNA.
It's the end of the world. What do you want to do?, November 14, 2022This is a speed-written IF game using the Twine system. In it, the singularity has happened, but technology is giving humans exactly 7 days to do what they want with their lives before being assimilated.
It's a sobering situation. The emotional stakes are subtly raised by changing the background color every day.
This is a speed-IF, so options are limited. The main options here are to write or to go outside. I varied back and forth between them, and had an ending that to me was satisfying.
Shoutout to the very specific descriptions of listening to local indie bands, felt very realistic.
Love poem about romantic encounter with a husband, November 14, 2022This brief game is essentially a poem about physical love between the main character and their husband.
It is simultaneously explicit and not, similar to the Song of Solomon, which represents sexual feeling as a form of divine worship. This short poem combines both that religious sentiment and also a form of physical violence.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and each person experiences romantic and physical attraction in different ways. While I could appreciate the author's emotion and feeling, I didn't feel a universality in the experience that called me to share in the experience.
The styling is quite complex, with shades of pink and red. The majority of interactivity is in moving to the next page or clicking on words to get essentially footnotes.
Overall, I valued the elegance of the language the most.
A brief, pustulent game about a horrendous zit , November 14, 2022This is a surprisingly polished game for 4 hours (I've said that a lot this comp, I wonder if this shows that I don't use my time as wisely as others do).
You have a job interview coming up, but you also have a massive zit! It's described in excruciating detail. You're in a bathroom with a little but a few things in the drawers and your cell-phone.
To me, the real appeal of the game is in the insight into your loved ones. Each one you call has a different reaction, some of them showing off a poor moral character, others a sweet or charming one.
The other big component is dealing with the zit itself. I had some trouble near the end with the game saying I hadn't done something when I had already done it, but it fixed itself pretty soon. Overall, a strong entry.
Excellent gothic horror choice game, currently a WIP, November 14, 2022I loved the part of this game that is currently complete. It's a well-style gothic horror game involving you and an old acquaintance, Edward Harcourt.
The idea is that you are one of the few people who are acquainted with Edward Harcourt, who has newly come into power and position. He has asked you to join him at his castle, where you have to deal with suspicious servants, dark dreams, and a town filled with unfriendly folk.
The demo has a lot of branches that seems to really affect the game, as I chose one of three backstories and ended up with some lengthy sequences regarding that backstory later.
So far, only the first two chapters are complete. It's still enjoyable, but I'm definitely interested in seeing the final product. One of my favorite Choicescript games was Heart of the House, which has similar vibes, but this one is taking some different directions that make it fresh.
A brief but frightening Adventuron game about a zombie eye, November 14, 2022This is a pretty surreal Adventuron game with images and a little music about confronting a giant Zombie eye in the London Underground. It involves a lot of sensory details, including sound and touch, in ways I found pretty poetic.
Dee Cooke is perhaps the adventuron author I know best, having made several excellent games before and winning or placing high in a lot of comps. I was surprised when this game was so small, then impressed when I realized it was in the 'made in 4 hours' division instead of the 'longer than 4 hours' division it seemed like it was in. This is pretty great for a speed-IF, with conversation, a reactive NPC, and graphics and sound.
Overall, it's a nice little treat with good atmosphere and some perspective shifts.
A riff on gothic horror and folk tales through letter rewriting, November 14, 2022This is a charmingly complex game for one written in less than 4 hours for a speed-IF.
You are essentially a protagonist in a gothic novel, writing to your sister about your husband whose previous 6 wives have mysteriously disappeared. You can choose several different versions of each letter you write to communicate different tones, leading to different endings.
This rewriting mechanic is reminiscent of Emily Short's First Draft of the Revolution, another letter-writing game that involved cycling through different options; in fact, that game inspired the cycling mechanic in Twine!
The mechanic here hovers between too simple and too obscure but lands, I think, in a happy medium. The writing is a pleasure as always from this author, with many references to well-known tales (and some less well-known; I was glad to see Ann Radcliffe mentioned, as Mysteries of Udolpho is one of the few gothic novels I've read). Very neat overall, especially for such a short time-period for game writing.
A multiple choice certification quiz with extensive manual (but spooky), November 14, 2022This gave me a chuckle, especially as a high school teacher. The game consists of two parts: a 1000-line text manual and a 35-question multiple choice test.
The game encourages you to do exactly what most students do when studying: start the assignment first and only look up answers as you go along.
The text is dry, an imitation of standard technical writing, but sprinkled with a variety of frightening or hilarious spooky situations, like scissor lifts made of solid flesh or horrifying accidents brought on by improper rituals.
Overall, there's a lot of effort here and the extra flavor is good. But a simulation or parody of a boring thing is often, itself, boring, and while there's a huge effort here to alleviate that, it doesn't fully succeed. As an idea, though, the whole setup is very clever.
Grimdark prison interview, November 14, 2022This game, written in Ink in 4 hours or less, has you, apparently a psychologist, interviewing a cold, emotionless killer.
You have to ask about his life, his actions, and his dreams. He is emotionally unstable, so you have to be careful what you say. Your comments can make him shut up or open up.
The game uses a variety of charged language and imagery, including strong profanity, descriptions of violence, incest, misogyny, and violent death, and strong hatred.
It's all very grimdark. This man is irredeemably bad, and seems to hate himself or everyone around him.
It has some interesting narrative twists and the craftmanship in the choice structure really spoke to me. But the content did make me feel deeply uncomfortable, which is a subjective thing that of course differs from reader to reader.
A torture/religious game written in 4 hours or less, November 14, 2022(I discuss some body horror stuff in this post, so squeamish may want to skip)
This is a speed-IF made for Ectocomp. In it, you play as a victim of a torturer who sadistically injures you.
The game is quite gory. There's a lot of things that various games can have that makes me uncomfortable and not play, but I don't really hear that as often from other players. So when several commenters on other websites had said this game made them feel deeply uncomfortable or stop playing, I was expecting perhaps the most horrible game ever created. With such foreboding expectations, the game itself, while still excessively gory, wasn't quite as bad as I thought.
For one, you are a very willing and happy participant in the events. While the descriptions are written to shock and horrify, is it all that different than a C-section, or a dentist visit? I go to the dentist, and they stab the roof of my mouth with a needle and then grab my tooth with pliers and pull as hard as they can, ripping out what's essentially a bone and leaving a bleeding cavity for weeks. So the game wasn't quite as bad as I expected; in fact, the part that turned me off the most was the first ending which had some unexpected misogynistic language.
Overall, the game captures a rapturous tone in a way that reminds me of some of Porpentine's work, specifically Their Angelic Understanding. The violent torture in exquisite detail reminded me of Paperblurt's The Urge.
I don't recommend this game in general, due to a few people having an adverse reaction (and me personally not being a huge fan of torture), but I think the craft is well-done and the writing is descriptive.
A brief Choicescript tale about a troubled ocean voyage, November 14, 2022This is a speed-IF written in 4 hours or less, written using Choicescript (which is a hard engine to do speed-IF in). It features a dinner party in old Constantinople, where you, a ship's captain, have to tell the story of a fated ocean trip that leads to the title of the game.
The story itself is bizarre and perturbing, and well done. The opening setting is also solid. Other parts of the game are a bit patchy, as is usual for speed-IF, since time runs out; the main things here are the quickly-sketched out endings and the fact that some parts of the game are written in rhyme and others are not.
Still, the story itself is very solid, and I like this setting and would like to see more. The only Byzantine/Constantinople game I've seen before is Kyle Marquis's Silverworld, also in Choicescript. Overall, I'm glad I played this short Ectocomp game.
A time management game where you make your house as creepy as possible, November 14, 2022I had a lot of fun with this game. Modeled on Untitled Goose Game, your goal is to cause trouble. Specifically, you have 6 hours before the new owner of your house arrives, and you have to make the house as scary as possible before then.
It's a cost/benefit analysis thing that requires trial and error: some actions take a ton of time but provide little benefit, others are short but trivial, some are heavy hitters. It requires some replay, but fortunately the choices are really funny and the text is enjoyable to read.
This was made in 4 hours, so it doesn't have huge depth, but it felt complete as a game. According to my rubric:
+Polish: I didn't see any errors, and the human-voice sound effects were really funny.
+Descriptive: The game had fun descriptions of everything.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could strategize and that the game was both responsive and not too easy.
+Emotional impact: it was funny to me.
+Would I play again? I played through three times.
A text message horror game written in 4 hours or less, November 13, 2022This is a relatively brief choice-based game with an interface written in Ink that mimics text messages.
You are texting your mom and your friend ash, just having a regular day, when things get strange and weird. The game's appeal is mostly based on its twist, so I won't spoil it here.
The plot is pretty good, but the dialogue and characterization are a bit generic; it's hard to get a feel for who the characters are, and their individuality. The texts are slow to come, which was a bit frustrating.
The UI looked neat, which seems like a good accomplishment. This game makes me think its author is really talented at web programming.
A series of cyclical nightmares with inter-connected puzzles, November 13, 2022This is a Twine game where you have three dreams in order, over and over again, about dying.
Each dream is fairly brief, with 2-3 or 4 choices per dream. There are a lot of options, though, so it's hard to know what to do to be safe.
Fortunately, if you explore each dream enough, you find hints about the other dreams. Phrases that don't make sense at the time but later you look at options and go, 'Oh, I get it now!'.
Even after playing a couple of times, I didn't always understand why some things happened (like why the kitchen just kind of disappears or what triggers the ending for the final dream).
The writing is on-point and covers some frightening situations. I didn't feel sucked in emotionally, maybe because I was focused on the puzzle-aspects and felt safe as it was all a dream. But it was very descriptive.
Excellent work for a 4-hour game, and a neat way to do choice-based puzzles.
A lovingly written short story about a ghost protecting a family over time, November 13, 2022This game is written with Twine and takes place in five acts, each of which is brief but meaningful.
You play as a ghost that finds itself in and out of existence, with the times in existence being important moments in the lives of your surviving family members. At first, there is very little you can do, but over time you develop more abilities. But it's not really a power-based or puzzle-based game; it's more about the story, about how your connection with the family deepens and grows over time.
The five acts vary between light hearted, dangerous, and sentimental. Gameplay mostly consists of navigating through the house, inspecting everything once, and then finding the one thing to return to to make things better. The pacing is excellent, as it does take some effort to finish each act but it never took long enough for me to feel frustrated.
The game does have some twists in it which, even though I saw it coming from some vibes in other reviews and though I've seen it done several times before, I did feel chills/lots of sentiment at the end, which to me means the author(s) executed the overall story with a lot of skill.
Overall, the best feature is the skill in plot and characterization.
Untold horrors in a changing labyrinth with giant story twist, November 12, 2022This game is based on cosmic horror. You and two companions have been trapped in a shifting labyrinth for days, trying to find your way out. Tensions are rising, especially between your pushed-to-his limits friend Vlieg and your deeply-fascinated friend Tia.
The game is written using Binksi, a combination of Bitsy and Ink that uses tightly-constrained pixel art and the dialogue capabilities of Ink. You sometimes move around, running into things to talk, and other times have pure dialogue.
In the ending I reached, there was a massive shift in perspective. It was a clever concept and I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, it also brought a ton of profanity for a long time that honestly wasn't that fun to me. The big twist doesn't quite make sense conceptually, looking back, but it does make sense in terms of cosmic horror.
This game is quite complex, and I think it really shows off just what Binksy can do, for those interested in the engine.
A pleasant, methodical ghost-hunting parser game, November 12, 2022This game was made in 4 hours, but has about a dozen beta testers, and it makes sense, as it is very polished.
This is a game where you explore a dark mansion with a lightsource and a helpful notebook. You are trying to find a ghost, and have to navigate around, dealing with blocked passages and places your light can't get through.
The atmosphere is generally creepy, especially since someone died there in the past. The descriptions of the dark areas are especially evocative.
Overall, it's a clever game and has some heartwarming parts.
I think it could still do with a little more polish, even with the cadre of testers. That's to be expected for most speed-IF, but it would make sense for the author to add on to it, since I could see people liking it in the future. The commands I think would be useful to have responses to include(Spoiler - click to show)POINT POINTER or STACK BOOKS, or X ROD.
I liked this one quite a bit. I used hints 2 or 3 times.
A maze full of whacky horror-fied coworkers, November 12, 2022This is a Twine game with a neat little map in the corner showing all the rooms in a kind of maze. You navigate around with a score described as 'Survival Chance' which goes up or down depending on what you do.
It's a lot like gamebooks in gameplay style, except without randomized combat. You have different encounters with people and need to pick up various keys and tokens and other items in one area to progress in another.
Story-wise, you have to go to the help desk, but you get trapped, because it's haunted. All your coworkers are skeletons or werewolves or other wild things, and the humor is pretty goofy.
The game could use a little more polish; there were a few typos here and there, and I never really connected emotionally. But overall it was a pretty strong game and amusing while I played it. The author did add several features that improve gameplay, like the map and back button.
Zombie defense minigame written for Ectocomp, November 11, 2022This is a fun little whack-a-mole game written in Choicescript for Ectocomp in the Grand Guignol division.
In this game, you have a four-room house, with the baby in one corner and supplies and windows in all the others.
Your options are to forage for supplies, or rest, or, if zombies are approaching a window, to attack with shotgun or axe.
I passed one horde and leveled up, but didn't pass the next horde. It didn't seem like there'd be a lot more variety, so I didn't replay. Overall, an interesting concept.
+Polish
-Descriptiveness
+Interactivity
-Emotional impact
-Would play again
Man-shaped mushrooms make me maniacal, November 11, 2022This is a relatively brief twine game with three endings, two bad and one good.
The idea is that global warming exposed a layer of mycelium all over Antarctica that is sentient. Scientists made super-soldiers out of it by using genetics to create human-shaped versions of the very strong mushroom material. But these mushrooms tend to cannibalize each other, so to stave off their desires, humans volunteer to be companions that the mushrooms can drink the blood of every now and then.
You volunteer to be this companion, and have to fill out some intake forms and get acquainted with the area before meeting your future companion.
The game does a good job of expressing the alienness and horror of the creatures, but I'm not sure it presents as strong of a picture of the protagonist, whose motives and actions didn't always seem connected to each other or to my desires. Overall, the styling was nice and I enjoyed the ending I reached.
Mad scientist time-loop game written in 4 hours, November 11, 2022This is a game with a fun little idea for the speed-IF portion of Ectocomp. It's hard to write a parser game at all in 4 hours, let alone a time loop, so this one is pretty impressive.
I thought at first it was set in the world of Gravity Falls, since there's a guy with the name Old Man McGuffin that sounds like the gravity falls scientist guy, but the names aren't entirely similar (McGuffin vs McGucket). Either way, the game has the old scientist offload a weird time-loop device on you as a 'trick' during trick-or-treating.
The game has a pretty big map for a small game, but a lot of it is red herrings. Once you find the areas that are 'real', you can piece together what to do.
This game wasn't polished or fully descriptive (which is usual for speed-IF, including my own), but was fun and the puzzles were neat.
A tarot- and cult-influenced Halloween Visual Novel, November 11, 2022This is an impressive game for one made in 4 hours.
It features a kind of cult or religion that has 22 members, one for each of the major arcana. You are death. One of the highlights for the game is the custom art of each member (one of which features the non-sexual nudity mentioned in the content warnings). My favorite was the high priestess, with a symbolic-looking pose.
There is also music, background images, etc. The gameplay style is Visual Novel style, with several pages of text interspersed by few but impactful choices. I only saw a few choices, and it was hard to know the outcome, but I know there are multiple endings (I got ending 2).
The story is that your cult is horrified by Halloween, when the devil's servants are allowed to walk around unless placated by candy, so you go to a house whose owners have died and decayed in order to try to hear God's voice on the radio.
Overall, the writing is well-done, descriptive and evocative, and the game is well-polished for being made in such a short time. My current preference is to have more agency in a story (or to be able to read more quickly for replays for endings), so I wish I had a bit more to do. The worldbuilding is done well, and I'm glad I played.
Big, puzzly hybrid parser game about possession and archdemons, November 10, 2022This is a complex, rich game written using a custom parser-choice hybrid system similar to Robin Johnson's Gruescript, in which you have traditional parser actions like NESW movement, taking, and dropping, but all through a choice interface.
You've been trapped in hell too long, and want to get out. Fortunately, you are capable of transferring your consciousness between others, able to possess all but the lowest beings (gross!) and the highest beings (that's what got you into trouble in the first place).
The map is laid out visually on the screen in a perfect grid, and has several affordances to allow you to travel around the map.
This is primarily a puzzle-fest. For those who like parser puzzles (including me!) the ones here are excellent, with timing puzzles, pattern recognition, and required leaps of intuition. I got through most of the game but needed a major hint for finding the last 4 or 5 squares of the map.
Some of the best parts of the game involve finding a way to defeat all 7 arch demons, each representing a different sin. This part was very clever.
There is some sexual content in the game but very non-explicit, more just hinted at or left to the imagination.
The only drawback I found was the sparseness of the text. Minimalism in games isn't a bad thing; there are many minimalist games I've played that can evoke great effect. And some areas of this game were very well-developed. But I feel like some more parts or people in the game could have used a little more shine, especially since I've seen lots of bits of excellent description from this author both in parts of this game and in past games; I may not even have noticed the sparseness in, for instance, the statue rooms, if I didn't know what he's capable of.
Still, I think the broad majority of parser fans will like this one, it's very clever and fun.
An expansive city with sparse puzzles and creepy atmosphere, November 10, 2022This is an interesting game; there is a large city that is literally part of hell, with tons of streets and cross streets.
Each area either just connects to others or has 2 buildings in it, with each building usually having a single person in it and a sparse description.
Wandering around, your goal is to leave the city. There is a vague air of menace, with hints of a threatening Candy Man and a creepy emptiness around and uncanny valley of NPC interaction.
You can progress pretty far by grabbing everything and combining them. I ran into some difficulty because I didn't realize that some of the random scenery in each room was useful. I've found in the past that it's generally pretty frustrating for players to have a large group of similar rooms and hiding important objects in a small number of them with no special indications; the worst case of this I've seen is the Horror of Rylvania, where there are baseboards in every room and in exactly one room you have to exam them to find a mousehole. This game is much more generous than that, but still it was hard to find the needles in the haystack.
Overall, the big city was cool. It had a similar feel to Winchester's Nightmare, which is also a giant hellscape city with sparse rooms. But this game has it's own character and style and is, I think, worth playing, especially using the source code, which accompanies it and which is organized very neatly.
A goofy over-the-top short combat game speed-IF, November 7, 2022This is a parser game written for the Petite Mort version of Ectocomp 2022, written in 4 hours or less.
The game is intentionally silly; a fairy begs you to help her against a bad fairy, but you have to eat a taco and taco medicine first and punch an undead gorilla.
It's short, with three main scenes. Punching is the main action, and always works, which reminds me of One Punch Man (although this would be multiple punch man). Examining yourself shows an image of a werewolf.
I teach creative writing to high schoolers, and I have a couple that likes to write stream-of-consciousness meme stories about Tyler Blevins and people in the school and random whacky fights, and this story reminds me of that style of writing.
It's quite descriptive, but unpolished. The interactivity surprisingly works well, since there's only one important verb. It was funny, but I wouldn't play again.
Quick and short wordplay game centered around rhyming pairs, November 7, 2022This is the the first Petite Mort game I've played this year (games writtern in 4 hours or less) and the fifth entry in Schultz's series of rhyming pair games. It has less of the glitter of the other games, but has some nice coherence.
You play as someone summoned to aid some ancient beings in a great battle. To help them, you need to gather allies. The map is small, basically a cross shape, with a central area and a room in each of the 4 cardinal directions.
The story here is much more coherent than most of the games in the wordplay series, and it's nice having concrete goals and an honestly cool backstory.
The rhyming pairs are a bit tricky, though, and due to speedy implementation there are a bunch of rhymes that didn't make it in, especially in the main room. I eventually turned to the walkthrough.
The game is not yet polished and because of that I had some trouble with interactivity, but was emotionally impactful and had some fun descriptions. I would play again after more polishing, it was pretty fun.
Complex and rich historical tragedy with multiple perspectives, November 6, 2022This game is a fine game, one of the most complex and deep I've seen during Ectocomp. I may be making this up but I swear I heard the author say she was planning on entering this in IFcomp but decided to enter it into Ectocomp to allow for more polish time. This might not be true, but it would make sense, as this game has the kind of structure and polish that high-ranking IFComp parser games tend to have.
The idea is that you play as multiple player characters, each with their own chapter, but sharing a large map: a duke's castle, where the young duchess, only 15 years old, is struggling to please her older lord, and his anger has found its expression in unpleasant ways. The various chapters provide a solid narrative arc, from introduction to rising action to climax and denouement.
The story is based off a poem (whose name I'll omit, as the authors has), and has the feel of a richly researched game. Period-appropriate clothing, art, jewelry, architecture, horticulture, etc. are described in detail.
The game has a high ratio of words-to-action; new scenes will often have page-long introductions, and single actions will often set off large chunks of story. This is often paired with a short game, but this game is quite large, with a big map and many things to see and do. Instead, the game strikes balance by providing significant guidance for most events, a style that is more of a guided tour than a puzzlebox. (I've adopted similar a similar playstyle in some of my own games, including a Sherlock Holmes adaptation; it fits adaptations well, as it keeps players on the main narrative path).
This is an earthy game in a grim world, though happiness exists for some. Players encounter domestic abuse, rape, sexual abuse, degradation, intimidation, underage marriage, and psychological manipulation. Most characters are on the bottom tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, concerned about physical safety, food, and sexual desires, while a couple reach for love or even esteem, but none are situated well enough to reach for self-actualization.
The map is a large castle, hard to navigate at first but slowly becoming more familiar. By the end I could make my way well-enough, but I found out after finishing that there is a map available for download. I don't feel it was completely necessary, as the oppressively large castle and getting lost adds to the sense of fear or awe in the game. And getting lost is the main source of in-game hints, outside of talking to people.
Speaking of conversation, it's a topic-based system that works pretty well, especially since you're primed on how to speak early on. I think adding 'A' as a synonym for 'T' would be useful, because ASK/TELL is a fairly common IF trope and it's usual to implement both (just now, going back in the game, I see that T stands for TALK [Noun], not TELL [noun], which makes sense. It might be worth making A/ASK/TELL synonyms for TALK/T).
It's interesting to see the connections between this game and the authors' other games. The use of poetry, either author-written or as inspiration for the whole game is a strong pattern (at least 6 other poems have inspired games by this author, including 4 in a single game). The darker historical setting is also common in these games, although the exact time period varies. This game is unusual in that there are less puzzles and more roleplaying as a renaissance character.
Overall, a strong game and one that I think everyone should check out.
A spooky halloween text adventure, November 6, 2022This game is the first released by fos1, a long-term supporter of IF through helping to organize ParserComp and other IF writing competitions and moderating IFDB.
It starts off with a gentle, fun recreate-real-life experience; there is a house that seems modeled off a real-life house, and you're asked by your wife to carve a pumpkin with your son Greg. The house contains things where you'd expect them (in drawers and cupboards), but it thankfully avoids a lot of clutter by not implementing a ton of red-herrings.
After working on your tasks, though, things change drastically and you find yourself in the Pumpkin World (as the description says, Be careful in the dark side of Pumpkin World!). Pumpkin World has more puzzles and some interesting characters.
Overall, I ended up making my way back. I had to use the walkthrough for the final command.
I think this is a promising first start. Some things I think could be improved, given more time. Probably the biggest thing I would do is add some flavor to parser errors and default responses, since that's what people see the most when playing. I find it helpful when writing games to type RESPONSES ALL during a game; it gives you a list of every default response in the game. You can then rewrite them yourself (like, The standard report waiting rule response (A) is "Okay, Dr. Law. I'll wait."), which I think is a neat effect.
Because of that, I think the game could be more polished; while the descriptions are minimalistic, they are heartfelt and positive; the puzzles were fairly well-clued; the overall emotion was cheerful; and I think my one playthrough was enough.
Multiple choices for making a truly terrifying haunted house, November 6, 2022This Inform games looks very polished and refined, unusual during Ectocomp, which often features quickly-written games.
Also unusually for Inform, most of the machinery of parser games is omitted in favor of essentially binary choices.
You are Bone Villa (a riff on Bob Villa), working with the Property Boo-thers (a riff on the Property Brothers), and it's your job to select the perfect haunted house. You walk through ten rooms, in each of which the two brothers, Hoary and Terry, present competing alternatives to the design. At the end, your choices are summed up as one of 33 different possibilities.
The first playthrough was pretty fun, seeing the different possibilities and coming up with strategies in my mind. It was longer than I thought, since 5 rooms with 2 binary choices each would have been enough for 32 possibilities, with the 33rd being special. So it wasn't just a binary tree, which was interesting. It said I should try to find more possibilities at the end, so I replayed.
Replaying shortens some descriptions but is the same material, same choices. Eventually the game can give you hints, but it wasn't until I had played several times that I realized there was an 'ideal' house. That was confusing to me, because both descriptions just seem contrasting styles; at first it seems like they're going for an 'over-the-top vs restrained' thing in the choices but that turned out not to be the case. I was puzzled on how you could have a best house when there was little chance to distinguish between them.
Eventually, you can summon help, which helps you find out that (moderate spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)different choices correspond to different 'colors'. But even with that hint I was a bit bewildered.
I think 10 choices is a lot for a game that is intended to be replayed quickly and has no other new content between rounds besides finding out your score and placement. I think more clues as to the system could have helped as well.
I played about 5-6 times through, then decompiled to see what a perfect game would be like. I saw in there that this game is actually (Spoiler - click to show)based on an earlier 10-choice game by the author, reskinned to be haunted.
Overall, I think experimentation like this is what drives IF forward, but as an overall game experience I felt an imbalance between the rewards for success and the effort required to achieve it.
A lovingly illustrated short horror story based on Slavic folklore, November 5, 2022This game has really high production values. It's even got a custom loading icon! There are nice custom-styled fonts and colors and background images, and the text is rich and subtle. It includes cyrillic letters in cursive (I think) which say 'Welcome, sister' or something like that.
The story is about Rusalkas, water spirits that are created when someone betrays a woman and she drowns afterwards. There is a prelude, telling the story of a rusalka, and then a longer story with more choices about a young girl and the boy in the village she broke up with.
I was very impressed with much of this game, but I had some trouble, too. The text is complex, and I had difficulty following along between figuring out what's implied, jumping between multiple narratives without clear indications, and following the allusive language. And, for all the setup, the game feels incomplete; we only see the story of one rusalka, when the game seems set up to tell more.
In any case, this game could serve as good inspiration for people wanting to see how they could style Twine, it looks great, similar to Grim Baccaris's work.
Branching supernatural disaster game during Hurricane in Louisiana, November 5, 2022This game has you play as a well-prepared Louisiana resident hunkering down during a category 5 hurricane. Fortunately, you have an attic stocked with tons of equipment. Unfortunately, all sorts of supernatural creatures are messing around with you.
This game has nice presentation with Chapbook and music/sound effects. The color and font choices worked well for me. It's pretty brief, but has some nice non-linearity and several endings.
The thing I liked best about the game was the specific local flavor. Several of the monsters are referred to with French names or have characteristics unique to the area.
The only drawbacks to me were that each path was fairly short and a lot of the items didn't really do much that I could see.
Rhyming pairs in a strange parser dream, November 5, 2022Andrew Schultz has made many wordplay and chess games which are a lot of fun. There is a series of games now (I think the first was Very Vile Fairy File), where you have to find rhyming pairs of words. This game is the 4th in the series, which is called the "Prime Pro-Rhyme Row".
For me, the quality of these wordplay games specifically (not all games) depends on a couple of things.
1. Is it fair?
2. Is it challenging?
3. Is it coherent?
My favorites in this category are probably Shuffling Around and Threediopolis. In this series of rhyming words, I like Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey in the current IFComp. They do a good job of tying everything together and offering several paths forward.
This one does #2 well but feels a bit weaker with #s 1 and 3. There are less options for progress, both in terms of the map and in terms of words. At least one required solution used a word I hadn't heard marked as 'archaic' by online dictionaries, and a few combos used a feature the game had actively hinted against previously (specifically (Spoiler - click to show) 1-word answers, where the game says that usually those won't be needed).
There are things to help you, like the machine that says if your rhymes are close, and the Jumping Jerk, which tells you the answer once you've tried enough. I used it 5 times in this game. And, of course, there is always the walkthrough.
The other thing I think I miss from the other games is a bigger tying-together of the story.
Overall, I enjoyed this game, but I would only recommend it to people who liked the other rhyming pair games and want to get more of that experience.
Twine romance game about a genderfluid alien trying to fit in, November 5, 2022This is a prototype Twine game entered in the Ectocomp 2022 Grand Guignol competition. It is kinetic fiction, which means it currently has almost no choices besides going to the next page, where the main choice is pacing. The current stated plan is to expand it to include more choices in the future.
You play as an ornithologist who is also an alien assigned as the only alien in the area of earth you're in. Everyone stares at you, because you're literally from Pluto. You've managed to get some good work done and make friends, but your existence makes others uncomfortable and you just can't fit in with human traditions.
Especially gender, which your planet doesn't have a conception of. Most of the game consists of dealing with good and bad reactions to your conception of gender and self.
I said the game contains almost no choices; one that I appreciated a lot is the ability to skip the sex scene. I honestly wished this became a standard in choice games, as I was able to enjoy the genuinely sweet romantic buildup while avoiding content I'm not comfortable with.
I had a strong emotional reaction to this game for a couple of reasons. [Apologies for the long, unrelated personal story]. One is that I almost didn't play it because I was having stressful flashbacks. I used to be a math professor, but I always struggled. I had done all of my undergraduate and graduate work in the same math department where I had a lot of friends among the professors and staff. I had done well, and people had always supported me.
But once I left to be a 'real' professor, everything changed. My research faltered, and I encountered a lot of pushback from professors in my very narrow field. I was told that I had misunderstood major parts of the research topic or left out key parts of theorems, that my research didn't really have any applications, and the most hurtful, that my writing was just bad and/or sloppy. I started having papers get multiple rejections, and since that's the main 'currency' in the math world, I lost my chance at getting a permanent job, and ended up in limbo for a few years. And my refuge, the school I graduated from and where I liked everyone, had implied they would hire me when I came back, but ended up going with other people, only hiring me for a temp job, out of pity, I thought.
I eventually left academia (which is really looked down on in the field, like complete failure), and I've suppressed those thoughts. But I started fooling around with an old research problem today for fun, and I felt so many bitter, jealous, sad, and stressed thoughts remembering those times.
So I almost cried reading the story of Beckj, because even though the setting and reasons were so different, I recognized the feeling of everyone around you just feeling judgmental or looking down on you, and feeling like everyone just wishes you would be different than you are (I remember my postdoc advisor telling me I should never have become a father, because I took so much time off to be with my disabled ex-wife and newborn.). This story is a very specific story, but I think the author has done a great job of tapping into universal experience.
It also resonated with me because of the experiences I've seen with my trans friends, both Bez emself and also the numerous trans people I've met locally. I've seen how hurt they feel when people misgender them or feel uncomfortable using their chosen name (which is odd, as so many other people have nicknames completely unlike their birth names and no one cares), and the positive scenes between the MC and the love interest seemed completely authentic.
I do think adding the extra choices in could enhance the game, so I'm glad that's in the works.
Branching Twine Tarot game written in 4 hours, November 4, 2022This was a fun game to finish on while playing through Ectocomp games.
You are at a party that is winding down when your friend Mery suggests using Tarot cards to predict your future.
In the game, she deals 5 different piles, each of which contains 2 cards. When she gives you a brief interpretation, you are also allowed to pick one of the two, or to quit playing and walk away.
There are a lot of endings, including gruesome deaths, but there's at least one cute and positive ending about being creatively inspired.
There's some content warnings for sex, drugs, etc. but I only really saw deaths and the Tarot cards have some nudity. This game has a lot of endings for a game made in 4 hours, which is nice!
A nice, brief spanish visual novel about crashing on a planet, November 4, 2022I liked this short spanish Ectocomp game entered in the '4 hours or less' part of the competition; it's brief, but longer than you'd think for a game made in 4 hours. It is in visual novel style, with some white-on-black lineart and relatively few, but impactful, choices.
In my playthrough, I had 5 days to live after I crash-landed on a planet, since oxygen was running out. The main theme was discovering nature on the planet, both good and bad, and deciding to interact with it positively or negatively.
I never felt super invested in the stakes, but I thought the game was charming and glad I played it, and since it doesn't take long I think people should check it out.
A trippy Spanish binksi game about visiting a small town, November 4, 2022This game was complex and difficult to understand at first. It's a binksi game, similar to bitsy (the game system with minimal sprites, color schemes and animations), but mixed with Ink, the scripting language.
In this Spanish Ectocomp game, you wind up driving to a small village that still has people using donkeys and children play strange games with silhouettes and with a fountain in the town.
The game has several shifts in perspective that I didn't fully understand, which I can mostly attribute to my own poor understanding but also seems to be a mechanic designed to mirror the protagonist's own troubled mental state.
I definitely found the imagery in the game disturbing and frightening, but only from a psychological viewpoint; there is little to no gore and no jumpscares or anything. I think it is effective at being frightening. Like the author says in the description, it can be easy to miss things; I missed a lot of things on the first try and had to replay. Fun, short, and easy to play.
An unfinished Spanish witchcraft horror game with promise, November 4, 2022I was very excited by the beginning of this game but soon found that it was fairly unfinished.
The opening is very mysterious: you and your wife arrive at a house. Your wife has a bruise--is it from you, or someone else? You enter a house with 5 rooms, greeted by an old woman with dark secrets. That night, you have a terrible dream...
All of this is great. But much is left to be done. Conversation doesn't work (TALK TO, ASK ABOUT, direct speech, etc. in Spanish), and many items are not implemented. One of the few things that is implemented is an inventory limit of just two items.
The game has so many cool ideas, I would like to see it more developed. It stopped right at a very cool part! But for now I think it just needs more work to flesh it out more.
A well-implemented small scenario with thriller and occult elements, November 2, 2022As a non-native speaker, I appreciated this game, since it was well-implemented, suggested verbs in the text that can be used (like "Montando el kit se construye un..."), and is a tightly-contained one-room scenario which limits possibilities to a reasonable amount.
The idea is that you are in a building watching a newly-born political party (the Party of the Future) holding a rally. Something odd is going on, as people and buildings around you demonstrate if you watch them closely. On the bed is a suitcase containing a disassembled rifle.
This game is short, but it had a couple of twists I didn't expect. It has one main puzzle, which I think is pretty fair. I decompiled it to figure it out, but even then it didn't give it away, I still had to think about it. I really liked the writing in this game, too, it was terse vivid and descriptive with its few details.
A cool custom engine used for a creepy murder game, November 2, 2022This game was interesting. I thought it was Twine, but it seems like a custom engine made by the author on github. It has regular links but includes a row of buttons for common actions like dropping, pushing, attacking, opening, etc.
The game has a world model with several locations and items and NPCs in them. You start with a dramatic opening: a note to yourself saying that you must kill Rodrigo.
The story is interesting and is based on a scene from a movie that left a deep impression on the author, but I wonder if it isn't a perfect fit for the UI here. I had trouble figuring out how to use a bank card to pay for food, for instance; do I click on the card itself? Open the card? Attack the card? Similarly, there were a lot of background red-herring items that had no real story use.
I felt like the story got progressively creepier, and the ending was impactful (literally). The engine overall seems very solid; I could see it working great in a larger game that was more puzzle-based.
Horrific uncanny valley 3d-models with humorously extravagant characters, November 2, 2022This is the second entry in one of the weirdest series of IF games I've ever played.
Last year I played the first game, Fiesta Mortal, which was a bizarre kind of visual novel that used Sims-like 3d models with pre-Toy Story quality and a horrifying uncanny-valley look. There was a bunch of navigation and inventory trying to stop Steisy, the popular girl, from murdering everyone and you.
This game takes everything from the first game and amps it up. Steisy, now a psychiatric ward patient, looks horrifying with an immense grin and shaved head to support the Free Brittney moment (which she later finds out has already succeeded before she shaved her head).
Her brother, Marlon (I think, I can't remember), when he isn't busy spying on his 50-year old female neighbor with a telescope, wants to visit her to triumph over her. In the meantime, Steisy has to put up with rectal inspections by angry nurse Latoya and meetings with her cellmate and doctor.
Every Spanish swear word I ever learned is used a lot, as well as a few more I had to look up. The characters are oversized stereotypes and parodies, like the flat-earther who derails the game for an intense argument about how Nazis are building bases under the earth and made the south pole as a giant wall around the earth to hide the true mega-continent that lies on the edges.
Overall, the game is inappropriate or crass or over-stylized in many ways, but that is its style, and it kind of works, to be honest. It's like watching Trolls 2 or other B-movies. I think I would have backed out if it were in English due to weird content like severed PS1-style heads, but the language barrier helped provide a buffer between me and content. Wild experience.
A tale of emotional resolution in older times, November 1, 2022This game is fairly complex and its a good chance I didn't understand it completely. It involved quite a bit of folklore and older time things that were hard to translate (and copy and paste doesn't seem to work for google translate), and it is written in a dialect that drops the 'd' at the end of words (like tablao for tablado), which was a bit tricky for me. It's written in Adventuron, and is actually a well-implemented example of the engine.
You play as a man in a Romani family whose name I couldn't quite understand (I think it means something like the evil eye?). The game is divided into two sections; the first involves obstacles in the path of a wagon trip, and involves both conversation and some standard fetch quests.
The second part is a loop where you sing or play guitar for money in a cafe, each time receiving feedback on how to improve. I started off with horrible music but eventually got much better. That unlocks some ending scenes that are quite shocking and weird at first, but, upon reading the beginning quotes of the game again, seem to represent a kind of catharsis. I got kind of stuck on this second half of the game, to be honest.
Overall, this game is incomplete, according to the author, but I found it complex and descriptive. I appreciated the manual and the suggestions at the bottom of each page.
I debated for a long time between 3 stars and 4 stars, but I'd rather be nice if I can't decide so I'm going with 4.
A cute twine game about a young girl helping out her spooky grandma, November 1, 2022This French game written in 4 hours has quite a bit of material. You, a young girl, are excited to go out and assist your grandmother, who is quite old and maybe a witch?
She has the strange ability to speak only in capital letters. She leaves you a note with chores you have to do, mostly feeding cute or spooky animals.
Overall, I thought it was well-written and looked nice. There was at least one bug that made it a bit hard, but that has been fixed since then.
The grandma is a neat character, very intriguing. And the UI is beautiful.
A creepy French speed-IF about waking up in a bathroom, November 1, 2022This entry in the Petite Mort portion of the French Ectocomp speed-IF is simultaneously perhaps the most ambitious of the games I've played so far but also the one with the most problems.
It is a parser game, and you wake up in the bathroom wrapped up in something. Weird objects lie around the room, and you have to find a way out.
I thought it was descriptive and had a compelling idea, but I don't think the author had enough time to finish much of the game. Lots of objects have no description or just don't exist in the room. I looked at the code, too, which was really interesting.
In the end, I guessed half of the solution to the main puzzle but had to get help with the second half. None of the mysteries really get resolved. Overall, I think this is a good game for 4 hours of work, but would need more hours to get all the way great.
A trick-or-treating CYOA in French, October 31, 2022This is an amusing/frightening story written for the French Ectocomp competition in 4 hours or less.
It's an Ink game where you go trick or treating, and I actually found it more fun on replays to see where the 'tricks' are. You have to get a costume, meet up with friends, and choose what order to visit different houses. It's fairly short and simple, but has some strong characterization.
The writing is, as far as I can tell as a non-native speaker, slightly child-like, with run-on sentences and a carefree attitude.
I played three times, because each time I reached what I'd consider a bad ending. I think a good ending exists, but I haven't been able to find it; if anyone gets there, let me know how!
Amusing French game about getting inspiration for a spooky story, October 31, 2022This was a fun Petite Mort game in the French Ectocomp competition (Petite Mort here meaning a game completed in 4 hours or less, quite different than its usual meaning).
This is remarkably polished for such a quickly-made game, but I think that's due to its well-chosen scope. You're in a room with just a few objects, and you have to hurriedly think of inspiration for a story. Every time you look at something, you improvise part of the story based on that object.
Each object provides a different story for each section (except maybe the very last one?), so, as it claims, there are 1024 possible stories, although there are only 20 or so distinct pieces of text to read. Still, it's fun, and includes an intro story based on an Arno Schmidt story.
Minimalism with robots; metroidvania lite, October 29, 2022This is a fun medium game. The author has a long-running series of games that feature a limited parser, where only a select few commands are recognized. In fact, you could say he's a pioneer of the field.
I've come to learn how to play these games, although they're still pretty hard for me. So I was looking forward to playing this game.
You play as a robot that has to go around zapping bugs who have infiltrated a robot factory. It kind of reminds me of the MO factory in adventure time, if it was working well (the only similarities are single minded robots, but still...).
It's kind of a metroidvania situation, as you gain new abilities and items as the game progresses. There are also codes, waiting games, patterns, etc. However, there's no sequence skipping possible like in a lot of Metroidvanias.
I did better than I usually do, completing all the optional tasks and getting all but 1 of the bugs. But man, that last bug was nasty; I looked at every hint and then had trouble. It was the (Spoiler - click to show)sculpture bug. It was fairly clued, I just forgot some capabilities, which shows how complex can get.
I liked the characters in this game a lot; they were simple and often dumb but it makes sense for a collection of bots.
Struggle to live in a future where you extract text from bacteria for cash, October 29, 2022This game was played at the Seattle IF Meet-up with the author narrating the game and adding her thoughts, and then I played again on my own.
You play as a future trans woman (now known as Lavernean) who has been let go and now has to do basically gig-work to make money. You also have a longterm fatigue-related illness and there's 'nanoplague' going around.
Each day you can decode more dna to make money. You also need to deal with your illness, find food, and deal with your impending eviction.
This game was hard to play because it is very realistic. I've had to do day jobs and night gig work to make food money and/or rent in the last few years, and it's pretty stressful. Three of my closest family members have fatigue-related illnesses, too, so there's a lot that hits home.
Things are pretty rough for our protagonist. It's sad but also accurate for some people I know that (Spoiler - click to show)hitting up and/or sleeping with your married ex-flame is the best way to make money.
There are a ton of endings; the writing is on-point and well-done, the characters distinct and vivid. I did find that the difficulty was (realistically) pretty high, and I kind of felt like I was slowly drowning. It takes a lot of work to be able to impart that feeling, but it was also stressful. The level of craft evident is very high, and I'm glad I played.
A pleasantly creepy multimedia experience, October 29, 2022I'd first like to say that the art, animation, and audio for this game are very well done. I loved the style, and would be happy to see it again; it's unique, I haven't seen other games with the scribbly dark figures.
You play as a dangerous and large being that is hunting for food by a bridge. Humans pass by, and you can decide how to act towards them.
I played through to one positive ending (villager ending 1), but the way the game reacted to my choices made me feel like there were many very different endings. That's pretty cool!
There were some typos here and there (like "One of the small humans'", with an extra apostrophe). Overall, it was fairly brief. But what is here is excellent.
Use mind control for corporate profit--sparingly, October 29, 2022As of writing, this is tied with Esther for the most-reviewed game of IFComp 2022.
It's a fun short Ink game where you have the ability once per night per person to inject corporate slogans into people's brains.
The fun of the game is that you can use your powers to mind read 4 different 'tracks' all night (i.e. following each of the four main NPCs), jumping tracks at will, as well as watching the TV as a 5th track.
Your actions have a variety of drastic side-effects, and strategizing is fun, so I replayed several times. I do think it could have been fun to be a little longer, or have one more person, but overall I found it very impressive.
Flee an apocalypse while connecting with others, October 28, 2022This is the last of the Texture games in this IFComp 2022 competition, of which there were quite a few.
This one is fairly long and well-developed. The world is ending: the sun hangs still over the horizon and has for days, while a storm is sweeping behind you and other strange happenings are occurring.
In my playthrough, I encountered a haven in the storm which seemed to have sinister undertones. The game ended on a positive note.
Most or all of these Texture games were written in a workshop, and they generally seem to all have some supernatural manifestation of an inward emotional issue that has to be worked through, like the ending of a relationship. I think this one handles that 'prompt' (if there was one) really well. I would give 4 stars except I didn't, for some reason or another, really connect with the emotional aspect personally, just admiring it from afar.
A gross game about nosebleeds and social anxiety, October 28, 2022I had heard rumors about this game before I played it.
This is one of many Texture games entered in this competition, and it's probably the best-put-together one out of the bunch.
It's a visceral body-horror game in a limited sense; you have blood leaking out of your nose while at work but you feel desperately like you can't pay attention to it or fix to it or you'll be letting everyone down.
I'm sure there are many interpretations of this, but I definitely feel like it touches on social anxiety/impostor syndrome (actually, looking back, one of the content warnings is social anxiety).
The visceral text is accompanied by excellent animations that make the spreading drip of the nose bleed a lot more real. I had some trouble, though, with a completely black screen, taking a long time to find the right way out.
This game grossed me out and I didn't enjoy playing it, but I think that speaks to its quality.
A brief spot of hope in a life that spiralled, October 28, 2022Katie Benson has made many games of varying length that are always well-polished, descriptive, and generally have simple, story-focused gameplay with a positive message (such as the Crumbs series), although sometimes things can get wild (like Off the Rails).
This game is a bit short but has a nice message. Each screen generally has two choices, one that expands the text and one that moves on.
The idea is that your life is spiraling out of control. Things are getting darker and sadder and you find yourself more and more isolated. But there is a glimmer, like the game name says.
I definitely appreciate seeing games from this author in competitions and hope to see more, always a positive spot.
A charming story about mice with a few small puzzles, October 28, 2022This game is small and designed for children. It has some lovingly made illustrations of little mice and the girl who runs a cafe.
Story-wise, it's about two mice who want to get special food at the cafe but can't communicate. Mechanics-wise, it's almost like a language puzzle, and had surprising depth for such a small game (like the depth of a medium-sized game).
The writing is generally pleasant; it had some, but I wanted more, humorous incongruities of the type common in good kid's stories (may favorite was the (Spoiler - click to show)fall of the pudding at the end and everyone's reactions. The whole thing feels like it was designed with prudence and restraint, maintaining a small size and scope and polishing itself in that sphere.
Twine game about community organization, October 28, 2022This is a Twine game that has a brief intro followed by a large open segment where you can choose between 30 or 40 houses to knock on, each with their own mini-story.
You work for a community organization group and your goal is to collect a certain amount of subscriptions before the night is over. You have to monitor both the funds, your bathroom needs, and your body warmth. Each action takes some time to complete.
Out of all the 'simulator' games this year in IFComp, this one works pretty well mechanically, with clearly understandable variables and some ability to strategize how to use your time.
Storywise, I could partially identify with it. I spent 2 years as a missionary, and quite a bit of our daily time was spent knocking on doors, handing out fliers on street corners, or doing service work like English teaching or soup kitchen volunteering. I guess the difference is that I wasn't looking for money donations, but trying to share a religious message. I would say that the results in this game are much more positive than the ones I experienced on average!
It was well known even then that door-to-door is one of the lowest-productivity ways of making contacts. Referrals were much more effective, since you could find people who were already interested instead of bothering people who don't care. Door-to-door knocking for anything can be extremely wearing.
I'd be interested to see how community organizing plays out in real life. It almost sounds like a HOA in this game (give us money and we'll make decisions for the neighborhood). It's interesting seeing different problems people care about in the game and how the protagonist evaluates their importance.
A relatively brief game about witches in Scotland, October 28, 2022This game has a brief intro about the history of Witches in Scotland, and then lets you wander around several areas with an inventory of items, taking on different quests and trying to help people while avoiding suspicion of being a witch.
This sounds like a great setup, but all of its a bit thin. Inventory doesn't really get used much, maybe once or twice. I looked around a bunch but only found one of the quests that I could finish. (I looked at the code and see I should be able to finish the other, and other reviews seem to have managed it!) There are some spelling problems (the author says it's not their native language, which is very understandable). After a while, my game just ended the day; I think it might be on a timer? And it assigned me some points.
So, overall, some good ideas, but it felt like it could be more fleshed out, I think. It had a lot of clever concepts that just didn't feel like they got fully used, to me.
A comedic but heartfelt game about growing up and finding yourself, October 27, 2022It's hard to review this game objectively. I got into IF for parser games, and it wasn't until I tried You Are Standing at a Crossroads by Cat Manning that I realized I could like Twine games.
Once I got started into Twine games, the funniest games I found were by Brendan Hennessy. I was very excited when, in my first IFComp, he entered a game, Birdland, which is the most-rated game on IFDB since 2013 and the most-rated Twine game ever. I thought it was brilliant and have shared it with many students since. The couple of mini-sequels that came out since then were enjoyable.
So when I think of 'what should a good twine game be like', or, I guess, 'what do I like in a Twine game?', it's basically 'whatever Astrid Dalmady or Brendan Hennessy write'. Which is why this isn't an objective review.
Anyway, as for the game itself, you plays as Bell Park, one of the longest-recurring characters in his games. While in past games you were a teenager full of promise, you are now an adult with history. Unfortunately for you, your younger, 12-year old self has travelled to your present and wants to know all that history.
Meanwhile, the two of you team up to find the fiance of your old crush Cassidy. In the meantime, you encounter a wide cast of characters and use a nifty map screen to choose how to navigate around town.
This game is different from Birdland. Birdland had a very consistent day/night mechanic over a week, making it clear how the game was progressing and allowing for a sense of excitement and overall motion. While the mechanics in this game are also interesting, it lacks that overall drive. Instead, though, it has a lot of real poignancy and emotional depth. How would your teenage self view you now, with all of your hopes and dreams having been tested by time? (or, if you are a teen, what's your older self going to be like?) It's a mechanic seen before in other stories, but I like all those stories (thinking of 13 Going on 30 here). It is a less substantial story physically, but has more to say, I think.
The game has excellent artwork (I went through a phase where I wanted to copy Hennessy's design for my Twine works but it was too hard and didn't really go anywhere, but I ended up commissioning art more often and he does that so maybe it did go somewhere?). The backgrounds and fonts and colors are easily readable and unobtrusive.
This game does a lot good that is unnoticeable because it's just not doing what bad games do. It gives you a sense of agency without pushing but also lets you feel like you didn't miss out on branches you didn't click on.
To me the highlight is the humor, subtly leading your expectations and then defying them. I enjoyed (minor spoilers (Spoiler - click to show)the part with with the two crowns, as well as the taurine chewing gum, just the fact that it exists). The many bizarre worldwide events over the last decade made for a lot of potential jokes at the time traveller's expense, but were selected with good sense and care (could have made a lot of darker jokes, which I'm glad didn't happen).
I really like this game, glad it was made.
A short Twine game with lots of worldbuilding, short time, October 27, 2022The name of this game comes from the fact that you have 5 remaining hours and each big action or scene takes up one.
This is a short Twine game, but it seems like it has the worldbuilding for a much larger story. There is an ancient, near-immortal Shogun (named (Spoiler - click to show)Charlie????) that enslaves and tortures special people who have Curses.
A weird apparition gives you a weapon to fight the Shogun (from searching, the weapon may be inspired by Sword Art Online). You can have various fights, or just remember all the deaths in your life and give up, etc.
The game feels a bit rushed or unfinished, with lots of plot threads left hanging and some little bugs (an option near the end wouldn't let me click it, for instance).
Overall, I think this just needs more time in the oven. The slavery in the game doesn't really seem to serve a purpose besides being a shorthand for suffering.
An adaptation of a spy thriller, October 27, 2022I really am not sure how to review this one, because sometimes I think it's excellent and sometimes I think it's a bit choppy.
This is an adaptation of the book The Thirty-Nine Steps. I haven't read it myself, but from Wikipedia it looks pretty cool, about a man on the run who is hunted down everywhere he goes.
This adaptation adds a good deal of additional content, and allows you to focus on being Bold, Open, or Clever. Interestingly, the choices not only increase your ability in that area, but they also affect the way you see the world about you, making you more paranoid or clueless, etc.
The game gives you a lot of freedom, but I feel like, due to that freedom, I missed a few essential plot points, such as never really learning about the people I'm pursuing. A couple of other things I feel like are confusing without context (late game spoilers:(Spoiler - click to show)I pushed a fireplace rod and a bunch of steps disappeared in a cloud of chalk. Why? What's the purpose of such a mechanism?).
So I'm wavering between 3 and 4, but I'll round up to 4.
An exercise in futility, made in Texture, October 26, 2022This is one of the more polished Texture games in the IFComp 2022 competition. Texture is an engine for IF that involves dragging verbs onto nouns to make choices.
This game is primarily a phone menu system. There are a lot of options, many of them creative (like turning it all into Polish).
The overall feeling is a sense of futility or frustration. I tried out several endings, and all of them seemed to express the same sentiment.
Overall, the game is very polished and descriptive, and conveyed its sense of frustration to me. I wonder if the joke could have been extended a bit or if there could be more of a central narrative, or something else to extend this a bit. Unless of course I missed a big final ending! I've missed stuff like that before.
A famous chess endgame in a puzzle format, October 26, 2022I've avoided playing chess most of my adult life. so I never learned about famous endgame positions and puzzles.
I've learned a few recently through Schultz's work. He has several chess-based puzzle games that teach principles of few-piece chess positions, including a few mini-puzzles that teach a single position.
This one involves a setup where each side has the king and 1 pawn each.
I found it enjoyable, and liked the backstory. But I spent a long time on it due to encountering a bug in scenario 2, which I forwarded to the author; essentially there is an unintended solution to that scenario, so I couldn't figure out if my unintended solution was blocking the 'real' one of if I could still solve it. I looked at the walkthrough and found one line that more or less gave away the second solution, to both puzzles in fact (the line was that (Spoiler - click to show)the king can only focus on one pawn at a time). If that bug were patched, I would definitely put 4 stars for the rating.
As a side note, I think this game struck a good balance between 'let the player keep playing in a losing position to see why it's losing' and 'cut them off right after the first mistake'. One quality of life change I would like to see is a more dramatic heralding of completing one of the scenarios. Right now, it is very similar in appearance to losing, so if one is repeatedly replaying quickly to try different strategies (especially since there's no undo), the text can blur together, so some kind of major break (like bold, or a line of asterisks, or some other signifier) can be nice. The counter in the corner does go up, and that's the main way I noticed the scenario number increase.
Overall, it's been fun to learn more about chess through these puzzles.
A decidedly undercooked parser game, October 26, 2022Almost any game can be polished up and made great. This game needs a lot of polishing.
This is a parser game that puts you in the middle of 9 rooms, 8 of which have the same description that includes a typo. None of the standard responses are changed, ABOUT, CREDITS, HELP, etc. have no response. There are only two items.
It seemed like there was absolutely nothing to do. I eventually decompiled the code and used it to finish the game; the following set of rules may serve as hints to others:
(Spoiler - click to show)When Floor 1 begins
After dropping colored egg when the location of the player is flod room and Floor 1 is happening
When Floor begins
After jumping when the location of the player is pled room and Floor 2 is happening
Every turn during Floor 2
When Floor 3 begins
After inserting something into something
When Floor 4 begins
After touching monkey during Floor 4
Every turn during Floor 4
After pushing when the noun is Ye Shiny Red Button and Floor 5 is happening and player has golden egg and player has golden seven and player has golden octagon and player has golden monkey
After pushing when the noun is Ye Shiny Red Button and Floor 5 is not happening
According to my rubric, this game is not polished, descriptive, has obscure interactivity, did not have an emotional impact, and I wouldn't play it again in its current state.
But I don't think the effort is wasted or the author is bad. Clearly there are some good ideas here; this just needs more stuff implemented. I would recommend the author to pick the source code of one of the games you find when you search IFDB with the tag "tag:I7 Source Available", and look around to see what kind of things authors can do to make games more polished.
A conglomeration of literary references in a surreal twine game, October 26, 2022This is another surreal Twine game based on exploration (after just having played Lucid), but I'm happy with that since it's one of my favorite genres.
This game is built out of a bunch of literary references, starting with Neuromancer (which I've never read), and branching into Kafka, Alice in Wonderland, etc. Most of them are oblique references, ones you have to puzzle over or which potentially could describe several stories (at least for me).
The tone is fairly dark, beginning with unwanted surgery and poisoning and including a lot of theft.
The game is somewhat narrow; at first I thought there'd be tons of options or strategy but the game funnels you pretty effectively. I can say there are several options that are hard to discover and the endings can take work, so that's actually pretty good, now that I think about it. Maybe the funneling is actually a good thing, since with Lucid I had the opposite problem of too many choices.
Overall, it was pretty fun to try to puzzle out the literary references. 'Diary of Anne Frank' is a bit of a bold choice to have alongside more goofy or wild entries. But I had a good time with this. The main drawback to me was the lack of weight in the endings; to me, the endings were abrupt and didn't resolve many narrative arcs (I saw 3 endings, including a death).
A text memory of a real-life Christmas present with Harry Potter themes, October 25, 2022This game definitely seems like a good contender for the Best Use of Multimedia XYZZY award specifically for its map 'feelie' attached to it, which is a complex map that folds and unfolds multiple times.
That map is an essential part of the game, since it marks the main treasure or objects you're looking for.
Those objects are Golden Snitches. The idea of this game is that the programmer made a real-life treasure hunt for his daughter, hiding four golden snitches in the house and creating a map that reimagined their house as various locations from the Harry Potter series.
The game itself is sparse in comparison to the lush map. Your father, Papa, follows you around, serving as a hint system, and rooms he doesn't enter are unimportant, as he feels no need to give you clues in them.
I was struck while playing with the casual, unaffected display of wealth. I've been both moderately wealthy and moderately poor in life; in my youth, my father was a video game executive and supported 7 kids in a large house with a big backyard. But his business went under, and years later after my divorce I've experienced food scarcity and can't afford a reliable vacuum or a washing machine. With that background, this house seems quite magical, with a balcony over a grand hall, a spacious backyard with water features, multiple secret passages and hidden rooms, and multiple rooms for the child, including their own bathroom. It feels like reading British books like Middlemarch (which I've been doing), seeing the life of the upper middle class or lesser aristocracy.
The game itself is charming and full of love. The two areas that I think are drawbacks are the sparseness of the room descriptions and the lack of implementation of several objects mentioned. For instance, when I first encountered the bookshelf, I couldn't X BOOKS.
As a final note, the Harry Potter themes are heavily prevalent, as a heads up for people that have strong feelings towards JK Rowling.
Surreal imagery, time loops, and visceral images, October 25, 2022This is an interesting game, and kind of intimidating at first.
Basically, you are in a surreal landscape, perhaps a dream. There are many, many options at first in this Twine game, so many I felt a bit overwhelmed. They are all bizarre, like someone with a singularly non-descript face or a host of voices telling you to avoid a specific thing.
As you explore, it becomes more clear how to navigate around the map. You will also die, or end, many times, resetting in a loop. Sometimes things can carry over.
I peeked at the walkthrough a bit at first to gain confidence. I really like how this played out; the surreal imagery was cohesive and coherent to me, and it really felt sinister.
I think I would have appreciated some way to have more guidance at first without using the walkthrough, and I was a little frustrated with the very last choice (Spoiler - click to show)going into the light resets the whole game so you can't try the other option without replaying everything. Great writing overall, fun game.
A long and rich comedy detective game with shares-one-brain-cell duo, October 24, 2022This is quite a large and complex Twine game that has a lot of humor. It's about a mysterious male protagonist who wakes up and seeks the help of two magical detectives named Cannelé and Nomnom. They are a duo who act like siblings (maybe are?) and express intense dislike for each other while also acting pretty dumb.
The game has excellent styling with colors used for text, animations, and some minigames that are quite well done. One is a card game; another is a complex 'detective board' with red string and post-it notes that unfortunately doesn't always work well with saving and loading, but is fun while it lasts.
The game is very long already, lasting over two hours for me, and is actually incomplete. The player is invited to post their hypotheses and guesses for the finale online, with the author taking these hypotheses into account for their later writing of the big finale.
I loved the images, the interaction between the protagonist and the two detectives, the minigames, all of it. Except...
I don't like the dynamic between the two main NPCs. It's just pure negative all the time, completely unrelenting. It can be a funny bit, but I wished for just an occasional gleam of fondness, or loyalty, etc. There may have been some, but it was few and far between. This is 100% just personal taste; I think there could be many people that like this so it doesn't have to be changed. But I like 'jerk with a heart of gold' more than 'jerk with a heart of jerk'.
I also found more than a few small typos and had some trouble with saving and loading and keeping the 'memory board' the same.
Overall, this is one of my favorite games of this comp, and the criticism above is just a small detail in a great work. I'm looking forward to the finish, and can recommend this.
Anton Chekhov short story with lightly interactive framing story, October 24, 2022This is, I believe, the third 'stateful narration' game I've played, and the first I've figured out how to get a reaction on. Edit: It was in fact the second, I have lied.
These games have an engine where you type something in a box (the game requires it to be in its internal dictionary) and then it parsers that output.
In all the past games I pushed the boundaries of it, like typing 'fart' in every box, and the game didn't respond at all. Even this time, I used words like 'deciduous', 'petrochemical', and 'brobdingnagian', and it didn't respond at all.
So I decided to just give in and type clear words like 'happy' and 'sad'. The game seemed to understand those, as well as 'despondent'. Given a couple of similar projects I've seen recently, I suspect that what's underneath the hood is 'sentiment analysis', where there is a database of dictionary words with a score associated to them about how positive and negative they are. Or not; I could be completely wrong. But that's what it feels like.
Like the other games, this has a classic short story inserted uncut and unchanged with a framing story around it. I'm not sure why this is the pattern; the short story is interesting, but it doesn't affect my feelings about the new parts of the game. It's kind of like buying a car and entering it into a car-decaling competition and putting a realistic copy of the Mona Lisa on the hood and then adding your own work around it without altering the original in any way. I think I rather prefer remixes of originals more than juxtaposition; A Fifth of Beethoven is a great remix of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for instance.
The framing story has some interesting elements, but I found it hard to find a narrative thread or two outside of mimicking the lottery element of the chekhov story. It's possible the main purpose of the sauce story is just to provide several opportunities for the stateful interaction that is mostly about reacting positively or negatively to something.
Fun fact: the image used in the cover art is from a picture of a baby lottery held in early 1900's Paris and featured in Popular Mechanics. Pretty wild!
For my rubric, I find this game both polished and descriptive, but the interactivity could use a little more pushback on words with neutral sentiment; my main emotional impact was from the Chekhov story rather than the surrounding material; and there's not a lot of replayability here.
A cute, short choice-based story about a mug come to life, October 24, 2022This is a game intended for kids about a magic cup that comes to life, written with the Strand system, which is the system used for the Magnetic Scrolls memorial and several IFComp and ParserComp games since then.
A lot of stories intended for kids end up being too inspid for either kids or parents to enjoy. This game was 'corny', but it was a kind of corny I liked and an imaginative one as well, with its own internal logic and, to me, compelling arcs, even in its short playtime. I found the writing detailed and vivid.
You play as a tin mug that has the ability to affect the world around it, especially on today, its birthday.
Choices were usually binary, often with one clearly better choice, which would make sense when teaching a young child about how choice-based games work. I guess my only thought about possible drawbacks would be that the breaks between choices are fairly large and it would be difficult to hold a child's attention that long if they're excited about choices.
A procedurally generated maze with some symbolic elements, October 24, 2022I really enjoyed Charm Cochrans previous game, and I was surprised at how different this was compared to that. That one was a religious-themed Twine game with good graphics and lush descriptions. This is a stripped-down parser maze.
It's well-implemented and runs smoothly. You are met at the beginning by a man who introduces himself to you and explains the maze. You then go through it.
While it seems hideously complex at first, the vast majority of the maze rooms have only one entrance and one exit. If mapping, it's only really necessary to write down the rooms with three exits, which are rare.
There are several layers of meaning in the game, from the base Inform implementation level (with little meaning in itself), to the maze itself, to the objects in the maze (like the lizard you can follow or string you can leave behind you), to the messages from Everyman and the LED tickers, to clear political statements that are plain and not symbolic (especially (Spoiler - click to show)the gravestones describing people who died from being denied an abortion for a non-viable pregnancy or who died without anyone using their real chosen name).
Overall, I enjoy surreal games and well-implemented games. I thought that a lot of the messages were delivered well, and if it is designed as a way to feel the frustration of being a marginalized person in a white male cishet-dominated world, I think it demonstrates it very well (also the frustration of caring about the climate or similar issues and getting a lot of promises that don't get acted on). But the main gameplay loop was not one that I enjoyed; a frustration simulator is still frustrating; a frustration parody is still frustrating; a metaphor for imprisonment through frustration is still frustrating.
But given that the game seems designed to incur those feelings, I can only conclude that the author has succeeded. Given that they've so far made an excellent Twine game and an very well-coded parser game, I can only expect that his next game will be brilliant.
A decadent and grimly humorous illustrated twine game about a terrible town, October 24, 2022This is a lavish Twine game that has you visit a town as an apprentice baker, set on making a cake for the town's Savings Day.
The real appeal of this game is the characters. You meet a variety of well-illustrated characters, each in a unique style that reminded me of Tim Burton or Ruby Gloom or the Haunted Mansion or even HxH's Palm. Each one has their own dark secrets to hide.
The game simultaneously has a lot of variety and very little. Every time, you must visit the same people to get the same things. But you do have a chance in how you treat them and what you discover. You even can choose from many endings, but all of the good endings have a lot of overlap.
There were some minor inconsistencies here and there (like the credits page softlocking the game by not offering a way out of it) that damped enjoyment, but this is one of my favorite games so far in terms of content, characters and art.
A somewhat unpolished but creative candy murder mystery, October 23, 2022My dad use to run a video game company, and one idea he always had was to make an incredibly bloody and vicious fighting game with entrails and gore, etc. but with all characters made of chocolate, so that it would technically pass Nintendo rules.
He never got around to making it, but this game reminds me of that concept. It's a hardboiled detective story with candy version of murder, gore, hardcore pornography (alluded to only), a strip club, etc. All of it is bowdlerized through the candy medium.
The author of this game has made quite a few interesting and/or bizarre experimental Twine pieces (and one using an RPG making software, I think), so I associate him with creativity and innovation in a choice medium.
In this move to the parser medium, he's brought the creativity and the amusement. One thing I think is lacking though is dealing with 'bad' parser responses. Due to the parser medium allowing theoretically infinite possibilities, a large part of parser craft is nudging players gently (or not) towards commands that actually do something. So more custom parser responses, implementation of basically every noun in every description (or turning them into synonyms of other nouns), etc. This can often take up a huge part of programming time, but it also represents a huge part of player time, since often half or more of a player's commands will result in an error, as they try out whatever they think of in the moment.
That, coupled with some capitalization problems in room names, makes me feel like what this needs more than anything is some more time in the oven. I've found that the best way to get this part of the game nailed down is to have a bunch of testers send transcripts and then implement a response for everything they try (or redirect it to a pre-existing response).
Overall, a clever concept.
A Texture game about a lost sister and your quest to find her, October 22, 2022This is a well-written texture game about a young woman who is desperate because her sister is missing.
Starting with a true crime-like opening, the game soon pivots in another direction.
This is written using Texture, which is an engine where actions are dragged onto nouns. As far as was apparent to me, this story is mostly linear, with choices either expanding some dialogue or moving the story along. It is possible there is some branching but I didn't find evidence of it.
I enjoyed the story and the characters. I felt it ended a bit abruptly (I had a successful ending), and would have liked to see more variety in interaction.
Beautiful game about finding someone who has lost herself, October 22, 2022Abigail Corfman has made many high-quality games in the past, so I was excited to play this one.
This is a richly-illustrated Twine game, with black-and-white chiaroscuro images on one side and options on another. The game has background music and sound effects. The screen was too low-positioned for me to click on at first, but going to full-screen made it work better.
This is a combination story-focused and puzzle game. The idea is that a man, Anthony Lane, suspects that he has a wife but can't find her. You have to investigate the house to find out what's missing. Like another game in this comp, A Long Way to the Nearest Star, you have an inventory of thoughts and items that you can select from in each room, providing two-factor puzzles that make for a richer game.
The first half of the game had a lot of narrative momentum for me, with the puzzles being fairly light and forgiving. It bogged down a lot in the second half as it is possible to make irreversibly bad decisions.
But that made me have to think a lot. I had to really stop and imagine this person, what their life might be like. I continued to do poorly, even restarting. But I worked at it more and more. It was compelling to try to really thing about what their life was like, instead of what I wanted it to be like or assumed it would be like. It was like an exercise in empathy.
Overall, I think this is really well done. Love the art, too.
A poetical and philosophical fantasy story about the coming and going of elves, October 22, 2022This is an IFComp entry that is entirely focused on story, understanding and self-thought rather than gameplay or mechanics.
The idea is that there were once elves who one day left. You meet (or met) a woman who was one of the last to live among the elves. She teaches you about their language, and about their 497 words for goodbye.
That description doesn't really do justice, though, because the real content of this game is its style rather than its story. More than anything else this story reminded me Borges and Calvino, both of whom I've read less than perhaps I ought to have. I looked up those authors after reading this game and enjoyed learning about them and their literary techniques.
One thing this game does that those writers do is to purposely jar the reader from their pleasant immersion in the story. Frequently the game will lead you to what seems like understanding only for the author to say 'but it wasn't like that at all'. Kind of like, for imaginary example, if you were telling a story about people lining up for miles in NYC to get cheesecake, and then the PoV character asking 'It must have been good then,' and then getting the response, 'Of course not, it was terrible. It was all tourists lining up.' I'd like to say this technique is an example of Verfremdung, but I just learned that word 10 minutes ago and am almost certainly misapplying it.
The language is lovely and complex, requiring a slower reading for understanding, similar to Chandler Groover's work. One runs a risk telling stories about storytellers like this; if you're writing about a group who is known for great poetry and expressiveness, you yourself must be expressive and poetic. But this game sidesteps this a bit neatly by having the main character him or herself be impressed by the secondary narrator.
There were a few minor typos (I found four, two of which were in this phrase: (Spoiler - click to show)the the City when I first arrived here; I lost myself within its imensity . Overall, it's fairly polished.
I first heard part of this game read by the author after the comp started in the Seattle IF group, and I could still hear his voice while playing it. I enjoyed it. I suppose the only negative to me was that I felt a bit at a distance from the narrative, both mechanically and narratively; it felt like someone else's story. But it was a beautiful one.
Choicescript version of a dating show/slasher flick, October 22, 2022This is, I believe, an adaptation of an award-winning screenplay by the author, and I think it shows in the quality of the writing.
In this game, you are invited to a reality show the season after someone got stabbed by a Barbie-masked attempted murderer. This season, everyone is back, so the would-be killer is among your group.
Gameplay is split between some classic-style romance gameplay (who do you talk with? who do you ask on a date? etc.) and running from or fighting with the killer.
The tone isn't always realistic, but it feels like a stylistic choice, making it more like a slasher flick. People get injuries that would be deadly in real life but continue to run or talk for a long time after; tv producers seem not worried about liability, etc. It makes for a slightly surreal game that puts you at a level removed from the experience, better able to contemplate bigger questions like gender roles in film and why audiences like terrible things.
Overall, I felt like the writing and agency worked well. I played a ton of Choicescript games last year and I would say this one is above-average in its use of the system.
This is a more mature game, with some profanity, a large amount of violence/blood and some mild/network-friendly sexuality.
While each individual part of this game is excellent, it didn't completely gel for me; a part of that was that I chose to be a cis het male and the game seemed to anticipate I'd be a woman, including people staring at my heaving chest and so on. That's probably intentional, given that the game is questioning these very assumptions, but making intelligent and thoughtful statements doesn't always translate to compelling gameplay. By and large though this is an excellent effort and one I believe most people would enjoy if they are not turned off by slasher flicks.
A lengthy and somewhat heartwarming game about running a tavern, October 21, 2022As someone who's never tried alcohol, mixed drinks always seem intriguing; I always imagine they'd be like milkshakes or punch or other sweet things. From what people say, it's not really like that. But I like the way the bottles look and the idea of trying to combine ingredients in a neat way.
This game heavily features a minigame where you have a stock of drinks (represented visually with nice graphics) and have to mix specific cocktails from it. All real-world drinks have been re-named, and some are pretty funny (especially ones that are just nicknames for a single drink).
The main storyline is about you, a young individual, trying to save up enough money to buy out the tavern owner. Simultaneously, you are contacted by a 'watcher', an extradimensional being, who discusses the nature of agency with you.
The dialogue in the game is written with an accent, which is always a risky choice, as it can come off pretty goofy or hard to read. This one was fairly simple, though, so that's good.
There is some strong profanity in the game (I have a filter that turns it off, because why not?), and some mild references to sexual situations.
Overall:
-Polish: I had a couple of times where a major event repeated itself (making a buffet, passing out, etc.) and there was some fiddliness with things like the tip box, where you made a choice whether to put it out or not, then when doing the 'getting ready for the day' menu, you had the choice again, repeated word-for-word. Just things like that I feel could be fixed up a bit.
+Descriptiveness: The game is very descriptive, especially with the imaginative cocktail names.
-Interactivity: Like several other reviewers have pointed out, the main minigame can get monotonous. I got to flinching when I'd get another round of 9 orders. But I think the core idea is good, maybe it just needs a few tweaks. I wish there was a sense of progression in skill, or something to learn, but after the first few it's mainly repeating identical actions.
+Emotional impact: I found it heartwarming the way the group could hassle each other but also bond in positive ways.
+Would I play again? With a few changes, like those mentioned above, I think it would be fun.
A Texture story about several ghosts in a graveyard, October 21, 2022I initially misinterpreted this game quite a bit. I found 2-3 bad endings early on and thought that was the whole game, and was pretty disappointed.
But it turns out it's actually a 'gauntlet' structure game, with multiple binary choices, one leading to death/failure, one leading to success.
If you find the right path, the game leads you through several different ghosts, each of which are very distinct from each other. The 'failure' text actually gives a lot of background you can't get from just succeeding; fortunately, the other coded in mini check points for these parts of the game.
I enjoyed this the most out of the texture games I tried during this competition. It had some interesting themes about grief and those who may or may not deserve it, as well as the fun cast of characters. It is polished and descriptive and has interesting interactivity, but I didn't feel a strong emotional connection for some reason or another. Worth checking out.
This was my former review:
This is a tiny game written in the Texture language, which involves dragging verbs onto nouns.
When I say tiny, I mean it's only 3 or 4 screens, with 1-3 possible actions per screen and a couple paragraphs per page.
Tiny isn't necessarily bad; I love the Twiny jam games, which had < 100 words each, and even made some of my own games inspired by them. But this game and story don't have any features that benefit from brevity, like branching or innovative twists.
What is here is entirely competent: nice artwork, interesting writing, some fun action design. It could be a fine story/game if expanded.
A future museum employee deals with desire for affair, October 21, 2022This game is a fusion of a couple of concepts/story threads. The first is a futuristic story where you are part of a VR museum curation team. This is a really interesting story that feels well-researched and describes things like how to crowdsource tagging videos with metadata and how perception of culture changes over time.
The other thread is where you are a burnt-out member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and mother and wife, and your older but handsome coworker Sean starts looking really attractive to you as a way to escape.
A lot of the game deals with the outlook of unhappy wife who somewhat believes in the Church but feels oppressed and dislikes several aspects. A lot of this part was hard to read as I was divorced primarily because my wife felt much of the same things that this protagonist feels with regards to the our church, and just like the protagonist, she wanted a way out.
I appreciated a fact I didn't discover until the end notes, which is that (Spoiler - click to show)there is no way to actually have an affair. It made me feel like the game really did a good job of representing player agency, since (Spoiler - click to show)just because you do everything can to make someone like you or want you, doesn't mean it will work.
Besides dredging up a lot of uncomfortable personal feelings (which I think is a sign of good writing), the one thing that didn't entirely click for me was the pacing; it was never clear just how close we were, or just what actions would have what results, if that makes any sense. Stylistically, it's a reasonable choice, since relationships are messy and confusing. But I felt like the gameplay was obfuscated (if that's the right word here).
Overall, I think this one will do well. Great research and touches on a lot of pertinent points in modern society.
Exploring a city from Calvino's Invisible Cities, October 20, 2022This game lets you explore Octavia, a city described in the book Invisible Cities (by Italo Calvino) as a spider-web city hung on a great web of ropes, pipes, etc.
You are offered three different items to take with you. When you arrive, you have time to explore and look around, seeing the wonders of the city.
But not very much time. After 20 turns, the game ends with a vague message. I unfortunately got that message on my first playthrough right when I was trying to click a moving link, so I thought that this was a 'failure message'. With no undo, I was out of luck.
But I think the intent here is that you explore for a short time but are unable to see it all in one playthrough. That's a beautiful idea, but I find the execution a bit wanting. There's no indication that that's what the ending signifies, and the other review on IFDB I read also seemed to consider it as a bug or problem of some sorts.
I'm giving 3 stars mostly because I like the conceit both of the spiderweb city but also because of the idea of the limited time, even if it came off a bit weird.
A short, minimal parser game about a hidden tomb, October 20, 2022This is a short parser game with a premise similar to Infidel. In it, you explore an underground tomb and have to discover a way out, since your friend shoved you into the tomb so that he could take the treasure for himself.
The map is pretty simple, laid out mostly east to west with a couple of branching rooms. There are a lot of unimplemented objects and identical objects (like a large proliferation of candles).
There's only one real puzzle; the rest of the game is essentially a red herring. The descriptions do sound cool; seeing it depicted visually would be fun I imagine it would look a bit like the tombs in Moon Knight.
I struggled with the main puzzle because I didn't pay close attention to the room descriptions. Overall I think does the story pretty well and some technical details pretty well, but overall could use some work. I think the author has good potential if they get more practice and maybe more beta testers.
A short Twine game with a few puzzles about aliens inspecting humans, October 20, 2022This is a brief Twine game that has some complex parts to it. You play as a alien technician or researcher working in a lab with a professor, going through a pile of human artifacts and trying to figure out what they're for. It's kind of like Little Mermaid, when Scuttle tries to guess what human artifacts are used for.
The game is a little unpolished; I found several typos and capitalization errors. It's pretty descriptive though, and it's funny when it shows the items it's been describing. The author does a pretty good job of thinking of objects from an alien point of view, but sometimes it's too on the nose (for instance, some human keys are described as possibly a physical form of an encryption key).
The puzzles can be pretty interesting (a color one threw me for a loop), but some segments that seem like they should be puzzles actually are taken care of as cut scenes.
Overall, I found it generally amusing, but didn't feel a strong desire to play again.
A real-time resource management zombie Twine game, October 20, 2022In this game, you have a brief introduction explaining how zombies have caused an apocalypse, and then you become the commander of a base that needs to defend from zombies.
As commander, you have people you can assign to tasks. In the Easy Mode I played in, there were 6 roles (farmer, builder, etc.) each with several subtasks. It was overwhelming at first, especially when different bars started counting down in real time, but once I realized how slow it was I realized there was tons of time to make decisions.
Maybe too much time; the game got a little repetitive pretty quickly. I focused on farming and finding more survivors until those maxed out, then built a research base and focused on finding a cure.
Overall, the writing was goofy, but descriptive and vivid, and the simulation held together surprisingly well. I think it could have used a bit more variety though; I spent most of the game with the game in a side window just running, waiting for it to be done.
Very short Twine game about picking a partner, October 20, 2022From the picture, blurb, and length on the IFComp page (which I swear used to say 2 hours, but I think I must have misread it because now it says 15), I expected this game to a big, polished Twine game with cool visuals, like Porpentine's Crystal Warrior Ke$ha.
Unfortunately, this is a very short Twine game with 1 major area, with simple links to rooms and back (each room being one passage). State doesn't seem be to be tracked at all. Almost all the endings are just vague statements that you slept with someone.
I think the author can do better. This kind of game can be written up in 30 minutes or an hour. That doesn't mean you can't make a great game in that time, but it's hard and needs good luck. I'd like to see more length and/or effort and/or cool new idea.
A charming compact game about getting everything ready to go outside, October 20, 2022This one-room parser game has about 20 endings, of which I found 3 (one significantly more difficult to achieve than the others).
You are tired and hungover on the couch but need to get up and exercise by walking outside; it's explicitly set during this Covid-19 pandemic we're in, and I have the impression it's during a lockdown/quarantine.
I zig-zagged a lot with this game. My first thought when I started it was 'Oh man, that's a lot of unnecessary items in the first room.' This is what it said:
"The Living Room is standard-issue, complete with television, sofa, floor lamp, coffee table, side table, window, ceiling fan, rug, hardwood floor, and a thick layer of dust."
My second thought was, 'ha, if this is just a badly implemented game, I can just TAKE ALL and it will tell me what is important.' That seemed to work well, but then I started trying to explore and realized that this was actually a one-room game, and all those things were there not because this was a poorly scoped 'recreate my apartment' game, but because it was a single room with tons of detail.
The first puzzle was pretty hard for me because I wasn't exploring at first, just trying to reason things out. Once I worked out the game logic, I got better. I started using the hint mechanic in the game before I knew it was the hint mechanic (I felt less clever about solving all the puzzles I did once I found out I had technically been using all the hints).
Overall, it was clever how many puzzles were crammed into one room. I think that the descriptions could have used a bit of fleshing out; minimalism is a good style, but this didn't feel like aesthetically chosen minimalism, just quick and dry descriptions.
I think this game is fun, and can generally recommend it for puzzle fans.
Surreal, abstract game about loss and ink, October 20, 2022This is a Texture game, involving dragging commands onto nouns, one of several written in a writing group and entered into IFComp.
This one deals with grief; a loved one is gone, and a letter from her appears and follows you.
I played through twice, one being peaceful and accepting, one being hateful and destructive. I felt like it made a lot more sense the second way. This game has poetic and abstract style, and I didn't connect with it. By that, I mean I would often read a page and feel like I couldn't remember anything I read or anything I felt. The words felt slippery in brain.
Overall I liked the branching paths, but I didn't like how the text often lacked paragraph breaks and sometimes changed font size dramatically from one page to the next; I know that can be a stylistic effect but I couldn't the connection between the text and the font size.
Overall, I like surreal games and enjoyed the 'dark' ending of this. But the formatting and phrasing threw me for a loop.
Explore an abandoned ship with a faulty AI, October 18, 2022This is a Twine game with a significant world model. In it, you explore a ship you've crashlanded on which is empty except for an AI named SOLIS.
There are a lot of areas to explore, and you have both an inventory and notes of all important information.
It has puzzles that are honestly complex and can be fairly difficult. The inventory allows for quadratic complexity: you have to be in the right room, and use the right item.
I enjoyed the AI, and felt an attachment to them. The nice thing about IF containing AIs is that the AIs exist in reality, in a sense; the organic characters are just described in words, nothing like their 'true' selves, but the AIs are supposed to be code masquerading as a person and that's what they actually are: code in Twine or Ink or Inform that takes your inputs and reacts to you. It's weird to think about.
Anyway, the game is fairly non-linear and has multiple endings and paths to victory. I think a large chunk of content is the same in each walkthrough, especially conversation, but you can replay those parts with different attitudes.
Navigating back and forth got a bit tedious by the end, but fortunately a new mechanic gets introduced that lets you 'warp' around ((Spoiler - click to show)following the robot).
Overall, I really enjoyed this polished game.
A custom web-parser game about completing a magical examination, October 18, 2022There's a long tradition of games about completing a magical education, including early games like Enchanter and more recent games like Winter at Hogwarts and Junior Arithmancer.
This game is a pretty standard example of the genre, where you have 5 tasks to perform and must search for spell books and ingredients to complete the 5 tasks.
This game uses a custom web parser. It's actually not too bad, being able to handle things like hitting the up arrow to repeat earlier commands and getting a lot of commands I typed right. It does have weaknesses, though, like not understanding pronouns like 'it'.
The nice things about this game include multiple paths to solutions for many puzzles. It has a built-in hint system, but I often found the hints were only available for things I already knew about. I had to check the walkthrough for about 30-40% of the game, and finished at 2 hrs 7 minutes (according to the game's handy timer).
I found several typos in the game, and it wasn't very descriptive. But I had fun with this game, and appreciate how the engine seems to be coming along nicely.
A teenager fights pirates in space, October 17, 2022In this game, you get grounded in space and have to go asteroid mining as punishment.
As you mine, you are confronted with pirates who shut down your ship.
The bulk of the game is a complicated puzzle with reflecting mirrors and xy coordinates and angles. I just followed the walkthrough, and have no idea what clues you would have or how difficult it would be without a walkthrough.
A fix-the-broken-spaceship game with plenty of hints and multiple npcs, October 17, 2022This game is a fairly hefty parser game where a spaceship is sent spiraling off into space with only one person, you, in it.
You have a to-do list that expands and contracts as the game demands. There are a lot of little devices: cabinets, panels, fuses, etc. and a very intricate-seeming fuel injection system.
The puzzles are generally clever. Some of them are moon-logic type puzzles.
As a case in point, very near the end of the game (heavy endgame spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)you find the captain's journal and need to unlock it. The captain has two pictures: one of a dog named Pluto and one of the moon. The idea is that the password is Pluto's moon, Charon. But why would someone, in their own room, make their only personal objects just happen to be an obscure hint for their own password?. But most of the puzzles are fair.
Implementation is sometimes missing but when it's not it's very solid. So a lot of cool objects are implemented (including a large rope) but a lot of scenery objects are just not there or are missing reasonable actions. (For instance, (mild lategame spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)if you unlock the starboard chest, it has wires, but you can't refer to them or interact with them in any way. Similarly, there is an operations console on the bridge which isn't implemented.
I think this is already a good game, but I think with a few tweaks it could become a great game. Maybe there could be a post-comp release with a bit more things written in? Either way, I enjoyed playing this. It was a little unpolished, but had nice puzzles, pretty descriptive, and was enjoyable, and I would replay it if it was tweaked.
A surreal gruescript game about being lost in life and playing music, October 16, 2022So I have to shout out this author for being the first person to release a Gruescript game in a competition outside of Robin Johnson (that I know of). It's a cool language and looks neat.
This is a surreal game where you explore various dreamscapes after having failed at a musical career.
In a contrast to Robin Johnson's puzzle-filled games, this is more of a thoughtful introspection game where you wander around and follow directions given in-text.
I love surreal games in general, and Gruescript is cool, so I have a lot of good feelings in general. The execution needs a lot of work, though. The author says they want to learn, so here are my thoughts on things that could be improved:
-I feel like there could be a little space between the output window and the room description window; it felt a little crowded (I don't know if this is adjustable?)
-Some buttons had underscores (Who_Am_I) and some had spaces; I think it would look better if they were standardized.
-Some options seem like they unintentionally lock the player out of an action; like going south in the very last area and finding the envelope. Even if you don't open it, you can't go back north.
-The writing is descriptive, but it often feels like something's off with punctuation. I had similar problems and always check my games with Grammarly (I promise this isn't an ad lol), may be useful here. by playing through and copying and pasting the output
Overall, I think the game could be substantially improved, so I'm giving a lower score for now, but I definitely think this is promising and would like to see more from this engine and from this author.
A short surreal game about graduation and finding yourself, October 15, 2022This brief Ink game follows two teens, May and Jason, who are graduating soon and preparing to head off to college. They stroll through the woods and discuss their future.
Things start just slightly surreal and go further, but it never seems to shake the protagonists, just like how it is in a dream.
There might be some plot branching, but most of the choices feel like character determination to me, like role-playing, not even necessarily saved as game states.
There was some beautiful imagery in the game, young adults trying to find their place in the world literally represented as a journey through an allegorical world.
It felt a bit disjointed and brief, though. I worried I had skipped a whole chapter when I reached the end of the first act and clicked on a tiny, almost missable 'right arrow' and ended up in a very different place than the last chapter ended. But the table of contents seems to indicate I saw all 3 sections, so I guess the game itself is just a bit smaller than its story could allow.
Overall, a pleasant game to spend time with. According to my rubric, it's polished, descriptive, has good interactivity, and reminded me of pleasant times, but I wouldn't play it again.
Brief, custom web parser surreal game , October 15, 2022This is the third game by Eric Zinda with the Perplexity engine. The first two games were intended to be played with voice, I believe, while this game didn't seem to have the voice option.
The Perplexity engine is still really rough, but each game has been better than the last one. I imagine there's a ton of backend work going on between games, but I think the front-facing part could use a tune-up.
In this game, you explore a bunch of surreal areas, usually involving nature, a deer, and traffic-related imagery.
While the game is a significant improvement over previous entries, it's still pretty rough.
Polish-wise, the game tends to form uncapitalized sentences when using automated descriptions. It is smart enough to answer the question WHERE IS THE _____? but not smart enough to make the output easily understandable. This version seems to understand most traditional IF commands and abbreviations (like X for LOOK AT and I for INVENTORY, which is a big relief.
Descriptiveness-wise, the game has many rooms with a cursory description followed by a list of visual objects, sometimes kind of confusing (like 'A bush, a bush, and a tree').
When it comes to interactivity, the game is mostly fair, but at least one point in the walkthrough asks you to interact with an object that is not visible and doesn't show up in the description of other objects (specifically the (Spoiler - click to show)branch in the mossy log area).
Emotionally, I liked the surreal theme and thought it was cool. The little clues were nice. The other issues made it harder to stay invested but I like the concept.
There's not a ton of replayability, but overall I wasn't sad I played.
A very large puzzler parser game themed around trees, October 15, 2022This is a very large IFComp parser game where you in a sort of simulation trying to find a 'kernel' of some sorts.
The main area is a giant tree, from which you can eventually find 8 sub-areas. Each sub-area is a simulation of a different part of the world, including the Amazon rainforest, Missouri, Elizabethean England, etc.
Gameplay consists of finding objects in one world and generally using them in another. It can be fun to try and think where one can be used.
Content-wise, everyone has things they like and don't like; while I enjoyed the mini worlds idea quite a bit and some of the sections like the Viking ones, I felt uncomfortable with some of the others. There's some sexual wish-fulfillment in play (like a dominatrix pirate and a harem of succubi), though nothing explicit seems to occur, and there are some cultural moments where I thought it wasn't an entirely respectful depiction or relied on surface-level depictions. At times I feel it reaches too hard (at one point, an extreme not repeated, it even says "they wander off[...]together to figure out what to do with the rest of the wreckage of their miserable lives (this is called "pathos", by the way)."
Overall, the level of polish is high; there were a few sticky situations (like how (Spoiler - click to show)ENTER BAOBAB works but (Spoiler - click to show)ENTER CRACK doesn't in the first room of the Savannah).
I messed around for about an hour on my own, accruing 11 points, then followed the walkthrough. Some of the later puzzles seem to require a great deal of mind-reading, but I suppose there may be more in-game hints if I had reached those points naturally.
Overall, it has a lot of satisfying parser elements. While the tone and characters didn't always reach me emotionally, there is a lot of craftmanship evident. I don't plan on revisiting it, but it is polished, descriptive, and has much good interactivity.
A custom python parser game with ascii art but fiddly interactions, October 15, 2022This seems exactly like the kind of game that would be made by a talented and energetic individual who had never played a text adventure made in the last three decades if they woke up one day and said "I'm going to make the coolest text adventure on earth" but didn't have many people test it.
It's a python game with a bunch of actually really good ascii art. It has a maze, randomized combat, some tricky puzzles, art that sometimes changes according to your actions. Seems like everything a text adventure would need.
Except it has very few of the quality-of-life expectations most parser games have, and many of the solutions are poorly hinted.
For instance, on the very first screen, you are around some trees. Commands like N, NORTH, I, INVENTORY, X ME, LOOK ME don't work at all, but that's okay, this is a custom parser so it has no need to follow conventions from other games. Rereading the help text shows that STATUS gives inventory (although I didn't notice this till later). X TREE and EXAMINE TREE don't work, but LOOK TREE does. It turns out you're supposed to (Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREE. Once you make it to the next screen, it's not a big jump to (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK PLANE, but now what? After several fruitless minutes, I turn to the guide to discover I should (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK IN POCKET. But why? If the author had had several people try this game out, they would have found quickly that few people would guess this. You can access a HINT that generally helps you, but most people seem to like games to be solvable without HINTS, using them only when stuck.
The randomized maze combat was hard. I was determined to finish this game, although I kept randomly dying (and there is no UNDO and typing the wrong command after dying exits out of the game entirely, and the command for loading a game during the game is different than the command for loading the game after dying and typing the wrong one will also exit the game as will hitting enter just one too many time). Combat is just pressing enter over and over after picking your weapon, and looking at the code the strongest-looking weapons are incredibly weak while the weakest-sounding weapon is the strongest. There are several insta-deaths in the labyrinth as well.
Overall, it looks like it was magnificently fun to code and make the art, but it doesn't seem like a game that was created with a lot of player-side input, and I ended up frustrated. My 1-star rating is not indicative of the effort put into the game or the total amount of fun that can be derived from it, but merely results from the fact that my usual grading rubric (polish, descriptiveness, interactivity, emotional impact, and replayability) evolved from a different style of text adventure than this one.
(Note: for a much more positive review by a different reviewer, see this link: https://intfiction.org/t/b-j-bests-ifcomp-2022-reviews/57995/3?u=mathbrush)
Heartbreak in twine: a relationship comes to an end, October 13, 2022This is a brief Twine game about a painful breakup of a relationship.
I have to preface this by saying that I didn't play the actual game. I noticed it had timed, slow text which I found difficult to read as it didn't sync up with my regular speed, so I'd finish fast then wander back above and miss the next part coming in, having to catch up again, etc. So I downloaded the game and opened it up in Notepad++ changing all the (live: 12s) or other such numbers to (live: 0.1s) using regular expressions so it all loaded a lot faster. I noticed one chunk of text was timed to slowly spool out over 156 seconds, while with my normal reading speed it took 31 seconds to read the same material.
Anyway, sorry for digressing about something unrelated to the actual story.
The actual story is heartbreaking and felt familiar to me from events in my own personal life, so I really felt a connection to the situation. The emotions are handled pretty well, as is the internal dialogue; it felt true to life, for me.
Interestingly, (spoilers about the breakup details) (Spoiler - click to show)in my playthrough at least, it doesn't seem there was physical infidelity, or that if there was that it was the main issue. It seems instead that emotional infidelity is the problem, the idea that you were once someone's number 1 and now someone else is.. That really hit home and made this a lot more visceral, to me.
Overall, it lasts just as long as it seems it ought to; it's fairly maudlin but that's what I like. It contains some strong profanity. I think it's a great work; I personally would like no slow/timed text, since reading text naturally paces itself through spacing and paragraph size, etc., but this is of course completely up to the author.
Edit: I saw another review that had a very different take on this, and I realized that different paths must have different endings. I replayed and found a very different path that is actually the opposite of some stuff I said above. That's pretty cool to have that non-linearity.
A very brief RPG-style game about being marked and fleeing, October 13, 2022In this Twine game, you play as someone born as a Beast, someone who is marked with a strange symbol. You have to run away to a place where everyone else is like you or respects you.
The game seems like it will be huge, with two input fields and 4 status bars or conditions. But I played to two different endings in less than 10 minutes, both of which seem like full stories.
There are a lot of great ideas here; the overall storyline, the lush background graphics and sounds, the compelling choices and the way even the writing responded to my actions. But it all feels very unfinished and unpolished, with some typos and grammatical errors (like 'corspes' for 'corpses'). This just needed more time, I think.
A short Twine game about monsters in a scientific aquarium, October 12, 2022This is a short, basic Twine game about an aquarium where weird monsters are in a pool and you have to run away.
The game does give you some options; there are several situations where you have to search for items by clicking on a variety of links. There are also some big branches in the story, especially at the end. At least one final choice just lead to a blank page.
The formatting doesn't put blank lines between paragraphs, which I found pretty difficult to read. There are many typos such as no spaces after periods, it's vs its and capitalization. The dialog felt a bit unnatural, but I don't know why.
I found the overall story to be descriptive, but otherwise I think this story needed a bit more work. I think the author is capable of pretty fun stories given more time and more feedback prior to releasing.
A short texture game about horror with some emojis and pictures, October 12, 2022This game was listed as a 2-hour game, so I was expecting the largest Texture game ever, but it turned out to be less than 15 minutes long.
In this game, your roommates are going on a trip while you are left behind. Alone in the night, you face a few frightening encounters, and have a disturbing morning.
This is a Texture game, where you drag actions onto nouns, and here all the actions are represented by emojis.
I had trouble forming a coherent story out of this; it's mostly vibes, but it seems to contain elements of anxiety, self-harm, and something weird involving your friends?
An interesting experiment, but not one the grabbed me. It's polished and descriptive, but I didn't form an emotional connection and struggled with the interactivity.
Minimal python game, October 12, 2022I teach computer science at a high school, and we use python (and, in the past, Java). At the end of last year one student really enjoyed making randomized D&D combat scenarios and weapon creation tools, and did that as his final project.
This game is very similar in nature and quality, the same as a final project for an intro python course. It has a randomized character creator that can give you magic abilities, a cat, or neither, among other things. You have the option to walk around, trade for better items, or warp to a new area.
Walking around is the main feature. Often it would describe me finding something and then something happens. The most variable was chests; having a sword and finding a chest, you slash it open, and it can kill you, give you an entity that follows you, or give you money.
Dying has no real effect; you instantly respawn and you keep all your items, so it's the same as nothing happening.
I was able to buy a sword, a shield, a map (which I think helps you pick where to warp), and some magic arrows. The game ends when you get 100 coins.
Overall, if this were a student in my class, I'd give them an A for excellent work. As an IFComp entry, though, I think it lacks polish, is not very descriptive, has somewhat unsatisfying interactivity, and doesn't lend itself to emotional impact. The game achieves, I think, its author's goals, but my personal tastes weren't aligned with them.
Beautiful multimedia nonlinear zombie game in grim world, October 12, 2022This game is self-described as more an interactive novel than a game, and that's fairly accurate. Gameplay consists of clicking different days on a calendar and reading vignettes that happen that day. Multimedia images and animations are displayed on different days, and often the text will rearrange and morph, especially when revisiting days.
The storyline is purposely obtuse, slowly revealing more of itself, with some major shifts. I don't know if even now I'd be able to paint the broad strokes out; (major spoilers for what I think happened) (Spoiler - click to show)I feel like at the beginning some of his family turned to zombies and some didn't, so he left the ones who were still alive and tried to die? Then wandered around, found the cat, met some people, then came back to his living family? Also maybe lost an eyeball as a kid before the change?
This is a grim and unhappy world. This game contains descriptions of violent, painful and gory deaths for animals, lots of zombie-related human gore, disrespect for courses, strong profanity, and suicide references, with multiple gory images. It also features a cat companion for whom things don't always go so well, as well as several positive interactions with that cat.
Overall, the craft in this game is remarkable, and the storytelling is vivid and descriptive. The calendar was a clever innovation, and though I didn't feel a strong sense of agency, I did the best I could by reading dates out of order. The biggest drawback to me personally is the grim and unhappy nature of the game, which is a matter of personal taste.
A big surreal game about a train and a strange city, October 12, 2022This is a large, custom-engine choice-based game that takes place in a surreal world like the Phantom Tollbooth or a Roald Dahl book.
The player is on a train that mysteriously stops in a giant field of corn. You get out and explore a town full of odd people.
It uses a custom javascript engine that relies on a map to get around; however, you can't click just anywhere on the map; you must click on an adjacent tile first.
Gameplay revolves around having a big notebook full of thoughts or ideas as well as a bag of items. Each location has some intro text, following which you can use the map or click on one of these ideas.
This is essentially quadratic in nature, then, with interactions of each item with each location. This was manageable at first but grew a bit out of hand for me. I also found the movement in the game extremely tedious as I had to click a location on the map, navigate its initial text for the dozenth time, then click on the next location, etc. especially when running back and forth to check for missed things.
After about 2 hours of gameplay I found trouble following the walkthrough, as a woman I had talked to earlier was supposed to appear in the Center-West Tram Station but never showed up.
Overall, I would be interested in seeing the rest of the game at some point, but the interactivity was pretty frustrating.
A very stripped-down game about aliens invading, October 12, 2022Marco Vallarino is an author who has entered several complex and well-regarded games in previous IFComps, including the fun Darkiss series.
So it comes as a surprise that this game is very basic. It has a simple map; each room in the map has a sparse description and one or two items to interact with. The game is a series of fetch quests that tell you what to find next after depositing the most recent item.
I got stuck at one point because I didn't think to (late game spoiler about bypassing robot)(Spoiler - click to show)search the junk in the closet, and there was a key response that misled me: (Spoiler - click to show)Trying to unscrew the mirror when you don't have the screwdriver says 'you need to unscrew the mirror' instead of 'you don't have anything to unscrew it with' or something similar,, so I just assumed it was bugged till I looked at the walkthrough.
+Polish: The game has some missing punctuation and some misleading responses. But it works generally smoothly, with most the problems falling under the next criteria.
-Descriptiveness: The descriptions are very plain.
+Interactivity: Basic fetch quests are more or less the bread and butter of parser games, and this was short.
-Emotional response: I didn't feel a strong reaction to this game.
-Would I play again? No, it was pretty clear the first time through.
2 stars is pretty harsh, but I know this author is capable of making very fun parser games. This one was just not as fun as Darkiss to me.
A fantasy steampunk game about a mysterious package and strange things, October 11, 2022This game is very much a story, not in the sense that it's not a game, but that it has a strong central narrative, creative setting, and interesting characters.
It's an Ink game, with two main kinds of choices: role-playing ones that have temporary effects but let you get into character, and branching ones that affect big chunks of the storyline.
You play as a courier running around the rooftops of a desert city. There is a lot of worldbuilding here, between enemies, friends, and strange creatures.
The branching storylines are very different. In one, I spent a ton of time with two academics, eventually becoming one. In another, I spent much more time with my friend Karae and robots.
Overall, I found it polished and descriptive, and had some emotionally touching moments. It was interesting interactivity, but I feel satisfied with my playthroughs and don't plan on revisiting.
A large adventure across procedurally generated seas, October 11, 2022This author's game Skybreak! is one of the most popular games from 2019, even getting nominated for a Best Game XYZZY Award. I really enjoyed the game myself; it was procedurally generated, bouncing from planet to planet trying to complete various success criteria.
This game is a fantasy version of that (kind of like how Agnieszka Trzaska first made 4x4 Galaxy then 4x4 Archipelago). You are a dreamer exploring a vast ocean of procedurally generated towns and cities. You generally pick choices by typing capitalized words or selecting from a menu by typing a number. Some choices are always available to type, like STATUS.
What this game does well is replayability and freshness. Procedural generation here has dramatic effects on the story, and includes nice chunks of unique content. The setting is compelling, and there are many approaches to the game and customization of the character.
Where it's worse for me is in difficulty and polish. The game has you start with goods and food, and it's really hard to consistently replenish these. Very few locations sell both or either, and usually you can only do one action at a port. You can do pretty well without either, though, at least for a while. Getting injured in some way is very common.
Polish-wise there are occasional typos, once there was a popup error when starting a new character (something like (Spoiler - click to show)first dreamer has been removed), and there was a reoccurring bug where exits were listed that didn't actually exist (possibly if you try a wrong direction the game includes it in the list of exits? I'm not sure).
I ended with a score of 150, mostly made from Recording my secrets (as mentioned in the manual). I died (or won?) by repeatedly ignoring directions in a cool Fallen London style (specifically by (Spoiler - click to show)returning to a tower every night when told not to). This was a satisfying ending.
I'm sure there's tons more content, but for now I've seen enough for a (positive) review.
Explore odd friend's big mansion filled with portals, magic and machines, October 10, 2022There are a ton of ways to author IF. One way I've seen is to experiment with different styles in an attempt to find what players like, and respond to feedback by making big changes in future games. Another style is to keep making exactly what you like, making games that are all alike, consistent with each other. There are other ways, too, of course.
The games by this author seem to fall in the latter category. Each of these games is written in qBasic by the same system and features a large building that contains different areas containing diverse historical or other themes, often accessed through portals, minimal descriptions of areas, potions or elixirs, riddles and codes, and multicolored devices. The idiosyncrasies remain the same as well, such as objects in containers not being 'in scope', so you can't examine or take things in an open container directly, instead requiring the command TAKE ALL FROM ____. The author has a type of game he enjoys making, and I appreciate the consistency.
I played around for 10 minutes or so then went to the walkthrough, as I knew from experience that this game would be hard to finish in two hours without doing so.
I ran into some trouble with the parser. For instance, 'STAND ON LADDER' or 'STEP ON LADDER' didn't work, but 'CLIMB LADDER' did. In a room described as having many books, X BOOKS said it didn't understand, while X BOOK said 'you don't see the small book', an object I had yet to encounter.
This game is best enjoyed by enthusiasts of text adventures that prefer the pixel art/command line look, like puzzles over story, and want something long and tricky but fair to digest. An author with a similar feel is Garry Francis, for those looking for even more.
A complex meditation on war, peace, and interplayer communication, October 10, 2022The author of this game entered the first two-player IFComp game a year ago (The Last Night of Alexisgrad) which inspired at least one other multiplayer IF game (Ma Tiger's Terrible Trip) by another author.
Those games featured a few pages or so of text interspersed by choices which were then communicated to the 'other player' via passing of codes (in the first game) or a server (in the second game mentioned).
This game is different in several ways. In the first place, it is a substantial chunk of text. Each of the two stories takes well over an hour to read through. There are only a few choices to make that get transmitted; the bulk are not.
I'll spoiler much of the rest of the discussion below to various levels of detail. Before that, I'd say that this game has a lot of disturbing content of various sorts: (Spoiler - click to show)occasional extreme profanity, slurs spoken by people presented as villains, torture, execution, and affairs. Overall, it had a gritty/depressing vibe to me.
I'm putting the story descriptions in spoilers, even though they're mostly spoiler-free, because knowledge of one story can be seen as a major spoiler for the other. Reading just one should be fine, with Caroline's suggested as first story.
Short description of Caroline's story:
(Spoiler - click to show)This is a well-written story of a woman balanced between duty and excitement. A young housewife of an arrogant politician is offered a job showing around a handsome and exciting foreign diplomat. Said diplomat has an entourage that keeps him safe and occasionally asks Caroline to carry out an essentially pointless task that seems to be about agency.
Short description of Leon's story:
(Spoiler - click to show)Leon is a military soldier specializing in interrogation. His job is to interrogate suspected war criminals and sentence them to death, torture, release, or return to their cell. However, he can only provide suggestions, which are then sent out to an ordinary civilian who then decides whether to follow the suggestions or not, allowing some plausible deniability.
Bigger spoilers for overall combination:
(Spoiler - click to show)Playing Leon's game was very surreal, at the beginning, as he was none of the characters in the first story and he seemed so disconnected. I was shocked to find that the mechanism of communication between them wasn't the words or choices of the first story but simply the trivial color choices (this would have been more apparent had I played multiplayer first).
It seems clear then that this is the connection to the philosophical experiment in the title of the game, 'The Chinese Room'. In this thought experiment, a person is placed in a room and receives instructions with no understanding of what they are, processes them according to prescribed rules, and then outputs another message which they don't understand. Theoretically, with sophisticated enough rules, the output could seem truly intelligent, the work of a genius (such as chess moves or even conversation), but the person running the room actually has no clue what is going on.
So in this game, you make many many choices that are deeply meaningful and clearly informed by knowledge, but your communication between players is limited to laughably ineffectual systems. An especially amusing/sad point is when the Leon player, after having innocents murdered or hardened criminals released by the opposing player, can send feedback on their performance; however, this feedback only shows up as the color of a handkerchief in a pocket in an incidental sentence I hadn't even noticed in single player mode.
Overall, the two stories together are much stronger than either individually. In a very specific way, this game is a comment on multiplayer systems and communication itself, and is an interesting experiment.
A piercing twine story about a woman torn from her love, October 9, 2022This is a somewhat brief Twine game with at least 3 endings.
In it, you are a woman who is set to be married to a man you barely know, wearing a wedding dress you don't even like. You actually are deeply in love with a woman, but in your small, religious town everyone is violently opposed to lesbian relationships.
You are driving away from it all, but feel like you never get anywhere.
There are at least 3 endings I saw; most of the game is linear, with a couple of branch-and-return points and two major choice points that I found.
Here are my thoughts:
-Polish: The game's formatting was a bit all over. It often switches from a prose-mode to a more poetical-mode by putting a line break after each line, but it was little cluttered and might look better with more spacing.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is vivid and imaginative, often visceral, like when describing the death of an animal or the horrific aftereffects of (Spoiler - click to show)a car crash. The vivid writing is the main selling point.
+Interactivity: While its mostly linear, the choices available do allow for you to characterize yourself and it feels like your choices have understandable and clear consequences.
+Emotional impact: I felt a lot of sympathy for the protagonist.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I enjoyed this game personally and replayed it a few times.
A brief Ink game exploring a 'mind cave' of a dying witch, October 9, 2022In this Ink game, you are a spirit or something similar in the physically manifested version of a witch's mind. Or rather, the witch is in the 'mind cave' and you give her directions while she describes them.
There are several puzzly elements. I never died or got locked out, so its possible that you can't lost, but I'm not sure. I found things like a maze, a giant that attacks you, and then a wide, branching area with different doors, where one 'ultimate door' was unlocked by all the others, as well as alchemy puzzles, a whole city street, etc.
Sometimes things seemed like they had to be done exactly 1 way, but I got by anyway (for instance, I used one ingredient wrong in a potion). A lot of the game seems more about roleplaying than about getting things right, and I'm okay with that).
Overall:
-Polish: The game could be more polished. There were a few occasional but noticeable grammar problems, and the storyline feels a bit incoherent.
-Descriptiveness: Things are often assigned interesting names, but few details are given about them. We know nothing about a 'window with a yellow frame' except it's a window with a yellow frame. We know nothing about a giant except that he's giant; a cat is just a cat. Minimalism can work, but for me here it didn't.
-Interactivity: I just forged forward because I've seen this type of game before and figured almost any choices could work, but I wished there was more feedback.
+Emotional impact: I found the game actually fun; surreal stuff like this is one of my favorite types of writing.
+Would I play again? Yes, it would be fun to explore.
A choicescript space trading game with custom UI and some bugs, October 9, 2022I played this game for a couple of hours, but didn't find the ending. I ended up poking around in the code, though.
This is a choicescript game with some neat css styling. In it, your sibling has been abducted and you have to find them.
Gameplay consists of moving around quadrants. There are 100 quadrants, and it costs fuel to move between them, a small amount for adjacent quadrants and a large amount for distant quadrants. Each quadrant has 4 sectors, which costs battery power to move around.
The game is procedurally generated in a minimal sense; each planet has a randomly selected 'level', which determines how many shops and things there are. Then text in each shop is pre-determined with blank slots that have words chosen from a random list.
I quickly realized that almost everything on a planet was pointless except for the trading and refueling. You can buy info, but it's rarely helpful, usually talking about planets so far away that fuel costs eat into your rewards. Travel guides don't seem to do much.
So I just bought and sold and moved around. I found an asteroid and claimed it, and started improving it.
But there were significant bugs: for instance, mining never has anything in it. Peeking in the code, it's hard coded, line by line, for 350 lines, for there to be nothing in the mines.
More severely, there are separate variables for available cargo spaces and total cargo, and only one is updated when upgrading your asteroid, so every time you upgrade your asteroid you permanently lower your cargo capacity.
I saw in the code that you can find a cheeky companion (didn't see how), possibly get married, and that there is an ending coded, but I'm not sure I'll be able to find it.
Dialogue-wise, in the main story bit, the game has character, but it likes to play tricks on the player in the sense that the guy you're talking to will treat almost anything you say as something wrong. I wasn't used to that, but it worked overall.
I think this game needed a lot more playtesting, including by the author; it doesn't 'feel' like the author played through a complete game by himself, and I'd heartily recommend doing that a couple of times, tweaking the game to make it easier or harder as needed. I would definitely raise my star rating if that polishing happened!
Double rhyming through a manageable surreal landscape, October 9, 2022This is a wordplay game by Andrew Schultz, the third in a series involving double rhymes (like the name of the game itself).
I found it more appealing than the other two. Like the other games, this is a surreal setting, with names and locations picked more for their rhyme possibilities than anything else. But somehow it felt more coherent than the others. Also, the map is more manageable in this game.
Gameplay mostly consists of taking locations or items and typing two words that rhyme with two words in the location or item. There is a help system that is carefully explained, except for its main feature consisting of two dials. I got about halfway through before I realized that it (Spoiler - click to show)was telling you how many letters to add or subtract to your first and last words, although I'm still not sure what the last two decimal places mean.
I had to go to the hints increasingly more as time went on, and there was one word that I honestly had no clue ever existed (heavy spoiler for later game) (Spoiler - click to show)FLAIN.
The main boss had what felt like consistent character development, and the storyline felt taut and trimmed of fat. Overall, I found this to be above average for a wordplay game.
A chatbot game where you help a woman deal with a troubling figure, October 8, 2022This game has a fairly unusual format. Like parser games, you type in text and get a text response. Unlike parser games, it's not necessarily deterministic; instead, with a chatbot structure, it reacts to keywords. I tried to see if it was using GPT-3 or something similar, but it was hard to tell; it knew a bit about Harry Potter but not so much about Chemistry. Overall, it felt somewhat more like a hand-rolled chatbot and less like a standard AI bot.
There are several things to discover in this game, but it can be hard to know what to do first. Just messing around will eventually lead the game to guide you towards a solution. I was able to finish without hints, and it took me about an hour.
For content warnings, the game does contain a fairly gruesome realistic image later on (a (Spoiler - click to show)blue-lipped overdose victim).
Overall, the chatbot system was a bit hard to use but I felt like it guided me to where I wanted to go. The text has a fairly descript 'voice' and nice little details, although necessarily due to the technology it didn't respond directly to my questions, leading to some bland messages.
I like 'dream games' and surreal stuff. Overall, I think this worked fairly well, but I don't really see a ton of replay value and I think the chatbot structure could be refined over time (although I imagine that it's a real challenge to work on something like this).
A complex and rich puzzle game in a mall with very large map, October 8, 2022This game is a sequel to Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, a game a couple decades old. When I first played IF in 2010, I downloaded the Frotz app and played all the main games that come with it. After I found how fun big puzzle games like Curses! are, I searched for other games that were like it and found Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina. I ended up really enjoying the game a lot.
This sequel so far lives up to the original. Per IFComp rules, I've only played 2 hours, getting 20 out of 250 points and unlocking much of the map.
You play as a parent (I think a mother?) that is trying to get a prom dress for your daughter. There is a large mall that is mostly abandoned due to a parade. It's a 3-story mall, with many stores per floor and other areas outside.
It's a puzzle-based game, with a variety of puzzles, including conversation, codes, machines, animals, etc.
Like the original game, it has a huge map and is (eventually) very nonlinear. Unlike the original, it contains extensive in-game help systems and suggestions that smooth out the player experience. In particular, the (very mild early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)texts from your daughter help point you to the next available puzzle. I turned to the hints once, when I felt like I had a reasonable solution to something but it just wasn't working; it turned out I had just thought of it differently than the author, and the progressive hints gave me just the hint I needed.
The first two hours have been fun, and I look forward to the rest. I was just going to power through with the walkthru, but I think this is fun enough I'd like to take it slow later.
A silly-superhero origin story, part of series, September 28, 2022I remember playing the Frenetic Five games a few years ago. They date back a few decades, and were a funny take on superheroes with characters that had pretty under-powered powers, always taking on villains with similarly silly ideas.
I never beat any of those games without hints, but I appreciated the vibes and felt they were internally consistent.
Although I've forgotten a lot about those games, I was happy to see a sequel/prequel released. This is a pretty fun game about trying to open up a vault.
It's a game that requires leaps of intuition for almost every step, which is a style that is both frustrating and rewarding. Given enough time, I probably would have wanted to play this off and on for a week or more, but instead I played an hour or so before using some hints that Dan Fabulich wrote on Intfiction.
I think the author succeeded in their goal, if their goal was to please fans of the former games and create a difficult one-room game centered on exploration and experimentation. I do like easier games myself, or ones centered on learning complex systems with easy individual parts, but I appreciate the vision of this game and hope the author keeps their intention to make more.
When this first came out in Parsercomp, I heard people talking about bugs, but the author seems to have patched them.
An internally-consistent and pretty big Basic time-travel adventure, September 22, 2022This game placed well in the 2022 Parsercomp competition. It's in Basic, with a custom parser; most games written in Basic with a custom parser are pretty bad, but this one is good. It's only as I write this review that I realize I've played another game by this author, from last year, so it seems this parser has had plenty of time for polishing.
This is a time-travel adventure. Descriptions are sparse and leave a lot up to the imagination. Puzzles are often riddle-based or combination-based; individually, they are often obscure, but as a whole they have consistent internal logic.
The parser generally works well; it has a few oddities that I noted in my review of Somewhere, Somewhen, and which others have noted as well; since the author has been aware of them for some time, I doubt they will change, so won't note them here.
I found it all generally pleasing. I almost never played text adventures as a kid, but there were two I played a lot in 5th grade in the 90s. I remember one of them being a Wonderland-like game that had gardens and interesting areas, and most puzzles were riddles. This game has very similar vibes to that era of game, and I found it charming.
Overall, this is a big game (I played about 4 hours and used a walkthrough about 11 times), and fun. I'm glad it was entered.
A smallish, polished heist game using traditional puzzles, September 7, 2022This game has you explore a forest and a small house to rob an alchemist of his gold.
The motivations and storyline are lightly sketched, as is much of the scenery. The focus is on the core parser experience: taking items, using them, a maze (with a map), keys and doors. There's no real surprises here: the goal is to recreate the feeling of games past, not to innovate.
Overall, it succeeds at its intended goal, and is polished and functionally descriptive. I enjoyed the time I spent with it.
Text input, graphics output: a short stickman adventure, August 29, 2022One thing I've learned from writing IF is that it's impossible to please everyone; you can make something that some people love and some people hate, or you can make something that most people feel moderately positive about, but that's about it.
I think this game is well-done, and the author is a nice person I've seen on the forums. For me, though, I had a primarily negative response to this game for reasons not at all related to the quality.
This is a graphics-based game, where you enter text and get stick figure responses. It defaults to full-screen and has background noise and some slight pause between player input and response. You are a knight/stick figure man trying to rescue a stick figure woman rescued by a dragon.
My reasons for playing IF aren't due to nostalgia (I didn't even get into it until I had a toddler, in 2015); I love IF primarily because of its quick response times, its flexible and un-intrusive nature (as text in a resizable window that can be multi-tasked with), and, as text, its ability to be skimmed quickly and typed in quickly.
So this game has almost none of the features that I enjoy about IF, and I found myself honestly irritated while playing.
Grading it on my scale:
+Polish: The game is quite smooth and polished.
+Interactivity: On one hand, I was surprised that the game expected and acknowledged compass directions while telling the player not to use them; on the other hand, the parser was fairly robust and allowed for a lot of surprising interactions. I was baffled by the puzzles (I used a lot of hints) but given the minimalism and internal logic I feel they were fair.
+Descriptiveness: The art was pretty informative
-Emotional impact: As described above, my primary emotion was irritation.
-Would I play again? I would not.
A touching and descriptive riddle game with beautiful text art, August 28, 2022This game was entered in the 2022 Parsercomp, and I helped beta test it. It came in second, but only by a fraction of some points, and is an excellent game.
This is a metaphorical story which, as told in the authors notes, is somewhat autobiographical, and touches on dementia. You are exploring some woods and a ravine to try to get firewood for your home while also recovering your mother's lost words. The writing and tone feels a lot like the 1800s gothic novels, like The Mystery of Udolpho.
The lost words take the form of riddle-poems. When solved (and playing in a graphics-compatible mode), they take the form of the solution to the puzzle.
The riddles are less of a purposely-frustrating-and-obfuscated description of something, and more of a description of something using highly figurative language. That doesn't necessarily make it easier, as I struggled with a couple of the notes for a few minutes, but in a good kind of struggle that made the game more engaging.
The writing is descriptive and evocative, similar to this author's other works. The real-life connection shines through, making it clear that the author cares about this subject and about the people in her life.
Overall, a satisfying game and one not to miss.
A supernatural experience at a menial job, August 28, 2022This was an interesting game, with a mix of features that I'm not really used to seeing.
It's an inform game, and it's written fairly matter-of-factly, spitting out objective descriptions without commenting on them, which serves as an intentionally amusing contrast when things start to go weird.
You play as a young woman at a storage facility all alone, and you have to find and fetch three boxes. Your boss is kind of weird and has a lot of psychic stuff laying around.
It has three main puzzles, one of which is very easy, one of which took me a few days to solve, and one which has multiple solutions (I found one, club floyd found another, decompiling shows maybe 1 or 2 more).
The middle puzzle I almost gave up on. It involves the elevator, and the main issue I had was that its special feature (Spoiler - click to show)having all items fall out when the elevator goes up felt like a bug, since there are a lot of buggy games in parsercomp and elevator implementation is rough. I was especially inclined to think it a bug since riding in the elevator makes you permanently stuck (something I think may get fixed in a later version, as the author has mentioned doing so after the comp). But once I was reassured it was solvable, it was actually a lot of fun to wrestle with, and was, for me, the main highlight of the game.
The ending was interesting, and overall I think the concept worked well. The author used special inline images for the checklist, which looked nice.
A single challenging chess puzzle, August 19, 2022This is the latest in Schultz's series of chess puzzles, some of which have a series of increasingly difficult simple puzzles, some of which focus on one or two challenging problems.
This focuses on a single endgame position. I struggled with it a bit; not being a chess person myself, some of the rules involved were a bit arcane to me (like the stalemate rules). And perhaps my biggest problem with the game is that the author assumes familiarity with how endgames run, making seemingly useful moves end instantly without much explanation (most were generally well explained, I'm just salty because I don't see how pc7 kc5 where the rook goes to d1 is a stalemate; I wish that particular one was either better explained or if it let the player make the move and try for a turn or two more before shutting it down). So I just had to rely on random guessing for the first few moves.
I thought about searching for help, and I did look on the forums, which reminded me to read the documentation, which helped me grasp things. In the end, it was satisfying. And I think that this was the most emotionally poignant of the chess games; while my main attraction to this game was the puzzle, the emotional aspects were a nice touch and well-integrated.
I do think there is a mistake in the verbs section (correct me if I'm wrong):
It says (Spoiler - click to show)"You can also say N to set (or re-set) the default piece to promote to, say, the knight. In this case, although K is usually the king in algebraic notation, K is referred to as the knight, since you can't have two kings on the board," but typing N just moves the king up a square. To actually change the promotion you have to type the letter of the piece you want to promote to after the move, like c8b for bishop. As written, the text implies that typing N lets you select what you promote into.
Monster hunter extraordinaire in haunted house, August 19, 2022This is a detailed Adrift game set in a haunted house.
You encounter many classic monsters (werewolf, ghost, vampire, mummy, etc.) and have to find ways to defeat them all.
The game is really quite detailed, with changing room descriptions and independent NPCS.
Playing it made me think a lot about Graham Nelson's Bill of Player Rights and how most of the games I play follow it while this one does not. And it provides a different feel that's fun but also one I struggle with. This one includes a lot of randomness (I never actually finished because one of the wandering monsters I just couldn't run into), some required guesswork, some learning by death. But that also provides a different kind of challenge.
So, overall, it was fun, not what I'm used to but overall enjoyable. I did have trouble with one puzzle since it requires you to (Spoiler - click to show)look at a door's hinge, but the door is visible from two rooms and the hinge is only implemented in one and I looked from the wrong side initially.
An epic-sized space adventure with a complex path to victory, August 16, 2022This is the 14th game by Larry Horsfield, counting all the ones listed in the credits, and is so think the fourth or so I’ve played. For years IFdB’s old recommendation algorithm would suggest Die Feuerfaust to me as the next game to play but I never got around to it.
One thing I’ve learned about his games s that they are written almost like movies. It’s like he sits down and thinks “what would be an awesome scene here? What would be a cool move?” and then fleshes the game around that and adds obfuscation. Not necessarily classical puzzles, in the sense that you use logic to figure out what to do, but obfuscation in the sense that things are hidden behind some layer of searching. For instance, this game has right almost identical rooms called Living Quarters, half of which the game has you leave automatically and the other half of which contain an important item hidden behind some combination of “search”+preposition+room object. I had fun trying this part without the walkthrough and felt proud that I found tons of stuff in the base after an hour or so.
But I had missed several key items and actions (like loosening the straps on the rucksack) and was only 10% of the way through the game. So I typed in the walkthrough and enjoyed the movie, which was actually entertaining.
I think it would be possible to eat this game without hints. For me, playing an hour or so a day, it would probably take a month and need the help of people online who were playing with me. However, I found ore satisfaction in this way of playing. Thanks for the game!
Slick-looking custom parser in Godot with sci-fi and monsters, August 13, 2022This game was entered in Parsercomp, and I'll admit I didn't finish it (though I got pretty far!)
You play as someone in a fairly secluded area that sees lightning hit a radiotower, and then strange things happening. I ended up exploring a very large house filled with bizarre tech.
The game is written in Godot, which I think is an open-source alternative to Unity (maybe I'm wrong?). The game loaded quickly and looked nice, with several animations and a map that updated frequently, and also some visual puzzles.
I struggled mightily at first to even see the game, as it was taller and wider than my laptop screen and didn't seem to have dynamic resizing. I tried fullscreening the browser, then I tried shrinking and fullsizing, and only then did I realize there was a 'fullscreen' button at the bottom. One itch option actually lets you make the game fullscreen from the beginning, I think.
Instead of having the player guess the commands or remember a commonly used set, like most traditional parsers, this game has a specific list of commands which can be used, about 6 on average. These commands don't admit any abbreviations, and while there are clickable links for each command, the links don't enter the commands for you; instead they tell you how to use them.
Text is split in three areas: the room description, the outcome of non-important action below that, and your input even further below, similar to Scott Adams games.
The game branches into several endings, some early, some later, and includes a lot of weapons of various efficacy and different monsters that randomly pop out to get you.
I encountered a game crashing bug early on (don't inspect the truck seat!) but I got around it. I got much further, until I found (Spoiler - click to show)a still figure watching the wall in a basement that took 3 weapons.. After I defeated it, with just a sliver of health left, the game said I needed to type NEXT to continue, but NEXT didn't work. Having encountered at least two game-locking bugs, and having heard that it ends on a cliffhanger, and having seem much of the game, I decided not to continue.
I get the impression that the author isn't heavily involved in a lot of current interactive fiction, and so just went with their own direction and imagination on what a parser game should look like, based on old memories (this is all wild assumptions). I find it nice to see what directions people would go in if not constrained by a wider society or community, and this seems pretty neat, kind of reminiscent of Adventuron, which seems to have had a similar development pipeline.
I give the game 2 stars for descriptiveness and emotional impact but bugs make it harder to give more. If fixed (along with typos and quality of life improvements), this would be a 4 or 5 star game.
A game allowing you to reflect on a static short story, August 12, 2022This game was entered in Parsercomp, then taken out, then put back in.
I had a hard time engaging with this game. It's written for an online format that forces the focus onto text boxes. You are supposed to type words into the box that the game recognizes.
At first, I tried to put whatever words I thought fit good, but then I tried the boundaries. It recognized 'felicitation' but not 'felications', for instance. Eventually, I started typing 'fart' in every box and the game was just fine with that. It was a little dumb of me, but I wondered how it would respond.
And it didn't really do much. The main part of the story is a sci-fi story, which I felt was oddly watered down and non-descriptive. I tried to copy a paragraph of the text to pick at it and analyze it, but that's when I realized the game forced the focus so you couldn't highlight anything. In any case, I was trying to figure out what I didn't like about it, and I realized it reminded me of the overly wordy and empty-of-meaning style of writing popular in certain older books. I was surprised to find later that this story wasn't new to the author, but borrowed from a 1950's publication, which I seemed to have not noticed when it was mentioned.
Between snippets of this text, there are two characters having a conversation about the text, with blank boxes for you to fill in like mad-libs. These conversations are mostly analyzing the text.
Overall, the game was polished and very complex, but I bounced off of the main story and the side story. I think it has an appeal, definitely to other people, but for me the whole thing felt a little bloodless.
From a technical standpoint it seems very impressive, overall!
A promising time travel game with some rough edges, August 12, 2022This game was written in four days, which is very impressive given how complex it is.
This is a time travel game with 3 different periods you can hop back and forth between. You can also send items to different time periods as well.
Your goal is to go back and say goodbye to a girl you love who died, but in a different timeline.
There are about 6 or 7 different puzzles, and it's engaging, but there are a lot of rough edges. Especially in the graveyard, where I tried tons and tons of words, none of which were implemented. There are typos as well
I think this would be an amazing game if it was tested and polished. As it is, though, it is merely a promise of a future good game.
An amusing adventure with a custom engine about a lodge, August 10, 2022I've been playing Parsercomp games in the reverse order of their placement. This one is pretty low on the list, but I actually had fun with it.
It's a custom parser engine, and it could use a lot of work when compared with engines that have decades behind them, but I liked the look, the browser-readiness, and the quick response time, so I definitely think it has promise, better than many custom parsers I've seen.
The game is silly fun and somewhat reminiscent of Zork. You are asked to visit an old professor friend (I think?) and end up at a lodge with several mysterious objects and items around.
A lot of text is non-interactive in this story, with lots of items described followed by 'PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE', which could lead to some disambiguation problems, but if you LOOK at the prompt it lists items in a big list, making it easier to know what you can interact with.
The structure branches a lot, which is a bit of a bummer as there is no save feature and replaying the beginning quickly gets repetitive. Replaying is more enjoyable if you can shake things up a little every time right from the get go.
I saw one typo, which is not that bad. I had some struggles at the end (this was my attempt at a happy ending after my bad ending revealed a surprising truth):
(Spoiler - click to show)
What will you do?
> hug beast
Undefined response.
> drop gun
Undefined response.
> say hello
What would you like to say?
> hi
What would you like to hi?
> x beast
A terrifying beast standing 12 feet tall. Its teeth and claws look razor sharp.
> give gun to beast
Undefined response.
> drop gun
Undefined response.
> l
I didn't understand that.
> look
There's a terrifying beast, and a bat swarmed exit.
> wait
I didn't understand that.
> stay
I didn't understand that.
> scream
I didn't understand that.
> x gun
It looks like an old service revolver. The wooden handle has been polished with sweat from decades of use.
> give gun
Undefined response.
> talk to yeti
What would you like to talk?
> x yeti
What would you like to examine?
> x beast
A terrifying beast standing 12 feet tall. Its teeth and claws look razor sharp.
> beast hello
The beast pauses.
PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE
Despite some typos, I'm impressed with the polish for a game made by hand. I found it amusing, and played a couple of times.
A demo for a game about searching a database for visual images, August 10, 2022This game seems a lot like Her Story (a popular game where you search tons of short video clips interviewing a woman about a crime, and you have to find and use keywords to search; I think, I haven't played it) but it uses static images instead of videos.
There are only about 8 images and it's difficult to know what to type. I got most of the images from this intfiction thread:
https://intfiction.org/t/anyone-having-any-luck-with-kondiac/56651/3
Overall, this is just the beginning of the game, so it's really hard to evaluate how enjoyable it would be if finished. Right now, I'm assigning it a low score on my scale (which measure polish, interactivity, descriptiveness, emotional impact, and the desire to play again), but I could see an improved version being really fun.
A unity game with text-completion parser set in Antarctic base, August 9, 2022This game was originally written in Godot and ported to Unity.
You play as a researcher in an Antarctic base. You need to get up, shower, eat, and check out some samples.
Unlike most parser games, there's not much freedom in what you can type. It lists the commands you can use (usually 2-4), and when you type one in, it lists the possible objects/directions. It's highly constrained, so there are usually < 5 possible options at any point.
This kind of takes away the best part of a parser game (freedom) and the best part of a choice game (speed), leaving a bit of frustration.
This game has several typos and is unfinished. I think the core idea is great and fun (I like Antarctic base games) but it just needs more work and more time.
A basic sketch of an adventuring system written in Python, August 9, 2022This game was entered into the recent 2022 Parsercomp.
This is a python game. When it begins, it has a neat little loading animation, then gives you a list of commands.
Gameplay consists of fighting, where you can attack or run away, plus eating to regain health and trading.
There are only a few simple encounters and locations, so it seems like most of the work went into the system. These kind of things are pretty hard to program, so I imagine that the author found it enjoyable to wrestle out how to program all the different activities.
Unfortunately, most of the work recreated things which were done before in other languages, and so from a player standpoint there's not a lot here that's new or exciting.
-Polish: The game is a bit buggy and could use more disambiguation and error messages.
-Descriptiveness: The game is fairly sparse
-Interactivity: It was a bit hard to figure out what to do
-Emotional impact: It doesn't seem designed for that.
-Would I play again? Probably not.
A Vampire:The Masquerade game focused on motivation and emotion, August 7, 2022To be up front, this is probably the VtM Choicescript game I’d be least likely to recommend to the general public.
This game is very high quality, but it doesn’t focus on the mechanical aspects of the VtM nearly as much as the others. For me, and I expect many people, the draw of these games is to try out the systems.
Furthermore, choicescript games in general are often easiest to enjoy when the effects of your choices are clear and obvious. This game has a lot of branching text, but much of the variation is in the emotional aspects of your character’s thoughts rather than major events (compared to similar games; there is still major event branching in this game, just not as much). Also, there’s some more strong profanity on this game than I prefer.
With those caveats aside, this is an excellent psychological introspection game. More than the other vampire games, this dives into the inner mind of a vampire. I think the game was describing itself in this quote (only available in certain paths):
“Alex had a knack for putting together campaigns that would test your morality more than your STR and DEX, and they would frictionlessly lead you to dilemmas that forced your group to ask: So, who are we? What do we stand for? What do we play for?”
Another, later quote takes a rare wink in the fourth wall:
“ For a moment, the idea that you might be a made-up character yourself takes root in your mind and seduces you with the possibility. What would it be like to be a fictional character—just another collection of ink and paper in a book with its own backstory and motivations? You're full of so much mundane detail that when the plot needs you to do something, they can pull you out and have you do it without any messy internal conflicts dragging you down—that's the fantasy, anyway.”
The game is about you as a vampire who was abandoned by your vampire-sire, and later taken in by a man named Markos. You live in Athens, which is gripped by a conflict between those who want vampires to continue the Masquerade, hiding from humanity, while others, radicals, want to tear it down and reveal all.
This author is a previous Nebula nomineee, and it shows. The story is tight and excellent. However, it is somewhat dark and can be depressing; failure at the end is not only possible but likely.
Some have described the game as rushed, and I think that’s because of the focus on the inner mind. The typical events of a game, like fights, betrayals, etc. are given less focus while your own doubts and hopes are played out over a longer time.
I had thought of giving this 4 stars, but I honestly enjoyed the storyline quite a bit, especially some parts about sunrises.
A graphical exploration and archaeology game , June 16, 2022This game is by Inkle, a studio that has made numerous interactive fiction games. While this game has many non-textual elements, the text is a very important part of the gameplay and the core mechanic is a large textual language puzzle. It took me 16 hours for one playthrough, according to Steam.
The main idea is that you, in an fictional futuristic setting, are an archaeologist exploring an ancient, highly-advanced civilization. They settled a nebula with 'moons' connected by jets of water that are navigable by boat. The main thread throughout the civilizations' history is the use of a language: ancient. This is presented as a series of sigils, usually ran together, that you at first guess and then eventually become certain of (through a mechanic where the game tells you if you got it right after you use it a few times in a row). No spaces are used in most words, making finding where words start and stop the hardest part later on.
I'd like to split up this review a bit into different categories, starting with what was, for me, the weakest part:
3d Navigation and pacing
I bounced off this game at first because of this. One thing that a lot of commercial IF games lean into, especially ones by authors transitioning from indie to AAA-adjacent, is to bulk up the play time, is splitting up stories with long sections of travel. This is done in 80 Days, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, and here, too. This leads to a lot of very dull moments. 80 days helped make up for it with quick transit animations and making the movement part of the overall puzzle, while in most of these other games it's just dead air.
This game splits up content in two different ways. Large chunks each take place on different worlds, split up by ship travel, which has no hazards and no decision making outside of binary choice points and occasional random treasure. The smaller chunks on each world are split up by 3d motion. This uses invisible hitboxes that don't always line up with what you can see; this is especially apparent in 'open worlds' that look easily navigable but are secretly linear. I found myself frequently running into walls and getting stuck. Amusingly, I realized that the space part and the 3d part were very similar to Kingdom Hearts 1, just without the enemies.
Conversations happen in real-time. Speed is adjustable in the menu, but there is no scroll-back and pausing is difficult. I generally like text games because they can be picked up and put down, minimized, multitasked, and easily played around others without being intrusive. For this game, I had to give complete attention at pretty much all times, and even then I missed quite a bit of dialog looking away to itch a scratch or to answer my kids' questions.
Continuing on my scale of not liking to liking are things that I liked a lot but don't really factor into my rating:
Graphics and audio
I think they did a great job here. Voiceover is really lovely, the music is heartrending and sci-fi feeling. The art looks a lot better than most 3d games, and loads well on my potato laptop. The artists and sound designers really did well.
Character and Plot
This is generally very good, with some slight caveats. Characters are very distinctive and mostly memorable. The protagonist has a rich past interconnected with many corners of the Nebula. The plot contains multiple independent strands circling the big mystery: where did these civilizations come from, why is everyone here, and what's going to happen to them?
Our main character is kind of a jerk. I know subconsciously it can be easy to perceive strong female characters as aggressive when compared to similar male protagonists, but I believe our character has attributes would be jerky for men as well, especially in regards to her interaction with the robot Six. It was actually refreshing in a lot of ways, but I think 'jerk with a heart of gold' interests me more than 'jerk with a heart of jerk'. The strong personality does lend to some fun role-playing through.
The plot threads were very intriguing, including the mysterious workings of your home city, the cryptic machinations of you employer, some kids trying to find their place in the world, etc, as well as your progressive discovery of the ancient world.
I felt like the ending in my playthrough came at a time where I had a lot of loose ends, and not a lot of choice to go back and work on them. And the final reveal, while visually stunning, left quite a bit unresolved as well, especially given how much build up there was. I know that it can be hard to simultaneously give people choice as well as a satisfying plot structure (which is one reason, I speculate, that a lot of Choice of Games with award-winning stories often don't sell as well as those with straightforward power fantasies), but I've seen a few people do a great job of this, such as the 'Truth' ambition in Sunless Skies. That game separates your quests into different categories and has clear victory conditions, so you know if you're going to leave threads unfinished. It also provides a very weighty, powerful, and conclusive finish to the final story. I feel like Sorcery! 4 also had a very satisfying ending. This game, Heaven's Vault, was not bad at all with its ending, better than average for sure, but could have been amazing.
Puzzle mechanics
I really enjoy languages. I've studied French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Greek, Latin, Japanese and a little Hebrew, some more than others. So I was definitely up for a challenge here.
As someone who has struggled with many languages, I have to say that the experience in this game is much less like learning an actual language and much more like learning a code alphabet for English. Emily Short, in her review, said "a great deal of Ancient is English in a chiffon-sheer disguise", and I have to agree.
However, this isn't necessarily a negative. Language take forever to learn. I've been studying written Japanese for 3-4 months now and still struggle with basic pronunciation. For the average English-speaking player, learning an actual non-English language would be far too difficult.
So the game simplifies it. 'Ancient' has none of those bizarre ultra-common connector words that can mean so many things (like 'zwar' in German or '就' in Mandarin). Most sentences, especially early ones, follow simple noun-verb-object patterns, with some light prepositions added in later.
Most words are ones that can be easily identified with pictographs. Themes of light, travel, people, fire, water, air, earth, plant and metal dominate the vocabulary. In another distinction between in-game and real-life pictographic languages, there is not a significant 'drift', where everyday words have bizarre derivations based on non-written considerations (like the fact that 'mother' in chinese is woman-horse due to homonyms). Interestingly, the pictograph for 'man' is the same in 'Ancient' and Chinese, although I don't know if that's a coincidence.
Some features are distinctly English, such as the way that past and future tense are conjugated and the use of helper verbs. The game uses symbols that directly derive from modern earth culture, like (Spoiler - click to show)question marks and x's
These features make word-solving easier. Even then, it would be impossible to just begin with a blank slate, make guesses, and hope you're right later. It'd be the worlds' hardest cryptogram and sudoku, a big pile of guesses waiting to collapse. Instead, the game gives you a huge leg up over real-life translators by giving you four options to guess from, 1 of which is always correct. Which every one you pick is indicated by a ? in future uses. Once it's used 3 or 4 times, the game confirms your translation or denies it through your robot or your own intuition. This is probably the main feature that makes the game far easier than learning a real-life language, and it is, in my opinion, what makes it actually fun.
By the end, individual pictographs are all easily identifiable, so the trick is giving you longer sentences with no spaces, so you have to identify words by their structure. The language is very systematic, and I was thrilled to puzzle out some pieces, although some I struggle with, especially (Spoiler - click to show)the difference between a period . and a colon :. It can become very difficult to find the border between words, and you can't figure out new words unless you surround them on both sides with established words. I often had to save longer texts to come back to after I learned more words.
I adored the translation. For me the highlight of the game was finding a huge (Spoiler - click to show)book that never seemed to end. I translated over 20 lines, took a break, delivered it somewhere, and translated more until it made me stop.
As mentioned earlier, the game ended kind of abruptly for me and I had some unresolved translation, but by then I felt like I was going to have to compromise anyway on what I had hoped to achieve in the game. I didn't feel compelled to do another playthrough, but I may try again some day.
Overall
Overall, it was worth the money. I got it on sale. It provided me 16 hours of content and could easily go up to 30 or more, with a large chunk of that being just reading/translating. That's much more than most free/indie interactive fiction. I didn't really like the 3d movement aspects at all, and I feel the ending could have had more narrative weight, especially (Spoiler - click to show)talking more about loops, and the repetition aspect. But the plot still pulled me forward the whole game, and for a language puzzle, it was the best I've seen out there, and the dialog, art, and sound were outstanding to me.
For my star rating system, it was polished, descriptive, had good interactivity, I felt emotionally invested, and I will likely play again some day. Just not today.
A meditation on mortality; also, older women steal things, June 14, 2022This is an Exceptional Story, a part of Fallen London that is available to subscribers or purchasable separately at a higher price.
In this story, you are robbed by two unusual thieves: a pair of sisters of advanced age. You are quickly drawn into their shenanigans, and plot a heist with them.
The main focus of this story is the relationship between the two sisters, and their individual meditations on mortality and age, as well as the loss of ones dear to them.
The heist itself, and your group, is relatively straightforward, leaving more focus to go into immortality. The groups you encounter here are the urchins and the Gracious Widow, with this story giving some chunks of info regarding her that are otherwise difficult to obtain. I'd primarily recommend this story to people interested in the Gracious Widow specifically, or who have considered what it would be like to get a new lease on life in their old age.
Help a revolutionary attack the sitting powers, June 14, 2022This is an Exceptional Story, an additional piece of content for Fallen London that is available to subscribers, or for purchase for an additional amount.
This story centers around a revolutionary (called the Growling Radical) who was essentially exiled from London for a time. He wants to come back and put on a performance that will shock the powers-that-be.
And that's all that really happens. There aren't too many twists in this story; he asks you to help his song, he puts on the performance, and you can influence a bit how things go.
In a recent survey, out of the 100 stories that require money, this story ranked 90th, one of the least popular. But the author has also written a story in 6th place, The Brass Grail, so it seems less like a skill issue and more like just an idea that didn't work out as well as hoped.
A supernatural spy thriller, June 14, 2022This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, an extra piece of content that subscribers receive and which can also be purchased separately for additional costs.
In this story, you, a detective (as most characters in Fallen London become early on), are asked to track down a missing Dachshund. Your client is a newspaper reporter that covers the Bazaar (a Bazaarine Correspondent).
But soon you discover that you are entangled in a web of espionage. A lot of the story revolves around decrypting messages with seeds you find (this decryption is carried out automatically, rather than solving a cryptogram by hand). You find several people out to get you, and you soon get embroiled into a massive conspiracy with supernatural terrorism and several Masters.
I'm a fan of mysteries, and this game does a great job of setting up several curious and mysterious things that later get pulled back in satisfyingly and surprisingly by the story; kind of like Checkhov's machine gun instead of Chekhov's gun.
Descriptions are vivid, especially of people. The masters are painted vividly, the clay men are humorous, the new assailants and missing people are unusual and diverse, and the locations are creative (especially the sugar factory).
I think one thing that I enjoy about this story (and Chandler's others) is that the player is at the center. Many of the other stories, including recent ones, have you at the edges of some great conflict, where you observe for a while and then make some monumental choice at the end. It's like you're in someone else's novel, but you play the side character who gives good advice at the end and changes the tide.
But in this and other Groover stories, you yourself are the main story. You are the problem for other people, the main driving force of the plot, the center around which other things resolve. Your actions feel weighty. Some other stories by other authors do this, too, like the Icaran Cup or Flint.
Overall, I enjoyed this one.
Solve a bizarre string of robberies , June 13, 2022This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London. Exceptional stories are chunks of additional content for subscribers which can also be purchased separately.
This story takes a lot of strange terms, some of them very dark. One warning for a kind of content that might trouble a lot of people (even people who usually don't need warnings): (Spoiler - click to show)possible animal abuse. More specifically: (Spoiler - click to show)you can voluntarily choose to murder a sentient elephant and watch it die and get harvested for ivory. This is only a small side part of the story and not the main thrust.
In this story, there is a mysterious band of thieves that seems to be making enormous amounts of money, but without any apparent victims. Your job is to figure out who their victims are.
This ends up being tied to some of the deeper lore of Fallen London, specifically (names of factions it ties into): (Spoiler - click to show)Parabola, the chessboard, and the Red Handed Queen. It has some significant choices that gave me pause, and features a lot of duality, which is a favorite topic of mine to play in IF.
Overall, I would give this 4 stars, except it features a couple of concepts I personally enjoy quite a bit.
Hold a dance to kill the dead , June 13, 2022This is an Exceptional Story from Fallen London, a piece of additional content for subscribers that can also be purchased separately.
In this story, a group of the Tomb Colonists (older people who have pushed Fallen London's immortality too far) desire to experience true death through the ancient Totentanz, a mystical dance that releases the dead into a dream world.
The dance is connected with the Third City, a predecessor to Fallen London from pre-Columbian America that ended in a horrible tragedy. It's also connected to moonlight, which in Fallen London shows things how they would be, not how they are.
Most of the story revolves around assembling the various parts of the dance. This includes visiting a mad scientist, hunting down a mysterious woman all across London, and attending a high stakes auction.
The concepts are interesting, but some of the interactions feel a little like filler. Definitely a good one for fans of the tomb colonists, though, or Mr Wines.
A jailhouse drama with three odd characters, June 13, 2022This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a kind of additional content that subscribers get.
This story features a prison with three inmates. The prison, a fixture in many Fallen London stories, is a giant stalagmite that has been hollowed out. There is an infestation of sorts in a higher level, so prisoners are getting moved lower down where there is, unfortunately, less room.
So you are sent in undercover to determine who should be released. The characters are a notorious pirate captain who may actually be a decoy, a retired spy, and a sentient tiger (a not uncommon kind of character in Fallen London).
The writing is excellent overall, but the storyline, I feel, tries to be too many things at once. It's a character study, it's a mystery, it's survival horror, it's political drama, it's romance, and I feel that there's just not enough room in the story for all these threads to be pulled together, especially since the interactivity means that some plotlines won't be followed up on.
Class warfare through magic makeup, June 13, 2022This is a Fallen London exceptional story, a chunk of additional story-focused content available to subscribers (or on its own, for a heftier sum).
This story focuses on a new brand of makeup being sold door-to-door in an MLM format, with people recruiting others and getting bonuses for it. The makeup is based on the Neathbow, colors in Fallen London that have magical effects (like forgetfulness, remembrance, dreams, emptiness, etc.).
The collective is trying to disrupt Victorian London society by giving greater power to the lower classes. The establishment is not happy about this.
You become one of the recruits, but you become embroiled in a dispute from the far past. Features cats, royalty, Egypt, a striking main NPC, and the other side of mirrors.
This is an excellent character piece, but that is its only distinguishing quality, unless you are especially interested in social reform.
A german game book about combat and economy, June 13, 2022This is the final German IF Grand Prix 2022 game I played. It's a static pdf that's a gamebook.
You keep track of an inventory, health, money, and time. The main gameplay revolves around rolling dice for combat with slimes and kobolds, as well as, later on, some human combatants.
There are several 'grind zones' where you can fight with enemies and gain wealth as long as you like.
I found the game fairly tough to play as intended the first time through, with only 5 health and a lot of enemies that have a 33% chance to beat them per roll, and losing 1 health per loss. But it was fun.
I felt like the setting was often a bit generic, kind of like a random JRPG (you have villages with inns for recovery, slimes are the main enemy, etc.)
Overall, not life-changing but fun for a short time.
A short german Commodore 64 game about crashing in antarctic, June 12, 2022In this game, you crash-land near an abandoned arctic station and have to find your way to civilization.
I was worried at first, as playing a commodore 64 game in a foreign language seemed daunting. But the game actually has a great layout emphasizing important items and directions, and had many simple shortcuts to make the game easier.
There could be some improvements overall; the game is fairly short, not a lot is explained, and there's at least one typo I noticed. But I definitely appreciate the simplicity and it had a cute animal NPC.
A spider-centered Exceptional Story, June 12, 2022This is an Exceptional Story, a bonus piece of content for subscribers which can also be purchased by itself at a premium.
This story centers on spiders. There are a variety of spiders in Fallen London, from the sorrow-spiders that hatch in eyeballs to their larger cousins like spider councils or senates, huge beings formed from conglomerates of smaller ones.
This features the spiders of Vesture, a kingdom on the Elder Continent. Fallen London takes place in a giant cavern called the Neath, which has a variety of locales (such as Hell). The Elder Continent often seems to intentionally evoke North Africa as well as Eden, and is connected with immortality and life.
Vesture is a kingdom made of an alliance between spiders and humans. This story examines that connection, entangling you in a royal family's dispute about how to handle the death of a great, vast spider and the fallout that will bring. Family loyalty and tradition vs progress are the main themes.
I enjoyed the story, but felt a little constrained. There are some very meaningful choices (including a permanent companion and very different endings), but I didn't feel like I really shaped the story, mostly witnessing someone else's story and stepping in at the last moment. I prefer the exceptional stories where you take a more prominent role, even if it's all still scripted.
Trapped in an elevator with a smuggler, a golem, and the God of bling, June 12, 2022This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London, a kind of content that comes out once a month to people with a subscription, or can be purchased later for a significantly heavier cost.
This story has a quite charming premise. The city of Fallen London is ruled by Masters, hooded, alien figures that each have a different 'domain'. Much of the progress in Fallen London's main storylines centers on the Masters and how much you know about them, so info on them is generally considered rare and precious.
This story focuses on Mr Stones, whose domain is all things beautiful, especially diamonds.
A smuggler needs help with a diamond and Mr Stones. But instead of robbing him of a diamond, he wants you to 'plant' a diamond from the surface. Why? Because (Spoiler - click to show)it's a cursed diamond, one that brought empires to downfall. Specifically, it's the Hope Diamond. Things go wrong, though, and you end up trapped with the smuggler, a furious Mr Stones, and a clay golem-turned-Quaker, kind of like a bottle episode of a sitcom.
You can end up learning quite a bit about Mr Stones himself, probably the biggest backstory reveal we've ever had on him and just about the deepest possible level of lore.
Mechanically, there were options to try to save certain people and whether to trust or betray. It was generally satisfying, and I think this one is worth playing, but overall it didn't exceptionally stick out. This may be due to the overall high quality recently.
A custom-parser German space game about fixing a station, June 11, 2022This game is custom-written in C++, and has you wake up on a ship that is malfunctioning. You have to figure out what's wrong with the ship and repair it.
Pros: The game has lush and vivid descriptions, and has an interesting environment with generally logical and often physics-based puzzles.
Drawbacks: The implementation of some synonyms and nouns is lacking somewhat. As a non-native speaker, I often just put the wrong words in, but I frequently found commands that worked in other German games didn't work here (like 'hinab'). Furthermore, when I was super lost, I discovered the code was public, including some test walkthroughs, and in those test playthroughs the testers tried the exact same things I did, which means the author was aware of the problems and either could not or chose to fix them, leaving the implementation a bit choppy.
A problem for non-native speakers like me (not factored into the score) is that there are a ton of non-useful items cluttering up each room, with a single useful item in most rooms. So you might have an exercise room with a cardio machine, stationary bike, weights, etc. each with a long paragraph worth of description, but only one of them has anything useful on it. So I found this quite difficult to play, whereas a native speaker would have a much easier time. It made me think about how my English games could be improved for non-native speakers.
A german parser game full of hidden implications, June 8, 2022This game takes place in a small apartment after you have moved in with your wife Laura. Most of the house is filled with packed boxes.
This game is remarkable for what it doesn't tell you, kind of like 9:05 in several ways. I've played several games by this author before that I felt like were rich and vivid. In contrast, this game is stark and minimalistic.
Essentially, you're trying to fall asleep but you feel a bit agitated. You need to find ways to calm yourself. There's a timer before you have to wake up at 7.
In the middle of the night, things change. You're awoken by a disturbance and need to investigate it.
I imagined that this would open up new areas to explore, but it didn't, really. Instead, careful exploration is required and you need to think about what kind of things would work logically for you in this situation.
In the end, the game was very polished, purposely non-descriptive, had interesting interactivity but didn't really connect with me emotionally. I could see myself playing again.
Note: I had to decompile to figure out some actions.
A short, one-room german comedy game about disasters, June 5, 2022This German game has an English version, Wry, which was entered into Spring Thing and which was well-received.
I actually enjoyed this version a bit more, which I guess, for me, lends credence to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. I really appreciated how the game led you on on what to do, and how responsive it was, in general. In addition, I saw less of the ribald fantasies in this version, as I knew less commands to try out lol.
There were a couple of minor issues; looking at the wall gave a response in English ("On the wall above the sofa hang several pictures"), and X BILDER still lists a young lady being among the pictures even when the canvas has slipped out. But overall, I found this enjoyable and fresh.
A complex UI for a complex German game about a Trump-ruled island, June 5, 2022I played this game for quite a long time. This is a German Grand Prix competition game from 2022.
It's a downloadable executable that requires an up-to-date version of .NET. It's written in German, and is a custom parser game that contains 6 different windows, each with clickable links (one is the main story, one is constant links and directions, another is all objects in the room, another is inventory, another is a static room description).
The idea is that the whole game can be done either through typing or through link choices. Each object has its own set of links. Overall, it made play simpler, but frequently this led to an overabundance of links. For instance, most rooms had 7 or more furniture objects that did not matter in the gameplay. And many links were redundant. For instance, 'climb on top of' and 'get down' and 'go to' links were always there but never seemed to be used.
The story is that you are hunting Phoney, a 'hamberder' loving man who leaves behind bankruptcy claims and red hats to go through a portal where he rules an island through 'Phoneyvision'. Phoneyvision makes everything seem better than it really is. For instance, his wife is reality is a sticky blow-up doll, but in Phoneyvision she's a model.
Unfortunately, Phoneyvision only seems to work in two locations for most of the game. I had to restart once because I used phoneyvision in the wrong place and entered a void containing nothing but a rotten hamburger. I feel like it's a bit of a missed opportunity.
Gameplay mostly revolves around surviving a grim and darkly humorous world populated by parodies of Trump's associates, such as the cannibal ghoul that is also Trump's lawyer, or the poisoner/tax-collector named Middlefinger (not sure who this one's a reference to). Rotten food, mean-spirited pranks, and general filth and decay abound.
The UI has a replay option to allow you to go back to any time in your story, but every time I used it it got stuck in the first room of the replay. I tried saving, but when I closed the program and re-opened it my save wasn't there.
Overall, I think the engine is impressive but could be improved. This is part 1 of a four part story. I don't really enjoy mean-spirited humor, and felt frustrated with both my bad German and trying to understand the game's puzzles, but this game stuck in my brain so I played it for several days, getting help from the author. I'm rating it as '2-10 hours long' in my classification system, but a native speaker might finish it sooner.
Gorgeous graphics mixed with classic puzzles but confusing systems, May 18, 2022This Adventuron game takes full advantage of the system's graphical capabilities. It has excellent pixel art for a multitude of characters and mini-games.
You play as a young sentient animal on a spaceship. You want to be a star, so you go around the ship talking to others and getting advice.
Most interactivity is in the form of riddles or puzzles. There is a language-to-language duolingo-like game for learning languages, a graph theory problem, a logic puzzle, a cryptogram, math problems, etc.
An immense effort has been put into this game. Unfortunately for me, most of it was put into the areas that I am not quite as interested in. As for the main play, there are some frustrations. For instance, typing LOOK won't bring up the room description again, so you have to leave and come back to find out who's there. There is a chicken wing tree, but after you pluck one off and try to eat it it acts like you don't have it. There are occasional typos that distract. Overall, I had fun, but I think the very high production quality of the rest of the game gave me higher expectations for the text-based part.
The art is the best part of the game, with good shading and 3d perspectives.
Pleasant little illustrated Adventuron game intended for younger audiences, May 17, 2022This game was entered into the 2022 Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It has some lovely illustrations and uses the Adventuron engine.
You've lost your pet dog and have to explore a spooky mansion. A tutorial helps you out to get started. Most puzzles revolve around EXAMINing things and TALKing to people. There are a lot of cute characters, like philosophical skeletons and silly pumpkins.
It's not too long, but some of the puzzles were moderately challenging. One lasted a little bit longer than I would have wished, but overall this is one of the strongest games in the competition.
A kid's parser game for protecting Australian wildlife from a forest fire, May 17, 2022Garry Francis is a prolific author, specializing in text adventures with a focus on puzzles and core parser gameplay (like GET/DROP/etc.). This game and the other one he released in the same competition (The Carpathian Vampire) show a lot of growth in implementation and puzzle design.
This is one of the smoothest games of the comp. You play as a koala who is also a bushfire warden for the surrounding wildlife. You have to provide for yourself and all those around you.
The main charm in this game is the vivid descriptions of australian wildlife and plants, with background action happening (like skinks crossing your path), a garden area with tons of plants, and puzzles revolving around Australian wildlife.
I think this is pretty great, and was glad to play it. My one desire might be for a couple of additional things to implement for consistency. One puzzle, for instance, was only solved by (Spoiler - click to show)the verb ASK [person] ABOUT [something], while a later puzzle had a character (the owl) who didn't respond to ASK OWL ABOUT [topic] for most topics that mattered; instead, this was a TALK TO puzzle, which was somewhat inconsistent with the earlier puzzles.
Explore an underwater area with magic, May 17, 2022This is an Adventuron game written for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It's parser based and has you diving into the ocean, exploring for treasure.
Here's my rating:
-Polish: I feel like the game could be brushed up a bit. The tutorial isn't reactive; instead you have to type RUN TUTORIAL separately in two rooms, and in one of those rooms it just lists several turns' worth of info, whereas other tutorials in this comp reacted to your actions. Similarly, more synonyms could be added.
-Descriptive: Many objects weren't described. The descriptions in the game are easy to picture, though.
-Interactivity: This game involves guessing the verb a lot. For instance, opening the chest: (Spoiler - click to show)OPEN CHEST and UNLOCK CHEST don't have meaningful responses, but PLACE GEM does. And after you open it, (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE LIGHT, ENTER LIGHT, LOOK IN LIGHT, SEARCH LIGHT, ENTER CHEST, none of it works, except for TOUCH LIGHT.
-Emotional impact: It was hard to connect with the game, because I was frustrated.
-Would I play again? Same as above.
The game isn't that bad overall, but I wish that more people had tested it and that things the testers tried were implemented. If that had happened, I would definitely give this game a higher score, because it has a lot of good ideas; it's only bug-fixing and adding more responses that I think it could use.
Three puzzle games of varying difficulty blended into one, May 16, 2022This game has the same storyline shown from multiple points of view. As you complete an easy one, a harder one unlocks. In an amusing twist, the 'help' system for each difficulty level is the PC of the next difficulty level. It's an adventuron game, and comes with a built-in map.
Each difficulty level is linear, solving one room at a time before unlocking the next room.
I found the puzzles pretty hard as the game went on. The first difficulty level wasn't too hard, but I couldn't figure out the wordplay puzzle in the second difficulty without the walkthrough (I had tried (Spoiler - click to show)GLASS and 4-letter words without success). I also had deep trouble with the wire problem, especially since the solution relied on a word not in the verb list, and the cake puzzle, well, I'm not sure how it worked even after the solution. This isn't bad, necessarily, since being stuck is a feature of puzzles, but I definitely did get stuck; other reviews say they had no problems in this game so it's probably just me.
Overall, the game was entertaining. I would have preferred some simultaneous puzzles so I could work on one while being stuck on another. I found the writing was clear and set the scene well in most problems.
A combo parser/link .exe game about collecting raspberries, May 16, 2022This game has a pretty unusual format. It's a .exe file entered into the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, and it features a bar for typing in parser commands as well as hyperlinks to make play easier.
I used just the hyperlinks, as typing was unusual. It may have been just me, but it seemed like I couldn't hit enter and get a response unless it was an acceptable command, which was weird because I couldn't tell if the game was lagging or if I just didn't have the right command.
The links operate by single-clicking for directions, double-clicking to use items or pick them up, and clicking once on one item and once on another to use them together.
The puzzles are fairly simple, mostly exploring and grabbing whatever you command. Finishing one puzzle generally unlocks the next.
I had a couple of frustrations. The text color was similar to the background image, making it hard to read. Text scrolling with a mouse was required, but the mouse wheel doesn't scroll. And there are some text mistakes that make things confusing.
A magic pirate puzzle adventure with sound, May 14, 2022This is an adventuron game with a two-word parser and tutorial designed for beginners.
While many games in this comp seem to lean towards younger children's interests, I feel like the pirate story is not really childish. Instead, the author provides an interesting backstory for an island with magical creatures and enemies.
Most of the gameplay, though, is centered around solo exploration. Some puzzles have multiple solutions, which is neat.
A lot of work went into worldbuilding and into a tutorial that is helpful at suggesting verbs and giving expectations for the parser.
Overall, I wonder if it could have been a bit more fleshed out. It's actually more substantial than many games in the comp, and being shorter is better for beginners, but it felt pulled in multiple directions by seeking to be simple and short but also to do epic storytelling, which would have benefited from a bigger buildup. I had fun, though!
A short ADL game about picking up and dropping items to get points, May 14, 2022This feels kind of like a game for the author to experiment with and/or learn ADL.
It's a .exe file that leads to a simple game with < 10 rooms. Most rooms have 1 item. There are several characters you interact with using TALK CHARACTER. Instead of GIVING items, you PUT items in different places. The game ends right when you get the final point, closing down instantly without waiting to display the end text.
The writing is minimal, there isn't a strong connecting narrative. The puzzles are logical, though. If this was a trial run for the author to check out the language, it succeeded. I'm very glad there was a tutorial, as most games written in .exe parser are hard to navigate, so that's a definite plus here!
A cute smallish game about a troll helping magical creatures, May 13, 2022I think this game does exactly what its creator seems to have wanted to do: make a light parser game with intuitive commands in a fun environment with lovely ascii art pictures.
You play as a troll who is lonely. All around you are magical creatures (one per region, each depicted with ASCII art). They all have desires found in a book, and essentially give you a bunch of fetch quests you have to accomplish.
Overall:
+Polish: The game is very smooth and polished.
+Descriptiveness: The characters are vibrant and unique.
+Interactivity: The game is simple, but has enough resistance (through multiple sources of info and several possible targets) to make it fun.
+Emotional impact: I enjoyed the game and art.
+Would I play again?: Yes, and may recommend it to others.
A solid, compact game with fair puzzles and a light difficulty, May 12, 2022This is a vampire game designed for the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It's aimed towards beginners, and I think serves its purpose fairly well.
You begin outside a dark castle and have to find a way in. The tutorial will take you all the way through this part, about 1/10-1/5 of the game.
Inside, you have to explore the small castle and figure out a way to stop the vampire. There are quite a few items including red herrings, but everything is logical. I got stuck because I didn't notice one room exit at first.
There's not a ton of tension here. As a tutorial game, that's fine, and I've done the same in my own tutorial games, but I would wish for more in a bigger game. There's some nice atmospheric messages, though.
A great game with magic and puzzles but some weird bugs, May 12, 2022This is really a very inspiring game, but I haven't been able to complete it yet due to some weird issues.
You are sent back in time to your grandmother's life, who was Cinderella but able to make potions. You explore a large city, discovering various potion recipes and hidden secrets and memories while making money to buy things for the ball.
The puzzles are engaging. I used a lot of hints, but only because the game is so large; it's generally fair as long as you examine everything.
There are a couple of weird bugs though which the author is aware of but are really hard to fix. These bugs include items sometimes stopping working, making progress impossible. By restarting several times, I've managed to get through each individual stopping point, but never all at once.
Pleasant Adrift game set in space with economic system, May 10, 2022This game seems to be set in the universe of Grandpa's Ranch, another game by this author, but with a very different execution. In this game, you go to space!
Your grandma is not dead, as you thought, but rather was captured by interstellar smugglers. She just got free, and needs you to retrieve a diamond. This contrasts with the first game, which was mostly about exploring a small house and doing mundane tasks.
The city in this game is actually pretty sizable, enough that I was glad to have a directions-giving alien hologram (which came in useful in many ways). There's even an economy on the planet, with several steps for gaining money from getting a bank card all the way to buying an enormous treasure.
The biggest place I got stuck was with delivering packages. I kept trying ENTER BUILDING and DELIVER PACKAGE and KNOCK DOOR and OPEN DOOR before discovering what to really do (Spoiler - click to show)(which was touching the sign). Other than that, the game is generous and helpful in guiding the player towards verbs that work.
I played on the web runner, and sometimes you had to TALK TO someone repeatedly. I tried hitting the 'up' key to repeat the last verb, and tried typing G, but neither of those worked. If anyone knows a nice way to repeat the last command in adrift, let me know in the comments!
A short, linear adventuron game about a kobold looking for home, May 7, 2022This is a brief adventuron game entered into the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.
In it, you play as a little kobold thrown off a cart in a medieval town, and have to go find your way home.
It is a 'gauntlet'-style game, meaning that you face one challenge at a time and either pass it or die. The game has an instant-rewind feature, but there are numerous ways to die and some are better-signaled than others.
Some of the puzzles require a bit of cleverness to solve, while others require finding the right combination of words. Emily Short once said that once you know mentally how to solve a puzzle, a game should make it easy to get that to happen (without struggling with the right wording). As a converse to that, I'd like to say that a good game should also make it clear when you're on the right track. A lot of puzzles in this game ignore alternate solutions or don't provide helpful feedback (I'm looking at the door puzzle here the most).
Overall, I would have preferred less learning-by-dying and more simultaneous puzzles and more striking text descriptions. The best part for me was the sense of being stealthy.
Robot has to escape a hotel/house. Adventuron with graphics, May 7, 2022This is an interesting game. It seems to mix 8-bit sci-fi with spiritual overtones and possibly a trans metaphor.
You are a robot about to be decommissioned. You were created female but pose as male. You have to escape a large building.
It feels a bit like a Scott Adams adventure, and its minimalism itself is not a detriment. However, some of the puzzles were kind of obscure to me, even with the hints (which require praying to access, actually a neat trick). So a lot of the time I felt like I was fumbling around.
The graphics added to the game, and when I struggled with verbs a little examination or exploration quickly resolved it, which was nice. I think Adventuron was a good choice of engine here, since the graphics added more than in-depth implementation would have to this minimalistic game.
A pleasant puzzler with a complex magical language, May 6, 2022This game is, I believe, written in a custom parser that the author has used in other games. It works well here, with elegant javascript integration.
You play as an adventurer/junior magician gathering spell ingredients for you boss. The spell ingredients are all food items.
The map is laid out visually, making navigation simple. Areas vary in complexity from mostly-empty to containing multi-level structures with puzzles in each level.
The primary puzzle-solving technique is inspired by The Wand by Arthur DiBianca. You say a magic spell in your grimoire, and point your wand at something for that spell to take effect. The spell language follows patterns that you have to discover.
I haven't completely finished the game, finding only a little more than half of the ingredients on my own and 4 more with hints, but the game lets you stop at any point, and I've gotten up to an E for Exceeds Expectations.
The puzzles are rich and interesting and systematic, and vary from trivial to complex. I didn't connect on an emotional level, more just skimming the surface, but that's more due to personal taste. Overall, well-done and enjoyable.
A visual novel blended from pieces of a larger story. Dark fantasy., May 5, 2022This is a game that's essentially a demo for a longer visual novel. It takes pieces of stories of that game and mixes them into one.
This game has quite a lot of visuals, with the snow animations and wintery background being especially gorgeous, and the overall portraits being fairly high quality.
You play as a bartender who gains a mysterious ability: when someone talks to you, you gain the ability to 'replay' their story and make different choices, which can have an effect in the real world afterwards.
These stories involve dark and frightening creatures in the woods, which have become more dangerous ever since the sun disappeared.
Overall, the dark vibe here is good, the stories are detailed, there's more interactivity than most VN-type games. I did have trouble getting a feel for the 'flow' of the game, as there wasn't so much an overarching story arc with rise and fall of action. Since the full game will have an entirely different storyline, that problem may fix itself.
UFO cycling twine poetry, May 1, 2022This is a short anthology of 7 poems.
Each poem consists of a few lines, each of which has cycling text.
You can either read the poem straight through and then cycle each line, or cycle through one line at a time. Or anything else you like! So it essentially is a collection of two-dimensional poems, which I like.
The poems are all about aliens, and saucers, and changes, and doubt. With its combination of obscure meanings and occasional goofy lines it reminded me a bit of Subterranean Homesick Alien or Decks Dark by Radiohead.
I appreciated this anthology intellectually, especially its polish and design, but didn't feel emotionally engaged for some reason or another.
An unfinished space parser game with graphics, May 1, 2022This is a short parser game set in space. It has neat little pixelart graphics at the top.
Like another reviewer, I had a bit of trouble realizing I had to hit enter to start the game (might be worth adding a 'hit enter to continue' text on the title screen).
The game has you floating in space. There's not much to do besides cry, it seems at first, but fortunately the game has implemented a lot of little actions to add character. But then the real puzzles start (for me, I started by (Spoiler - click to show)examining my suit, if anyone's stuck).
Besides being longer, the best thing the game could do is get more transcripts from players and responding to even more actions than are in the game (for instance, I think TURN ME should give a different response).
It also might be worth splitting up some of the complex actions into more parts; I typed in one command and the game had a big, complex scenario where I tried things over and over again until I figured it out. It might have been more fun to do that myself instead of having it described to me.
A lovely but incomplete demo for a romantic magical game, May 1, 2022This game has plenty of potential but is still in the early stages.
Right now, it's a completely linear intro with some nice music and some placeholder images with a charming feel. You are a young witch ready to profess your love, but when you arrive at your sweetheart's door, she's gone, and only a fragment of a spell is left to give evidence.
And that's it. Would play the full thing, when it comes out.
An epic fantasy feverdream, May 1, 2022There is a genre of game in Twine which is massive, sprawling, and focuses on stream-of-consciousness style text. Furkle's early games were the trendsetter, especially SPY INTRIGUE, and other games like Charlie the Robot and Dr Sourpuss have branched the genre out into many areas.
This game is unusual in that it employs the fever-dream word-flood format but is also an epic fantasy story.
It is difficult to piece together storyline in this genre of writing. In this specific story, sentences can sound like this:
"Azalea ersatz lunars crackled glowing over semitranslucent ambient films this headache brutally pounds out in stechschritt to a buzzing id blockage"
One sentence I measured was almost 600 words long.
Attempted plot summary:
(Spoiler - click to show)Other sentences have more coherence. As far as I can tell, the main thrust of the storyline (told over 27 chapters, some much shorter than others) is that you are a person in a water world who has made a theft or bad business deal, and ends up killing someone over it. You enlist at sea on a quest to visit the submergence. On the way, you fight a sea monster. Then you must ascend a type of tower, which wasn't an original stop. As you do so, you seek out the Vedas, who are either Gods or nobles or something else. You request to become a Veda, or something else more than you are, which comes with a name change. Your mother was a Veda. As part of the transformation you cut off your finger? Then you visit the submergence, and someone activates a world-breaking device.
At times it seems you are someone else, or maybe it just focuses on two members of the crew, but there are two people or gods or something with very similar names (like imimnemo and emimnemo), but this is also confusing because the main character of the main story has two names (like Leinur Emimnu) and different characters use different names.
Overall, there is an emphasis on pain or emptiness of life or the quest to escape existence. It ties into Eastern traditions with statements like:
"There is one question to which I do know the answer: who we are when they wish we were not:"
but also Western ideas like sin.
Overall, it's wearying to get through; the game says so itself and describes itself like a migraine. I had to rest several times while reading it, even though I was speedreading after the first 4-5 chapters. But I'm trying to build up tolerance for Finnegan's Wake some day (I made it through 30 pages once before giving up), so I felt like this was a good practice run.
Edit: At some point, characters are making up monsters and fights like a D&D game, narrating them to each other. It's possible this is the entire story, and it's possible it was just a side diversion among the crew.
A smoothly-integrated tool for playing D&D solo, April 30, 2022I've seen a few interactive fiction adaptations of RPG systems before (such as the Choicescript Vampire: the Masquerade games). The ones I usually see let you use your stats but generally have pre-written scenes and a constrained set of options to choose from.
This game, instead, provides you a framework to guide you while you set everything up on your own character-wise. For instance, in combat, you are provided with a little map to move your character around, and a way to take turns, and a monster manual entry for the monsters, but instead of rolling dice for you or giving you a set of options, it just asks you to keep track of your actions and the enemies and just let it know when someone is incapacitated, ending the fight.
So this is less a self-contained game than a tool for someone who wishes to try out the DnD experience and is willing to invest the time into making a character. Due to this framework nature, it fits with any kind of expansion or adaptation to the game, any character class.
In a way, it makes it like a virus, not that it's bad or infectious, but in that it can't live on its own and needs other substance to help it grow. Because of that, while I thought it was cool, it felt lacking in the criteria I generally use on this website. The next time I get on a D&D kick, though, and can't find a group, I could definitely see myself pulling this out.
Co-op sci-fi game about family in a slightly futuristic setting, April 30, 2022This game was inspired by The Last Night of Alexisgrad, an IFComp multiplayer twine game where the participants passed codes back and forth to each other.
The author of this game goes further by connecting players through a session ID that allows simultaneous communication in-game through choices. There is even a time portion, although it seems designed in a way that many playthroughs of the timed portion would not need collaboration, which is helpful.
The game is set in a somewhat futuristic setting where genetically engineered animals and cybernetically modified humans exist but are uncommon.
The two players take the role of two adopted/foster children of Ma Tiger, a rich woman entangled in shady business who has asked them to meet together with her after many years.
The MCs are a study in contrasts, one a man who is relatively happy and at peace, and a woman who is dangerous and has much to hide.
The game is fairly brief, which is good for a multiplayer game. The roughly 30 minutes play time advertised is generally accurate.
I played through twice, and your fellow player's choices definitely affect the game. That drew me into the storyline more. The plot arc is necessarily contracted; if anything, this feels like a setup to a longer game in the same universe, not in the sense that it leaves a sequel hook, but just that many plot elements seem like they could be developed much further and there doesn't seem to be a significant emotional resolution for either character.
Overall, a solid concept. It was a bit hard to find people to match up with; perhaps one day there will be a massive online server of people just waiting to sign up to play co-op twines, but it hasn't happened yet!
A time-travel loop game about a school and potatoes, April 30, 2022This game has a great deal of potential but unfortunately doesn't pan out yet in many areas. From reading about the game, I wonder if a lot of time was spent trying out different interactive fiction engines.
You play as a young high school student who goes to school and gets stuck in a time loop. You have to replay over and over to progress.
I had a bit of trouble with figuring out how the game worked. A lot of options seem to send you to a fake-death the first time you go to them, but then they are important later.
The formatting uses centered text and no paragraph breaks. I think it would have been a bit easier to read with left-aligned text and paragraph breaks, and using a serif font and colors with less contrast than pure black and pure white.
The writing has grammar that sounds off, especially with comma use or punctuation around quotations.
Overall, I think the underlying idea is solid and there are some funny moments, but I felt unsatisfied.
A voice-acted story of memory and music, April 29, 2022This is a story about cleaning out your mother's house after she died. As you explore the house, you discover little secrets and memories here and there, piecing together a larger puzzle.
It's a melancholy game, and has some nice voice acting. The pacing of the voice acting is interesting; only the text in quotes is read out loud, but if there is narrative text between quotes then there is a space in the audio, which I can only presume is to give people a time to catch up. So it kind of presupposes the reader's reading speed, but it worked generally well for me.
The story is sad, overall, but in some ways bittersweet. One of the scenes hints at the MC being trans, but I don't believe that's related to the overall sadness.
I don't use headphones and play IF around others, usually, so I had to schedule special times to play this, but I do feel the audio effects were positive and contributed to the story.
It includes a puzzly element at the end that provided some good interaction, and exploring worked well earlier on.
Voice-activated interactive fiction game about taking a baby to daycare, April 28, 2022I helped beta-test this game.
This game uses a custom parser first developed in Kidney Kwest, but with a twist: it's intended to be played entirely vocally.
The parser encourages you to use full sentences (so 'open door' might throw a warning that it's better to say 'open the door'). It also is designed from the ground up and seems to involve a lot of built-in systems. So, for instance, asking about the location of a thing will usually tell you what room it's in, what region it's in, etc. Due to this systematic nature, sometimes the game will omit capitalization or punctuation, but this usually not detectable in the voice version. A final issue is saying 'put Time on [anything]' (a phrase I said a lot because in my accent Time sounds like Tom to the computer), the parser says 'a bottom is not on a time'.
The game itself is simple, and gives you a lovely tutorial that shows you how the whole system works. The tutorial is, itself, a small game. The larger game is mostly interacting with things: doors, keys, containers.
When I beta tested, I completed the game, although it seems to have been expanded since then. This time I believe I got locked in an unwinnable state since I (Spoiler - click to show)left the baby in the car and went inside, and the car took off without me. Overall, I think this technology is interesting and must have been very complex to program.
A woman falls into a strange complex under standing stones, April 28, 2022This is a mid-length Twine game where you play as a visitor to some standing stones who is sucked into the ground and deposited in a strange room.
Gameplay is mostly based on exploration, inventory and examination. There is a bizarre, alien world to explore.
Overall, the concept was interesting, but I had friction in random places. There was a ton of profanity for no real reason (the game starts with a few screens of just the F-word over and over again), each page had an animation before the next page which was cool at first but slowly wore out its welcome, and a lot of choices were hard to strategize with (like choosing left or right in a featureless corridor, or only having one option)).
I definitely felt some atmosphere from the writing, and that was to me the biggest success in this story. It gave me Brian David Gilbert vibes so I start listening to some of his songs while playing.
A sort of cryptid sandbox game where you try to photograph bigfoot, April 27, 2022P.B. Parjeter is an author best known for complex twine works, usually long and intricate. This seems to be the first parser game by this author.
You play as Bigfoot's kid, a sasquatch on a mission to expose your father to the world by photographing him and other cryptids. You explore a park while working on your master plan.
It's quite a bit more solid than most first parser games by authors who already know twine. I didn't see many, if any, capitalization or punctuation errors. There were a couple of things I think could be polished (like using custom appearance text for items and a smoother introduction of some items in the initial scene).
What goes write is the creative and inventive puzzles, and the forgiving point system where you only have to get 60 points to win. That means that if you're beating your head against a particularly tricky puzzle or having trouble getting the parser to listen in one section, you can just skip it. So I skipped all the light puzzles and the ants.
The game lists several parser authors as beta testers, which may help explain why the game is so well put together for a first author. I can only expect that the remaining rough edges would be fixed up in a subsequent game as the author gained more experience. Overall, I had fun with this game.
Short and clever escape game, April 27, 2022I think it would be fair to describe this as an escape room game. You wake up in the dark and have to navigate from there until you exit the room.
This is exactly the kind of game that works well with La Petite Mort (the four hour competition): has a concept that wouldn't work as well in a longer game, has a constrained setting to allow for more detail.
I didn't encounter any implementation problems at all, which is pretty impressive. Definitely had a fun time with this little puzzler.
A literal puzzlebox written in a custom engine, April 27, 2022I beta tested this game.
The Box is written in a new parser engine designed by Winters, which includes a hybrid form (like Dialog or Gruescript) allowing most of the game to be played by clicking links.
This is a literal puzzlebox. After a brief intro, you wake up in a cell with a mysterious box in front of you with 5 different puzzles or sets of puzzles belonging to each of the visible sides. Clues and aides are hidden throughout the rest of the room.
I found the puzzles generally fair and engaging. It includes a cryptogram which I generally find less engaging in IF, since they have standard solution algorithms that aren't directly integrated into game play, but I appreciated the smoothness of this one. I enjoyed the light-based puzzles and the numeric one the most, and perhaps the final puzzle.
The framing story is brief but well done. As a demonstration of language capabilities, it certainly seems like a strong parser engine, which is very difficult to do. It didn't capture my emotional fancy, but other than that it is a solid and well-done game.
Bad therapy from a computer 'friend' in a dystopia, April 27, 2022I have a bit of trouble writing a review for this game, as the first couple of times I started it I realized I hadn't retained any information after several screens worth of material. I kept retrying it to help it sink in but it was like water in a sieve.
Eventually, though, the game began to have a pseudo-computer interface in an older style (the year 1999 is mentioned). You have been assigned a computer therapist called 'Computerfriend' whose job is to analyse your mental state and help you make better choices.
I tended to go along with what the computer said, and ended up with ending 2/6.
This game is one for which trigger warnings are especially beneficial. It contains (Spoiler - click to show)messages urging you to suicide.
Overall, the game was polished and effective in communicating emotion. However, like I said, I had difficulty retaining anything I read; having played it is more like trying to remember a dream after waking up.
A cute but dramatic story about a dog and his ball , April 27, 2022This is a story intended for beginners, and I believe may be the author's first published game.
It's a brief parser game with a dog protagonist. You have been hurried away from your regular home and, in the tussle lost the ball.
There is a larger overarching plot, where (very early spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)the reason you are shuttered away is because bombs are dropping in Ukraine. This makes for a dramatic storyline, and what started as a personal search for a ball becomes something more selfless, urgent and important.
The game uses a fun mechanic where 'smell' is as important as 'look'.
There are some errors, mostly things that are difficult to deal with in Inform (like extra punctuation and capitalization). Other than that, this is a surprisingly smooth game with a story that ended up feeling nice.
A short, amusing story of a crow with nice graphics, April 23, 2022This is a visually very nice game, and funny, too.
It's a short twine game where you play as a crow with an attitude and intentionally bad spelling (basically 'no u' times 100). Your attitude, is, in fact, measured, and you 'win' by getting the highest attitude.
We played this in the Seattle If Meetup and I played it after, as well.
It's fairly brief, and amusing. It seems to have some kind of randomization or procedural generation, as you can get different events on different playthroughs.
There's some mild profanity. Overall, it's not too long so if the above sounds appealing, try it out.
Thoughtful musings on life and running away, with game-breaking bug, April 23, 2022This is a game written in Squiffy, which is based on the engine that Quest uses but is choice-based.
You play as someone who walked away from a relationship and is going cross country on late-night/early-morning busses.
It does a good feel of evoking that wistful travel feeling when you've left something behind and are passing by other people's lives, people you'll never see again but feel important in the moment.
Unfortunately, there is one passage that contains no links to any other passages (in a section on a movie), and this makes the game no longer possible to play. It's possible to fix this by opening the game up in a text editor and adding a link to the next passage. I didn't do so, but read ahead.
Overall, thoughtful and musing. I wish there were a way to tell which links were exploratory and which links moved the story forward.
Archaeology and translation game with audio and glyphs, April 23, 2022This is an interesting experiment, reminicscent of Heaven's Vault or Short's First Draft of the Revolution, but I think it falls a bit short from both.
You plays as a translator, given glyphs in the ancient language of Asemia. Clicking on glyphs gives you other glyphs. After you go to the next page or two, a translation appears.
Asemia was a place of hard things, where people died and soldiers destroyed. The music and the extra-translatory dialogue also deals with this.
To me, the biggest difficulty I had was in the obfuscatory interactivity. What does clicking do? The same glyphs and stories came up multiple times, sometimes with different translations, and sometimes with the same. Do my actions, cycling through glyphs, change the output, or do you automatically get different results each time?
And it just doesn't make sense from a translation viewpoint. The glyphs you cycle through are very distinct from each other, so it's not like you are trying to guess what different words are in the language. It would make more sense to cycle through the translation of a fixed glyph, like Heaven's Vault does.
I'm sure there could be a deeper meaning to everything, but I didn't find it. Lovely visuals and graphics, though, and the writing is solid.
A tale of a dark and twisted family, told through twine, April 23, 2022This is a Twine game with few options, more of a kinetic fiction than a game per se. It's also one of the most effective uses of such a structure I've read (another effective one I could recommend is Polish the Glass).
The story is about the Bladesmith family, a twister group of individuals that read like villains from An Unfortunate Series of Events if it was aimed at a slightly older demographic. Abuse, fraud, deceit and murder follow the family and everyone in it.
It includes amusingly absurd elements (like the multitude of Mildreds) and provocatively vulgar elements (like the opening scene of a man smearing faeces on the glass).
Overall, here's my assessment:
+Polish: The game feels quite smooth overall. There were at least two typos (squeeking vs squeaking and some other typo near the end), but they were minor in the grand scheme of things.
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid and detailed writing.
+Interactivity: While mostly linear, the story does allow little sidebars and choice of navigation that lent interest to the story.
+Emotional impact: I found it both amusing and morbid.
-Would I play again? While I found it very well-done, it has a edge to it that's not my personal preference. I only enjoy darkness in media if it sets off an inner light.
OCD/anxiety/sensory processing simulator, April 23, 2022This is a compact twine game where you attempt to go about your day despite a minor annoyance.
The bulk of the game is a long loop about dealing with the annoyance.
Quite a bit of it reminds me of my friends with sensory processing disorders including certain forms of autism, where they have to go to other rooms to avoid noise or where head-cancelling headphones.
Some of it, though, seems more directly tied to OCD, like repetitive hand-washing behaviors.
Its overall message about how to deal with these things isn't something I can personally vouch for; however, the techniques described do seem related to those I've used to manage depression, so I could see them being valid in this situation.
Overall, I think the structure is interesting, but I feel like it could have been developed a bit more, hit home more.
Fantasy game with some 3d graphics and required login, April 23, 2022This game requires you to create an account with an email and name and to accept cookies, which felt like a lot. I used a burner email and fake other things.
The idea is that you are a young man named George who is the son of a blacksmith and knows the royal family. Every year, a young maiden gets sacrificed to a dragon, but this year, you hope to help stop that.
Here's my overall rating:
+Polish: The images look a bit strange, like the princess wearing some kind of autumnal leaf pajamas. Otherwise, I didn't run into errors.
-Descriptiveness: A lot of details are just skimmed over or assumed. Plot twists happen in quick succession without a lot of forewarning or explanation.
-Interactivity: It was a bit confusing figuring out what to do, or what did what. At one point you're given a ton of gold, but then it doesn't really come up again. I grabbed a fire crystal, but it said I needed a sword; later I was given a sword, but it never came up whether I used the crystal. Exploring a royal camp ended up showing me part of a villain's base, but it just seemed out of nowhere.
-Emotional impact: I had difficulty becoming emotionally invested in the story.
+Would I play again? I'd probably like to see other endings.
To be fair to the author, a significant amount of work went into this game. I may have been prejudiced from the start, as I enjoy the quick, anonymous, pick-up-and-put-down nature of more text IF, so having a full-screen graphics-based game with mandatory account creation likely put me off from the actual content.
Smugness simulator: Edutainment about eating bugs, April 23, 2022This game's tone reads like a game parody of Neil deGrasse Tyson's 'well, actually' twitter posts (like when he pointed out that leap day isn't the earth actually leaping). The tone is very heavy-handed and smug, with the game literally telling you 'you made a wrong choice, make better choices in the future'.
I'm sure it's a parody, but a well-made simulation of an annoying thing is still an annoying thing.
Otherwise the writing is sharp and word choices and images are clever.
Message-wise, I think the concept of humanity eating bugs is just fine; I love shrimp, and shrimp is more revolting-looking than other insects. But it helps that I was fed shrimp at an early age; I got used to it, and I'm not used to bugs.
Overall interesting, but, to me, too successful at imitating an annoying person.
Six horror stories told through real-time mechanisms, April 23, 2022This game is an interesting experiment in involving real-time in text games.
Basically, there are several storylines going one in different motel rooms as well as outside. You have peepholes into 5 motel rooms. Every minute or so of real time, a counter updates the in-game time and you see new things in the different rooms. Occasionally, you can affect things by being in the right place at the right time (the vast majority of these being deaths).
It's an interesting concept, but it was hard to puzzle out in-game, and I only heard it from others and saw it in the code. Without knowing how it works, the game seems oddly repetitive as you see the same scenes over and over, since they don't change until the next 'tick'.
The writing and plot is similar to B-movies, with some strong profanity, a voyeuristic but not explicit sex scene, and violence. Plots are mostly tributes to classic horror movies, although at least one seems non-magical.
Overall, I'm not sure this timed method worked for me, but I'm glad someone did it so I could see how it works. A couple of the stories were effectively creepy for me.
An amusing and mostly-solid western story with grotesque humor, April 22, 2022Bitter Karella has been making games for many years now, but I think this is the best one I've played so far, for my tastes.
You play as a cowgirl whose beloved horse has been stolen by a lying, murderous judge, and you have to get it back.
It's set in a wide town with quite a few locations, and even more that get unlocked over time. I say the humor is 'grotesque', but by that I mean that a lot of solutions are amusingly gross.
The characters are vivid and based on tropes and stereotypes, like a snake-oil salesman, a crazy miner/inventor, a brothel owner, etc. A few of them lean heavily into racial and cultural tropes, like an opium-smoking asian man named Lucky Strike or a hispanic saloon owner named La Muerte with a face painted like a sugar skull. I'm not really fond of relying on racial stereotypes, but all those characters are portrayed in a positive light as independent business people respected in their community.
The puzzles were pretty hard, and I had to get help on a couple, especially on finding a bezoar. I played the game over about a week on and off. Most puzzles are 'find an item in one area and use it in a creative way in another'. A lot of the humor is in finding out what item actually solves to problem.
The implementation of the game is a big improvement over all past Karella games, but still has a couple of rough edges here and there. I had trouble finding the right words to use the dynamite, or to use a rope. Fortunately, the game itself will also include the right wording to use as a hint, and has other features designed to help with implementation.
We played part of this in the Seattle IF Meetup, where it seemed well-received, and I finished it on my own later.
One-move game about you, an island, and a monster, April 22, 2022This is a short, one-move game from the author of the iterative Locked Door series.
You are alone with a hideous monster on a planet, alone and marooned. Most actions end the game immediately, with some kind of effect, while others give you more info.
A lot of work went into this. Decompiling this, there are a ton of verbs being implemented here.
Many of the results are similar to each other, but at least they're coherent. I got a Sisyphan vibe from the game (maybe projecting; I like Sisyphan things).
I can say I found it pretty funny when I realized what the general theme was. Worth trying out due to its short, easy-to-try length.
A giant game with many endings, with few rules, April 21, 2022This is a very large Twine game. I think of all structures Sam Kabo Ashwell mentioned in his 'Standard patterns in choice-based games', it most resembles the sorting hat, as there are ten or so different paths that, once you pick, is generally linear to an ending.
You play as a person whose identity is stolen, leaving you as a gaping hole in an alternate world.
That world is one where anything can happen. A shop that has a closet can take you to another world, and so can biting a sucker.
Each path allows you the choice to become a 'man', like the Drake Man or the Darin' Man, giving you an awesome and alternate life.
I found the prose to be overall well done, and there were interesting ideas. But after 3 or so paths, I began to feel like there were, if it's even possible, too many good ideas!
Brandon Sanderson has said before that good magic systems are more interesting the more restrictions they have. This isn't a high fantasy novel about complex magic, but I think something similar applies here: if anything is possible, it's almost the same as if nothing is possible. After a while, it all kind of blended together.
I opened up the game in Twinery to see how much I missed, and realized that after an hour or so I had only seen about 20-30% of the game. I used the code to read the 'ultimate' ending, which I thought was roughly as fulfilling as the other endings, but had some cool descriptions of things.
Taste is subjective, but for me personally, I think I would have enjoyed it more if there were more structure in terms of themes or some other kind of rhythm to the game. Outside of that, the game is coded in a smooth and complex fashion and the writing is vivid and descriptive.
Awkward party simulator with meta-commentary, April 19, 2022This is an intricate Dendry game where you spend New Year's Eve at a party with your parents, friends and acquaintances. You've burned a lot of bridges in the past, and it's all coming back to get you know.
I was surprised at the end to see that Depression Quest was not on the list of inspirations, as it has a lot of similarity with this game. Options that are selected are denied due to your bad feelings, or greyed out in the first place. Things you'd like to say can't be said, etc.
The New Year's Eve setting provides a good backdrop for the time limit, which is until 12:00. Just like a real party, it first feels like there's too much to do and then too little. This game directly reminded me of all the reasons I don't enjoy big parties with people outside my own family, especially parties where romance is possible but unlikely.
Romance is a theme in the game, but not in a positive way; there are numerous former crushes running around. Edit: (there actually are some positive romantic elements, but I found more negative options due to my choices)
The game has excellent attention to detail, especially in Chinese-heritage culture. Characters are provided, usually with translation, and the game describes food, drinks, Mah Jong, etc., together with westernized/globalized additions like Marvel movies and pumpkin pie.
Overall, this is a strong game. I appreciated its meta-commentary at one point about how it feels like interaction with human beings is an optimization puzzle, and I've felt like that before. The only thing for me that I didn't click with was the waiting around aimlessly that happened a little more than I would have preferred. Perhaps it was due to my own actions, though.
I played this as part of the Seattle IF meetup, and then played on my own later.
An accurate depiction of a controlling/abusive relationship, April 19, 2022Whew! This game brought back a lot of memories.
It's a game that doesn't take too long to play. You are a person with an abusive significant other, Alex (I read the protagonist as coded female and the antagonist as coded male, but the game is purposely ambiguous and uses they/them pronouns for Alex).
Alex does things that are expressed as being for your best interest, but really they are for their own selfish interest. Keeping your away from your friends and family on social media , moving to be closer to their family but away from your friends and family, constantly worried that you will cheat (yep), shaming you for interests they're not into. All of which I've experienced in real life.
Actually, contemplating this game made me zone out for about an hour, thinking about things, and I wrote a big personal essay about it and realized I never finished this review. I guess I'll have to give this game points for emotional impact, that's sure. I found the choice structure not as compelling, but I can't think of any recommendations for it. It has real interactivity and limited options, but I feel it could be somehow pushed a little more. Overall, a game that has unsettled me to my core.
Space-based twine game with some realistic images and procedures , April 17, 2022There is a long tradition in IF of space games where you start alone in or near a damaged space station and have to make it out alive or at least figure out what's happened. It's a genre I enjoy.
This one goes out of its way to focus on realistic aspects, something I haven't seen much before. A lot of images directly from NASA are used, as well as a variety of free images online that have been modified, with accompanying music.
Using airlocks requires a variety of processes, including exercising! Hadn't known that was a thing with pressure changes before.
I ran into a couple of issues with lists not lining up (numbers and text was mismatched) but I think that might just be my Chrome browser, as the same thing happened with a website my son was working on, so I don't think it's the author's fault.
The only thing I felt really lacking here was emotional engagement. The processes were interesting and clinical, and there were definitely places I could have hooked in emotionally (a picture of family, the loss of Commander Rico), but for whatever reason I just didn't feel that connection. Overall, well done scientific space adventure.
A complex meta-story about the struggle to exist and be seen in the IF world , April 17, 2022This game/narrative is one that references the IF world directly, something I'm always interested to see. I've played Bez's games since 2015 and been listening a lot on Twitter, so I was interested to see how things coalesce.
The result is a complex narrative similar in structure to last year's The Dead Account, but with very different content. Both games put you in the role of a moderator closing down the account of someone who's passed on, a kind of in-memoriam/Citizen Kane/Spoon River anthology review of someone's life and whether they are of worth.
What makes this game unusual is in its complex rewriting of reality and the IF world. It's a difficult feat to call out an entire community without calling out the individual people in it; to do so, Bez has created an entire false community replete with echoes of shadows of real people but which is so entirely different as to render it impossible to point fingers. This is a real feat; I feel like I've been embedded in the community under question here and played a role in many of these events but I couldn't point a finger at any person and say 'I know who that is!
For instance, the Jot Archive Volunteer Project is strongly reminiscent of both IFDB, the intfiction forums, twitter, and the old rec.arts.int-fiction forums and IFMUD. MrDear makes me thing of Ryan Veeder, Mr Patient/Sean Shore, Graham Nelson, etc.
The content of the game is several years worth of tweets or posts, describing a journey through games that is clearly (even mentioned as such in the author's note) Bez's own journey through the IF world, even if it doesn't always meet up one to one. Sometimes, the parallels are obvious (Bez's Queer in Public vs Algie's "Queer As F*** Because F*** You"), and other times its harder (there doesn't seem a clear parallel to the real 2020's Lore Distance Relationship, Bez's most popular game).
Points made about the community include:
-Twine is often overshadowed in big competitions by parser; even though there are clear outliers it remains the reality for most entrants
-Cis white males often have more success in IF with what seems to be less effort
-Due to the prominent position of some women in IF (which I'd assume would refer to both cis women like Emily Short and trans women like Porpentine), the marginalization of most people who aren't white cis men goes unnoticed
It's hard to disagree with those points.
Beyond that, there's some excellent quotes about writing games in general which I copied down:
"Making games is about giving somebody a hidey-hole to see my heart through if that makes sense? And nobody seems to really care about that imho."
I've often thought that IF and writing in general is a way of sharing a piece of your soul with someone. So I agree with that. But then he presents a new thought which hadn't occurred to me:
"But it is also only the version of me that was preserved at that time. AND does not mean you 100% know me or what I’m thinking. Unless I say it is all me in there, don’t assume that ffs."
I've never really thought about how media takes a snapshot of our current selves and saves it for the future, whether we want it to or not. I think that explains a lot of older authors wanting to remove things they wrote in the past that were objectionable or cringe.
And this is the last thing I copied down:
"I feel like my need for external approval is an ouroboros that will never EVER be fulfilled. Either I seek it and don't get it (often) or I seek it and do get the level I wanted (rare) but it ain't enough. My goal is so far away, and it keeps moving, so maybe I gotta lower my damn expectations—towards myself and in the IF world."
The end of the game concludes with Bez's current reality and deepest fears brought together to their possible end: the death of an author after a forgetting mind disease, followed by a second death when the community forgets him.
As a side note, I found it emotionally jarring when the game started with you helping an older IF figure to prune and delete people's old stuff, because that's what I'm actually doing in real life right now, working on a project where I close out people's old stuff that's no longer relevant. Fortunately, it's just bug reports, so no one's hard work or creative labor is being lost.
Assigning a rating to a game like this is behaving exactly like the narrative actors it contains, who judge and rank and sort and gatekeep. However, I am going to do so anyway:
+Polish: The game is thoroughly polished
+Descriptiveness: The writing is vivid and detailed.
+Emotional impact: clearly the game resonated with me
+Would I play again? I think so.
?Interacivity: On one hand, there's not much to do besides run through the list of things and then make a decision. On the other hand, the game itself talks about how stories don't have to be approached as systems first and stories later. On the other hand, I don't think I should give a high rating in a category just because the game calls it out. On the final hand, though, I wanted to rethink my decision at the end and spent a while reloading the page because there was no immediate reload, so it seems clear the interactivity worked for me at some level.
Lengthy tournament-based game with inspo from Rocky and Norse myths, April 16, 2022This is a quite long Twine game about preparing for and fighting in a cyborg boxing tournament.
It comes with custom images, styling and animations, mostly health bars moving up and down and some neater tricks near the end. It has music as well by a person called gigakoops which is pretty good.
The story is about a down-and-out boxer with a loved one needing medical attention. You, the boxer, get some aid from an old man in a run-down gym. Together you train for the big day when the tournament will begin.
Writing-wise, it's a competent and engaging blend of inspiration boxing movie and cyberpunk.
Choice-wise, I was a bit frustrated at first because so many choices were like 'yes', 'yes, but phrased differently', and 'yes, but even another way', with no 'no' in sight. I felt railroaded quite a bit at different times.
There is one major choice, which is which of three stats to focus on. This primarily comes into play late in the game, where high stats unlocking different paths.
The game has some nice narrative swerves, although one of the biggest ones was a double-swerve I didn't see coming. Also, norse mythology ties into the game more and more as the game continues.
Overall, here's what I think:
+Polish: The game is smooth and polished. There were a couple of bugs (my mom was referred to as 'he', and I almost clicked the 'restart' button because the menu moves up and down) but otherwise quite good for such a complex game.
+Descriptiveness: The descriptions were vivid.
-Interactivity: It pulled together at the end, but I felt confined for too much of the game.
+Emotional impact: I was into the story.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I'd like to see other paths.
Angelic intervention with a creepy father-like being, April 15, 2022This was a game of big contrasts for me. There were parts of it that were phenomenal and parts I struggled with.
This is a story about a young girl alone at home whose father is outside, texting her to let him in. The problem is, though, that her father was in the study just a little while ago.
I loved the writing in this. Vivid and surreal images mixed together for a very creepy feel. It reminded me of some goosebumps stories when I was younger, like the one where the dad was a plant scientist.
I had a couple of problems with the choice structure, though. Where I struggled the most was:
-It was hard to differentiate between 'side-topic choices' and 'move on' choices. There are two distinct kinds of choices in the story: pink boxes and in-line links. But sometimes an inline link was a 'moving on' choice and sometimes a 'side-topic', and you couldn't tell just from placement. The pink boxes looked a bit out of place, too.
-I felt out of sync with the options. Something scary would happen, and I'd think 'I have to get out!' but the options were always things like 'Hang out and explore' or 'eat some food'. For some reason I couldn't get my mind in sync with the character.
I love horror and find this writing style to be very enjoyable, so I'd definitely like to see more games from this author. I just hope that I'll be more in synch with the choice structure next time.
Shakespeare, twine, and time travel, April 15, 2022This fantasy twine game is modeled on Shakespeare's language and style of writing, and deals with bandits in search of a temple with a hidden treasure.
The story has some fascinating elements of time travel and Pictish culture, of which I learned many new things (one I didn't fully learn was the other name for Picts, and so I haven't used it here as I've forgot it).
There are some interesting mechanics, such as a variable amount of gold that you can bribe someone with, with varying results. The styling looks quite nice.
I didn't feel completely drawn into the game, for whatever reason. Partially it might be because some of the language was off, like using 'thy' as a subject or the '-st' suffix for the third person tense. I enjoy Shakespeare quite a bit too, and I feel it could have been a little closer.
Overall, though, the game feels quite polished and I expect that I would enjoy further works by this author.
A pleasant and engaging anagram game, April 14, 2022Out of the many wordplay games Andrew Schultz has made, the anagram ones are perhaps my favorites (along with Threediopolis). I feel like coming up with anagrams is hard enough to be fun but easy enough not to be overwhelming or send me to hints or online solvers right away.
This is a compact game, set on a circle (or torus) with 7 different locations. Each one is solvable through an anagram.
After that, there is a motion puzzle that is a little tricky to solve. What is going on, exactly? Well, it seems like they want you to (strong spoilers without an explicit solution) (Spoiler - click to show)visit every square of the torus, never moving more than half its length at once, and varying your steps somewhat.
It took me quite a while to figure out what was wanted here, as I kept finding solutions deemed 'too easy'.
Overall, I'd say this is a fairly challenging game, and definitely one not to miss for fans of the first two, longer games.
Clever and challenging twine puzzle game about a protagonist in pieces, April 14, 2022This author has a history of making highly-polished twine games with complex and robust systems.
This game is no exception. You play as a recently-reanimated skeleton in pieces, and have the capability of moving each piece independently.
The map is constrained at first but then slowly opens up in manageable pieces.
The complexity is quite high; you can play as your self, detach your parts and play as them, and command another character as well. There is an inventory which allows you to both use items on things in the room and to combine items together.
The story is light comedic fantasy with dramatic elements (maybe Polonius would call it tragical-comical-fantastical-dramatic). The light-heartedness is connected to gameplay as well, which lets you face certain scenes over and over if needed to give you time to think of a solution.
The complex nature of the inventory and pc-changing system proved pretty hard for me. A couple of times, I had the right idea for the solution, but didn't know how to implement it. As an example (major spoilers for kitchen puzzle), I knew that (Spoiler - click to show)the peppers were bad for the dog, so I tried to pick up my arm and the peppers and combine them to rub them on it. Then I tried dropping the arm while holding the peppers. I tried talking to the cook, but didn't realize I could switch characters while talking, and there is a later similar puzzle which doesn't allow character switching during a short scripted scene. These kinds of issues with playing are normal for me with parser games, but Twine games rarely reach such a level of complexity. Overall, I found it challenging in a good way, and can heartily recommend it (and need to remember to nominate it for some XYZZY awards next year).
A mildly raunchy comedy game about an insurance salesman, April 14, 2022This is a one-room parser game with a lot of little and big gags in it. You are an insurance salesman waiting for a noble Baroness to arrive to sell insurance too.
In the meantime, though, several mishaps occur, each more ridiculous than the last.
Like others, I found the ending abrupt and thought there might be more. Decompiling the source code, I could find no solution to (Spoiler - click to show)the burning curtains, while at least one other reviewer found that reaching the part of the game with more points gave an alternate ending.
Our male character has a sexual fixation with the baroness, and it crops up enough that I personally found it annoying, as I don't associate such material with positive feelings.
Overall, the comedic timing was well-done, and outside of the ending I found the puzzles not too hard and also engaging.
Branching mini-stories over coffee, April 13, 2022This is a Bitsy game with 6 different main paths. Bitsy is a visual equivalent to Twine, using simple graphics and arrow keys, although this particular game has some more elaborate images.
Instead of moving a character like most Bitsy games, you navigate a conversation menu. It's a rainy day, and you walk in to see an old friend you haven't seen through years. Different conversations seem to give completely different friends; or do they? There's another thread at the end which is interesting.
Overall, I found this game polished, descriptive, and the interactivity matched its length. I don't think I'd play it again, but it was emotionally interesting to me.
An exuberant and amusing dog-team-up Adventuron game, April 13, 2022This game reminds me of what you'd get if you mixed the 'buddies' movies (like Space Buddies) with Secret Life of Pets and Sherlock Holmes but both characters are Watson.
You are a dog on a leash. You like you're owner, but don't want to be on a leash. You escape, and eventually find another dog.
Then the game opens up into a huge map, with I swear 30+ locations. Many farcical situations arise, including things like kick-flips, ollies, pretending to be a dog mannequin, wearing a dog bow-tie, and an enormous chunk at the end where you (Spoiler - click to show)stop a burglary of a museum.
It's a very long Adventuron game, one of the most complex I've seen. It's charming and funny.
My biggest sticking point was just not knowing what to do. Different IF communities have different conventions on what's considered 'fair play'. Most games I spend a lot of time around with (like old IFComp games) tend to only use standard verbs or verbs directly mentioned in the text. In this game, I had to fiddle around for a while, especially with an embarrassingly long 20 minute session I had trying to solve the first puzzle. I didn't want to resort to hints, but after that, I used them copiously.
I especially used hints later on because the game often sets up and plays out hilariously funny scenes but with little motivation. As a hypothetical example (not in the game), it'd be like hearing an alien is attacking the city, and then you see a line of dominos leading into an alleyway. Pushing the dominoes would tumble them down, and then you'd discover there's a giant cannon in the alleyway which the dominos trigger, shooting and defeating the alien. This is an absurd example not in the game, but illustrates the kind of logic: it makes sense in hindsight, but otherwise it's kind of hard to guess that you need to do it.
This is a common issue with humor games, where you have to balance player participation with setting up good punchlines. For my part, I enjoyed the humor and am willing to sacrifice a little agency for it.
I did experience one difficult bug, near the end. When I had succeeded in the biggest task of the game, (Spoiler - click to show)foiling the robbery, I dragged the robber out of the water and tried to lead the police to the museum. I got lost though and accidentally re-triggered the water scene in an infinite loop. I got out of the infinite loop by reloading my browser window, which took me back to my previous turn, and going a different direction.
Overall, a fun romp, one of the most enjoyable long Adventuron games, and highly recommended.
A twisted mashup of fairy tales with light but engaging puzzles, April 12, 2022This game manages to strike a fine balance between puzzle and story, giving fairly easy puzzles with a lot of 'oh, I know where this goes but I can't use it yet' moments. It reminds me of Ryan Veeder's work in that way.
This game is a mashup of many fairytales, including the 'three brothers' theme, three challenges, and stories like Snow White, Rapunzel, the musicians of Bremen, and many of the lesser-known Grimm's Fairytales.
It decides to show the darker side of many of these, with the darkest presented as exactly in the books. One lean I felt uncomfortable with was (Spoiler - click to show)the option to marry a prepubescent girl, but after reading the notes and remembering the original tales there's a good chance that was in the original stories.
The game has an interesting relationship between the player, narrator and player character, with a lot of dramatic irony (in the original sense of the audience knowing what's going on without the character doing so). This thing has been done before, but rarely in such a polished and enjoyable game.
Overall, the game feels effortlessly fun, but a great deal of work must have happened underneath to make this happen. Puzzles give you increasingly strong hints if you are stuck, a feature found in games like Coloratura and part of my own philosophy.
Large text dumps are fairly common, but read easily and are mostly based on the fairy tales.
I can strongly recommend this game, and enjoyed it quite a bit, perhaps the most I've enjoyed an IF this year.
A fantasy story about two kids in the underworld, April 11, 2022This is a long Twine game about a young woman who's had a very difficult life finding her younger brother being sucked into a mysterious portal by a dark creature.
Following her brother, she enters a mysterious world filled with destruction and many malevolent entities. Her brother's life is at stake, and there's not much time left.
As the author puts it, this is a narrative-focused game and eschews large-scale branching, but manages to find numerous ways to test the player.
Puzzles come in two varieties: riddles, which are either type-in or choice-based from a huge list of options; and using a color-based system where some colors in the game always signify the same thing (kind of like (Spoiler - click to show)circles in Sorcery 2).
Overall, the writing is earnest and deals with a lot of childhood trauma. Emotions are plainly spelled out, and overall it reminds me a bit of Steven Universe (crying breakfast friends) or She-ra in terms of the emotional notes it reaches for. The emotions didn't land quite as effectively for me as in those two examples, though.
There were some unusual word choices in the game that were jarring, like using the phrase 'he was made into a room' instead of 'he went into a room'. It could be cleaned up a little bit grammar-wise; I would give it 4 stars if that happened.
Overall, I felt like it was a worthwhile investment of time, and I was glad to play it. I've enjoyed the author's other games and hope that they continue the trend of releasing fun and meaningful games.
An ultra-surreal game about hypercubes, Berkeley, and set theory, April 10, 2022This is the third game by this duo, the other two in the past having been very long, surreal games, one of which reflected a psychotic break and really felt like what such a thing would be to experience.
This game starts with the first author confessing that he/she (both pronouns are used) made sexual advances to their trans step son whom they've lived with for 9 years, and that it has ruined the partnership of the two authors, after most of this game had been written, and that the author is trying to make up for it.
Much of this game isn't real, so it's hard to know if this is, but it certainly seems so, which is sobering and disturbing.
The rest of the game focuses mostly on a few recurring themes:
-The idea of very large cardinal sets and non-principal ultrafilters on them. This is an area of math that is extremely abstract, especially since (as mentioned by the author) most of these things are non-constructible and cannot be proven to exist in any meaningful way under normal mathematical assumptions.
-The author's life at the Lothlorien coop in Berkeley, which still exists and houses people today.
-The idea of using psychic energy to communicate with Hong Kong singer Deng Ziqi telepathically.
-The author's relationship with Staci (who I believe is also Maev?)
The game is laid out on a six-dimensional hypercube, corresponding to 6 binary digits, corresponding to the 6 cardinal directions N,E,S,W,U, and D. Unlike most games and real life, N and S are not opposites and have no relation to each other. Instead, going North cancels itself out, so going N twice will bring you back to where you started.
Not all 64 options are filled; about 20 or so are empty 'unfinished' rooms. One room had its connections backwards (so that going U and D changed the N and S bits), which may or may not be intentional. The room names are based on the binary numbers.
In the rooms are found items, one at a time or zero. There are lots of scenery objects described in the text but none are implemented.
I received around 432 points (I think) out of 530 or so. There is no overarching goal outside of 'binding' some items together in a chain, which just gives more points. One room contains a complete walkthrough for the bindings.
Overall, as a game it continues the glimpse into a surreal world offered by the previous games, but the confession at the beginning overshadows everything else and renders it all heartbreaking.
High quality twine puzzler about French art heists, April 9, 2022I had some trepidation approaching this game, as, based on the last Lady Thalia game, I assumed it would be:
-long,
-complex,
-requiring a great deal of thought,
-engaging,
and thus require some special time set aside. And I was right! If anything, this game exceeds the last one in all those categories.
You play two different women this time: one, the infamous lady thief Lady Thalia; the other, a policewoman named Margaret Williams, somewhat stodgy but dependable. Together, you are teaming up to stop a rival art thief who is obsessed with royal privilege and the trappings of aristocracy.
Play alternates between playing as Margaret, who investigates and prepares, and Lady Thalia, who follows up on Margaret's leads. There's a point system (which is humorously lampshaded in-game), and sub-systems including a relationship tracker between the two leads.
There are a variety of puzzles, with the most consistent one being a conversational system where you can choose between being flattering, direct, and leading someone one; most conversations give you 3 chances to find the 'right one', with a bonus if you get all 3 right.
The other puzzles for the most part involve retaining information from earlier and using contextual clues. There is a complex save system which allows for easy restoration (I did this quite a bit), but some choices have significant delays, so a perfect playthrough is quite difficult.
The characters are bold and well-written, and I'd consider this among the best crime/heist Twine games.
A trans lesbian coffeeshop post-apocalyptic portal story, April 9, 2022This game is a lot of things all at once.
Perhaps the majority of it is wish-fulfillment, of a sorts. Your character is a nervous, self-doubting trans woman with major executive processing issues, and the biggest storyline is about a girl you've had a crush on for years turning out to have a crush on you too and the two of you flirting, with her being deeply accepting of everything about you including your transness and disability. This is contrasted with your family and society (represented by an institution) who accepts neither of these things.
Overlayed on this is another storyline, that of the world having already ended and a messenger of light from Hell (I think?) having become entangled in your dreams.
Overall, the game does a good job of sketching distinct characters and their personalities. There were enough small typos here and there to be noticeable (wish I had written them down, but forgot). There are some bursts of strong profanity, mostly used to express anxiety (including the first screen). The game has a lot of references to attraction and making out but is generally non-explicit except for a segment describing the character's own body, from the lens of their satisfaction (or lack of) with her appearance.
Overall, I think this game appeals most to one's sense of longing for acceptance and belonging, which is fairly universal. And in that sense, I would say it's a successful story.
A chilling and well-researched ghost story in Manitoba, April 7, 2022This is an Adventuron game set in the plains of Manitoba. It involves research about local plants and wildlife and about Ukrainians who emigrated to Canada.
It also contains a jumpscare, so fair warning! Scared me quite a bit. Just the one scare, though.
Overall, it's a well-done horror story that is elevated by the obvious research and care into the background details. It has 10 different achievements, of which I found 8.
Overall:
*Polish: I didn't run into any parser problems, the art is well-done and the prose is smooth.
*Descriptiveness: A lot of vivid imagery and attention to detail.
*Interactivity: I liked the open-endedness of the achievements but also always had something to do.
*Emotional impact: Pretty scary, although 80% of it was the jumpscare.
*Would I play again? Yeah, I think I could.
A graphics-assisted parser-choice hybrid time travel game, April 7, 2022This game uses the Strand engine, which is the same engine (or a related one) used to put the Magnetic Scrolls games on the web. It features a parser but most interactions are through choices. The majority of non-choice interactions are typing the name of an object to give or WAITing. It features numerous images as well. For me, the images were larger than the screen size, requiring some scrolling that obscured some of the text.
This game reminds me of Steve Meretzky games, like Leather Goddesses of Phobos or his later graphical games. You play as a nerdy programmer who runs into tons of women, all of whom look like 'sexy' Halloween costumes (sexy pirate, sexy robot, etc.). There are references to sexbots and wanting to kiss the nerdy programmer, so it has a lot of that 'nerd gets the girls' vibe from 80's and 90's films and games. It has a shop called '9/11'instead of '7/11', which, I thought, 'Is that a September 11 reference?', but I thought probably not. But then the clerk there is named Abdul, which could be a pretty weird Sep. 11 reference, a stereotype about shop owners, or just a coincidence.
Gameplay consists of warping to different time periods and solving puzzles that are mostly about puzzling out patterns through trial and error. There are a lot of combinations and the puzzles seem designed to take some time, and I ended up using the walkthrough fairly soon.
The themes and messages didn't really gel with me, and I would have preferred a little smaller pictures to give the text more room. I appreciate the technical design that went into the game and can imagine several people who I think would enjoy it significantly.
A sprawling Twine game about a sprawling house and alienation, April 6, 2022I always enjoy a good story about a strange house that changes over time; I haven't read House of Leaves, but I've seen many games and stories cite it as an inspiration. Others I've seen include Map by Ade McTavish, Aaron Reed's novel Subcutaneous and the Backrooms urban legend.
This novel focuses on the 'house grows larger' largely as a metaphor for relationships, shown in individual vignettes (I'm sorry for making constant comparisons, but the vignette system reminds me of Spoon River Anthology, a story told entirely through gravestones).
People come into the house and find themselves changed, some losing friends, some losing each other, some arguing, some finding friendship, but the house always grows.
Overall, I found it polished and satisfying. The only thing I had trouble with was occasionally not really knowing what to do next (especially around the orange juice), and not knowing when the game would end. The narrative arc kind of meanders around, like the house itself. Otherwise, I found this to be a solid and thoughtful story.
A ghost story used to contemplate unhealthy relationships, March 31, 2022This is a thoughtful game, a mostly-linear ghost story about a roommate that haunts the place and about relationships and our dealings with the others.
I liked the writing in this, it's really about turning an inner eye on ourselves and seeing the bad habits and unhealthy relationships that we have let become so natural that we can't even see them anymore.
It also has an interesting take on ghosts, similar to but slightly different from most representations I've seen in media.
Amazing concept and potential but overall missing; horror story, March 17, 2022This a a very well-written but overall unstrusctured short, linear twine story about a funeral home late at night, and a cat.
It cites influences like House of Leaves, and has a bilingual protagonist, with the game including vivid details of a Hispanic family's life and culture. The protagonist is relatable and there's some great scene-by-scene writing.
This setup gave me huge expectations, but the story ends with a very quick infodump and sudden ending with nothing but a 'start over' link. It felt like it was missing a third of it; the ending could have worked with more middle exposition, or it could have worked with a longer denouement, but I was left feeling unsatisfied. But I would love to read more by this author, as I love the style.
A deep dive into an erratic and selfish character (a squirrel), March 16, 2022This is a weird game.
It's a unity-based visual novel with some video title cards, jazz music (or maybe ragtime?) and static cut-outs of animals.
You play as what I can only describe as a deeply disturbed squirrel, one out of touch both with the thoughts and emotions of others but also with physical reality itself.
While the game isn't super long (about 5 or 6 vignettes), each explores a dark facet of the human existence. It feels like the 'depressing half' of Anna Karenina (the one centered on Anna, as opposed to Kitty and Levin).
But in the end, even a narcissistic and untethered-to-reality squirrel deserves to live and has some human worth, and is perhaps deserving of love (although this goes against the squirrels own desires, so maybe not).
All in all, I didn't expect the pieces of this game to fall together for me the way they did, but I think I'll end up contemplating this for a while.
Extremely relatable writer simulator, March 14, 2022This is a game from the recent 'Running out of Ink' itch anthology.
In this Twine story, you play as a tired author who just moved out of her parents' house and is trying to write a story over 3 days. Your choices during each of the three days affects the resulting story, which you can read at the end.
A lot of it is very relatable; trying to manage your creative output by procrastinating through playing games (something I've been doing myself except with writing reviews), writing for the 'wrong outlet' (where you are verbose) instead of the 'right one' (where you get stuck). I especially related to listening to podcasts while playing grindy games (I can highly recommend mixing the Magnus Archives podcast with Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies).
The character is depicted clearly and the variable story at the end is neat (the code for it is basically a time cave, with three possible first pages, 9 second, 27 third, etc. approximately).
My only caveats are that the game could be tidier. Paragraphs run together; I'd rather see each new paragraph indented or a full line left between them, like the finished story at the end. And there were a couple of noticeable typos (like 'to' for 'two') that could be caught by using Twine's text dump feature and running the result through Grammarly.
A claustrophobic exploration game about mystery, science and love , March 13, 2022This game is part of the Running out of Ink: Limited Spaces anthology recently released on itch.
The story is about you, a youth who discovers a mysterious door in the forest. You are barred from entering, but when you return as an adult, no one can hold you back.
Gameplay is centered on finding journal entries and tapes. The tapes have very nice voice acting, although I was playing around my kid and the first tape started with some loud profanity, so I ended up just reading the thoughtfully-provided transcripts instead lol.
The feel of the game is simultaneously full of terror but also calm. All of the damage is in or from the past. There are lots of spiders, claustrophobic situations, darkness, hints of obsession, etc.
There are some puzzles in play. The first puzzle completely stumped me. I was flabbergasted, not knowing if I had enough info. Then I realized (moderate-to-strong hint)(Spoiler - click to show)certain parts of the documents are highlighted.
Overall, I found the storytelling high-quality, professional tier; this reads like a sci-fi story in an anthology you'd see displayed at a Barnes and Noble table. The design and layout are custom Twine that look very nice, especially the tapes.
Overall, it's a strong game. I don't know if I'd replay it; while every piece was strong, games also some times need a je ne sais quoi that ties it all together, and for me I didn't get that overarching sense of completion that would make a game perfect. But it is a game I can recommend and praise.
A hard-hitting series of vignettes about androids and white male culture, February 22, 2022This 2022 French IFComp game really reminded me of 60s and 70s science fiction books of my dad's, which often had hard-hitting social issues not as an allegory but as the main feature of the story, with the science fiction only serving to shed light on the bigger issue.
This game is about androids but also about young white men, incel culture, etc.
In 5 short vignettes (and an epilogue), we encounter a growing number of young men who are convinced that they are not human, but are, in fact, androids.
But strangely it is only androids, and not gynoids. No minorities think they are androids either.
It's worth reading. For a non-native speaker, it felt long, but it was around 7K words total in my playthrough, so definitely doable. Gave me a lot of thoughts and taught me a lot about French slang and 'cuisine bretonne'.
Your choices in each story generally are about choosing between making a situation more volatile or making things more calm. The interactivity felt a little weak; occasionally it seemed clear my choices were doing something to the story but often it didn't feel that way. The excellent writing did a lot to mitigate that.
An ink implementation of the famous opera in French, February 22, 2022This is an entrant into the 2022 French IFComp. It is a prologue that covers the first scene or so of Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte.
It's very appealing visually, with a detailed backdrop and avatars for speakers.
Overall, I found it solid, but I felt less capable of making decisions that change the story. Most options were about reacting, with a few important actions. I wasn't sure if anything was being tracked, but at the end it listed my stats and showed that I had changed things a bit. It might be good to have a way to check that more often in the finished game!
A smoothly polished French game with Moiki engine and dark Bohemian themes, February 21, 2022Though just a demo, this a pleasant experience overall.
It uses a custom interface that is made with Moiki, a system I've never seen before but which seems like a smooth, stats-based hyperlink system with good graphics integration. My first impression is 'choicescript mechanics and Twine styling options', but I'm not sure how accurate that is.
Game-wise, I'm going to call it 'Bohemian' as it's focused heavily on wine, food, culture and literature. It has some darker undertones as well.
The stats at first felt like perhaps they weren't used very much, but as the game progressed I saw them more. It was a bit odd seeing some choices where you have to be good at a stat to use them, but your reward is just more of that stat (I swear I read an Emily Short post where she calls this 'rich get richer'). But the demo didn't last long enough to show the long game, so it's possible this won't be a problem in the long run.
My only other (small) complaint is that the text when gaining something special just flashes on the screen for a second, so I (a non-native speaker) couldn't finish reading it.
Otherwise, a good story, reminding me of an Edgar Allan Poe story adapted by someone who owns a vineyard.
Classic fantasy adventure in branching French twine form, February 21, 2022This is entry in French IFComp 2022 written in Twine.
You sign up to be an adventurer, giving your name, age, description, etc., and get to choose between swords and magic.
The game has an odd structure. It splits in wildly different directions a lot, like a Time Cave, but many of them are dead ends, like a Gauntlet, but the ones that don't often allow you to visit one of the other main branches.
The writing is classic fantasy, with wizards and wyverns. While pleasant, I didn't feel a strong emotional connection to the game. And some of the structure I feel could be improved; there is only one save slot, and no undo, and if you reach a good ending while you have a full save slot, there's no way to start over without clearing your cache. And on my chrome browser, there was a graphical glitch with scrollbars appearing out of nowhere.
But it was enjoyable enough if you just want a bit of fun on an afternoon.
A complex game with some progress but seemingly many bugs, February 21, 2022This is a game I'd happily replay in a better state and which is fairly descriptive. However, I had numerous problems with it that I'm not sure are solvable.
This is the author's first IF, and takes place on an island you sail to in a canoe. On the island you can disembark and discover a huge, bustling city with a complex web of possible trades and an economy.
It's a very cool idea. The problem is the bugs. The author had to try and work around several implementation issues and their solutions don't always make sense. For instance, instead of typing HELP or AIDE for help, there is a manual floating by you you read. Similarly, the walkthrough is just an item in a different room you can read, and so is an 'indice'.
The canoe isn't a vehicle you enter; instead you have to TAKE the canoe to use it. There is an object that guides you through the forest but it is purposely left vague and it disappears from your hand at some point.
More distressingly, the seashells used as currency seem to disappear as soon as you enter the village, which means I can't give them to anyone. Rats also appear which you can kill for money, but they are seemingly random and also pretty uncommon after the first one.
Over all, it has cool ideas and I would like to see a more polished version, but I had to give up.
A brief but imaginative French Dialog game about mirrored secrets, February 20, 2022This game is most likely the first Dialog game written in French (for the 2022 French IFComp). As someone who's currently writing an English Dialog game, I was intrigued by this.
The author admittedly had to rush this game, but it feels pretty smooth overall. I only found one error message not translated ('You can't go in that direction', I think). I did feel like a lot of synonyms and alternate solutions were missing (especially for [mild early spoiler](Spoiler - click to show)trying to get the shining object stuck in the rubble; I tried PRENDRE, PRENDRE AVEC BRANCHE, POUSSER AVEC BRANCH, etc.). Thankfully, there's a walkthrough.
Story wise, your mother always told you sweet stories about a mirrored princess in an enchanted land. But when she dies, the journals she leaves you have notes and maps that indicate it all may be true.
I found the story quite cute and liked the ending. If the game were polished a bit more I think it would be quite good, despite its brevity.
A rich and complex surreal French twine game about identity , February 19, 2022This is an interesting game from the 2022 French IFComp. You wake up in the back of a limo having lost all of your memories and have to discover who you are and where you are going.
It's written in Twine using a retro-looking font (appropriate for the name Retrospection, but not otherwise pertinent to the story).
Perspective and identity are a major component of the game. Both first and second person are used, as are gender-neutral french language (the pronouns iel/lea, as well as ending adjectives with .e like 'fiancé.e'). Your opinion of yourself evolves as memories trickle.
This game is a good example of how 'bad' design principles can work well if used judiciously. This game contains examples of 'gauntlet' design (where you have to pass certain trials and need to restart if you 'fail'), as well as having large chunks of non-interactive text that fills the whole page. Despite this, the large chunks are well-written, and the game is structured in a way that replay is quick and not tedious.
The game even includes a very fun visually interactive element a (spoilers for mechanics but not content (Spoiler - click to show)jigsaw puzzle), and possibly more; there are many endings, of which I saw two 'losing' endings and one ending I consider a 'winning' ending (mega spoilers for content)(Spoiler - click to show)deciding I wasn't worthy to return to life.
A French Ink horror/slasher game with several puzzle elements, February 19, 2022This is an entry in the 2022 French IFComp written in Ink. It starts off in an intense situation in a haunted house before flashing back to 'how it all started'.
It includes several possible relationships, the possibility of death for you and others, and a lot of state tracking. A typical portion of gameplay is reaching a room or series of rooms with the option of looking at several different sub areas. In each sub area, you can grab an object to use or attempt some kind of action. Keys are common.
The storyline and puzzles are satisfyingly good; I think both could stand to be improved and rely too heavily on tropes. However, I found the characters interesting and the puzzles much more fun than most Ink games.
There are few bugs (I think I found one about a drawer being stuck but it tells you what's in it anyway?). Overall, I found it mostly polished, pretty descriptive, interesting interactivity, emotional impact from exciting scenes, but probably won't play again.
A unique concept involving a journal and a strange mechanic, February 17, 2022This is a French IFComp game.
I think a lot of the interesting parts of this game come from the first few moments, so I'll put most of the review in spoilers in case you want to try it out real quick. I can say that it should be apparent fast what is going on, and that the first few seconds are interesting, and that the comma in the game title is not a typo.
(Spoiler - click to show)This is a game where you have to type out journal entries over several 'days'. The twist is that the entries are pre-determined: you have to guess what someone would type in a journal and hope that you're typing what they want you to. Every character you get wrong (including punctuation!) deducts a point. Every correct word adds a point up to 50. When you lost all 50 points, you have to restart that day.
The game doesn't last too long, so it can be completed in one sitting. This was intimidating, though, as a non-native speaker, but there are mechanics that help with that over time. The game did pull a couple of tricks on m though.
+Polish: The game is very polished.
+Interactivity: It was weird and I don't think it would work for other games, but I liked it in this one.
-Descriptiveness: The actual text was quite vague.
+Emotional impact: I was impressed by the cleverness.
-Would I play again? Not much replay value.
Cool new system, but lots of rough edges in this brief fantasy game, February 17, 2022This French IF Comp game has you sent as a spy to an alchemists lair to search for evidence of misdeeds.
You are equipped with a camera of sorts to take images of suspicious things. There are several secrets to find and a few hints of world-building.
This is written in the Donjon language, a native French language alternative to Inform 7 but also done in natural language. The file can be read in plain text, which I had to resort to to solve it.
My experience with the implementation was mixed. Playing IF in a language I'm not completely fluent in is always a challenge. It was hard to tell if something was implemented weird or if I was the one who was being weird.
But here are a few things that I think are definitely the game's issue:
-Several nouns are mentioned but not implemented. For instance, a desk has notes on it, but the game doesn't recognize 'notes'. In the end game, there are (Spoiler - click to show)chains but trying to 'regarder' them or 'prendre' them makes the game confused.
-There's a big issue with the 'taking' code: (Spoiler - click to show)the source code has special results if you 'deplacer' the rug or the alembic, but the game also lets you just 'prendre' those things without triggering the special event.
-Many objects have an adjective+noun name, but you have to type both. I became deeply frustrated with a 'livre verte' because I couldn't P Livre or P Verte.
So, overall, I thought the worldbuilding was cool and the camera device. But the frustration prevented a totally enjoyable experience.
Edit: as a side note, I had a little trouble due to my silly american keyboard not having any accent symbols. I got around it by copying and pasting words from the text, though.
A game about divorce and loss told through shifting perspectives, February 16, 2022This is a well-coded TADS game about coming to grab your things from an empty house after a divorce.
Play primarily revolves around exploration and discovery of key items that advance the story in some way.
The theme is about divorce, loss, and 'what might have been?' I took these themes seriously, as I am recently divorced and could understand some of what the narrator was going through.
This is a pretty messy divorce, though. Unhealthy events and actions abound. The narrator is regretful, of course, but regret can only take you so far, and I think that's one of the main themes here.
Overall, the mechanics and story work for me, but there are a few sticking points here and there. I had a lot of difficulty getting started. The game provides no hints, and takes the position that players should take careful notes and that some info won't be repeated. I figured things out in the end but I was frustrated (spoiler for main mechanic: (Spoiler - click to show)more specifically, I noticed that some objects wouldn't go through the shadow, so I thought none could, and didn't try taking the soil through. I thought I had left the shards behind and the pot appeared, so it too me a while to realize what was going on).
For the story, I felt like things were perhaps spelled out a bit too much for my personal taste. This is a real, visceral story, but I feel like a lot of art that I find 'magnificent' has a sort of ambiguity to it that allows you to draw many interpretations from it. Having our feelings and reactions to everything and the 'meaning' of it all spelled out at the end felt somewhat restrictive.
Overall, I think people who play this will be pleased, especially for those looking for mild but non-trivial puzzles mixed with emotional storytelling.
Quest through time and space, with a Hans Christian Andersen setting, February 6, 2022This game takes the classic, depressing/sacrifical tale of the little matchgirl and uses it as a setting for a larger story.
In the original story, each match a girl lit gave her another vision of brighter things. In this game, each match is used to teleport to the user to...whatever location Ryan was interested in talking about that day?
The overall puzzle structure is fairly lenient; it is generally a fetch quest, and each task can almost always be solved by brute force, but has internal logic.
+Polish: The game is smooth. I had a couple of issues with synonyms here and there (literally can't remember what, but it was me typing dumb stuff), but the vast majority of possible actions I tried worked great.
+Descriptiveness: Very clear and easily envisioned settings and characters.
+Interactivity: The quest structure is simple, but I felt allowed to go off the rails at times.
+Emotional impact: It didn't have quite the gut punch of the original, but was more fun.
+Would I play again? Sure!
An iteration adding a strength-based puzzle, February 4, 2022I think this will end my journey through the iterative puzzle games in this series. I hesitated last game due to some graphic material (a dwarf that was (Spoiler - click to show)hanging by a noose), and this game includes some drug-related activity; put together, it feels like a kind of humor I'm not into, kind of like the Unnkulia series from the early 90's.
This iteration is much more reserved than the last. It adds a few simple items to a previously empty area in the midgame. Again, it can be difficult to figure out which commands to use. I feel like the previous episode may be better overall.
Edit: I see the next one's tagline is 'can you polish a turd' so I feel justified in assuming this vein of humor will continue.
Much bigger game with dwarven subplot and some disturbing parts, February 4, 2022I suppose I should say that this game might need a warning for either suicide or lynching, depending on how you interpret it (there is a (Spoiler - click to show)dwarf hanging from a noose), which honestly felt unnecessary.
This update adds a very large area with interesting mechanics including scoopable items, an NPC with several requirements, timed actions, and flame. However, very precise commands are required. I had to decompile the game to discover that the necessary command for an important action was (Spoiler - click to show)BURN something WITH FLAME and not just BURN SOMETHING).
However, that whole dwarven area can be skipped. I didn't even know what the purpose of it was till I decompiled; apparently its final item (the (Spoiler - click to show)axe) is meant to solve the puzzle of the (Spoiler - click to show)nest with a doorknob in it, which you have to cut down, but you can just take that object directly.
That said, this is a pretty significantly large game now. It's pretty rough with implementation and needs polishing (several beta testers would have helped) but has come a long way from the original game, which was just two rooms with a locked door and a key.
Some fiendish puzzles with implementation problems, February 4, 2022This iterative game series (each building on the one before it) has gotten to some pretty clever puzzles. I especially enjoy the puzzle that leads to (mild spoilers (Spoiler - click to show)the axe).
Implementation issues are rife, though. To complete it, I had to use the follow non-standard verbs (moderate spoilers): (Spoiler - click to show)SNIP, use BLANK with BLANK, and POUR.
While the increasing puzzle size has made the game quite a bit more enjoyable, I almost with we were seeing multiple levels of polish and implementation instead, with less and less bugs and more fanciness. But the problem with that is that minimalist content is easy to add; its complexity is linear, with a small change in size requiring a small change in coding. But smooth programming is quadratic; making a very polished game requires coding in tons of interactions between different items and things, adding responses to everything players try, getting a lot of testers, etc. So I'm not sure it would work in practice to show that through a series of games.
Bigger and fancier but messier, February 4, 2022This edition of the iterative series (each adding new material to the previous game) adds quite a few new rooms and makes previous interactions require more direct input.
However, most of the new rooms are quite sparse, and the new syntax for things isn't always clear (for instance, it took me a while to figure out how to use the (Spoiler - click to show)grabber). Also, it includes exits that are indicated in the status bar but not the text, which I find annoying in most games. Overall, though, I'm still interested in seeing what's next.
The sage continues: multiple npcs and bigger spaces, February 4, 2022This edition of the iterative game series (each one building on the code of the last) improves on the premise by including a new reactive NPC (Rex, a dog who follows you) and incorporating light and a dark subterranean area.
There are still unfixed bugs or quality of life issues from the past that likely won't get fixed in future updates (like 'bathroom' being lower case or disambiguation issues with keys), but it's pretty fun seeing all the things you can do.
As an individual game, 2 stars. As part of the series, 3 stars.
Lengthy Lovecraftian horror game in the vein of Anchorhead, February 4, 2022There is a long tradition of big Lovecraftian games in IF (Theatre, Anchorhead, The King of Shreds and Patches, Lydia's Heart, Ecdysis, etc.) This is one of the most recent such entries, and one I beta tested.
The setting is that you are moving to a new city for a scholarship at a foreign university. You move into an old, isolated house and all sorts of strange occurrences start to happen.
This is a sprawling game, including big locations (including a town and a village), and includes complicated set-piece puzzles like big machines and run-ins with cultists.
Overall, there's a rich background and detailed writing. To me, the thing I struggled with the most was the pacing. Some major events take place as almost-instantaneous cutscenes, especially early on, while more mundane things get dragged out unnecessarily at times. Still, this is a solid and enjoyable game, and I can recommend it to people looking for more good Lovecraftian games.
Audiovisual puzzle game investigating a rogue Joan of Arc AI, January 26, 2022I beta tested this game.
This is a pretty long choice-based game with an expansive map. Each room has about 1 puzzle on average. The majority of the puzzles are the same: The screen is divided into 4 invisible stripes. Moving your mouse up and down will cue an animation filling that stripe (generally a sound wave) and play a sound. One sound will be different from the others; you must click that one.
There are other puzzles from time to time.
In addition, there are save terminals and other points that play scenes from the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc while a synthetic voice reads text in a heavy french accent.
The idea is that an AI company cloned/re-made Joan of Arc to use for commercial benefit, but things went wrong. You learn more as the game progresses, of course.
There are enemies, and defeating them drops 'bits' that you can use to buy shortcuts.
It's really clever and polished, and very descriptive. But the interactivity is a bit tedious, especially when re-crossing an area over and over again. For that reason, I've never fully replayed it after testing, but played the first few rooms again before writing this review.
A compact but tricky multi-stage puzzle to open a door, January 24, 2022This series of games starts with a simple puzzle in the first entry (just a locked door) but adds puzzles every time.
This entry is quite complex compared to earlier entries, with a broad map, numerous tools and items, an NPC, easter eggs, etc.
However, some bugs and typos have crept in, like 'bathroom' being lower case and some synonyms not being set (like for the (Spoiler - click to show)safe, where 'set' and 'turn' don't work but 'turn' does).
So the game isn't polished, but it is more descriptive and compelling than the others.
The third iteration of a minimalist game, with a real puzzle, January 24, 2022This version of the Locked Door series (which adds more and more puzzles to the original) introduces the first real puzzle, although its fairly simple.
Rather than the original two rooms, there are now 5, with one room included in another.
There was a bug in this one, where trying to (Spoiler - click to show)open the crate without (Spoiler - click to show)the crowbar will (Spoiler - click to show)increase the score and partially act like you have the crowbar but not open. Given the smallness of the game, I think it could have been error-free.
Slightly more complex than the first game, January 24, 2022This game is part of an iterative series, where every new episode builds on the last.
This one adds an NPC and requires a single somewhat complex interaction, as well as making the final room one step longer. It's reasonably well polished, and I was amused/intrigued by the iterative concept, making it more emotionally impactful than the first.
Almost the smallest game possible with a locked door, January 24, 2022This game is essentially one of the coding examples from the Inform manual. It consists of two rooms, one with a locked door and a key. There are no real surprises; decompiling shows no hidden content.
The game is polished, but is not descriptive, has little interactivity, low emotional impact, and I wouldn't really play again. According to my rating system, it's 1 star.
A criticism of fast-and-easy sloganistic political theories, January 22, 2022This is a fairly abstract Ink game (and one that I helped beta test).
In it, you play as a college student roped into a demonstration about Smart Theory. The speaker goes off for quite a while about smart theory, and you can choose between making snarky comments, playing along or being passive.
The Smart Theory is a parody of political theories. As presented, it could apply to both American political parties. Some digs seem aimed at one specific side (for instance, the huckster is selling a book called Dumb Fragility, which from the in-game explanation seems like a riff on liberals talking about white fragility), but it could apply to just about any political theory.
Overall, it has several humorous moments and works smoothly. However, I thought the random nonsense words didnt' work as well (like Bathcunk) and would have preferred more chances to act.
An artist seeks for balance between light and dark, January 22, 2022This is an ink game in six chapters, each around 4 or 5 choices long. Each choice gives a page full of material.
You are an artist filled with self-doubt. You won a competition, earning you prize money and using that to get to Rome, but once there you have no inspiration for your painting.
Every where you go, two creatures follow you: one light, one dark. You have to choose who to feed.
There are 5 endings. One ending is the 'true path', containing almost 50% more material than the others; one is the worst path, containing much less content than any other. I reached all endings except for 'balanced'.
I enjoyed the vivid descriptions of art in Rome, and looked up a bunch of them (I especially enjoyed the garden of monsters). The self-doubt in a creative artist was familiar to me as a writer.
At times I found the long pages and rich text a bit wearying, so I took a couple of weeks to play the game, doing a couple of screens at a time. Once I played through once, though, playing again only took 30 minutes or so.
Lovely musings on art. For anyone seeking the 'best' ending, what worked for me was (Spoiler - click to show)feeding the dark creature on odd chapters and light creature on even chapters
A promising but ultimately flawed high school magic/mafia game, January 22, 2022This is a recent game from Choice of Games set at a magical university. You are an adopted scion of a powerful mafia figure, and you have been sent to a college that offers majors in both mundane and magical areas. You are encouraged to join a group of 3 magical fraternities while you go to class, meet friends and work at a magical coffee shop.
There's a lot going on here. The writing itself flows well, with some standout characters and intricate worldbuilding.
One steam review mentioned like it felt like too many storylines were going on at once, and I agree with that. While the college, fraternity, and coffee storylines meshed well, the mafia felt more or less tacked-on. It provided some useful worldbuilding backstory, but it gave the effect of the author mashing two games into one, at least to me.
The game had compelling goals that I wanted to achieve, but I found making my way there muddy. I was frequently told I did bad at things but still managed to get in the frat and get a 4.0 my first semester. I was told I bombed every final next semester but still got a 3.0.
I focused on 2 skills exclusively (with a 73 in spirit stuff and 53 in thaumaturgy), but failed every test involving thaumaturgy. My game ended completely abruptly at the end where I had a single choice with no buildup and clicked what I thought was a spirit option but was apparently the wrong thing, instantly negating every success I had more before by just killing me with a 1 page epilogue that didn't wrap up anything.
Part of the difficulty was overlapping stats; I could never distinguish between Spontaneity and Adaptability, or between Honesty, Determination and Principled. I never even noticed the 'skills' section (communications, creativity, insight, and scholarship), and am not sure how those could be adjusted or checked.
Overall, though, the worldbuilding and writing quality pulled this one through for me. But I kept putting it down when frustrated and took a couple of weeks to play.
Recommended only for fans of magical academia and mob stories.
A collection of fear-inducing areas which could use some polish, December 15, 2021This game has you try to encounter 13 different phobias as you explore a small area with some woods and a bar.
The range of possible phobias is pretty big and I learned some new ones (like halophobia and ailuriphobia).
This game is written with PunyInform, a version of Inform shrunk down so that compiled files can run on smaller/retro devices.
However, it doesn't take full advantage of the platform, and is weak in many areas. For instance, there are shelves that have several items on them, as seen from decompiling the code. However, X SHELVES, SEARCH SHELVES, and LOOK ON SHELVES all show them as empty. As another example, the barman tells you to 'try buying <a certain item in the game>'. But BUY <the item> doesn't work. There were many such frustrations with the code. There is one person listed in credits who might have been a tester, but this could have used more testing.
-Polish: There is some rough implementation and some bugs.
+Descriptiveness: The setting is mundane, but the phobias were interesting.
-Interactivity: I felt frustrated by the responsiveness.
-Emotional impact: The storyline and fears didn't really draw me in.
+Would I play again? It's an interesting concept, and I never found 4 of the fears.
Find a crocodile under the sewers and perform an amazing magic trick., December 11, 2021It's nice to see Chandler Groover experimenting with the Fallen London format. He is known for his Exceptional Stories, and has a very loyal fan base on the Discord, with people saying things like this:
"I'd go as far as to say that groover is the only writer who consistently captures the mystery and beauty of the setting"
"I’m trying to find what I’m thinking of, but my suggestion is really based on the quality of groover’ s writing and also the focus on the everyday person that reveals some deeper truth about the universe"
"Chandler Groover, author of several fan favourite Exceptional Stories, typically agreed to Never Miss"
With that kind of praise, there's a lot of pressure, and it would be easy to fall into repetitive patterns. But I found this story to be pretty different than his others, so much so that I had no idea it was him until the end.
In this story, a magician's assistant is missing, a crocodile is loose in the sewers of London and you must stop it! This includes a sizable segment that is a complex maze, something I never thought I'd see in any Groover story ever, and especially not in Fallen London, a text-based narrative that tends to gloss over movement. This story also has puzzles involving large machines with moving parts.
During your journey, your goals shift, and you end up acquiring a large amount of materials (through the sewers) for a big project. This was a fun excursion, because it lets you see many of the more mundane or boring parts of Fallen London (like the shops in the Bazaar tab) through a fresh perspective as you tunnel into them from below, often finding bizarre leftovers from previous times or hidden-away secrets. The scenes in Mahogany Hall were really effective for me.
The story gets even more strange in the end, becoming almost mythological and filled with guts and animals. It all feels large and epic, but I didn't quite grasp it all. I think that's good, though; I wouldn't want to grasp all of it.
To be honest, the maze didn't really work for me completely, but I enjoy the innovation and would rather see further experimentation like this than a retread of old things. Definitely a memorable story.
As a side note, parts of this gave me flashbacks to All Dogs Go to Heaven, where the sewer crocodile horrified me as a child.
Fistfights and martyrdom on the high seas, December 11, 2021This story, an Exceptional story for Fallen London (a bonus chunk of content for paid suscribers), takes place on the Zee, and in part feels like an exploration of that part of the game's content (which was recently expanded).
You are in search of the heir of a rich family. She was last seen with the Circumcelion Brotherhood, a group of brawling monks who hope to get murdered and have after-death experiences before being brought back by Fallen London's general resurrection mechanics.
The main character in this has a lot of personality, and is the main attraction of this story, but otherwise there's not a lot here to distinguish it from other tales of the Zee. If you're interested in brawling monks and tough women then it's worth checking out.
A character study of two men: a servant and a prince, December 11, 2021This is an exceptional story, a sizable 'bonus' story provided for those who pay for Fallen London.
This one deals with the devils, a faction in Fallen London that is quite distinct from devils as typically portrayed. This group is a little out of sync with the rest of the world (generally having fashions from twenty years in the future), and are very interested in people's souls but also in creating and altering the laws of reality in bizarre ways.
Some Londoners reacted negatively to the presence of the devils and fought a disastrous war with them. The game has frequently referenced this war and its horrifying outcomes (through different stories involving Bishops and more recently with the Great Hellbound Railway, especially Moulin), but hasn't dedicated many stories to detailed events of the war.
In this story, you meet a manservant of a prince, a servant who fought in the war and is now afflicted by having some body parts replaced with plants (thus, the cover picture of the story). This manservant works with the Bellicose Prince, a child of Queen Victoria who, like most the other children, was (strong spoilers for those who haven't seen royal family stories) (Spoiler - click to show)altered by the use of tainted red honey into a gross monster.(Spoiler - click to show)
This story takes a lot of twists and turns and really is an exploration of war, survivor's guilt, PTSD, and trauma. Like most great fantasy or horror, it uses an extraordinary situation to examine ordinary feelings in a new light.
Explore the rage of a tempestuous urchin marked for glory, December 11, 2021I hadn't really put it together that the Mary Goodden of these exceptional stories is the Mary Goodden of Ifcomp 2021's game 'Funicular Simulator 2021'. Nice!
This was a really memorable exceptional story (a supplement to Fallen London's main story). While writing reviews for these, I had to look back in my fame history to remind myself what they were about, but this one was firmly lodged in my memory.
One of the main factions in Fallen London is the Urchins, a large number of lost youth who form gangs and steal things. They tend to represent innocence in Fallen London (like in the story Hojotoho, where they pretend to be valkyries and go on 'adventures'). They also have a connection to rain and storm, as they are generally the source of the category of items termed 'Wild Words', which includes things like Primordial Shrieks, Aeolian Screams and Storm-Threnodies. In fact, in the deeper lore they are associated with (Spoiler - click to show)the somewhat-dead god Storm, a vast dragon that has power over the sea, which is what this story deals with and what most spoilers later down contain.
A young girl is marked by (Spoiler - click to show)the God Storm, but you interrupt, entangling you in her life. You are tasked with taking her around and helping her make a decision whether to embrace her new life as (Spoiler - click to show)a vessel of innocent rage or not. Your journey exposes much of the difficulties of life in a foster care system and of a poor life, as you explore the palace, an orphanage, and a former foster home she was ejected from, discovering the sources of her rage.
I found this one poignant and memorable.
A charming story about kids, pirates, mermaids and loss, December 11, 2021This is an exceptional story for Fallen London, which is a special 'extra' story for people who pay a monthly fee or purchase the story itself later on.
In this story, you rescue three young kids who have decided to find buried treasure on the Zee but get stuck when their boat crashes on a small island. Rescuing them, you learn about their fascination with Captain Redbeard, a mythical pirate, as well as the story of their mother, a woman who died at sea and who may or may not now be a 'drownie' (in Fallen London, people who die come back, except those who die at sea, who become a kind of fish/zombie/person).
The kids are cute, and help you pick out a suitable pirate name (mine was Blood Killer). Their dynamics and their interactions with the larger world paint a really lovely picture of family and growing up.
Follow Victoria's grandson as he searches for drugs and power, December 11, 2021One of the key features of Fallen London is prisoner's honey, as substance which transports its users to the world of dreams. It plays a role in society similar to opium dens from that time.
Something you can learn about in many of the stories (especially early on in the Nemesis ambition) is about (Spoiler - click to show)gaoler's honey, a stronger variant that is made by bees invading someone's brain and sucking out the memories. It lets you experience their memories but causes them terrible pain. Even further in the lore, you can find a connection between this and the Royal Family, as (fairly big spoilers for those who haven't read stories involving the royal family) (Spoiler - click to show)they all used tainted red honey and became hideous beasts, except for one who gained horrible mental powers).
This game follows a member of the royal family who stayed on the surface, a grandson of Victoria named Albert together with his mother. He wants to experience the honey drug dens and wants to be like the rest of the Royal Family. A lot of the game seems intent on portraying a weak and sad outsider trying to be part of a larger group.
It is a solid story, but pales in comparison to most other royal family stories, especially The Gift or the captivating princess storyline in Sunless Skies.
An expedition for bones and monsters at the Gant pole, December 11, 2021This is a Fallen London exceptional story, meaning it is a supplementary tale to the overall main game.
This story was meant to explore the bone market and its side characters more. When the bone market first came out, the Carpenter's Granddaughter was (and is) an important figure who can sell the largest bone frame and manage your market exhaustion.
In this story, you go on a journey with that character to the Gant Pole, a location first featured in the spinoff game Sunless Sea. The Gant Pole is an enormous decomposing heart of a sea creature that is lived in an attracts things that have lost all other desires or purposes in life. Gant is one of seven fictional colors in Fallen London, described as the color that exists when all else is gone.
As you search for giant bones and fossils in this story, it takes a darker turn into body horror, including a chance for you to alter yourself in disconcerting ways.
Overall, this story is an interesting character study of its main protagonist and antagonist. The interactivity aids the story but isn't memorable in and of itself. A good option for fans of the Zee and/or bones.
A very long multimedia Twine story about goblins, November 26, 2021This is the biggest game entered into the Spanish 2021 Ectocomp.
It's a Twine game using a lot of images and sounds. There is very little interactivity; the majority of the game is long pages filled with text and images with 'CONTINUAR' at the bottom. Occasionally there are choices, but they don't always remember what you do (for instance, (Spoiler - click to show)giving an item to a teacher early on doesn't get recorded, because you can give it to someone else later).
The main interactivity is thing of incense that you have that you can burn to stop the goblins. However, it isn't always clear when you can do this; frequently when the goblins were doing something bad I tried to use it, but just wasted my 'charges'. It seems reserved for moments when (Spoiler - click to show)the game is trapped in a loop.
There were a few typos here and there. The story often switches between second and third person, although that might just be me as a non-native speaker misunderstanding. As for the story itself, it was very descriptive with a wide variety of characters and a lot of imagination. Goblins were tied together with a high school that was once a military base, and both tied to another world. It was a complex and long story, and one I'm not sure I understood very well. But the story itself, with the images and the sounds, are a great accomplishment. I just wish I could have done more myself.
A bizarre adventuron tale of a soldier's desperate passion for...letters, November 26, 2021This is an Adventuron game in Spanish, made for Ectocomp.
It has 4 chapters, each detailing part of the story of Sidodorf, a soldier in a war that no longer cares about living as much as writing one final amazing letter. This leads him to desperate and bizarre acts.
The adventuron programming works well here, especially since the error messages give good hints on what to do next. My frequent problem with different dialects of Spanish struck again; I always thought TAKE would be TOMAR, but in this game one must use COGER, which is a strong vulgarity in the Spanish I learned. C'est la vie.
This game was really a very interesting character study, and I think its protagonist may be worth nominating for a Best PC xyzzy award next year. Unfortunately for me and other would-be translators, you can't highlight text to paste in google translate. However, it was overall pretty clear.
Take a virtual tour of gruesome Madrid history, November 26, 2021This is, as far as I can tell, the only entry in the Petite Mort division of the Spanish-language Ectocomp, all others being in the Grand Guignol division.
This is also the most educational game of the competition. It's essentially a guided tour of gruesome Madrid history, from torture devices to famous murders.
I learned a lot. The main interactivity is choosing which area to explore next. There is custom styling which was slightly hard to read (for best practices it's easier to read white text on dark grey than on black backgrounds) but had interesting images and even an embedded google maps link.
Overall, fun to learn from.
Four tales of a family curse, November 24, 2021This is a Spanish Twine game that is an anthology of 4 stories of a cursed family. It's contained in a framing story where you're in an abandoned house and teenagers are trying to creep you out.
The stories are all different, explaining how a member of the Ferrosa family was cursed.
Each one is fairly well written, but the interactivity is fairly negligible. There are some noticeable typos, and the story just kind of stops at the end. Each of the stories themselves left me wanting a bit more; the only one that felt really complete was the love story with fire. The others felt like a lot of build up with not as much resolution as I would have wanted.
Still, the writing is descriptive and the game is visually interesting.
A beautiful story set in Japan inspired by a vintage photo, November 24, 2021There is a photo called New Year's Visit with Jizo, Niigata Prefecture by the photographer Hiroshi Hamaya, that shows three young children trudging through the snow, the first one carrying a Jizo, a type of Buddha statue with connections to travellers.
This is a medium-length Spanish Ink story inspired by that photo. Its choice structure is fairly simple, mostly linear, occasionally some choices that are more complex.
The writing is very sweet and contemplative. You are the eldest of the three children, and you have to take care of your two younger siblings as you travel to a distant location. Along the way, you must take care of each other and guard the objects you've been entrusted with. You must also deal with your complex feelings about your late father.
The language of the game is simple and meaningful, and I found it emotionally touching. I also ended up looking up a lot of the Japanese words in the game; they're described well in-game, but I found it useful to find out more about them online.
A short parser game with a brutal story about airport survival, November 24, 2021This is a Spanish parser game entered in Ectocomp 2021.
In it, you start as a passenger in a bathroom with a dead body on the floor and a fire extinguisher that you used to kill them nearby. The game then slowly reveals the backstory, along with an urgent condition that you need to fix immediately.
The story takes several dark turns, making this possibly the most brutal
fictional airport experience I've seen. And it was pretty fun!
Playing parser games in another language is always difficult, but I appreciated the list of verbs in AYUDA (although there were some verbs I had to look up: (spoilers for several puzzles) (Spoiler - click to show)cerrar, encender, quemar, and I thought I could use acostarme but it was tumbar. The parser was generaly good, but occasionally there were problems with plurals (I attempted to solve the first puzzle with (Spoiler - click to show)PONER CUERPO EN CUBICULO, which gave an unhelpful error message, but finally solved it with (Spoiler - click to show)PONER CUERPO EN CUBICULOS, and similarly X PUERTA in the final area doesn't work while X PUERTAS does).
I enjoyed the atmosphere and experienced a strong emotional reaction to the game. Puzzles were logical and mostly exploration based, although this game is Cruel on the Zarfian scale (available here). In fact, it has a scenario almost identical to the description of Cruel on the scale. I used a decompiler to help me figure out the verbs and actions for several of the puzzles, but the final real puzzle can't be solved through decompiling so I had to figure it out alone.
Overall, I found it fun.
A heartfelt story of a woman's life told through Twine and Texture, November 24, 2021This game is really creative. Similar to the latest Castle Balderstone game, it uses Twine to create a 'hub' that you can play other, embedded games from.
In this case, there is a large page where a woman is remembering many things. Each thing you click on leads to an embedded Texture page that you can play through, employing your imagination. For instance, you can be a shadow trying to grow to scare some kids, or an apprentice witch, etc.
The game's ending has an overall positive and bittersweet message. The stories are cute, with animals and a lot of herbs and plants.
Having every option available at once was a little overwhelming, and the texture pages loaded up a bit awkwardly (after one click they looked good). The embedded gifs were a nice touch.
A parser-like choice game about exploring a strange family's house, November 23, 2021This Spanish Ectocomp game uses the Kunludi engine, which (at least in this game) means there are in-game links as well as a menu of options on the bottom, some of which have other options. There are rooms and an inventory as well.
In this game, you are exploring an Addams-family-like mansion on a dare from some friends. You have to find something shocking to show them.
The game is pretty linear; if you explore everything you will eventually progress. It's fairly quirky, like Addam's family, and has some pretty mild sexual content and gore.
Overall, the writing was pretty good, but the interactivity could have been more complex.
A high school party murder mystery with tons of 3d illustrations, November 18, 2021This is a pretty weird game. It's a horror game written for the Spanish division of Ectocomp, and it has tons of illustrations that are made by posing some 3d models whose quality is somewhere between roblox and Sims. It's intentionally garish and pretty funny.
In the game, one of your old friends who had been ghosting you invites you to a party hosted by the most popular girl in school, Steisy. Unfortunately, dastardly things are happening there.
I got a bad ending, but didn't feel like replaying, as I prefer text-only games (or at least games where the text is the primary source of interaction). There were several puzzles involving movement and collecting objects. There are some sexual references and a variety of profanity (I learned some new words!) Overall, a funny experiment.
An amusing and complex story about exploring a monster-filled castle, November 17, 2021This game was entered in the Spanish division of Ectocomp as a Grand Guignol game, meaning it took > 4 hours to complete.
It is an excellently written game, using amusing and complex writing to tell the tales of a haunted castle. It has the form of a CYOA book, with different 'page numbers' references (although they aren't actually numbered). Different branching paths let you experience different monsters.
As a non-native speaker, I found a lot of words I didn't know here, as the author uses very descriptive and colloquial language. I found two monsters in two different paths. One, (Spoiler - click to show)the succubus, included some sexual scenes that were detailed but not explicitly describe sexual acts.
Once you've completed a path, the game gives you links to interesting facts about the creatures you encountered and lets you 'warp back' to a convenient place to find other paths. Overall, this was very well written.
Explore a constantly-flowing river of blood in adventuron, November 14, 2021This adventuron game, written in < 4 hours, has a couple of nice pixel art images thrown in, which I suspect was hard to do in the time frame.
It also has a neat mechanic. You are in a river of blood, and objects float by, headed downstream. You have to chase them to check them out. Meanwhile, death, or Charon, or a similar figure is hunting you down.
It was tricky sometimes to deal with the moving objects (and I think (Spoiler - click to show)the dinghy will float away even if (Spoiler - click to show)you are in it, causing some weird disambiguation issues). Overall, a fun little treat, with what must be the most blood of any game in the competition.
A short, classic-style Halloween CYOA set in the woods, November 14, 2021This is just a choose-your-own adventure story with a Halloween theme. You are alone in the woods with various options, and have two encounters with strange creatures. Your reactions to the strange creatures (at least the second one) determines your ending.
It's pretty short and the interaction isn't too strong. I found it relatively funny and played through it a couple of times. It feels very 'halloween'-y, so if you're in the mood for a shoot spooky treat, this is a good option.
A short, linear twine tale about a true-life parental tragedy, November 14, 2021This is a short Twine entry in Ectocomp 2021 and is, I believe from comments on intfiction, based on a true story.
You are a young girl with a generally kind and loving father. He begins acting strangely, though, and you try to come up with a hypothesis to explain his behavior. But nothing you do helps...
The game has some options, but is generally structured linearly. The game has custom styling, but the majority of the game's strength resides in its matter-of-fact storytelling of an emotional and complex issue. I found it polished, descriptive, emotionally compelling, and with just enough dynamic energy to push the story forward; however, I don't see much replay value. That would make it a 4-star game under my rubric.
A short graphical game with text narrative about a baby nightmare, November 14, 2021This game is written in Mosi, which apparently is like Bitsy but for mobile. Both platforms are used to do basic pixel art and to have little 'interaction spots' that bring up text and change the environment somewhat.
This game has you wandering around as an egg in the world of nightmares, eventually encountering others of your kind and humans. I explored a lot but saw some parts I couldn't reach. One part of the game was still in spanish, but the rest was translated well.
There was some freedom as to what to do, but overall the game left me wondering a lot about the main character and didn't really fill in very much, so I didn't feel a strong emotional connection to the game, nor did I find it very descriptive or have a strong desire to replay.
An unfinished game about guessing types of blood, November 14, 2021This is a game with a lot of good ideas that get kind of lost in execution.
It was written in 4 hours, and not finished. It uses interesting color styling for the background, links and plain text that generally works well (although some inline links are hard to see, being merely bolded).
It sets up an interesting competition where you sample a blood's color, odor and taste and use that to guess its original owner's age, last thoughts, etc.
Only one scenario is programmed. I guessed wrong, but an error in the game let me go on; however, it merely went to a page that said 'this is how far I could get in four hours'.
The text that is here is detailed and interesting, but in most ways it is unfinished and not ready for play.
Story-driven horror tale over several days at a forest lookout, November 14, 2021This is a complex story written in Inform. You play as a man who recently experienced a haunting tragedy. Driven to solitude, you take work at a national park working in a lookout.
But things aren't okay out here. Something strange is happening to animals and hikers, and there's little you can do to stop it.
The game is story-driven; puzzles are minimal, and the borders of your little world are enforced strictly, while the game takes most actions for you. I felt like pacing was slightly off, where a little more guidance in some parts and a little less in others could have worked better, but it's hard to put my finger on anything.
I think the story mixed together the threads of isolation, terror, and loss pretty well, and I found to be one of the better short games I've played this year.
A creepy short Ectocomp game, November 13, 2021This is an excellent creepy short Twine game made for Ectocomp in less than 4 hours.
It features custom CSS styling that nicely represents multiple worlds. You play as someone swimming in a pool that serves as a sort of portal to a darker (or lighter?) world.
There are 3 endings, one of which took me a while to find. The writing is nice and tight, the pacing is good for a short game, and it's visually appealing.
I had to look up the name, as a US resident. Apparently a Lido refers to a public outdoor swimming area, which makes sense since that's what this game is all about.
Amateur witch hunters make a tough decision (in Choicescript form), November 13, 2021This game is set in 1500's France. You are a student, with a group of other students, and there are rumours of a witch in the city.
This is a short game made for a speed competition in Choicescript. Despite that, it manages to build up some fun tension in a short time. The main objects of interest are interacting with your fellow witch hunters and trying to decide whether you are really doing what's right or not.
As a caution, this game contains (moderate spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)extreme violence to animals.
I found the ending a bit abrupt, but overall I liked the tension in the game. This was one of the more enjoyable Ectocomp 2021 games for me!
A short game with slowly increasing capability in a spooky atmosphere, November 12, 2021This is a Petite Morte Ectocomp 2021 game, written in 4 hours or less and featuring the custom parser system used in the author's game The Libonotus Cup.
Visually, the game looks good in terms of font and color.
The story and gameplay are that you are going to the bathroom when suddenly you appear as a ghost in front of a tower. There are 8 locations around the tower, arranged in a circle. Unfortunately, you don't have hands that can pick up anything.
So you have to visit different locations and gain different powers. One location had a riddle which was based on a pun, which could be hard for non-native English speakers.
The setting is interesting, and the descriptions are well-developed for a 4-hour game, but the whole thing is somewhat disjointed and nonsensical. It's just a fun, short puzzly game, and there's nothing wrong with that.
A short story about an evil apartment, November 12, 2021This is a fairly short twine game made in 4 hours for Ectocomp 2021 (Petite Morte division).
In it, there is an interesting take on viewpoint as the main text is from the point of view of your (evil) apartment, while your choices are your own.
There is a short part introducing the setup, followed by a puzzle part with limited moves.
I found two endings, but both were pretty depressing, so I'm not sure if I 'won' or not.
-Polish: The game seemed bug free, but had little in the way of styling (which makes sense for a speed-IF!)
+Descriptiveness: The gam isn't heavy on environmental details but has a distinct voice.
+Interactivity: I enjoyed the main puzzle
-Emotional impact: I felt like I didn't have time to really absorb the chillingness, and the two endings weren't strongly differentiated
-Would I play again? I feel like I got the whole message in the first go.
Multi-colored horror personality quiz?, November 12, 2021This is a Twine game about a book. The book is said to drive people to madness.
The book is associated with 7 colors, and each of those colors with different (dark) facets of life. You first read about others who took on those colors, then read the book itself, and choose a future, associating yourself with a color/facet.
There's a weird fact in writing that if you use too much darkness, gore, or sexual references, it goes right past being powerful and/or disturbing and goes straight to silliness/camp, and I think that's what's happened here. For instance: (Spoiler - click to show)YoU doN’t knoW True JoY. StiCk youR FiNger in your eYe, put a KniFe throUgh youR TonGue. The writing is so extreme, ranging from insanity to guts to strong profanity to bizarre sexual references, that it loses a lot of its effectiveness. I think it could have benefited from being contrasted with something else, like more specific, concrete details or reactions from the PC that show how a human would feel about this, etc. What we don't see in fiction is often far more effective than what we do.
Of course, reading is completely subjective, and I could easily imagine a review saying 'This was amazing! The variety of voices, the visceral details, I loved it!', so I encourage people to try it for themselves.
Deal with a struggling food bank and personal decisions, November 11, 2021This is the third game in the Crumbs series by Katie Benson, all of which deal with a struggling foodbank and the effects of Brexit. All games in the series are speed-IFs.
In this one, your foodbank is one of many across the UK which are being pressured into closing by HappyHealth, a government-backed private company taking over health care in the nation.
You can call three people to discuss the foodbank, deciding what to share with them, what to ask them about. Then you make the final decision.
Each person seemed real, and the text was interesting. I felt like I had some interesting choices. However, there was a bug where I talked to Trudka and then Mom, but the game thought I had talked to Mika instead, so it looped me in talking to Mom over and over. I solved it by talking to Trudka, then Mika, then mom.
(Edit: In the latest version, this bug has been fixed).
Kinetic fiction about demons and obesity, November 11, 2021I played both versions of this game: the 'basic' 0.5 mb strippd-down version and the full 800 mb version with multimedia. The latter is definitely better, since the contrast of blocky white letters on black background makes the basic version hard to read.
This is a fairly short game, as typical for Ectocomp games, but maximizes its content by being choice-free. This style is sometimes known as Kinetic fiction, which draws its interaction potential from our own self-pacing and choosing to further the story. It doesn't always work for me, but when the writing is good, like here, I like it. Another good example is Polish the Glass.
The story is about a woman whose mother hates fat and pressures her to make a deal with a demon that would keep her skinny forever...until it didn't.
I've seen a lot of discussion of fatphobia online, with camps who are extremely upset with each other. The most extreme on one side get extremely upset at any online posts showing a person who's not skinny, while the most extreme on the other claim that obesity doesn't cause any health problems.
This game focuses on a gentler course than either of those extremes. Instead of telling us whether fatness is good or bad, it asks us to decouple our personal sense of worth from our body size; we can still make plans on decide what to do with our weight, but not to please others or out of shame.
I think that's an important message, since a guilt-fueled obsession with weight can lead to many bad habits that are worse than simply being overweight in the first place, such as eating disorders.
A surreal world with pig latin sprinkled throughout, November 11, 2021This game is an overflow for ideas that didn't fit into the author's previous Pig Latin-themed game, Under They Thunder.
Like the majority of Andrew Schultz games, this is a world with names based on some linguistic trick (here, Pig Latin) that is surreal and focuses a lot on overcoming bullies using self-confidence.
It's a speed-IF with a small map, and due to the constraints almost all objects are undescribd.
The main gameplay element is that you walk around, but the map is blocked, but occasionally you get an item when you're walking that helps you pass them.
There's a little more to it than that, but I confess that I couldn't grasp the main puzzle at the end without glancing at the walkthrough.
A brief game with a symmetric premise, November 11, 2021This is a wordplay game centered around the idea of repeated sequences of letters (like how the title, 'psyops, yo' consists of 'psyo' repeated twice).
This is smaller than most Andrew Schultz games, which makes sense for an ectocomp entry. It has 4 puzzles you need to solve.
I found two of them with a little thinking and felt good about it. The other two stumped me; I used an online word solver to figure it out, and both surprised me as I felt they could be hinted a little more.
Overall, a fun concept.
A blend of game types in a spoof on Castle Balderstone, November 11, 2021For several years now, Ryan Veeder has entered a game with a variation on th name Tales from Castle Balderstone. Previously, these games were parser games that contained many 'mini games' with a framing story that you were being guided around a castle that was holding a contest or reading of short horror stories, with each story being one game. The narrator of the framing story speaks to you directly as a guest, and is usually Ryan Veeder himself.
This game spoofs that general idea, but instead of parser games, it uses Ink, Twine, and Choicescript (possibly more). In an interesting twist, this year's real Castle Balderstone game also blends platforms by using both Twine and parser.
This game uses the same framing device, except now there are more Ryan Veeders; in fact, everyone is a Ryan Veeder.
The overall switching between systems is impressive, but the game has numerous errors, such as doubled periods in the Twine system and a game-crashing mis-defined variable 'raven' in the Choicescript section. My game ended abruptly after the Choicescript section with a screen that I could only see when not in full screen but couldn't click on, so I assume that was the ending.
Overall, the game has funny elements (such as the stats screen of the Choicescript section). I feel, though, that it misses the mark a bit. Castle Balderstone is already a humor/parody series, so making a parody of it is like making a copy of a copy, kind of how Scary Movie made fun of Scream which made fun of earlier horror stories. Part of what makes Castle Balderstone games work so well is that, within the framing, the stories can be seen as completely earnest and actually work quite well as sincerely creepy or heartfelt stories; the games also serve as a combination dumping ground/testing ground for interesting game concepts, many of which are completely new or at least relatively uncommon in the parser scene. This game has a touch of that (with blending Ink, Twine, and Choicescript), but in the end I was left a bit disappointed.
-Polish: I found several bugs, including game-crashing
-Descriptiveness: The game is pretty vague
+Interactivity: I liked the switching systems and some of the mechanics
-Emotional impact: Like I said above, it didn't really grab me.
+Would I play again? Yes, especially if the bugs were fixed!
Emily Dickinson, twice, November 10, 2021This is a Petite Mort game, meaning it was created in 4 hours or less.
The author has chosen two lovely Emily Dickinson poems focused on death and the afterlife. The author has turned them into a parser game as minimally as possible, so that looking or some other simple action is all that is needed to get the next action.
Most adaptations fail when they go 'off the rails', since people's writing is rarely as good as the original they're adapting, so choosing to be faithful to the original was a great choice.
Of course a game written in 4 hours tends not to be super polished, but I like the imagination here and the concept is done well.
A micro-story in space with growing horror, November 9, 2021This is a fairly short horror story set in space.
You wake up in a food storage area of a ship with all the food running out. You have to exit and explore your ship. The general feel is uncertainty, terror, and wistfulness.
It's a small game, only 4 locations. The writing has a nice creepiness.
Overall, it felt a little spare, a little far in the direction of minimalism, especially the final room.
A long Quest horror game with good story but rough edges, November 9, 2021This game is fabulous plot-wise: you encounter a mysterious deer beast in the forest and track it back to a farm. There you discover a strange series of events in the past through the use of journal entries.
Getting that story, though, can be a real pain. Many commands go unrecognized. Here is an example from early on in the game:
(Spoiler - click to show)> x door
A solid front door made of heavy wood. The green paint has all but peeled away. You see a tarnished door knocker in the shape of a Fleur de Lis.
> knock
I don't understand your command.
> knock door
I better use the knocker to do that.
> knock knocker
You can't knock it.
> x knocker
A tarnished door knocker in the shape of a Fleur de Lis.
> use knocker
You use the door knocker and knock loudly... Nothing happens. Looks like no one is home.
(You unlocked an Achievement.)
A lot of the wording is confusing or misspelled (like 'Knock arrow' instead of 'nock arrow'). Overall, the game could've used less time in making its huge map and more time in polishing a smaller segment of the gameplay.
I really like the story, though, which is why I'm giving it a rating of 3 (for descriptiveness, emotional impact and the fact that I'd play again).
A horror/action parser game spread out over many locations, November 8, 2021This is an entry in Ectocomp 2021, in the Grand Guignol section.
You play as a young person who is able to see ghosts, or at least a specific ghost named Jack. Jack urges you to solve his murder and stop another which is about to occur.
The map is pretty large, extending over three different main locations, each with 8-20 rooms.
Interaction consists of classic parser gameplay (one puzzle (Spoiler - click to show)is familiar for fans of older games, although with an unusual twist) as well as topic based conversation.
The game has an interesting premise and excels most at setting and scenery.
The implementation could be more thorough. Many synonyms are not implemented (for instance, in the final scene, (Spoiler - click to show)the service box only works if you UNLOCK BOX WITH KEY, and not if you TURN ON BOX, RAISE LIFT, go UP, etc.) Many key items are not implemented, and some verbs that are directly suggested in the text do not work. An important PC's name isn't capitalized in responses.
I think this game could benefit from being ported to Adventuron. Adding some nice pixel art would improve the overall appeal, and the (large) Adventuron audience is generally less concerned about small details of implementation and appreciates the classic gameplay and interesting maps of games like this.
A gauntlet-style retelling of a Chaucer story, November 7, 2021This game, entered in Ectocomp 2021, is a brief Twine game in which you recreate the Chaucer story The Pardoner's Tale as one of the main characters.
For most of the game you have two choices: follow the story, or go off the rails. Going off the rails generally results in your death. There is no undo, so you'll have to replay, which can be mildly slow due to some timed text but not too bad.
There are three main endings: death, the traditional Chaucer ending, and, the game insinuates, a victorious ending, which I eventually found.
I think the Chaucer original is neat. The gauntlet story structure here was a bit rough, since you saw the same text over and over again and the extra deaths didn't really add much value. It was essentially a 'do you want to continue the story or start over from the beginning?' button.
The layout was a bit hard to read, with some paragraphs being centered and the lower paragraphs being left-justified. Also, the author used a serifed font on a pure-black background, both of which made it harder to read.
There were many stats displayed but they were a bit confusing. At one point I think I had -3 money.
Overall, the strongest points here are the interesting story and the characters.
A horror game inspired by experiences in Utah culture, November 7, 2021I was interested to see a game described as 'Mormon horror' on the IFDB feed. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it's rare to see interactive fiction that's connected to my church.
This game is a take on Bluebeard, a topic I enjoy (one of my favorite opera's is Duke Bluebeard's Castle, which has a lot in common with this game).
However, it differs from traditional Bluebeard narratives by putting a religious spin on things. The religion in this game isn't the same as my church; instead, it's an amalgamation of the culture in Utah, especially Provo, some esoteric doctrinal references, and some new innovations I've never really seen before.
The Utah culture shows up in things like 'dirty coke' (which is soda with mix-ins like coconut or flavored syrups) and 'Sunstone' (the name of a magazine that does academic/critical studies of the religion), or people using 'Brigham Young was my ancestor'. The main NPC is an area authority, which I think is an in-joke as they are in real life distant, benign administrators that are rarely seen (most real-life church figures that people take issue with are local like bishops or global like apostles). The new innovations are things like having an estate with a chapel on it (?) that is also an official temple for marriage purposes (?) or talking about early settlers being called skillet-lickers.
The main horror components are centered around common concerns that women (especially in Utah) experience in marriage: feeling pressured into early pregnancy, feeling socially inadequate due to infertility, feeling a loss of ownership over the body, and feeling pressured and grossed out due to a new husbands request for (metaphorical) frequent sexual relations, or being worried that you'll be forced into a polygamous marriage in heaven against your will. These are things I saw a lot in my town growing up and which I've seen almost not at all in every other state I've lived in. Utah can be pretty weird some times.
You have a health meter which results in your death when depleted, as well as faithfulness (which (Spoiler - click to show)takes you to a depressing heaven) and unfaithfulness (which (Spoiler - click to show)gets you kicked out but safe).
The game was polished in general, with custom styling but a couple of issues with paragraph breaks. I found the writing to be evocative. The various stats made for good interactivity in a fairly brief game. And the horror was true to real emotions and experiences I've seen before (in particular, part of it reminded me of a (Spoiler - click to show)traumatic miscarriage my former spouse had which I helped/supported during).
I felt like the game had very little to do with the Church of Jesus Christ itself; the vast majority of messaging in the actual church is 'God loves you' and 'if you've messed up Christ will help you if you let him'. But I do think it represents the experience of many women, especially in BYU/Provo/Utah, and that many people could see themselves in this game.
A grab bag of innovative parser/choice hybrid games, November 7, 2021It's become increasingly hard to review Ryan Veeder's games because they're generally all the same: 'This game does something very creative that I hadn't really seen before and is polished and funny. One of the best games I've seen in a while yada yada yada. If this game was by a new author, I'd think they're one of the best new authors out there.'
And that's all true here, too. This game does something I had once considered the 'holy grail' of modern IF, which is to combine parser choice in a logical way. In this game you use Twine in an overworld with a map, which leads to Inform 7/Vorple mini-games that seamlessly transition back into Twine. Its all hosted on the authors website using the autosave feature first used in his Fly Fishing game. My only concern is for preservation; is there a way to ensure the game could be saved for posterity?
Storywise, the framing story is the same as last year, a funny take on literary culture and the way we handle celebrity writers. It contains 5 (or so) mini stories:
Letavermilia: This is a linear (story-wise), puzzle-based space game. You play as a bounty hunter chasing after a criminal who is also named after a horrible plague. You chase them from world to world, with each world having a puzzle you must solve to find the 5-digit autopilot code needed to move on. Solutions range from exploration and mapping to a straight-up cryptogram (the latter being my least favorite activity of the whole game, but easily solved online and solvable by copious in-game hints). This game features some genuinely chilling moments and some funny ones as well, and demonstrates Veeder's predilection for deeply implementing unnecessary side systems. This one takes an hour or so to play.
Nyvo the Dolphin: This is a Metroidvania-style game where you as a dolphin explore a wreck filled with scientific equipment, which grants you increasing capabilities. This was horror in the sense of Beetlejuice or Addam's family, where our cheerful protagonist blithely navigates the remains of past human devastation and death. This one took about 30-45 minutes. I had a little trouble navigating, so mapping might have been good, but I enjoyed the power curve and the finale.
Singing for Me: this is a Lovecraftian (or maybe, more Blackwoodian or fae) small town living simulator, in many ways reminiscent of AKheon's recent Ascension of Limbs or titles like Stardew Valley. You play as a recent move-in in a cabin, and typing LOOK gives a list of places or people you can visit. Each visit takes the entire day. You can also buy stuff, where buying one thing takes the whole day, or sell many things at once. As you explore, you discover more locations and people. Like Stardew Valley, there are significant holidays that you can experience on a set schedule. Through these, the main story is developed in a classic 'creepy small town' style like Midsommar or The Village. I enjoyed this one; I was worried I wouldn't be able to see everything, but the game gives you plenty of time to focus on one or two goals that matter to you. I spent a couple of hours on this.
Visit Skuga Lake: This game had the most traditional gameplay but used a mechanic with quadratic complexity. Basically, you start locked in a closet, but soon break out with the help of (Spoiler - click to show)an amulet with an empowering eyestone. You then wander a large map, gaining two new classes of powerful items that interact with each other in an enormous amount of ways. I'll admit that I ended up 'lanwmowering' many options to find what worked, but it was also fun to experiment so it didn't really feel tedious. I played this for about an hour and a half.
Finale (called (Spoiler - click to show)Hunted): (Spoiler - click to show)This story was a bit confusing, but felt fast-paced and appropriate as an ending. It was Christmas-themed and felt like an action movie. Scenes focused on movement and basic take/use gameplay. It wasn't as compelling mechanically as the earlier pieces but story-wise and emotionally was satisfying. This took less than an hour.
Additional comments: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a secret fifth game. I was able in this one to read many books, see a family tree and look up people in it, make coffee, and find a nook, as well as talk to Allison Chase. I wasn't able to find any use of the nook or book or tree, so either I missed out on the point or this was just a 'chill and vibes' section like the end of Rope of Chalk. If the latter, I think it worked well.(Spoiler - click to show)
Fighting, politics, romance, mystery solving as a vampire, November 7, 2021I've enjoyed all of the Vampire the Masquerade titles from Choice of Games.
The first game in the (loosely-connected) series, Night Road, won an XYZZY Best Game award and a had a very out-of-this-world style with cray labs, magicians, ancient vampires, and a CRPG-style quest structure you could pursue in multiple orders.
The next game, Out for Blood, featured a human protagonist in a small town and focused on running a shop, developing abilities like intuition or gaining weapons, and handling a small-town vampire clash. It was lower-powered and a smaller focus.
This game sits nicely between the two. You play as a powerful but out-of-shape vampire in Ottawa whose Prince has gone missing at the same time that Anarchs are raiding the city. You have to rediscover your old strength while solving multiple mysteries.
The number of stats is heavily decreased in this game compared to the other VtM games (and Choice of the Vampire). Now there are only 9 or so main stats. Disciplines can be used, which is my favorite part of VtM games, but you either have access to a discipline or not, no growing it. The disciplines basically operate like a 'be awesome' button that is later penalized by high hunger, which can take away your freedom to choose as your are forced to feed. I played as Toreador, and enjoyed using Auspex and Celerity the most.
Focusing on a big mystery is a bit of a gamble in a big Choicescript game, since the player always knows the truth after one playthrough. This game deals with the issue by having many endings depending on what you do with that information and how you resolve the issue. In the end, there are several factions you can unite with. Also, there are many sub-mysteries to solve.
There are two romances for now, but each is fairly well-developed. The one I went with seemed much better integrated into the game than most romances, probably because the author was able to focus more deeply on each romance rather than fitting in a ton of different ones.
On an individual line-by-line basis, the writing is entertaining and flows well, and the pacing in scenes is well-done, with few slow spots, making this a page-turner.
I've written for CoG before and previously received a lot of review copies of CoG games for free, but this is one I bought myself for fun.
Random experimentation with one-word commands, October 24, 2021For the better part of a decade, Arthur DiBianca has been putting out limited parser games, where most commands are shut off and only a few work.
This game is kind of an opposite version of that. Instead of few commands, there are tons of commands, some of which you have to guess (for full completion) and most of which you don't know what they do.
This is a game that invites experimentation and discovery. Part of the fun is trying out a command and having it do something surprising but, in hindsight, reasonable.
There's not much storywise, but a lot of depth. Reaching the first winning situation isn't too hard, but getting all the points is very difficult (I admit I looked at the intfiction thread for most of the extra credit points).
Overall, I found the game enjoyable.
A short and simple game with surprisingly little feedback, October 24, 2021I took a lot of ballroom dance classes in college, and I remember one of the biggest problems a pair could have is noodle arms. If the arms are rigid, the two dancers can communicate effectively, but if they're lose, dancers tend to step on and run into each other.
This game has some good ideas but has so little feedback. I had no idea what was going on until I peaked at the code.
Gameplay-wise, you wake up and have 3-4 areas you can take care of by watering, removing trash, etc. (Spoilers for ending and mechanic)(Spoiler - click to show)This lasts for 7 days, and, each day, the river grows bigger, removing gameplay areas unless you shore it up enough the day before.
For me, it was difficult to see any effect of my actions, besides the immediate ones of watering and such. (Spoiler - click to show)The effect of the river was indicated by the absence of old text, not the presence of new, and as I was shoring up a lot from the beginning, I saw few changes. This, for me, made the game more or less a tedium simulator. Even once I knew what was going on, I had no real reason to care for either out come, because I was nobody in a nobody land. I can see the thought experiment, but it just didn't pan out for me.
Gender identity through metaphor, October 24, 2021This brief Twine game has you exploring a forest after you accidentally (Spoiler - click to show)lose your gender. Lookin around, you try to understand and search for gender identity through metaphor.
There are only 4 or 5 choices in the game, but there is meaningful choice. The game invites you to understand what is meant by gender roles and identity.
In the end, the choice isn't all yours; regardless of your choices, the game will not (Spoiler - click to show)allow you to choose your old identity.
I found the game to be polished and descriptive, despite its brevity, and was in some ways emotionally moving, although I don't think I'll revisit it.
An incomplete futuristic investigation game, October 24, 2021One trend in IFComp is that an unfinished game will place near the bottom of the comp, regardless of any other positive features it might have. There are some exceptions, but they are rare.
This game cuts off right after a big investigation. The idea is that humanity has moved on from reproduction, and everyone is now immortal, there are dozens of different pronoun options (the most meaningful choices in the game are centered around terms of address and pronouns), and everyone is smart and cool. The first biologically born person in millenia has been found murdered.
There are multiple typos (although literally as I was playing the game for 20 minutes near midnight on a Saturday, the author updated the game, which was a fun coincidence), such as 'TALKED WITH' instead of 'TALK WITH'. I also found the jumping between perspectives a little confusing as well.
Due to the confusing language and the errors and the unfinished aspect, I didn't find the game polished, descriptive, emotionally engaging, or something I'd like to revisit for now.
I do think the general idea is a good one. A game like this would probably do better in Introcomp, which was definitely underpopulated this year.
A quirky Twine game about exploring a fantasy-based cave, October 24, 2021In this game you explore a small cave with different fantasy creatures and gems and such in it.
This game is part of a small genre of games best described as 'quirky twine game based in a cave/dungeon that riffs on the silly parts of fantasy games but also has feels and is generally a simple branching structure with little state tracking'.
Other entries in the genre include Just Get the Treasure v0.9.1, Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir (a more complex example), TOMBs of Reschette, The Cave (a less humorous example), The Thing About Dungeons, etc.
This game is definitely on the zanier end. My son first got into Twine with games like this when he was 5, like Escape from the Crazy Place, because it's fun to do silly things like (in this cave) refusing to enter the cave from the get go. For me, as an adult, I still think it can be fun at times.
For some reason one of the passages didn't work at all for me on PC chrome, but it did when I loaded it up in the Twinery app (the one all in cyan that's on time delays).
Overall, I think that this game has some entertainment value, but I think it didn't offer very much new.
A minimalist map exploration and fetch quest game, October 24, 2021This game is a six-by-six grid of locations, each described in two words or less. Each location has something that needs resolving: a missing item, or a problem in a different square. You are the resolver, who will resolve the problems (including the word limit).
It's choice-based, but with mild quadratic complexity. You can choose between LOOKing and INTERACTing with each object in a room, and you gather an inventory of items.
I loved this game, with the only drawback for me being the 'lawnmowering' that felt natural for the mid-game, trying out different items in different rooms. This problem is both alleviated and exacerbated by the helpful text which tells you if you're in the right room. It makes lawnmowering both faster (less painful) but also more appealing.
Overall, I find this a very successful puzzle piece. It reminds me of Weird City Interloper, a bit.
I can also highly recommend Domestic Elementalism, another game by this author from the 2017 IFComp.
A well-put-together brief story about grief and accounts, October 24, 2021This game is one of two entered by Bez in this competition, the other being 'Weird Grief', and the two tie into each other.
In this one, presented in customized Twine, you are a moderator for an online community, and have been asked to begin closing accounts of dead customers.
Gameplay is divided into two components: reading through old messages, and entering a group chat with everyone involved.
The game has illustrated avatars for each important character, as well as a few other pieces of art.
The second section of the game is all on a timer. It's not too long, but I tend to multitask while playing IF (the format lends itself well to pick-up-and-put-down play), and I tabbed away to work on other things while waiting for the text to complete, only to come back and see it had wiped the screen and started new messages. I also had to leave in the middle of some text to use the restroom, and missed a couple of other parts because of that. So for future players, I'd recommend dedicating a set amount of time to read through the second portion.
The text includes frequent strong and mild profanities and depicts traumatizing events as well as reference to sexual activities.
Overall, I found the game polished and descriptive, with an emotional impact. The nonlinear interactivity in the first half worked for me, but the second half was a little rougher, so I'd give this a 3.5, which I'll round up to a 4 for IFDB.
A brief fighting sim and relationship manager, October 24, 2021This is a small but polished game, one that feels like an intentionally compact micro-game. The system would be appropriate for a longer game, but there's not much room to fit more in the game besides having multiple matches.
You are a cyborg gladiator in a political climate that seems to be modeled on current transgender discourse. You get to choose how you treat your fellow cyborgs, and you also choose your body type and weapon.
Combat has a kind of paper-rock-scissors format, with unusual combinations pleasing the crowd.
The game uses strong profanity every few screens and has elaborate violence and (spoilers for certain paths) (Spoiler - click to show)some vaguely described sexual scenes.
I don't feel like the game lasted long enough for me to get a good grip on it emotionally, but it's polished and descriptive, and the interactivity was interesting and responsive.
A short game about doctors and ethics in a future scenario, October 24, 2021This is a short Ink game. You are a doctor in a clinic that is almost empty. You have encounters with people and have to decide whether to spend your supplies on them.
The game is pretty short, almost like a demo for a larger game. Each major choice is an ethical one, and at the end the game thanks you for taking an examination (and starts with a similar comment), so I think it's intended for you to reflect on your morals.
Overall, it's a solid idea, but wasn't long enough to draw me in emotionally or to invite replay.
Parser game via text-message: explore an ex's dorm, October 23, 2021This is a great game concept that's well-executed. It's an Inform parser game with custom CSS to look like text messages. I've been interested in this concept for a while and had even made a draft once of the necessary JS/CSS, but my version looked bad and was buggy and deleted it. So seeing someone who achieved a complete and great-looking version of that concept is very nice!
You play as a random person who is getting texts from a friend. Your friend has broken into their ex's dorm room in an effort to get back a photo and to experience closure.
Technically, the game is very impressive. Besides the nice appearance, it also does some fun text stuff (like (Spoiler - click to show)drawing out the last letter of the name you inputted(Spoiler - click to show)).
Puzzle-wise, it's fairly light, focused on exploration without requiring you to use a ton of logic or calculation. I had to use one hint, as I had thought I investigated everything but missed a subobject I had seen early on.
Story-wise, I could identify with the themes of loss, snoopiness, and the realization that you didn't really know the other person.
The one caveat I had about the CSS/JS is that I sometimes had hiccups where I expected the texts to be done and started typing, not realizing there were more. There is a visual indicator (the flashing line), but it might have been nice to either add another indicator that more was coming (perhaps replacing the standard 'more' with '...') or just printing all texts at once, especially when using 'LOOK', which is the only place I had trouble.
Overall, I found the game was polished, descriptive, had interesting interactivity, was emotional resonant, and I might play it again.
Abstraction, surrealism and relationships, October 23, 2021There is a long history of using surreal, abstract worlds to describe relationships in interactive fiction, with Plotkin's game So Far coming to mind as an early example.
This game pushes that trend to its logical extreme. You are with a woman, walking through an abstract maze that is navigated by identifying three-dimensional solids (except (Spoiler - click to show)they're aren't really any of the options, making it guess and check) or picking out numbers in a pattern. The maze has a negative effect on those who guess wrong, (Spoiler - click to show)turning them into geometric solids.
Pseudavid is an accomplished Twine writer with an extensive back catalogue (I particularly recommend Master of the Land and The Good People). This game contains hints of those earlier games, but has reached such a level of abstraction that I honestly had trouble piecing out what was going on or making connections or 'aha' moments. In other words, this game was over my head.
+Polish: The game was very smooth
-Descriptiveness: It was quite vague. The writing is good when zoomed in but when zoomed out seems to lack content:
(Spoiler - click to show)Oh, still salty about it, aren't we? Of course you wouldn't forget it. So, what's the final tally? Very, very good! But not perfect. How should I take it?'
-Interactivity. The game is meant to be played once, but has pass/fail mechanics and inscrutable choices. I suppose winning may not be the point, but as its set up it seems to be a frustration simulator.
-Emotional impact: I bounced off hard
+Would I play again? The game suggests not to, so I won't, but naturally I'd be interested in seeing other paths.
An unpleasant man in an unpleasant situation, October 23, 2021I recently played through a game that used pedophilia for its shock factor, to show you just how bad the villains were. I mentioned in a review there how I dislike playing games that heavily feature pedophilia, regardless of the overlying message.
This game is similar, in that it uses something morally wrong (in this case, flagrant racism) to tell a a story. There are effective stories you can tell about racism, but this game uses unchallenged racist terms and ideas, leaving the player to make their own conclusions at the end.
I do believe the author intends this piece to have an overall anti-racist message. (spoiler for ending) (Spoiler - click to show)Your character turns out to be the true monster, and what seemed hideous monsters attacking him, saying things he couldn't understand, were soldiers of the race he hated. But that's only after we spent the rest of the game with characters saying things like (Spoiler - click to show)'all Asian women are ugly', 'mongoloids', 'sub-human'. It's like when an acquaintance repeatedly insults you but says 'just joking!', or back-handed compliments like 'I completely disagree with all your friends who say that you look like a hideous pile of cow pies'. It felt over the line, for me.
Overall, the game was polished. The only interactivity is choosing which memories to remember, and you don't have time to remember them all. I did experience an emotional reaction to the game.
When I play games, I immerse myself in the protagonist. And this is a protagonist I do not wish to identify with.
My 3 stars represents my overall rubric: polish, descriptiveness, and emotional impact.
A short and simple parser game about a child's toy, October 23, 2021This is a brief parser game where you play as a child's teddy bear who can walk around. Your goal is to defeat fears and gather friends.
The map is a bit complex in layout but small. Each friend requires a different method to find. A couple of the puzzles I found pretty clever; others were easy, and others I had to resort to a walkthrough for.
The implementation is a bit spotty; characters respond but they don't always make sense, and sometimes you might now the right action you need to do but not how to type it so the game understands it.
Overall, I think this was solid idea that needed more testing and polish. I didn't see any testers credited, which I think would have helped.
An account of a trial with extensive fake documentation, but few choices, October 23, 2021This is a pretty long game content-wise but pretty short choice-wise.
You are a new legal expert at a firm (I think?) and you're asked to look through evidence in an old case.
The case is described from beginning to end, primarily through PDF documentation that opens in another window. Your character can react to what they find, but opening and reading the documents is the main form of interaction, kind of like the more involved SCPs on the SCP wiki.
The game does touch an several important points in law like he said/she said and the balance between punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent.
I found the writing overall strong (with one caveat: I don't think the (Spoiler - click to show)child's writing is accurate. Children tend to use correct rules in the wrong places (like 'I goed to the store') instead of just having random misspellings (like 'I like stiks)). Characters were highly dramatized but were differentiated from each other.
The interaction style isn't what I usually go for in games, but it is what I like in SCPs and other collaborative static fiction sites. However, since I'm reviewing for an IF site, I'll stick with my usual rubric, for which I'd give this a 3.
Cat breeding, dating and disability simulator in Choicescript, October 21, 2021This game is a polished Choicescript cat breeding simulator.
You have $10,000 and a small monthly income, and have the opportunity to buy several different varieties of pedigree cats while buying different supplies and living areas for the cats.
Simultaneously, you have to deal with a new disability, which costs money and takes up your time.
I had remembered hearing before that buying pedigree cats was unethical, and you should get them from pounds. But looking it up, it seems like the main reason people say that its bad is because they have puppy mills or cat mills where animals are stored in unhealthy conditions. Even 'backyard sellers' can be problematic, with one website offering these red flags:
(Spoiler - click to show)
-The seller has many types of purebreds or “designer” hybrid breeds being sold at less than six weeks old.
-Breeders who are reluctant to show potential customers the entire premises on which animals are being bred and kept.
-Breeders who don’t ask a lot of questions of potential buyers.
-No guarantees-responsible breeders make a commitment to take back the pet at anytime during the animal’s life, no matter the reason.
Anyway, the point of the long digression is that my character did none of these things; quite the opposite in fact! So I was happy to do some ethical cat breeding.
The biggest strength of the game is, absolutely, its cute cat pictures. I like cats, but I spend very little time looking up pet pics online and don't really feel interested in such pictures in general. But the cats in this game are very cute, especially since you follow their story.
There are also several romantic options. It was actually a bit too easy to romance people; I thought I was picking a 'be nice' option but my character ended up asking the person out.
Overall:
+Polish: The game was smooth and looked good.
+Descriptiveness: The game had plenty of detail.
+Interactivity: It was clear what different options I had and how it could affect my strategy, without being too easy
+Emotional impact: It was pretty cute
+Would I play again? Sure
A fancy javascript parser game about a pirate race, October 21, 2021This game is, as far as I can tell, written in a custom javascript engine, since you can see how its constructed in the JS and I don't think Dialog does that (but it feels like Inform or Dialog).
This is a pirate racing game with a multitude of different puzzles, some optional, including a maze, a crossword puzzle, traditional parser puzzles, directing people, shopping and economy, logic puzzles, etc.
The idea is that you are entering a racing competition with pirate ships and have 1 day to get and spend money and time to prepare your ship for the race. Then you enter a choice-based segment where you race, encountering various threats and making choices you don't know the consequences of ahead of time, like classic CYOA books.
I found the game overall enjoyable, but I felt like it was missing some key direction at various points. In the beginning, it wasn't clear what was desired or what was possible. Similarly, during the parser interlude in the race, it was unclear what form commands should take, and it was somewhat fussy overall.
That's my only real complaint with the game. Otherwise, it has excellent polish and a fun setting.
Rob Nero blind: if you can!, October 21, 2021This is a choice game with some images and sound. In it, you play as a poor young thief whose father was the architect for Nero's palace. With the insight that gives to you, you decide to rob the place.
It seems that your choices matter quite a bit in this game. You can choose three different companions. My companion had a major effect on the story, so I can only imagine the other paths were very different. Also, the game referenced how I treated my companion and several other choices.
So there's a lot of replay value here, quality writing, good interactivity. There was some strong profanity and a few filthy-minded romans I met that put me off, so I don't plan on checking the other paths. I also learned some history from looking up things related to the game.
Friendship simulator based on a real story, October 21, 2021This game is meant to emulate an older teenager or young adult hopping on Discord and hanging out with friends by talking about a Japanese virtual idol group and making a wiki together.
The friendships in the game are uncomplicated and straightforwardly positive. All drama and tension come from the (Spoiler - click to show)abusive situation that the author finds themself in.
I feel like the representation of discord is accurate, and overall the writing was authentic.
The display was a bit puzzling; it's flat white text on a flat white background with no special styling or extra polish. The puzzling part is that one of the major focuses of the game is the protagonist's growth in the use of CSS, with the code listed in-game. Why not use CSS to make the game itself look fancier?
Finally, I feel a bit spoiled here, as one of my favorite games from last year (Lore Distance Relationship, which I voted for in several XYZZY awards) was also about fandoms and also treated the same real-life scenario (the authors are siblings). This game, while having emotional authenticity, doesn't have the same depth and polish of last year's game. But I am glad that both seem to be in a better situation.
Experience a fictional version of the Tumblr Potter fandom and JKR, October 20, 2021This is a pretty hefty Choicescript game that consists of two parts: a young person browsing Tumblr that's part of a fandom for a fictional series of novels (a science fiction analogue of Harry Potter with its own house-type system), and a story-within-the-story consisting of your character's fan fiction.
Fanfiction gameplay includes things like customizing your character and reacting emotionally to things, as well as choosing ships (as in relationships).
Tumblr gameplay consists of choosing from 8 or so different blogs to look at. Choosing a blog to look at brings up a post you can like, reblog, sometimes comment on, or skip to go to the next one (or back). Each blog has about 4 posts in each section of gameplay.
There are several chapters, each one giving more fanfiction and more events in the blogosphere.
Midgame spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)The author of the series makes posts in the middle of the game calling out one of your friends and saying that transgender people are degenerates. Most of the people you follow are trans, and so it puts a big damper on things and chaos ensues.
The game has a main story thread, but it also has a 'score' aspect in terms of your followers. Reblogging gets you more followers.
I had a ton of emotions reading this. I like to put myself in the headspace of the people I play as but doing so made me really uncomfortable this time, and I made choices in-game that I thought the protagonist would do that are things I really wouldn't do in real life.
The discomfort I experience playing this game is because it encourages you to have empathy for people and then puts them in hard situations that there aren't easy answers for. It also reminds me of real life confusions and conversations I've had.
So I definitely had a stronger reaction emotionally to this game than to others.
Mechanically, a lot of content is dumped at once in each of the tumblr sections. That's the way real social media is, but I've been trying to clear my head of social media 'noise' recently (who isn't?) and playing this reminded me why.
With its world-within-the-world and focus on the nature of human experience, art, and their interactions, and with the Choicescript format, I was strongly reminded of Creatures Such as We, a game by Lynnea Glasser in my top 10 games of all time. That game leaves me thoughtful and hopeful, while this one left me thoughtful and distressed. Both are useful. Of the two, though, this game had an interaction mechanic that didn't work quite as well for me, with the nonlinear asynchronous tumblr text dumps. But that isn't to say it didn't work at all; I think it's one of the better games of the competition and a masterpiece of technical work, doing things I didn't know were capable in Choicescript. And the characterization is excellent, with a lot of the characters coming alive for me personalitywise (although I lost track of some of the handles).
Explore layers of reality with AI-generated art, October 20, 2021This is a long Twine game that uses distorted sounds and AI-generated art to tell a story about a being in a world where astral projection is real. You discover in the first half of the game that (Spoiler - click to show)you are in a simulation of a universe that is roughly 9 simulations deep.
Much of the game is about gaining different versions of ascended consciousness, mixed with what I'd call 'stoner-dude' conversations with a lot of profanity and 'woah man!' type of interjections.
I liked the storyline, but didn't really care for our character, who had a lot of jerky options.
Overall, there was a high level of polish and descriptiveness and the interactivity worked for me. However, due to the dialog style I didn't really connect with the protagonist and don't think I'd replay.
Dense allegory in a symbolic world, October 20, 2021This is a Twine game with multiple worlds that all seem to represent the same allegory. Each world contains 4 women, who travel with you, and the worlds have symbolic meaning.
Simultaneously, you're searching for a woman, with an inventory of items and a mental retreat called 'the void'. Your character's name is He, and her name is She.
The game is not too long, but it is quite dense allegorically. One gets the sense that everything has deep inner meaning. However, I had difficulty teasing it out. Given the names and the quotations, the game seems to have originally been in Italian, and while the translation is generally good, it can be difficult to get 'vague but powerful prose' to work right across language barriers, and in this game I wasn't drawn in emotionally by the prose.
Overall:
+Polish: It had a few cool systems. I was able to create a bug early on that I think exists in some of my own Twine games where clicking on the inventory when you're already in a sub-routine with its own 'return' link will trap you in a loop forever, but besides that it seemed generally smooth.
+Descriptiveness: While the characters are vague, the description of the strange smog and the computers was vivid.
-Interactivity: It was hard to grasp what to do or what mattered. I went to the void a lot, but did it matter? I bought three pills and took one, but did it change anything?
-Emotional impact: Like I said earlier, I wasn't really drawn into this game.
+Would I play again? There are a few key points I'd like to revisit and understand better.
A creepy but somewhat unpolished hospital horror story, October 19, 2021I recently mentioned in another review how I'm a big fan of genre fiction. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about: a classic haunting story set in a hospital.
It's in standard Twine format (blue on black) and generally simple Twine branch-and-bottleneck, with some state tracking.
You play as a new CNA working at a nursing home where a dark secret stalks th halls.
I found the game genuinely frightening, playing late at night. The author makes good use of tropes; there's nothing really new here, it's just down well.
There is some use of text animation (including some flashing text). I feel like there were typos strewn throughout the text, mainly with quotation mark errors.
I'm giving this game 4 stars, due to its lack of polish but overall enjoyability. This is due to my personal enjoyment of this style of horror; for the general public, I'd say it's likely a 3-star game.
An underwater sci-fi game with deep worldbuilding, October 19, 2021Seth Paxton first entered IFComp last year as part of the writing team behind "Big Trouble in Little Dino Park", a fun dinosaur game that unfortunately suffered from bugs and a gauntlet-style structure that frustrated players, ending up in 82nd place.
This game is a significant improvement, incorporating numerous fixes requested in last year's game. It has far fewer bugs, excellent visuals and sounds, and a more free-form structure that encourages exploration and multiple playthroughs.
I think there is still room for improvement, but that's the best way to improve IFComp reception: try something out, tinker with it, see what people think, and adjust accordingly.
In this game, you play as a team of scientific researchers who crash on Ganymede and discover a mysterious underwater world.
It takes place in 5 different chapters, each with several variables saved that significantly changes later chapters. I can only describe my playthrough, though.
Each chapter has a different mechanic, from conversation to fetch quests to what felt a bit like a game of 'battleship'.
(commentary on chapters 2 and 4):(Spoiler - click to show)I felt like the Chapter 2 quest was hard to get started. I got started at the university but had trouble after that because no one else was interested in talking. I would have liked maybe one or 2 smaller successes along the way to keep me going until I got the big series of quests working. I felt like I saw variations of 'you can't go here yet' over and over. And in Chapter 4, it was similarly a bit hard to understand the mechanics without death, especially since I was told to find and return shark DNA, but every encounter with them ended in instant death! And that quest never came up again.
Overall:
+Polish: There were a few rough edges (like one uncapitalized sentence in the 4th chapter that stuck out), but overall I loved the smooth design and music and images.
+Descriptiveness: Lots of nice little details.
-Interactivity: I was frustrated on occasion, although this was definitely an improvement over last time. I considered making this a +.
-Emotional impact: Again, I went back and forth on this one. I liked the big reveal at the end, I enjoyed the dramatic dangers in chapter 4, but all of them felt like they could use a little more breathing room, a little time to contemplate and unpack what was going on.
+Would I play again? It'd be interesting to see other paths.
I think I'd give this a 3.5, but I'll round it up to 4 for IFDB.
A literary autobiography in parser form, October 18, 2021In this interactive fiction piece (which I played as part of a group and then again on my own), you play as the author, going through all the times in his life when he was (early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)stung by a bee. It also deals with his evolving relationship with his sister and others, and experiences in the 90s.
A lot of the nostalgia references hit home for me; I was about 4 years younger than the author, and remembered being fascinated with Dragonlance, and both entranced and off-put by the weird card-based Saga system (which got retconned pretty quickly!). I didn't play MM VI but I would have been playing Diablo or Chrono Trigger right around then.
The game bills itself as puzzleless, which is true, but it's puzzleless like Photopia, not puzzleless like Rameses. The difference is that in this game you have to actively investigate and think what would actually happen at that point. You can get through much of the game by hitting Z by you'll miss out on a lot.
I had mixed emotions while playing the game, and for me I'd describe it most as being about the literary quality of this game.
I devour fiction for its escapism. I like to see different views on what and how the world could be. I love it for its potential. Because of that, I love genre fiction. I prefer Poe over Hawthorne, Christie over de Maurier, Sanderson over Wallace.
This game has the same raw detail and undifferentiated take on life that great literary work has. This game shows the world as it is, through a certain perspective (that of the author). But the world it shows is an uncomfortable one, filled with many of the things I personally seek to escape through fiction. I prefer the ideal worlds that could be to the lonely and often dreary world we live in.
Quality-wise, there is a lot of polish. I think on the boat there were a few sentences with a double period at the end, but that's the extent of bugs I saw. There is occasional strong profanity and some sexual references from the perspective of a teen boy's thoughts.
An illustrated Adventuron game where you play an 'NPC' orc, October 18, 2021This is one of two Adventuron games in this comp, and its a great use of the system. The author has used a large number of properly licensed photos from various sources (including a number of cosplayers) to create a large fantasy world.
You play as an orc who is essentially an NPC in the Dream Factory, a place where humans (?) dream themselves as adventurers to fight against monsters (like you).
Gameplay consists of exploration, combat, leveling, etc. but with a whimsical tone. You can enter a dream world and learn about the history of anti-orc racism.
+Polish: This game is very smooth. I rarely tried a command that didn't have a smart response for it.
+Descriptiveness: Enemies and locations are lushly described.
+Interactivity: The main gameplay loop was satisfying.
-Emotional impact: The game was overall enjoyable, but I wasn't drawn into the world and its characters.
+Would I play again? I think it's a lovely game.
A multi-character parser game about defeating soda zombies, October 17, 2021Every IFComp brings with it some unusual coincidences. I find it fun that this comp has 2 different games (both enjoyable) where you have to assemble a rock band to stop another group from mind controlling people, and you have to use the power of music (the other game being Codex Sadistica).
This game uses a menu-based conversation system and allows you to switch freely between 3 main characters for much of the game.
You play as 4 kids who have a rock band at a school. The school and the whole town have been consumed by Hype, a new drink that turns you into a zombie!
You have to go on a series of wacky escapades to get all the stuff you need to defeat the monsters. Quests can be done in any order story-wise, but there is a definite chronology of which one happens first (which can be used to give yourself hints).
I found the game funny and well-conceived, but it had several parser hiccups I usually associate with games that haven't been tested well. My only assumption is that the game is so complex that some things slipped through. Examples include the (Spoiler - click to show)hype can in the second quests, which can get stuck in a state where most actions with it return no text at all; an uncapitalized standard response; the game telling you to look at (Spoiler - click to show)the shelf but there is no in-game object called that, etc. Besides that, I enjoyed this game a lot.
Save humans from spam while meeting a cast of characters, October 17, 2021In this game, you are a sentient program in a computer circa 2000. Your goal is to deal with an influx of emails, ZAPping or APPROVing them as you determine.
It cites DIGITAL: A LOVE STORY as an influence, but I've never played that game. It has a feel kind of like Wreck-it-Ralph/Emoji movie/Digimon in the sense that applications 'behind the scenes' are thinking, feeling creatures.
It turns out that one of your human's email friends is in despair because their father is taking away their computer. You have to work together with a crew of other applications to save her.
Here's my breakdown:
+Polish: The game is certainly very polished, with use of changing background images, pop-up boxes, text input, an inbox-managing system, text animations, etc. Could easily be nominated for an XYZZY award of some type for this alone.
+Descriptiveness: The game was very vivid in its writing, and the different email voices were very enjoyable.
+Interactivity: I'll admit, some of the spam emails were kind of long and boring. The simulation of an unpleasant event is still an unpleasant event. But I never felt like things were 'on rails', while simultaneously rarely feeling 'lost'.
+Emotional impact: I found the game funny and the story interesting. Like I said, some parts were boring, but many were not.
+Would I play again? I could see myself revisiting it.
A glimpse into the mind of a 'nice guy', October 17, 2021I know Stephen Bond entirely from his two earlier games:
-Rameses (from IFComp 2000), a popular and influential but controversial parser game about a young Irish teenager which was notable for not allowing the player any real agency, and
-The Cabal (from 2004) a joke game about how all of IF is run by a secret cabal that decides who's in and who's out.
I assume it's the same Stephen Bond, unless there are two Stephen Bonds writing interactive fiction stories about unappealing young Irish IF protagonists and agency.
This game combines a main storyline (from the viewpoint of Aiden, a young man) as well as numerous other snippets from the personal lives of bystanders, which kind of gave me a Spoon River Anthology vibe.
Aiden is consumed with love for for a girl named Laura, and has been for a long time as one of her friends. While they have an actual friendship, he spends most of his time imagining a happier future or a potential deeper love. Unfortunately, Laura is marrying another man. Today, in fact; and you've just been asked to be the best man at the wedding.
The gameplay feels pretty linear, although that's a bit belied by the complex web of Twine code you can see if you open it up in Twinery. There are numerous changes of viewpoint with corresponding changes in text color, a couple of images and some digital music sequenced from real songs.
This game falls in the category of 'very accurate representations of insufferable people', kind of like Savoir-Faire or the original Rameses. Aiden's mentality is that of a classic 'nice guy', and the ending suggests (Spoiler - click to show)that Aiden becomes involved in a bigger community, possibly incels or red-pilled stuff or MRAs.
I find Aiden understandable. I think Bond has done a good job of taking regular human weaknesses and amplifying them to a high level. Who hasn't had a crush in high school or on a distant celebrity that was unrealistic? But those come and go. This is a story about an enduring obsession, and that's what makes it more chilling.
I find this game polished, descriptive, and it had emotional impact for me. The level of interactivity worked for me for this specific story (with the different perspectives adding another layer of richness), but somehow the whole thing never completely gelled for me into a complete experience in a way that's hard to pin down.
An promising parser-like twine horror game with many loose ends, October 17, 2021This game has a lot of good things going for it, but the end product feels like the author ran out of time or energy with creating the game and decided to focus on polishing what's there (which is much better than making a game with too much scope and not testing it).
Mechanically, this is a Twine game that is built to be like a parser. Most nouns are clickable to get a description, and you have an inventory. Depending on what you are carrying, some items around you have other links. Most interestingly, you can combine any number of items, although I only saw that used once in gameplay.
This game has many similarities with Anchorhead. In both games, you play as a young woman accompanying her husband/partner to a strange and decaying city in order to get work at the city's university. Both have a city of surly inhabitants and a strange house with many secrets, as well as a wood-related mill outside of town.
The unusual feature of this game storywise is that there is a cheerful and warming house you stay at with two talkative inhabitants. The house gains greater importance as the game deepens.
The entire game is lovely. The only issue is that there isn't enough game, I think. The ending itself isn't bad, it's just that it leaves hanging many of the important questions from earlier on. Great games have a narrative arc that builds to a climax and then has a shorter, but definite, denouement; this game essentially falls off a cliff.
Things I can think of that are unresolved (major spoilers!) (Spoiler - click to show)the dog's origin and/or fate, anything with the sawmill, anything with the university, the chain and the slapping in the back room, the ability to combine items, the wicket in the town hall you say you can't go up yet, the pedestal in the town square.
I think it's not really helpful in general to tinker with games, but I think an 'expanded' version of this game that fleshes it out more would be great, maybe entered into the back garden of Spring Thing one year. Of course, just writing another game would be fun, too; the author is good at writing and codig, so I'd look forward to that.
A game about playing games and young friendship, October 16, 2021This is a complex game where you play computer games on a computer inside the computer that you're now viewing. While you do that, someone in real life (inside the game) comments on what you're doing inside the game (inside the game).
There are multiple games and multiple things in real life, and elements transfer from one to another (kind of like IFDB spelunking).
You are a teenage boy whose best friend (a girl named Riley) is moving away, and in a partially-packed house you are spending your last few hours together playing old adventure games on a computer.
Meta verbs are disabled; I opened up the game one day and then came back to it a week later and was shocked I couldn't RESTART. Then I tried it on a different device and the first thing I saw was a mention to use EXIT to 'truly' restart. UNDO is disabled, as well.
This game reminds me of several games of Adam Cadre. The meta-nature of playing a game and a game within a game with self-aware NPCs reminds me of Endless, Nameless. The piecing together of a story and focus on simple puzzles with 'aha' moments and emotional interactions reminds me of Photopia. And the inclusion of strip poker (not my favorite element) reminds me of many of Adam Cadre's works.
Overall, this is a great game. It's fresh, easy to pick up, sophisticated, and ties in elements of narrative IF and classic parser IF.
It has a companion game, Infinite Adventure, playable only using a DOS emulator. That is just an endless series of simple fetch quests. Interestingly, this game is also essentially a long series of fetch quests, making them mechanically very similar and story-wise very dissimilar.
I think the game worked for me on an emotional level. I like almost everything about this game, actually, but I don't think I'll replay it because the strip poker level on an old DOS computer brings back bad childhood memories. However, I'll probably replay it for some 'best games of the last ten years' article, so I'll still give it 5 stars.
A Quest 6 game about exploring a bizarre house , October 15, 2021This game has two purposes: to show off the new Quest 6 engine, and to be a great IFComp game.
For the first, it definitely makes Quest look good. I thought this was Dialog when I first started playing; the parser was easy to work with and the execution was lightning fast, something I didn't associate with the Quest of old. There have been tons of fun Quest games before, but to me the parser always felt slow and prone to errors. This new version seems great.
As a game, it falls into the 'weird house of an eccentric old man with arbitrary puzzles' genre, which is a genre I enjoy in general (Curses! is my favorite game, and Mulldoon Legacy was pretty fun). You're trying to deliver a letter to a mysterious old man while exploring a house that has large variations in size as well as many bizarre creatures walking through.
I solved about half of the puzzles on my own before turning to the walkthrough.
Many of the puzzles have a strange quality where the solution is something that only really makes sense in hindsight. Like other reviewers have noted, there are many possible solutions to most problems but only one or two are implemented (for instance, you can't (Spoiler - click to show)LOOK IN or SEARCH or SHAKE the boots when trying to find what's in them).
Similarly the setting has a lot of non sequiturs. From the author's notes, it seems it was developed from a series of forum posts years ago, which I read. Those forum posts helped a lot of things make more sense. I think the game could have benefitted from putting more of those explanatory details into the game itself.
There is some strong profanity. For me, I would have preferred not to have it, but some reviewers enjoyed the characterization it brought.
Here's my breakdown:
-Polish. Quest 6 is great, but the implementation of this particular game could use some work. For instance, it's possible to put the (Spoiler - click to show)boots right next to the (Spoiler - click to show)crack in the wall, making it impossible to solve the puzzle as intended since you are supposed to (Spoiler - click to show)type ENTER or IN but that puts you in the crack instead of the boots, even if you specify ENTER BOOTS. Similarly, (Spoiler - click to show)GET SAND doesn't work even if you have the pot, but FILL POT does.
+Descriptiveness: There were a lot of details flying around.
+Interactivity: The puzzles were often weird moon logic but it was fun.
+Emotional impact: Some parts of the game worked well for me, like the opening sequence and the exploration.
-Would I play again? The game is large and kind of intimidating and fussy.
A surreal exploration of history and the present, October 14, 2021I had trouble grasping this game as a whole, perhaps due to tiredness or picking unusual branches.
From what I can gather, it's a branching Twine game where you travel around the South, contemplating life in an almost dream-like way while also experiencing bits of the Civil War and the historical, experimntal university Black Mountain College.
In presentation, it is the standard blue-on-black Twine with no fancy features. It uses both text-replace links and normal, new-screen hyperlinks and doesn't distinguish between them, so it can be confusing at times. The Twine games of Hannah Powell-Smith are good examples of how to differentiate between different links effectively.
I'm always sympathetic to surreal, trippy games, like Harmonic Time Bind Ritual Symphony (recreating the author's real-life mental break) or drug trip games (like the excellent Blue Chairs), as it presents a view of life I'm not used to. This game was hard to pin down, though, and I feel like I definitly missed something important. Feel free to comment if you've found a deeper layer to the game.
A Choicescript adaptation of Gawain and the Green Knight, October 14, 2021Adaptations in IF are generally very tricky. The list of failed or mediocre adaptations is long (including my own Sherlock Holmes game) while the list of good ones is very brief (such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). The biggest problem is that novels and stories are 'on rails' and are centered on one pre-determined path, while Interactive Fiction invites exploration.
This one does well, I think. Part of that is due to the author's talent at adaptation. The other may be because the original tale includes parts that describe what 'would have happened', which can be incorporated into the text.
You play as Gawain, and the story follows the original tale pretty faithfully. A strange knight comes to Arthur's court and you are soon entangled in a quest. You find a strange castle where the host is kind and generous while the lady of the castle pursues you.
Variables are tracked in this game, but not that many stats seem to be. There is generally one ordained 'right path' but many scenes have multiple interpretations and solutions regardless of your desire (for instance, is it better to admit fear or not to have it at all?)
The game has strong themes of violence and sexuality, but treats both of them more as abstractions or threats or desires with moderate detail.
In both the online version and the downloaded version, the chapter headings were broken and I couldn't see what they were. That, and a stray typo, were the only bugs I saw.
I took several days to finish this because I kept getting distracted by work. The actual writing isn't that long, but I wasn't grabbed in by the text; or, perhaps, it was difficult to process my emotions about the strange tale (which applies to the original).
In any case, this exceeded my expectations and is one of the better adaptations I've ever played. I don't see myself revisiting it, as it resonated negatively with some personal experiences I had (by no fault of the author), but it is otherwise polished, descriptive, with good interactivity and emotional impact.
(Edit: I'm listting this as 2 hours, because I lingered over it, while others have said it took them only 1 hour going fast).
A polished Western parser puzzler about surviving a long shootout, October 12, 2021This game is a nice entry in a very under-represented niche of parser games: Westerns. While there have been some entries in this genre before (a Scott Adams Game, the puzzle game Hoosegow, etc.), it hasn't really attracted a lot of attention.
In this game, you play as a sort of singing cowboy, but your gun has been taken. You're on a quest to save a woman named Rosa from a band of bandits. All you have is your wits and your trusty guitar.
Along the way, you'll solve a lot of tricky puzzles. This game had some of the harder puzzles in the comp (from my point of view). There are complex mechanisms whose purpose you have to unravel as well as many physics-based puzzles involving (mild spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)heat, leverage, etc.
The story was pretty good. Like others have noted, it lacks the sense of urgency a drawn-out gun standoff tends to have in films once you start tooling around for the hundredth time. I'd prefer that over a turn limit, though! Second, there are some reasonable solutions that weren't implemented, particular when facing Whitey (I particularly would have appreciated responses saying I was on the right track for (Spoiler - click to show)putting hay in the barn and setting it on fire.).
The game has a lot of ties to real-life history with detailed notes at the end. The songs in-game include a lot of old classics that remind me of my grandfather who recently passed, and who loved singing cowboy songs. I think the game in general reminded me of him.
While the game did have minor flaws in the puzzles and story, I was overall impressed with it. Definitely would rank it at a higher difficulty rating than most games in the comp. I ended up using hints on only one of the puzzles, but the other two took me several days of on-and-off playing.
A long, polished parser game using emotions as verbs, October 12, 2021This game has a lot of work put into it. It has over a dozen testers (one of the best things you can see in a game), and draws inspiration from many other IF games.
You play as a ghost who cannot, at first, affect the material world. You also have no memories. As you play more and more, you unlock new verbs and new actions.
The story as it unfolds is one of torture and greed. You explore a big house and learn more about your untimely demise involving child abuse.
Here's my rating:
+Polish: The game is very smooth. With such a complex system, you'd expect a lot of bugs, but I found very few, if any. Parser errors were customized, as well.
+Descriptiveness: There was a spareness to the world. Some locations were described very succinctly. For instance:
"You are in a landing area at the top of a rickety staircase. There is a walk-in closet to the north."
However, the game was more descriptive with the emotions.
+Interactivity: Okay, I had some frustration here. Often, a new verb wouldn't lead to any progress in the room it was found in or the ones prior. This led to me trying the same verbs over and over again on everything with no success. It might have been worth adding a few more easy, early puzzles. For instance, I found no uses for (Spoiler - click to show)hate and love until long after I found both. However, the emotions idea was fun, and kept me persevering, so it was overall positive.
-Emotional impact. The story is not bad, and it reminds me (Spoiler - click to show)of the time I learned about 'the girl born without a face', which shaped my perceptions about physical disability and the love we should show to each other regardless of appearance. This story has a lot of good elements that would be ready to appeal to emotion, with a protagonist with mixed feelings about antagonists and a tragic backstory (similar, like the author said, to a story in Anchorhead, which worked a bit better for me). I think where things fell flat is that the protagonist is completely relatable and the enemies are clearly villains with little to no redeeming qualities. Our hero may have mixed feelings about them, but we, the reader, can clearly see them for what they are. This is kind of nitpicky, because this is a good story and I think I would like to read it again. I saw that this is the author's first game, and I'm reminded of a review that Emily Short gave of my first game (which I found quite painful at the time, and quite helpful now):
"I found [the game] least effective when it explicitly went for pathos in the writing, because[...]it hadn’t put in the time to build up that empathy. Similarly, the ending reached for an emotional point that it hadn’t done the work to earn, at least for me."
I think this is one of the better games in the comp overall and expect it to place anywhere in the top 15 or so. And if an author can do this well on the very first game, I can only imagine what games created with more experience will look like.
+Would I play again? Yes, I liked it.
Beautifully illustrated game about a goat considering a career change, October 12, 2021This is a Twine game which can be completed relatively quickly (around 30 minutes, much faster if clicking fast). It has 15 different endings depending on 3 different statistics that change throughout the game.
You play as a goat who works at a laboratory doing research on a mysterious substance. There is an accident, and you have to decide how you feel about work and what you want to do with your life.
I played through to all 15 endings, though the text of the middle game doesn't change much from playthrough to playthrough (there are about 2-3 variations for each section, so you'll see them all multiple times by the end).
The art is really lovely, it was the high point of the game for me.
Where Goat Game succeeds the most, to me, is in making a high-quality, smooth and bug free experience for the player where they can get absorbed into a story about an alternate world.
Where Goat Game falls short, to me, is in agency and plotting. The player character never really acts; everything is a reaction, except the final choice. Questions are all about how we feel, or how we respond to the actions of others. I would have wanted more chances to act independently of others.
Plotwise, there are many Checkhov's guns that never fire. There is a lot of worldbuilding here that just never goes anywhere. Like another reviewer said, the fact that these are goats is essentially immaterial; you could change a few details in the game and it would be the same. Similarly, you could change the dangerous magical substance to any kind of workplace safety issue and get the same feeling.
Finding all endings can be tough. I stalled out after 8, and ended up looking at the source for tips. The system is actually really clean and nice; if you want to see all endings and are really stuck, here is a complete breakdown (major spoilers:)(Spoiler - click to show) there are only 3 real choices in the midgame, each one raising one of the 3 main stats. The choices are the 'i like working/living/don't like living here', 'don't acquire secrets/sign petition/don't sign petition', and 'defend/criticize/decline'. Your final stats fall into one of 7 categories: tied stats, a value of 3 in a single stat, and any combination of 2 stats>0 and 1 stat=0. Each of these 7 cases has 2 endings depending on whether you leave or stay.
A big, polished, funny horror parser game with a lot of complex puzzles, October 11, 2021This long game is set on a movie set for a company that makes cheap horror films. After a harrowing experience with your boss, you have to explore five different studios to assemble a team to save your life...and the world!
Each studio generally represents one 'big' puzzle, and most have at least one mini-puzzle as well. The big puzzles range from using animals to complex timing puzzles to story-based puzzles and more. The grand finale is a puzzle with many strategies, many solutions and three distinct outcomes leading to three endings.
The writing is humorous. It is pretty gory (lots of blood and body parts) and violent (with the player initiating much of the violence). There was one instance of mild profanity. Conversation uses a simple menu system which seems to be custom (no Inform extensions are listed). There are quite a few characters to talk to, more than ten.
The game contains several linear action sequences that are predetermined, with only one sensible action available at a time (although that might be just an illusion). When I encountered two such sections (one at the beginning, the other at the end), I felt a bit railroaded, but each one opened up into a large puzzle, so it balanced out and felt great.
Some personal thoughts I had in relation to something I recently worked on (not really relevant): (Spoiler - click to show)I was especially interested in this game as I had just released a game with striking similarities, one I had intended to enter into IFComp. The two games are completely unrelated (this game has clearly been in production for a long time), but I too released a horror game where you wander an entertainment facility, solving big set-piece puzzles (including a lot of animals) and befriending the supernatural inhabitants of the park while it slowly transforms, culminating in an epic battle between two factions. I'm glad I didn't release my game in this comp, as Ade's game is better in every way. I love how he slathered plenty of story, conversation and characterization over everything, leaving very little 'filler' text, which is something I struggled with.
I had a great time playing it! I also enjoyed seeing tie-ins to Ade's other games, both mechanically (the puzzle involving (Spoiler - click to show)ghosts reminded me quite a bit of Map) and story-wise (the animals and their behavior is very reminiscent of Hard Puzzle 2, and other references are even stronger).
Edit: I should say that I worked really hard to solve this without hints. I almost never do that, and only tried because the work was engaging. My biggest mistake (that, once I fixed, solved most of my problems in the midgame) was thinking that (Spoiler - click to show)each studio puzzle could be solved by itself, but that's not always true.
A long, complete Twine RPG with multiple classes and quests, October 10, 2021Last year, the author released a game called 4x4 Galaxy, where you played a star fighter visiting 16 planets (arrranged on a grid), battling, gaining weapons, having different skills and different quests.
I really enjoyed it, but it got a bit tedious near the end of each playthrough.
This game is better than that one, though. This is a fantasy version and has more variety and more descriptive writing. Not only was I not burnt out by tediousness at the end, I was trying to find ways to extend my gameplay.
My character was a swashbuckler, and I focused a lot on combat. You start out with very few hitpoints and a couple of basic attacks, but enough to have some strategy (for instance, using a sword gives you the option to stun, while with a bow you can ignore damage reduction). By the end of the game, I had several legendary weapons, and could switch between sending out a half-dozen arrows from a giant's bow and using a finishing strike with 'the really really big sword'.
There are a ton of sidequests and they have excellent rewards. The main goal changes from game to game; mine was to assemble four pieces of a pirate's treasure map, and that involved things like becoming famous and defeating a pirate's ghost.
I did get really frustrated near the end of my several-hours playthrough when exploring the optional area (Spoiler - click to show)Coral Cove, which is a (Spoiler - click to show)maze with a kraken that attack randomly while walking around. I got very lost, and I gave up on it. In a future playthrough, I'd probably just map it out.
I don't think this game is for everyone; the opening is kind of overwhelming in terms of sheer number of options to try, and there is a lot of grinding, but I always enjoyed grinding fantasy RPGs as a kid.
There were a small number of errors. At one point </span> was used instead of <span>, leaving some raw code; a pirate threatened to conquer the land of [undefined], and a lot of dungeons that had events in their first room ended up overlapping the text compass. But these were minor in comparison to the very large amount of material in the game that worked great.
As a final note, the core gameplay here is similar to Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, so if you like one such game you might like the others.
A sprawling city and mystery with multiple opening and endings, October 9, 2021This is a TADS game entered into IFComp 2021. It is a very large game, with dozens of locations and requiring many hours to play through.
There are three different opening scenarios, each giving you a slightly different backstory. In all 3, you're an injured and forgetful young man exploring a small town called Foghelm.
There are numerous NPCs to talk to and a big mystery to solve. There are at least 3 endings, some of which are bad endings which you can't undo out of, so make sure to save.
Gameplay requires the use of ASK, TELL, SHOW, and ASK FOR. Searching all around is also helpful, as is keeping a map, even if you usually don't.
I manage to beat the game with 32 points out of 50, meaning there are many optional things I didn't see. I also replayed with a different opening, and some areas were unlocked that I couldn't see the first time and others were blocked off.
Overall, this is a compelling and excellent game.
It's negative features, such as they are, are typos (a frequent typo is having both a period and a comma after speech), topics for conversation appearing before you'd really know about them, and the big world map making it hard to know what to do at times.
Very fun game, one of the most fun I've played in a long time.
A post-apocalyptic road chase in Twine, October 9, 2021This is a pretty fancy-looking Twine game with options for play in Russian or English.
It features custom CSS styling with changing background colors and a cool mechanic where you can click on an item and then on any earlier highlighted link to use the item there, giving it more robust puzzles.
You play as one of two people in a vehicle speeding down a highway carrying precious cargo. It has kind of a Star Wars feel but on land instead of space. Some people start chasing you and you have to take control of the guns.
This is a fast-paced game and I felt nervous for my character a lot, thinking I'd mess up, but I got through okay. The storytelling and writing is good, and I enjoyed it.
+Polish: Very good looking game
+Descriptiveness: Vivid world building
+Interactivity: I liked the two-layer puzzles and the good hints the game gives you
+Emotional impact: I felt nervous for my characters
-Would I play again? This is a very good game, but it's a bit overwhelming at time, because there are just so many options.
Big, funny linear parser game about a nerdy Hercules, October 8, 2021In this game, you're a clueless, weak and nerdy Hercules who's cousin assigned him 10 impossible tasks.
There's a pretty big map, spanning several continents (although it's mostly abstracted, so you can 'go se' to Crete and back, for instance).
The writing is pretty funny. There is a large cast of characters that are all characterized strongly and each puzzle is an amusing take on the original.
Structure-wise, you can only take on the challenges in order. More than half of the challenges are solved directly by using an item from the previous challenge. The game alerts you if you are going out of order.
The solutions start out pretty reasonable (I think I solved 5 on my own) but quickly become kind of moon logic/Sierra-style puzzles where it's hard to guess the author's solution. However, there aren't that many red herrings (for most of the game) and so if you just make sure to try out each item every way you can you can probably work it out.
I had a lot of fun. The puzzle logic didn't click but the game is amusing even with a walkthrough. There is occasional mild profanity which doesn't really fit the game's style but otherwise this is just fun and silly.
Meet 4 characters on a supernatural mountain, October 8, 2021This is a game about riding a Funicular (basically a tram that is rope-powered instead of track-powered) up a mountain that has several special properties. It has unusual crystals all over, it emits strange radiation, and every 20 years it puts off a beautiful aurora.
On the funicular with you are 4 strangers. Each has their own joys and desires and secrets, and most of them (maybe all??) are romantic options.
The game isn't too long, but it has a major twist and then another twist in the ending.
The game explores some serious issues (drug use, infidelity, pseudo-science) and offers a lot of romance for its size.
Here's my breakdown:
+Polish: The game felt very smooth
+Descriptiveness: Getting 4 perspectives was nice
+Interactivity: I felt like I could make real choices in my conversations.
Emotional impact: It was good but I wasn't really drawn into the characters. Each contact felt a bit rushed; a 2-minute romance doesn't feel as real as a longer exposure would have.
+Would I play again? Yeah, it was interesting.
A somewhat linear fantasy story about helping your family, October 7, 2021This is a Squiffy game in a generic fantasy setting. Your town is raided by orcs that are mind controlled by white worms, and your brother and father are taken.
The rest of the story is mostly a bunch of standard fantasy sequences glued together and hurried over. For instance, you can go request aid from a king, visit an enemy city, make friends with a half-orc.
You generally have two choices at a time, sometimes more, but the branches converge again quickly. Sometimes the author forgot important information in one branch (like not telling you a beggar is following you).
There are major plot holes near the end. Overall, this story seems like if a very talented teenager spent a few weeks making a game in Squiffy, or someone older getting into writing IF for the first time. Either way, getting more practice will help and I expect future games would be significant improvements.
For now, though, my rating is:
-Polish
+Descriptiveness
-Interactivity
-Emotional impact
-Would I play again?
A science fiction twine game with unique puzzles, October 7, 2021This is a game originally written Spanish and translated for the competition.
You play as a kind of rebel against an all-powerful corporation called Faro.
Gameplay proceeds through several puzzles, including interrogation, reasoning puzzles, and at least one that I've never seen before (entering Hack's house, a puzzle that required me to (Spoiler - click to show)adjust my computer settings).
The puzzles are pretty tricky; I frequently looked at the answers in the code. One puzzle require clicking on a moving link; I ended up (Spoiler - click to show) highlighting with tab and then hitting enter.
The translation is not idiomatic. In addition, some words are not translated at all (Continuar for continue, for instanc, or the 3 meters for the Mind scan). The story has interesting characters, but I don't believe it has the backstory and/or continuity for us to care a lot about them. All of these are normal problems for writers that usually get easier with more and more practice, so I look forward to any future games.
Programming-wise the game is very sophisticated.
-Polish: The game text could be polished more.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is very descriptive
-Interactivity: I felt like some of the puzzles were unfair.
-Emotional Impact: I think if some of the other problems were fixed I would have a better connection with the game emotionally.
+Would I play it again? Yes, if it was updated!
A bunch of logic-type puzzles in one big Twine game, October 6, 2021This, like Retrocon 2021, another entry in this year's IFComp, is a collection of puzzles thrown into one big story.
However, this game has much more story, including a large overarching mystery in the 'wrapper' story around this game.
The puzzles are mostly traditional ones (like having 3 different-sized measuring cups and trying to get a specific value, or a slightly faster than usual Rings of Hanoi, a crossword, a wordsearch, etc.).
Each puzzle has a story associated to it. If you die by making wrong choices or running out of time (in Normal mode, there is sometimes a timer, while in Easy mode there is not), then you get the same puzzle but with a different story.
The very first puzzle is a bit weird (it is logical, but not a 'classic puzzle') like the others. Once you get past it the rest should be more familiar.
I thought that was pretty cool. I never became super invested in the ever-changing characters and the puzzles were mostly ones where the solutions are known, but I had fun doing it.
+Polish: Very polished.
+Descriptive: Yes, especially the changing settings
+Interactivity: At least there were no cryptograms or (at least for me) real Towers of Hanoi. What was there was frequently fun.
-Emotional Impact: Didn't get invested.
-Would I play again? It was fun, but I'm not sure how much replay value there is.
I really think this game is a 3.5, and would round up to 4 to be nice, but E. Joyce has already made many incredible games, so I'll point to those instead. Check out "Lady Thalia and the Seraskier Sapphires" (also co-written by N. Cormier) or "Social Lycanthropy Disorder", especially, because those are really fun!
A complex and vivid parser game with active NPCs but parser hangups, October 6, 2021This is a game with solid writing and design but shaky implementation, what one would expect from someone with a good writing background that is just now breaking into Inform 7. On Twitter I see that the author is an MFA student in game design, and the game's ABOUT text says it's a demonstration game, so that would all check out.
You play as a young would-be fortune teller in the house of a professional fortune teller. They dare you to tell the fortune of everyone in the house correctly.
There are 7 people in the house, and you can assign each of them 3 different fortunes.
Once you've done so, after a certain amount of time, they start interacting with each other, and after a certain time limit is reached, the game automatically ends and you are evaluated on how accurate your fortunes are.
Conversation works well in this game. But the complex scene-changing machinery is problematic. At one point I was in the closet and saw dramatic happenings in the room, with somebody storming out. Then I left the closet and the room, and saw the exact same scene, this time from outside the room.
More egregiously, on multiple playthroughs, after the first cutscene, I tried talking to Lux and then became stuck in the kitchen, with no way to leave. Any attempt to exit resulted in no text at all.
I wasn't able to determine if any actions you take besides fortune telling matter. It seems like it might; there are a few random objects scattered about. But with the bugs it's kind of hard to tell.
This game is far better than most projects made for MFA or BA degrees in game design (although there was a really nice Choicescript one recently). No testers are credited, and I think that having several more testers would have really pushed this to 'excellent' territory.
More chess puzzles with more complexity, October 6, 2021Andrew Schultz recently release Fivebyfiveia Delenda Est, a fun small game with chess puzzles that was one of his higher-rated games.
This is a larger game with chess puzzles that have a bit more complexity. There are a bunch of mini-kingdoms to invade and each has two 'tiers' to conquer. The game itself has 2 difficulty settings. I beat it on the first, and started the second, only to realize that it was very similar.
The puzzles involve setting up 2-3 pieces on the chessboard to trap the enemy king. Interestingly, sometimes you have to set up enemy pieces as well.
The storyline is fairly thin but understandable. The game sometimes holds your hand a bit more than I would have wanted. Specifically, beating one area sometimes automatically beats neighboring areas, even before you know what they do. If I had more idea before I left what each area was like, or was given the option to grey out such areas, I'd prefer that.
A heavy metal parser puzzler with colors and a couple rough patches, October 5, 2021This was a genuinely fun game. You are part of a heavy metal band whose set is being taken over by a glamrock band. You have to assemble your band together, but each is distracted and can't come help you.
After some initial exploration, you gain the power to JAM with the other members of your band, which lets you cause interesting effects. Jamming with 2 people at a time provides more effects, leading to about 10 jam powers all together.
The writing is snappy and fun, the colors are cool, and the mechanics are interesting.
The only real downsides are (for me), a lot of profanity (in line with metal fans, though) and a lot of missing synonyms and alternate solutions. I kept trying things like RIP SHIRT or SURF CROWD or UNPLUG SWITCH or TAKE SWITCH and getting error messages, when it seems like these things ought to have been implemented. The game is very smooth in other areas and had testers, so I guess I'd just recommend in the future piling on even more testers and implementing everything they try in a transcript. I think this game is already great, but I think it could be pushed to 'completely awesome' territory by such efforts. I definitely hope to see more games by this author in the future, because they have a real talent for writing and mechanics.
A bunch of mini games wrapped up in Twine, October 5, 2021This game is unapologetically just a bunch of mini games wrapped up in Twine with an ultrathin story applied.
The minigames include:
-A slot machine with fruit graphics and some animation
-A poker draw game
-Keno
-Horse Racing
-A football game
-A zombie-shooting card game
-A short custom-parser text adventure.
Each of the games worked pretty well, and some of them were pretty fun. All are based on RNG except the text adventure. The text adventure has a pretty basic parser (which has a tendency to insult you) and is of the classic 'my dead male relative's house' style, with each room lovingly recreated.
+Polish: Very smooth. The parser isn't awesome compared to dedicated parser languages but impressive for Twine
+Descriptiveness: It was easy to see what was going on usually
+Interactiviy: Most games worked well for me.
-Emotional impact: I felt distanced emotionally from my character and the games
-Would I play again? It was interesting, but I don't think I'll be revisiting.
A parser game about a magical fox-human, October 5, 2021This is a fantasy parser game where you play as a human/fox creature that can switch between forms at will. You are a guardian to a young human who has been captured and you have to rescue him.
Gameplay is centered on switching between forms to your advantage. This is done very well: your animal form can speak with other animals, has heightened senses and can fit into tight places, while your human form is stronger and can use tools.
The parser could use some work, and the opening scene is where it struggles the most. Going up or down gives a blank message, and trying to apply the bandages is really rough when it comes to guessing synonyms (things like PUT BANDAGES ON ____ don't work).
The cast of characters is described well, although the raiders stick out as weird (they use strong profanity, where the rest of the game is more at a YA level, and they seem fairly dumb). The animal characters are great.
Surreal horror game with religious themes in a compound, October 4, 2021This game features a hungry young protagonist in a wheelchair that explores a large world in Twine.
This game is very location-and-inventory based, with a large map (including an actual in-game map at one point) and several lock and key puzzles.
Gameplay consists of exploration, with special optional memories unlocked while a larger main storyline plays out.
Stylistically, it leaves many words uncapitalized and switches to different colors to signify different themes.
The story is a surreal religious horror where it's difficult to know what is real and what isn't. There is a large amount of imagery taken directly from the book of Revelations, and much of gameplay revolves around the fact that you are someone in a cult.
Overall, I found the surreal religious imagery to be effective. Many of the parts about wheelchair use seemed realistic based off of my experience with living with a wheelchair user for almost a decade (except getting through farmland!).
I appreciate the author leaving a lot up to imagination, using nuance and hiding behind symbolic imagery.
-Polish: There were noticeable typos. Everything else was great.
+Interactivity: The world map and the puzzles felt good.
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid writing, some of the most descriptive I've seen this comp.
+Emotional impact: I'm really into this stuff. It doesn't represent my worldview (I have a more hopeful interpretation of Revelations) but it lies in the intersection of my interests.
-Would I play again? It was pretty dark and I felt like I understood the message I was going to get, so I'm not sure I'll revisit.
A classic-style Twine game about creating and detecting robots, October 4, 2021This game feels like it would fit well in the early era of Twine. It's standard white text on black with blue hyperlinks, uses a couple text animations and has a standard branch and bottleneck structure with a sci fi or fantasy genre.
I like a lot of games like that (like Hunting Unicorn, for instance). This one turned out pretty well.
You play as a participant in creating sentient robots. You undergo questioning similar to a Turing test with your answers fed into the programming for a field of robots.
Later on, you encounter those robots, and must at a crucial moment conduct a Turing test.
I felt engaged with the story, and thought that the characters were vividly described. I felt like my choices mattered. I do think the game could use a little more polish, like a title screen or custom CSS or even some more callbacks to earlier choices. And while I liked it I don't think I'd replay it.
A wholesome game about tic-tac-toe with kids, October 4, 2021I was playing through all the IFComp games that are in inaccessible formats, and I thought I got them all. But then I saw this game and was surprised. This is a raw python file, and games like that almost never get reviews in the comps and tend to place lower down. As one of IFComp's most successful long term participants, Schultz would know it, which was my surprise.
But it's not always about crushing the competition, which is exactly the point of this game. You play as an adult who sees a kid playing tic tac toe. As a kid, you always had a 'draw' with other kids, and if they let you win, you got mad. But once, you won a game because the other player missed something, and you want to recreate that experience for the child.
I'll admit, I was mystified at first, and just played regular old tic tac toe games. It reminded me of Infinite Adventure in this comp, just repeating the same old interactions over and over (in this case, endless games of tic-tac-toe). But then I finally got it, and the game became a lot of fun. I first solved it the easiest way, and then I solved it the hardest way. I wasn't sure I had gotten everything, so I checked the walkthrough and saw I had done what was intended. I didn't go through and do all the other variations, because I felt satisfied.
This is a pretty small game, but:
+Polish: It was very polished
-Descriptive: There's some meaningful text trappings, but it's mostly a puzzle with some bare-bones story
+Interactivity: The puzzle was intriguing and thoughtful
+Emotional impact: I loved the motivation for the puzzle and enjoyed putting myself in the protagonist's shoes
+Would I play again? This was a very smooth experience.
Surreal puzzler that seems unfinishable, October 4, 2021Instead of giving a review, I'd like to give a description of my experience playing.
I start the game. I try 'X ME', and get the standard response ('As good looking as ever.'). I'm on an airplane with amnesia, no other flyers and the bathrooms blocked by doors. I find a few items and look around. I get stuck and look more, and find an object that only appears when you examine something twice.
I then get stuck, because I know I need to (Spoiler - click to show)break a keypad but I don't know how. I even try hitting it with (Spoiler - click to show)a pencil. I turn to the walkthrough: apparently I'm supposed to (Spoiler - click to show)hit the number 6 key, specifically, to break the keypad.
At this point, I realize I would never have figured this out. I turn to the walkthrough and start following it blindly. I go to a school with no connection to the last location, and apparently need to figure out that I need to (Spoiler - click to show)put a book from the airplane on a random lectern and then walk into it. I'm grateful for the walkthrough but after I escape the (Spoiler - click to show)complex plane the walkthrough breaks down, so it seems the author didn't test the walkthrough for this version of the game. I try exploring on my own but get nowhere. No testers are credited.
I would play this game again, but it needs a lot more polish, a lot of the descriptions are generic ('The barren hallway continues from north to south, and it turns to the east'), and the interactivity didn't work for me, leading to less of an emotional impact. This means I'm giving 1 star, although this game works reasonably well and probably took a lot more work than some other shorter games in the comp. It's just that according to my usual criteria it would only receive 1 star, and I'd like to be consistent.
I think the author could make an incredible game if they had a longer testing period with many testers, including some familiar with what's possible in parser games.
Detective game on a boat with great concepts but some execution issues, October 3, 2021This is Wonaglot's third IFComp game, the other two being the well-received Dungeon Detective games, both placing in the top 15 and both receiving XYZZY award nominations.
Mystery is one of my favorite genres, so I was excited to see a new mystery game by Wonaglot. Surprisingly, this one is a Quest-based mystery. Quest is a parser system that, like similar systems such as ADRIFT, provides a simple and intuitive system for making parser games with less overhead than Inform but a little less robustness.
The storyline is that you are an engineer with a set of special masks, asked to investigate a murder on a large private ship. This is a long game, the longest I've played so far in the comp.
This game has great concepts and could be described as ambitious. It has many NPCs spread out over dozens of rooms. The PCs respond to conversational topics and items shown and can move from room to room. There are multiple mysteries to solve, multiple subquests, and magic involved. There is even some animation involved. Perhaps most ambitious, there are 4 masks you can wear that affect how others see you and treat you, changing conversations.
While I completed the game and found it overall satisfying, the implementation wore thin in several places. The mask system was not intuitive; it was hard to figure out what effect each mask would have, and the first NPC I saw didn't react to it at all. In the end, the masks systems ends up pretty inconsistent; sometimes it changes what actions you can take; sometimes it changes a couple of lines of text in dialogue; sometimes it adds flavor text to room descriptions. It was difficult to make plans and execute them with the masks.
Similarly, the NPCs had so many different ways to interact with them (showing them things, asking about topics, and TALKing to) that most interactions ended up being not coded in at all, leading to a lot of 'I don't know anything about that,' a problem common to many parser mysteries.
And in the endings I got, it lists what happened to everyone, with a few saying 'you should have interacted with so and so more' when I had gotten to what seemed like the end of their quest, while people I didn't interact much with got a bigger ending.
I'm not sure that all of this could be or should be changed, though. In a recent game I wrote, I spent months writing out every possible response for every object, but all feedback I received about that was that the text seemed generic and bland (since writing 100s of lines gets repetitive). So leaving the player to only find the few key lines of text isn't a bad alternative. But in the end, I wished for more smoothness and understandability, especially for the mask system.
Overall:
-Polish
+Descriptiveness
-Interactivity
+Emotional impact
+I would play again
Play-by-mail co-op twine game with the death of the revolution, October 3, 2021This is a 2-player Twine game. Every time you make a decision, you are given a code, and asked for the code of your partner. This means you could play side by side or (as I did) messaging back and forth with people. I played once as each faction and am playing again with another person.
I never play IF with others, except at the Seattle IF Meetup, but I was able to find some great people on intfiction to message back and forth. It took a while to nail down transmitting codes but then proceeded pretty well. There are only about 10 or so choices so the game is pretty fast, although there is a lot of text per each early choice.
Story wise, it reminded me of the faux-historical games from Choice of Games (like The Eagle's Heir). You play either as the first (and last) newly-made dictator of an idealistic socialist republic or as the king's general who is coming to crush the rebellious city.
Choices definitely matter here, with different branches by one character giving different branches for another. They tend to share many features in common (so it's not a Time Cave wildly branching structure) but it includes different locations, choices for death and violence or peace, etc.
I found it fun and effective, and I didn't expect that to happen. There was one or two typos, but overall it's fairly polished.
I rate games on the following scale, which can give a high score even to relatively short games like this one:
+Polish
+Descriptiveness
+Interactivity
+Emotional Impact (I didn't get completely drawn in, but I did roleplay as my character and was able to be drawn into how they would react)
+Would I play again? I already have several times
A post-apocalyptic game about helping a baby's birth, October 3, 2021I enjoyed Matthew Warner's last IFComp game, Tombs and Mummies, but I think this represents a substantial upgrade. The author makes excellent use of the Adventuron engine here and I had little trouble with the parser itself.
You play as a man in a shelter that survivors of two apocalypses have constructed. Outside roam the infected weremen. Inside, your wife is about to have a baby, but she needs a c-section, and the only person who can help you is someone not likely to want to do so.
This game is Cruel on the Zarfian scale. It is very easy to unknowingly lock yourself out of victory. It also includes some randomized combat, although there are ways to fix anything that goes wrong.
There is a timer going on, so you can't dilly-dally too long.
A lot of puzzles have a riddle-like or crowssword-puzzle-like quality, like unscrambling words, remembering famous pop-culture numbers, or navigating a maze.
I beat about 60% of the game, but I had missed a major component early on and couldn't figure out why I always ran out of time. The walkthrough helped me through that.
Once you know the codes replay is faster, so it's not too bad to retry if you die.
Overall:
+Polish: Very smooth. This is Adventuron at its best implementation-wise, I think.
+Descriptiveness: It was very descriptive.
-Interactivity: I like the game, but fiddling with the doors and equipment and doing the unscrambling puzzle weren't really my cup of tea (although the unscrambled messages were funny!)
+Emotional impact: I think the game may overreach at times in the emotional effect it's going for, by relying on a selfless choice as the main thrust but requiring that selfless choice to proceed. Still, I found the story interesting.
+Would I play again? Yes, after I've had some time to forget the puzzles.
A F2P-mobile app-style fantasy card game with a variety of quests , October 3, 2021One of the games I've put the most hours to in the last few years is a lesser-known Hearthstone clone called Plants vs Zombies Heroes. It's the only card game app I've played, but it has a lot of features in common (I've heard) with the other big ones like Hearthstone.
So that's my basis of comparison.
This is an Online unity game. The download is a webpage with a redirect to the online play. Starting play has a lot of download bars as various things load. It has an opening movie cinematic with voice acting. After that, there is something of a tutorial, and then it opens up.
The main idea is that you open packs that contain cards or gold or other things, then you assemble a deck. You then play different levels or (eventually, but not now, I think) PvP. During gameplay, you have three keepers that generate points to buy cards with or attack (but not both). Keepers that get to 0 hp are taken out of play, same as for enemies.
Overall, this game is, to me, a mismatch for the comp. The spirit of the competition has generally been that you provide a complete gaming experience which can be archived and stay free forever, with possibly a better version released later for money (like Scarlet Sails). The two hour rule is there to encourage games to be substantially completable in two hours.
Neither rule is hard or fast; there have been games in the past which could not be archived (like Paradise, a text MMO game that was like a reinvented MUD) and the winners each year tend to take over two hours. But it's a bit odd to see a game like this which has different quests which can only be played once every 28 days (!) and has a cash shop with items up to $10.99 (none of which seem to be needed for progression).
I played the first two levels of the main game, but it seemed like GUI-based combat is the main thrust of the game with little text. Compared to Jared Jackson's Tragic from last year, it has much less of a strong storyline).
I don't generally include UI in reviewing, but it's an important part of this game. This UI could use a lot of tweaking; it popped up for me far too large for the screen. I think it told me to use CTRL+'-' and CTRL+'+' to adjust it, but I couldn't tell because I couldn't see. When I did get it to fit, it was usually too small to see, in a small rectangle with a blank white border around it. When opening packs, you had to slide a key from left to right. The interaction felt off; I think it was missing some kind of subtle highlighting when hovering over the key or inertia when sliding it. And you had to repeat it 30+ times in a row, making it kind of slow. The tutorial explains stats, but in-combat it's hard to remember; having hovering tool tips would be better.
Overall, this feels like an open beta for a commercial F2P/IAP game, which is why I provided the feedback above.
For my IF ratings:
-Polish: The game could use some tinkering with, as described above. I saw a couple typos, too, in the main story text, but I can't remember where.
-Descriptiveness: Most of the 'flavor' is communicated through images rather than text.
-Interactivity: It was difficult to figure out combat; all the mechanics were thrown at once instead of introduced one at a time, and complex opening and deck-creating had to be done before fighting. I prefer the tutorial of PVZ heroes, which has ultra-simplified combat happening first with a pre-made deck, then slightly more complex battle, then adding just a few cards to your pre-made deck.
-Emotional impact: I was too lost to get deeply involved in the story.
-Would I play again? Not without significant changes.
The scale I use doesn't really apply to this game; as a card game I'd probably give it 3/5. But I'll use my IF scale on this website for consistency.
Note that this was just my personal experience; others may have wildly different reactions to the game!
A retro-parser-aesthetic choice-based game about helping others, October 3, 2021This game defied many of the categories I tried to put it in. It looked like a parser game, Adventuron specifically, but appears to be custom written.
You walk around with on-screen arrow keys and a menu of verbs you can apply to your inventory or things around you, kind of like old Lucasarts games.
There are a variety of items, and a variety of people you can help.
On one hand, the programming is very impressive and the game looks well-done. On the other hand, it often contradicts itself. It will say 'there is a flier here you can take' but if you click TAKE nothing happens. It will say 'the frog leaves' but then the frog is still there. I was able to complete the game, and found it humorous, but I think that this could have received even more testing. For me, I like to spend 50% or more of my development time for parser games in testing alone, and for choice maybe 10-20% at least.
This game had heart to me, and it was polished and I might play again, so I'm giving it 3 stars. If the bugs were fixed I'd make it 4.
Procedurally generated mini-adventures in DOS, October 3, 2021This game is intended to run in a DOS emulator such as DOSBOX. It has a nice aesthetic; there was a guy a few years ago who would constantly crank out BASIC games that ran in DOS and their best feature was the cool ascii art and overall look and style, and this game has that.
The parser may be a heavily modified Inform, but is more likely some kind of custom parser, since it doesn't understand standard Inform verbs like VERBOSE or PULL ME.
Gameplay is procedurally generated. You are in a maze of a house with NESW directions and one item or less per room. One of the items is a 'goal' (in my 11 playthroughs, I saw a wet elf, hungry goblin, pedestal with inscription, chest, etc.) and one of the other items is meant to be picked up and put in the goal.
I had always wanted to write a game like this as a meta-commentary on generic adventures, a game that would have random aesthetics and map but always be about gathering 'something' to put in a trophy-case analogue. But I never got around to it, and this game is a better implementation of my vision, so I'm glad to play this and see a better version of my own dreams.
In the end, of course, the game is very slight. It itches my 'play an adventure' desire, just like Nick Montfort's Amazing Quest last year, but that's it.
Mild spoiler if you haven't looked through other comp games: (Spoiler - click to show)This game seems to be part of a pair, since BJ Best has a game called "And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One" that appears to have you play a pair of kids who are playing this very game, with the same text and same credits.
(Spoiler - click to show)There may be something hidden in the game, perhaps a secret that must be communicated between BJ Bests games, of which there are three (I saw on adventuron discord that he entered an adventuron game as well). I'll change my rating if I see anything new from those games.
A custom executable game about pedophilia and violence, October 3, 2021I'll be frank and say that I don't enjoy playing games about pedophilia in any way; I don't find them fun, and I have yet to play one I find enlightening. I think that games can and should treat difficult and heavy topics, but for me playing game about pedophilia is like reading a coffee-table book full of high-quality illustrations of feces. My apologies to authors who have attempted to treat this topic in a sincere and thoughtful way.
Anyway, this is a custom parser game where you explore a house and try to recover your memories. You wake up weak and bleeding, with a health counter that slowly decreases until you die.
The storyline centers around pedophilia, with texts by de Sade and inappropriate photos (described in vague text terms only) to be found. There are also several weapons to find.
The game isn't too big. I wandered around for a while before trying the walkthrough, and found that I had seen about 50% of the game already. The walkthrough itself contains many unnecessary but interesting commands, such as looking at every wall in every room and trying to go in wrong directions in most rooms. These commands are in the walkthrough because the author has implemented custom text for much of them.
The parser is pretty good, but I miss being able to use pronouns, since you must take an object before looking at it and it would be easier to type "take paper; x it" instead of "take paper; x paper". Some synonyms would be appreciated, like 'turn on car' instead of 'turn on engine'.
Overall, this game is solidly in the simulated realism camp of parser implementation, with a wound/hunger timer, lots of red herrings and random scenery, randomized combat, etc. There are multiple endings, of which I found 3 (although 1 of them just ended the game immediately, so I don't think it was a real ending. This was (Spoiler - click to show)driving away before discovering the truth.).
My overall rating:
-Polish: more synonyms would work well, I think. There are very few typos, but some of them are noticeable.
+Descriptiveness: The game is very vividly described.
-Interactivity: Finding the objects of importance often meant looking at things that are not described, such as walls or floor.
+Emotional impact: The impact was negative, but it did provoke strong emotion.
-Would I play again? I tried a couple of endings, but I don't plan on looking again.
I would have given 3/5 if the subject had been different.
A custom parser puzzler in Java with Japanese and Buddhist themes, October 2, 2021This is a long parser game in the form of a Java .jar file (a very recent version of Java is used and older versions are incompatible).
The result is pretty smooth looking and working. The responses come quickly, the save system works well. There's no undo, and death is frequent in this game, so be prepared!
You play as person wearing the clothes of a Japanese Buddhist monk. You travel through various realities, all of which have a recurring menacing figure and panels with different colored bulbs.
I played around for a while before turning to the walkthrough (as I do for most games!). I discovered that the bulk of the game is one big puzzle, with another big puzzle at the end. For puzzle fans, I'd recommend sticking out the first big puzzle. This is the puzzle having to do with (mild spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)the bulbs and panels.
The atmosphere of this game is great; I loved it. Very nice. The puzzles were, to me, a bit tedious. I went off the walkthrough at one point and had to try to figure out how to go back and complete an earlier part and found it very hard to execute the solution even once I knew what it was.
I had a good time, but I'm not sure I'd play again. This is much better than most windows executable IFComp games I played in past years, probably in the top 2 or 3 of such games, so I'd consider this to be a rousing success for the author.
Assemble a Halloween costume while learning about phosphate binders, October 2, 2021This game is an educational game about kidneys made for kids using a custom engine that reads full sentences.
The game itself has multiple endings; I finished after only examining 3 rooms out of 5 in the main hub.
A magical fairy is helping you get a Halloween costume by transforming whatever you pick up into costume parts. Meanwhile, you get hungry, and eating requires you to take phosphate binders due to your kidney problems. This opens up a minigame where you have to hunt for phosphate crystals.
Throughout IF history there have been at least two different threads: one using text to provide a realistic simulation of the world (including Emily Short and her physics games), and those pushing for abstraction and ease of use (including Ryan Veeder who provides a lot of subtle affordances to make gameplay smoother). Most people authors use a mix of the two.
Abstraction and ease pushed to its extreme leads to dynamic fiction, where there are few choices besides 'next page'. And realistic simulation pushed too far leads to hunger timers, inventory limits, and an insistence on proper grammar, all of which this game has. It's a stylistic choice that some are fond of, but I don't really enjoy my character getting more and more hungry as I go back and forth between rooms because my character can only hold two objects. The engine is also slow between responses, so it can be a bit frustrating.
I found the educational part fascinating and didn't know the kidneys had anything to do with phosphate. Also, this game is specifically designed for kids unfamiliar with IF tropes, so I'm specifically not the target audience. And a lot of the things I found off putting could be fun for kids; discovering the game character actually responds like a real person with needs and limited capacity is something fun about text adventures when you're new (at least it was for me).
Overall:
+Polish: It worked smoothly.
-Descriptiveness: The game felt kind of bare at times.
-Interactivity: The game felt a bit too fiddly for me at time.
+Emotional impact: I love the idea of making a game for kids and the phosphate thing was cool.
+Would I play again? I don't really feel like it, but I only found one costume and there were many rooms I missed, and I'd like to support this idea of making games for health purpose (kind of like Gavin Inglis's game about self-abuse).
Fight God in Cyberspace, October 2, 2021This is a pretty long download-only unity game that is choice-based with an interactive map, quicktime events and a specialized inventory. It is described as a Metroidvania, and that is true, as you collect multiple powers of your own choice and in a non-deterministic order as you play the game.
You live in a city that has a real-life side and a cyber side, and you can gain bionic or psionic modifications that make you stronger. There are a ton of mini games, including a fantasy MMORPG, gambling games, and arcade games.
There is a big cast of characters and many locations. While each one individually didn't seem super fleshed out to me in motivation and personality, as a whole the plot structure and relationships were interesting and satisfying.
Your goal is to rob a casino, but as the game progresses you find yourself more and more often coming up against God, a powerful AI that is in charge of your city.
The game doesn't have any easy way to save that I could see, but if you 'die' you go back to the last major decision point (I think; I only died once, at the very end). There are 9 branches but I only played through once, so I'm not sure what the others are like.
My number one gripe is that the main interaction was fussy. You read text and then choices appear, but how to get them to appear is confusing. I thought it was when you used the mouse scroll wheel down, but sometimes it appeared when I scrolled up, and sometimes I just had to wait. Choices always appeared whenever I equipped or unequipped an ability, so I eventually used that. Even the opening screen took me a while to figure out what to do. It might just all be timed and the mouse wheel thing was just in my head.
(And, just now, looking back, there is an option in the settings to let you see the choices immediately, so this is totally my fault!)
While the game isn't perfect, it was descriptive, polished (I think I only saw one typo in 2 hours), interactivity had a lot of highlights, I was emotionally invested and I'd like to see the other branches once I have some free time in the comp.
Explore classic literature and combine their objects, October 2, 2021This game is written in a custom parser-like engine (similar to Robin Johnson's Gruescript and also to Texture) where you can click on items to reveal more options with them and/or to drag them to other objects. Each new description results in the whole text box flipping over in a 3D animation. This is cool, but slows the game down a bit when running through already-seen areas.
The main part of the game is a large library (inspired by Borges' classic tale) that is organized in a very confusing way, accessible by selecting 'left', 'right', or 'back'. If there is a pattern, I didn't see it, so it's either random or a maze or I'm just dumb or all 3.
Each room has a book by a famous author, which you can enter. Each book world has a single room with one or more interesting items and a mini-puzzle. Solving the mini-puzzle allows you to take items to other rooms.
I found the idea clever, but the need for tons of clicking between rooms, slowness of the transition, and the tricky logic of the puzzles sent me to the walkthrough early on. If you want a real headscratcher it would be good to go through more slowly.
+Polish: Very polished.
+Descriptiveness: Some of the rooms are very vivid.
-Emotional impact: Nothing seems real, and I saw it more as a logic puzzle than emotional story.
+Interactivity: While the slow transition and maze were less fun to me, the idea of taking items from one book to another is fun.
+Would I play again? Maybe, this time without a walkthrough (and doing the other path).
A Facebook messenger game about a cyborg spy thriller, October 2, 2021This game is played on Facebook messenger, and requires you to be logged into Facebook to play it.
This is a choice-based comedy spy thriller. Most choices are out of three options.
The story is set in a future where everyone is controlled by a PLUS chip, especially you, an Enhanced cyborg, the first of your kind and the number one assassin for the United States government. You are asked to assassinate a man and his 2 young children to preserve the current regime.
This heavy story contrasts with the goofy and often mean-spirited writing. Your choices are often reactions like 'OMG?' or 'This is nuts', etc. Your character frequently insults each other and seems to have problems with women. There are several errors (such as a character whose name changes from Roosk to Roost and back), and characters often seem to change motivation or personality without warning.
Overall:
-Polish: The new system is very impressive, but the game itself could use some more editing.
+Descriptiveness: The author is good at vivid descriptions.
+Interactivity: At first I felt like almost all choices were meaningless, but some later on seemed definitely to matter. Whether or not it's true it was good at making me feel like it was true.
-Emotional impact: I tried to get invested in the story but the stakes and goals frequently change. Our character is a jerk, and I've realized that, while many people like playing as a villain, few like jerks, and the difference is that well-written villains have strong motivations for their evil actions, while jerks go out of their way to cause harm for no benefit to themselves.
-Would I play again? The somewhat slow performance of facebook messenger and the difficulty with backtracking or saving, combined with the length of the game means that I don't plan on replaying.
A fairly short and silly game where all coded responses are A's, September 15, 2021This game uses only the letter A in all of its descriptions. It retains inform's original error messages though.
Like SCP-5251, the puzzle here is figuring out what words would fit into the given spaces. Fortunately, it's based on (Spoiler - click to show)a classic type of adventure puzzle. I only figured that out by looking at the comments of other reviews.
-Polish: The game could certainly have commited harder by implementing more error messages and nouns.
+Descriptiveness: The whole puzzle depends on the way the descriptions are written.
-Interactivity: There could have been a lot more meat here.
+Emotional impact: I found the idea fun.
-Would I play again? No.
A surreal, branching Twine game with a lot of timed features, September 13, 2021This is a very long Twine game from early on in the history of the medium.
Anya DeNiro has a long history of making games exploring non-human or surreal viewpoints and the interface between reality and virtual reality.
This game uses features like text that shifts and disappears on a timer and other, normal twine features like cycling text and text-replaces.
The story is hard to grasp, especially as I play it late at night. In my first playthrough, I thought there was no story, just a mishmash of words and metaphors. But as I played through all 12 branches and found the ending, I realized that there were several stories, including human trafficking, artifical intelligences, a bloody edutainment math game whose players were a victim in a cyber terrorist attack.
I felt as if I grasped less than half the overall story, but it was an interesting and thoughtful combination. There is a long history of very long, surreal twine games by trans authors that straddle the boundary between reality and virtual reality (Porpentine, Phantom Williams, Furkle, etc.) If you like this genre, this will be a good addition.
A beautiful short game where you play as a plant, September 13, 2021This is a lovely little game by Caleb Wilson, one of many games of his involving magical plants.
In this one, you are at the bottom of a well with a piece of nearby sunlight. You want to grow but you just aren't strong enough.
This game is brief but with excellent characterization and strong writing, reminding me a bit of Out by Sobol, although less metaphorical. There are nice bits of world-building as well.
A gigantic Victorian fantasy text game with a dark atmosphere, September 13, 2021I've been playing Fallen London for at least 5 years now, with a few different characters. I never wanted to review it before because I was worried it would be transitory, and that once the company went under no one would ever be able to play the game I had written about.
But it has been doing better than ever, and has in the last few years added a ton of new content which has significantly improved it.
In form, it is similar to old facebook text games like Mafia, where you have a bunch of numbers for resources and items that change around as you click. The difference is that this has really nice backgrounds, a ton of well-written text (I think a couple million words?) and a card-based system for storylets.
The game is set in a version of London that was sold to dark Masters by queen Victoria. It was taken underground, where the laws of physics no longer apply and death isn't permanent. Hell is a neighbor, and fungus and candles replace plants and sunlight.
It really is two games in one: the first is a time-gated system of customizable stories, with sixty or so actions spread throughout a day (or 80 if you pay a monthly fee). These stories include sweeping epics of revenge or battle against extradimensional beings that changes entire countries or the world, as well as smaller stories like fighting a spider in the sewers.
The other game is a carefully-balanced resources game. Each 'click' has an optimum number of resources available, growing larger until the endgame, and some powerful items take months to save up for. Some hardcore players compete to buy extravagant items like a hellworm or a cask of immortality-inducing cider.
Many storylets are re-used; so, you can bust a 'tomb colonist' (kind of a decayed sentient zombie) out of prison over and over again. Some are only done once, like deciding whether to support a local mob boss or his cop daughter. The re-used ones tend to occur in 'grinds' which are pretty common in this game, although much less than they once were in the early game.
To me, the best stories are:
-Making Your Name, early storylines that help you progress the four stats: Watchful (used for detective work with a Sherlock Holmes substitute, archaeology or university work studying bizarre magical languages), Persuasive (used for romantic and creative work, including writing operas and engaging in courtly romances), Dangerous (used for fighting duels and capturing monsters), and Shadowy (used for pickpocketing and elaborate heists)
-Ambitions. These are stories that span the entire length of the game, starting from something simple (usually tracking down an old friend or lead) and ending up dealing with godlike beings. They include a horror story, a revenge story, an adventure story and a sort of legend or fantasy about wish fulfillment.
-The final stat-capping storylines. These include the railway, an end-game segment where you become a railroad baron, building a railway to hell that gets stranger and stranger the further from London you get; the University Lab, where you discover the dark secrets of the Masters; a series of wars that you lead as a general in a bizarre place; and elaborate thefts that make you a legendary thief.
The game can be 'completed' without paying, but the monthly fee makes grinding a lot easier and provides access to some amazingly good short stories called 'exceptional stories'. Older exceptional stories are available for a fairly hefty sum, but they are generally worth it (especially ones by Chandler Groover and Emily Short).
There's a lot of interesting material up front in the 'making your name' segments, so it's worth checking it out just to see the overall style and feel.
Edit: Looking at the other reviews, I'd say their criticisms are absolutely true (stories can be shallow, clues and hints are items instead of actual stories). I just can't give 4 stars after having played this game for hundreds of hours and honestly investing over $100 or $200 in bits or pieces after years.
A story-focused multi-scene LGBTQ romance/disaster on a boat, September 13, 2021The author of this game has made several other very successful twine games, including Birdland and its related works and Known Unknowns. Many of them are smooth and enjoyable LGBTQ YA stories and this is in a similar category.
You play as a young woman whos prom date gets publicly ruined as embarrassingly as possible. Unfortunately, this prom is also on a boat.
There are many characters, and all choices are dialogue options. This author tends to have a ton of little options hidden in the code, but each path you can take in this game feels like the 'intended' one.
There's nothing to see here in the way of puzzles or major decisions; the real draw is the witty dialogue, teen-relatable situations and, for those interested, LGBTQ representation.
For me, what it keeps it from being 5 stars is its lack of the extraordinary. I enjoy this author's games the best when they become bizarre and absurd, like weird dream birds or raccoons speaking in emoji. For me, this was like very good cake without frosting: delicious, but leaving you wishing it had that extra ingredient.
A difficult small puzzler in Adrift, September 12, 2021This game was directly inspired by the Hard Puzzle games in its difficulty level and clarity and by Junior Arithmancer in its actual puzzles.
Hard Puzzle was mainly known for being intentionally poorly-clued, with numerous red herrings and puzzles that aren't quite fair. The idea was to have a kind of game you can beat your head against for a long time before finding a solution.
This game is similar. You find yourself in 4 rooms with a helpful fairy. Each room has a number on the floor and some other object of interest in the room (either a door or a clue). There is a recess that is common to all the rooms (essentially in the center of the circle) with a book.
Puzzles involve the book and the numbers and the clues (which makes sense, since that's all there is) and is similar to Junior Arithmancer a bit.
I found the game very unfair and very confusing, but that is the intent. I got a lot of help from the fairy (enough to solve one of the clues) but looked on the adrift forums for the other 2.
I wish I were able to type and execute a list of commands on one line, separated by punctuation. Once you know the answers to the puzzle, it can be pretty tedious to enter.
Overall:
+Descriptiveness: It's effective for the style it's going for
+Interactivity: I didn't like the tediousness, but the game was trying to be frustrating and hard, and it was
-Emotional impact: I saw this entirely as a puzzler, removed from emotional ties
+Polish: I encountered no bugs.
-Would I play again?: The value's all in the surprise, and there's not much replay value.
A short adaptation of H. G. Wells Time Machine, September 2, 2021I beta tested this game.
This game is an adaptation of a static fiction story. This is something very hard to do well in a parser game; I've tried it myself and more or less failed, and so have many others. This game runs into a lot of the same problems: a faithful adaptation assumes a linear plot, while a parser game is centered around freedom of expression.
This game implements a house with many mentioned details but few which are usable. There are bugs, such as when one attempts to break a window (not needed in the game).
Plot wise, it doesn't follow the book directly, but instead starts after the action of the first one, allowing you to prove to the world that the time machine is real. The whole setup makes it seem like it will be very complex, but in reality there are only 2-3 puzzles and the whole game can be completed in very few steps.
A quick tour of liminal spaces that is itself somewhat a liminal space, August 31, 2021Liminal spaces are popular right now; my young son enjoys playing liminal spaces games on Roblox and I've seen bots about them on twitter.
Whatever the original definition of liminal spaces was, they are now dominated by endlessly repetitive/abandoned/mass-produced areas. The Backrooms is a classic example (an endless system of hallways with boring carpeting and yellow walls). Another common kind of liminal space is something designed for entertainment but which is now empty, or uncanny valley areas.
This game involves you travelling between several such regions. Interestingly, just like liminal spaces in popular culture are often worn down, this game is underimplemented, missing several exit lists and lacking custom responses for many things.
Here's my rating:
-Polish: The game is missing exit listings and just feels kind of undercooked.
-Descriptiveness: The areas that are described are evocative, but some are given just a single line that is rather unclear.
-Interactivity: I had to decompile to finish it.
+Emotional impact: It has the kind of liminal feeling that I assume it was designed to create.
+Would I play again?: Sure, why not. It's short and good at creating the feeling of low-key chills.
A sprawling town mystery in the Vampire: The Masquerade setting, August 20, 2021This game is the second in Choice of Games's deluxe series of Vampire the Masquerade games. It is long (the 12th longest CoG game), has at least a dozen high-quality character portraits, and uses the White Wolf system of attributes.
Inevitably, this game will draw comparisons with its (unrelated, story-wise) predecessor, Vampire: The Masquerade—Night Road. That game featured you as a solo vampire making their way up the ranks of the city's undead through elaborate and high-powered missions. This game, in contrast, focuses on a human protagonist inheriting an old shop in a small Illinois town that has a dark presence lingering. I can't think of a more apt comparison than Jojo's Bizarre Adventures. Night Road is more like seasons 1-3 of that story, big battles and crazy powers, while Out for Blood is more like season 4, a smaller story where we meet locals with different interests and abilities and the main enemy is a sort of lurking, hidden figure.
Mechanically, there are a lot of statistics to sink points into. This is an RPG, so we get a lot of experience points over 12 chapters. I sank most of my points into Intuition and the Occult. I found this satisfying, as I was able to get flashes of insight at different points (although I'm not sure if this was from my ability or built into the story), and I was able to use magic extensively to curse people, place wards, and to scry. Given the different achievements and options I saw, I'm sure I would have had a very different experience with a different stat build.
Mechanically, the game has a few distinct threads.
-You have ownership of your late grandfather's shop, and you can decide who to hire to work there, what to invest in, how to pay for it all, etc. It starts you off seeming like it will have numerous recurring options, like Metahuman Inc., but it never really circles back to it, so you only get one real shot at setting up the shot and then many sub-choices after to affect minor details.
-There are numerous romantic options, including the sultry vampire villain, a goth/punk human friend, a handsome disabled attorney friend, a friendly vampire hunter, etc. I had numerous romantic encounters with my chosen relationship and it seemed fleshed out better than many CoG games. Occasionally there were scenarios with my love that may have seemed out of place given our current history, but they were few and far between and none spring to mind immediately.
-(Early spoilers)(Spoiler - click to show)A wealthy and powerful vampire seems to have set up in town and is manipulating affairs. This thread forms the main plot.
-(Middle spoiler but not giving a lot away)(Spoiler - click to show)A group of weaker vampires is also in town.They form the second-biggest thread.
-A lot of complicated town history is also floating around.
The game definitely was affected by my choices, and I re-evaluated my viewpoint multiple times as I realized a group I trusted was pretty bad, etc. Near the end, I felt like the whole weight of complex machinery the game is built on began to break down, as I double-crossed a lot of people without too much punishment. But while it pushed up against disbelief, it never really crossed the line. I think a lot of things depend on the relationship statistic alone, and I had had a lot of built-up trust before the betrayals.
Overall, the game is very long, but many people have said it feels short. This is likely because the game has so many options and avenues mid-game that it doesn't really get a sense of building to something. The other VtM game, Night Road, had the regular structure of missions and payments and handled increasing tension well, but here it's hard to feel much progress until near the end. I don't think this game is short or small or linear, but I think it could be paced or structured a bit better to indicate its length. Someone in the CoG forums said it has 12 chapters and 12 endings, and that really helped me set appropriate expectations.
Overall, I would rank this as one of the better Choice of Games titles. I think it is worth its purchase price, and that fans of Vampire the Masquerade or White Wolf in general will be pleased, as well as fans of small-town stories. It's a story that I wish I had written, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I received a review copy of this game.
A rogue-like test battle game with randomization and attention to detail, August 6, 2021Arthur DiBianca has explored the creative space available for limited parsers for many years now. The sheer number of puzzles he has come up with for things like directional commands (Inside the Facility), wordplay (Sage Sanctum Scramble) and just poking a box (Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box) is impressive.
Here, we play as an adventurer in a small town where you can buy equipment, hang out at the tavern, or head down to the dungeon where you have a limited amount of time to battle and find loot. Dungeon verbs are limited to skipping the current battle, fighting, and searching, with extra fighting commands added later. It's really interesting contrasting this with the games of Paul Panks, exemplified by Westfront PC and lampooned in Endless, Nameless, where he always had a cookie-cutter village with a 3 or 4-room tavern, church, etc. and forest full of monsters. Those games were filled with a lot of cruft, while this game cuts all of that out to its bare minimum functionality.
This game is more or less an RPG or roguelike, and it has a 'grind' and RNG that sets it apart from his other games. Is this successful?
Here's my 5-point rating scale:
+Polish: The game is very smooth. Arthur's limited vocabulary allows for intense polishing on what remains, and the game feels completely smooth and operational.
+Descriptiveness: There's a clever mechanic where monsters came in 2 (and later, three) variants that differ from each other by just a small word or two. Only by careful experimentation can you distinguish which monsters are 'safe'. I feel like these constraints led to vivid descriptions since there had to be a lot of detail for the differences to be lost in.
+Interactivity: So this could go either way for most people. I grew up playing games like FFV (on an emulator with a fan translation) with my head down on a desk reading a book while I moved the arrow keys left and right, grinding encounters. To me, that was the quintessential RPG experience. This game also has a lot of grinds that can become tedious. For me, I was interested enough in seeing a little number on the screen go up; others may not be. More seriously, I had to battle the RNG on several occasions, especially the final boss, where I ended up manipulating UNDO to try and get a favorable combination. In the end, it turned out I had a misconception about the boss, and so my UNDO was unnecessary, but I did use UNDO for some of the final achievements which, unlike past DiBianca games, were less about showing extra skill and more about extreme patience with RNG.
+Emotional impact: For me, this game hit a spot of nostalgia. Otherwise, I probably would have felt distanced a bit by the 'where's Waldo' system, treating words as puzzles themselves rather than
descriptors.
-Would I play again? For me, the big draw in replaying an RPG is trying it with a different character class or setup or seeing what different random drops you can get. You can't really get that here, because you can only get to the final boss after thoroughly plumbing everything the game contains; there's no remaining mystery and only 1 'anointed path'.
Overall, though, I feel confident recommending this to others and consider it one of the best games in a year that's already had some great competitions.
Discover the secrets of a new saint caught between Hell and the Church, August 4, 2021This is one of Fallen London's Exceptional Stories that gets recommended a lot.
Exceptional Stories are IAP's for the main Fallen London game. Each is its own self-contained story and usually comes with a reward worth 62.50 in in-game money, which is a lot for new players and a moderate amount for endgame players.
In this setting, Hell is next to Fallen London (although it's not quite the Hell of classic Christianity and the devils are not more evil than others in this setting). The Church of England still exists but has adapted to deal with these changes.
This story concerns a new Saint which is appearing in different texts. You have to help an eager deacon to hunt down where this info on the saint is appearing from and deal with his leaning between the Church and Hell.
The highlight of this is probably taking a train down to the Marigold station (the last stop before Hell, and something you can reach on your own very late in the game by becoming a railroad baron) to see about this Saint for yourself.
The very good exceptional stories coming out recently mean that this one doesn't quite live up to their standard, but it was still very polished descriptive, and with some great payoff moments. I would consider it to be one of the better exceptional stories.
A cozy (or sad) wilderness parser game with graphics and sound, August 2, 2021This was a truly pleasant game to play. The art was very lovely, reminding me of a more advanced version of the art in Laura Knauth's Winter Wonderland.
This is written in Adventuron, and has a few 'modes', including a cozy one and a sad one. I played both of those.
The game has its own internal logic that doesn't correspond 100% to standard interactive fiction tropes. For instance, a few puzzles require that you type the desired result without detailing the physical actions that prompt that result (an example, not in the game, would be like saying 'go golfing' instead of 'hit ball').
Because of that, I got stuck a bit, but I noticed that the many other people who played seemed to get by without asking for hints online, so I persevered. Overall, I enjoyed the atmosphere of this game the most out of this comp, and think this is an outstanding use of Adventuron.
A classic adventure from the grue's perspective, August 2, 2021I beta tested this game.
This game is written using the author's own Versificator system, an excellent system built up over many years.
In it, you play as a Grue in a classic adventure. However, you have no interest in murdering adventurers. But you do want to get them out!
The game reverses several parts of classic adventures. Instead of mazes, you move through orderly access tunnels. Instead of finding light sources, you find ways to dim light.
This is a clever reversal and a fun way to play.
The only thing I had trouble with was the overall main mechanic of rescuing adventurers. The puzzle structure is organized in a way where it's hard to know you're making progress until you've figured the whole thing out. But that's mostly a personal reaction and may not apply to others.
I also played this as part of the Seattle IF Meetup and think it's appropriate for group play. We all had a lot of fun!
A pleasant game about reaching a train. Has two perspectives, August 2, 2021This game opens with a spooky pixel art world and story, then transitions to a generally pleasant, somewhat magical real life world with photographs.
It has 3-5 puzzles. All are simple, and most are well-clued. One involving a fish felt a little arbitrary to me, but overall it was nice.
The game felt smooth and polished. The writing gives hints of interesting worldbuilding. Overall, like others have noted, the game feels a bit disconnected between its two sides, but both sides are individually well put-together.
A cute little birthday game written by a kid, August 2, 2021This game was co-written by an 8-year-old girl and her father. Having a kid around that age that I've made IF games with, I completely enjoyed this game and thought it was cute.
I never had any problems with the parser, and I think the young author's fresh perspective allowed some surprising responses that weren't in the norm.
The 'puzzles' were simple to follow and interactivity flowed well.
Overall, a very pleasant little game. Very small, and very fun; what a nice experience for a family team.
A science fiction prison break game, August 2, 2021This game is the author's first game, which is surprising considering the level of detail and programming in the game, although there are a few bugs.
This game features a prison break from an alien base. For some reason (never explained in-game), your captors disappear and you have to shut everything down.
The puzzles are a mixed bag. A lot make sense, a lot are fun, sometimes the two groups aren't the same (I enjoyed a language code puzzle that had simple, nearby hints involving interaction, but later everything was in English). Occasionally solutions seemed really obscure.
The coding needed a bit more synonyms. For instance, late in the game there are buttons that have names, but saying PUSH [Button name] doesn't work. Instead, you have to say the action that they perform (this example isn't in the game, but it would be like having a button saying lights where 'push lights button' doesn't work but 'turn on lights' does). A couple of other inconsistencies with synonyms was probably the major fault of the game.
Story-wise, I feel like it omitted some major features, but what's here is okay. It has some pretty strong gore at one point.
As a game, it's okay. As an author's first game, it's much better than most, and I'd expect the now-experienced author to be capable of making very good games in the future.
A bite-sized chess puzzle, August 2, 2021I generally enjoy games by Andrew Schultz, and this was no exception.
It's a small game on a 5x5 chess square with a few short chess puzzles. Using knight moves, you must move around the board to achieve your goals.
+Polish: The game was very smooth. I kept trying to type SUMMON instead of CALL but that's entirely on me.
+Descriptive: I actually like the writing in this more than almost all other Schultz games. It goes in a different direction and I like it.
+Interactivity: The puzzles appealed to me.
+Emotional impact: Genuine enjoyment counts as an emotion, right?
+Would I play it again? Yes, I found it satisfying.
I don't everyone would like this all the time, but I think some people would like this some of the time. If you'd like a brief logic-based brainteaser that wraps itself up nicely, try it out.
A lengthy QBASIC traditional adventure with magic and codes, August 1, 2021This game is a large treasure hunt that, like very early parser games, is a mishmash of fantasy and modern concepts put together for a treasure hunt.
There is a central hub with different 'mini-worlds' you can access. They are interconnected, in that the solution for one world is often found in another.
I played straight through with the walkthrough, as:
-the game is in QBasic, and no scrollback seems to be available, making it harder to keep track of things
-the author stated it may take weeks to accomplish
-I wasn't sure if the game was 'cruel' or not in the Zarfian sense (i.e. can you lock yourself out of victory without knowing it?)
After I won, I went back and tried to explore on my own and look for different paths. I found it 'parcelled out' fairly well.
The parser is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the author describes it (in a forum post) as being the product of 40 years of work, and that it is a 'very powerful parser'. It can understand pronouns and complex commands like 'drop everything except blah and blih and..'
However, it has some issues. Sometimes you can refer to a noun by its first name (like EYE for EYE of NEWT) but not its second (like NEWT); sometimes, it's the opposite (so SCRAP doesn't work for SCRAP of PAPER but PAPER does). Perhaps most oddly, it, as many people have pointed out, can't take items out of container without using the phrase TAKE X FROM Y. Given the 40 years of development and the otherwise complexity of the parser, I can only imagine this is a conscious stylistic choice.
The world is sprawling, with many rooms having multiple exits and the ordinal directions like NW, SW etc. being used extensively. Rooms are almost ideally generic, with most rooms being empty and having names like 'MIDDLE OF CORRIDOR', with most descriptions being 'The room is vaguely lit and hard to make out. There are bare walls and floor and ceiling and several exits, including one going down.'
There is at least one NPC, who is fairly responsive. Puzzles include codes, riddles, leaps of intuition, musical puzzles, etc. with many hint sources in-game as well as built-in hints and a walkthrough.
Every game is written for a purpose. Some purposes are to share your feelings with others, to emulate something you find worthy, to try to become famous, to make money, to fufill a request for others, etc.
Due to the author's desire to keep in the oddities of the parser, the general vagueness of the game and its Zork-like setting, the QBAsic64 environment, etc. my guess is that the game's purposes are to evoke nostalgia and to demonstrate the author's system. Evaluated for those purposes, I'd have to call it a success.
For my own liking, the game is very polished and has some clever puzzles, but I didn't enjoy the interactivity as much as I could have and felt emotionally distanced from the game.
A tiny parser game in AdvSys, August 1, 2021The author has said elsewhere that this is just a small game that will be more polished later on.
It uses the AdvSys language, which is capable of making very powerful games but requires a lot of work to get going. Unfortunately, this game doesn't have all that work.
It is very small, with only one real puzzle, all of whose steps are clear, but it's hard to type them in. Here are my attempts at one of the most important steps:
(Spoiler - click to show)
>pour water
I don't understand.
>water flower
I don't understand.
>empty bottle
I don't know the word 'empty'.
>put water on flower
I don't know the word 'put'.
>pour bottle
Nothing happens.
>give water
I don't understand.
>give bottle
Nothing happens.
>open bottle
I don't know the word 'open'.
>put water
I don't know the word 'put'.
The real answer was (Spoiler - click to show)'pour flower'.
My score of a 1 reflects the games lack of polish and verbs and general unfinished state. I 100% believe that with more time the author could make something marvelous.
A windows parser Lovecraftian game with compact story, August 1, 2021This game is an interesting mix of skill and rough edges. I'm going to review it on my five-criteria scale:
-Polish: The game could use a bit more polish, especially in the area of synonyms and responses. A lot of art is in error responses, to guide you towards the correct phrasing. I was told repeatedly I couldn't (Spoiler - click to show)tie a vine to different things, only later to find that I had to call it (Spoiler - click to show)a creeper, not a vine. That's not so odd, but the error messages all implied that the problem was the action, not the noun. There are similar issues later on, with a lot of people having trouble with the final actions of the game.
+Descriptiveness: The game is lushly descriptive. I could quite clearly picture everything in the game outside of the mazes.
-Interactivity: The frustrations of the parser took this one down for me. Otherwise it's honestly not bad. There are mazes and combinations but they're all solved easily for you. The better parts of the interactivity are all the little hidden details that reward your actions. The worse parts are instant deaths with no undo :(
+Emotional impact: Despite the many frustrations, I'm a fan of Lovecraftian horror, and I thought the core of this was well done.
-Would I play again? Not until it's souped up a bit more.
A huge, complex story/puzzle game about dangerous Faeries, August 1, 2021This game is very, very long, certainly the longest adventuron game I've seen. It's split up into 6 or so parts, and the first part alone is already one of the longest games in Parsercomp.
I'm going to go over my 5 point scale with it.
+Descriptiveness: The author does an excellent job of painting a rich and vibrant world. Everyone knows each other, and events in one location affect events far away. Rather than a Zork-like grab-bag of random magic and sci fi (like a lot of big puzzlers), everything is tightly inter-connected, like Anchorhead.
+Emotional impact: Unlike Anchorhead, and most horror IF games, this is based on Faerie magic. While you may or may not classify this game is horror, it certainly presents scenarios which would be strongly horrifying to those in them. I enjoyed the story, which is the main reason I persisted.
+-Interactivity and Polish: These two categories go hand in hand, and I kind of want to give half a star in each. More details below.
+-Polish: The author intentionally chose Adventuron as an engine to show what it could do in a long-form game. Through a great deal of effort, I think he was completely successful in what he wanted to achieve. However, one difficulty is with not always having useful parser responses when having the correct verb and wrong noun or correct noun and wrong verb. One frequent occurrence for me was using the right verb and the wrong noun (like saying 'mirror' instead of 'fragment') and having the game imply it knew what I was doing but that it wasn't helpful. I didn't even know the game couldn't recognize the noun until I looked at the hints or other people's discussion. This happened multiple times. Outside of that, the game is remarkably well-constructed for such a long game.
+-Interactivity: The puzzles are a mixed bag. Some are mundane (find and light candle), some are complex (operate a camera and develop the photos), some are very obscure (the game is filled with many details in every room, and four or five puzzles depend on examining such a detail, while all the others are red herrings). I enjoyed the complex procedures, the gathering ensembles. Perhaps the most fun was just grabbing everything along the way, wondering what it would all lead to. Also related to interactivity, there were numerous timed events to add flavor. These were well-written and interesting, but when repeated multiple times and in various settings with the same text, became surreal and blurred.
The game is ponderous, which a huge number of locations. To preserve realism, the game frequently has you 'wake up' with a few key items removed from your inventory and placed around you. This contributed to mimesis but also contributed to me wondering where on earth I set things.
+Would I play it again? Yes. This is a marvelous achievement of a game. I'd like to one day write something like it.
A fastidious timed puzzle about assembling electrical components, August 1, 2021This game has you stuck at the side of the road with a dead battery in the middle of some deadly acid rain. You'll end up searching a mansion with a timed light puzzle and inventory limits to assemble a door opener.
The game is polished, but descriptions are fairly sparse.
The timed light puzzle, many empty rooms and inventory limits, as well as frequent responses where the game knows what you are asking but wants you to do it in more steps (like turning on the car) reminded me of different advice I've seen over the last few decades.
I'll share some of that here:
From a list of rules for games in IFComp by Jessica Knoch, with additional commentary by Andrew Plotkin from 2003:
"> Rule Three: Do not impose an inventory limit for its own sake.
> Rule Four: Do not include hunger or sleep puzzles.
> Rule Five: Check your spelling. Check it again.
All just as true outside the IFComp.
> Rule Nine: Do not include lots of empty locations.
Important for everybody."
Jan Thorsby's list of 'things that cause automatic playing' from 2005:
"List of things that causes automatic playing
By automatic playing I mean when a player types in commands more or less
automatically without thinking much. None of the things listed is necessary
always bad, and there are probably instances when they don't really lead to
automatic playing.
[...]
2. Many rooms
Traveling between rooms doesn't take much thinking, and the more rooms the
more traveling.
[...]
7. Time limits/eating puzzle
If a game has a time limit and the player is unable to keep it, the player
is likely to play the game again and just type in all the commands over
again minus the useless ones. A time limit that last through a large part of
the game is more likely to be annoying than a time limit for just for one
scene of the game. An eating puzzle is when the player dies if he does not
eat after a certain amount of turns. It is in effect a time limit.
[...]
11. Limited carrying capacity
Some games have a limit on how mange objects a player can carry. This often
leads to the player going back and forth a lot to pick up things he had
previously left behind. In many games it also leads to the game potentially
being made unwinnable, because the player may not have a vital object when
needed.
12. Having to type more commands than should be required to show ones
intention
For instance say there is a closed door to the north. If the player types
"north" it is fairly clear that he intends to open the door and go north.
But the game may not let him go north until he has first typed "open door".
Machinery is often needlessly complicated to operate.
[...]
14. Very easy puzzles
A very easy puzzle can be things like: unlock a locked door, buy something
in a store or give an object to a person who has asked for such an object.
These easy puzzles can be important to a story but are arguably useless from
a gaming point of view. If they are not important to the story one might
consider eliminating them.
[...]"
An intfiction thread including this quote from Michael Roberts from 2010:
"A word of caution on these is in order. Many authors worry that it’s unrealistic if the player character can carry too much at one time, so they’ll fiddle with these properties to impose a carrying limit that seems realistic. Be advised that authors love this sort of “realism” a whole lot more than players do. […] Don’t fool yourself about this -the thoughts in the mind of a player who’s tediously carting objects back and forth three at a time will not include admiration of your prowess at simulational realism. In contrast, if you set the carrying limit to infinity, it’s a rare player who will even notice, and a much rarer player who’ll complain about it."
A Nickolodeon-based game made by a kid, August 1, 2021This is an unpolished but complex and amusing parser game made by a kid.
It's strongly based on different Nickolodeon series, starting with the Loud House.
Here's my rating:
-Polish: For a kid making a parser game, it's great. Otherwise, it has numerous problems, most of which could be solved by time and practice.
-Descriptiveness: Most of the details are left out, relying on your knowledge of the shows or of classic tropes to fill in the details.
+Emotional impact: I thought it was fun and funny, especially the slime's riddle solutions
+Interactivity: It was straightforward but manage to cook up a lot of surprises. Some bugs but intfiction hints helped me out.
+Would I play again? With my kid, yeah
A charming short treasure hunt on a grandfather's farm, August 1, 2021This game is, I believe, a late entry to the recent parser competition that was for 2-word introductory games for kids. It's a simple Adrift game that is generally very polished, with a tutorial available, music, a few pictures, and some text effects.
Here's my rating:
+Polished: The game is very smooth and well-done.
+Descriptive: The game is sparse and, as part of the competition, can only put a couple of lines in each description, but the author manages to make each room interesting and to serve many purposes. It could have been easy to throw in a bunch of empty rooms to fill up space, but every is nice and compact.
+Interactivity: The puzzles were generally fair and interesting. I set the game down for about an hour in the middle, and forgot an important clue and had to look at the pdf, but if I hadn't wandered off I would have remembered.
-Emotional impact: While the game is generally charming, it never garnered a strong emotional response from me.
+Would I play again? Maybe I'd show it to my son.
Pick-up artist training simulator as a small parser game , August 1, 2021Danny Dipstick is a compact, polished puzzle game where you play as an uncharismatic man who is desperate to get a girl's phone number.
This game is based off on an older game by a different author. Much of my reaction to this game is based on my feelings about this variant of date culture in general, and may not reflect the author's own attitudes.
In my opinion, the central tenets of this game (that being able to easily persuade women to date you is desirable, that the barriers between you and 'random woman you just met' are all superficial things like appearance that can be easily corrected, etc.) do not hold up. In the past, almost all people met their partners through mutual friends, and now according to modern research the internet is even more common. For me, Danny's story didn't seem authentic and didn't resonate with me.
Like someone else mentioned, the depiction of the store clerk seemed inauthentic as well. He's described as scrawny, undernourished, with an almost unintelligible accent. According to statistics, the median Indian household is much wealthier than the median white household, and English is a first language for many in India. This corresponds with my own experience; in Texas, where I live, a huge chunk of my everyday coworkers and friends are Indian, and almost half of my wealthy tutoring clients are Indian. I'm sure scrawny, undernourished, unintelligible Indian people exist, but they're certainly outliers.
Mechanically, I was really pleased with the compact puzzles and their unity of purpose. The puzzles were simple but it contributed to the overall feel of the game.
A space colonization parser game with a fun opening sequence, August 1, 2021I remembered this game when I played it during the competition, but I couldn't remember where. Was I a beta tester? No, I wasn't in the credits.
Then I remembered that this was entered into Introcomp! The author has certainly improved the game since then. Back then, it only had the opening and then an empty crater.
This game has you play as a colonist arriving on a planet. The opening sequence is pretty brilliant, similar to the Ian Finley game Gris et Jaune. Unfortunately for both games, they get a little buggy later.
This game has few big bugs in it, like if you type REMOVE [something] it gives an error message with a space missing.
The game is ambitious, though; even though it's not super long, it has changing time, major modifications to locations, an autonomous NPC, and a (Spoiler - click to show)change in perspective.
If the bugs were fixed, I would give this game a 4 or 5, and I think the author didn't something great and should continue coding.
A work-in-progress horror romance Twine game about a supernatural agency, July 11, 2021This game is part of the list of great twine/ink games on itch that I found here.
This game has a setup that is partly a personality test and partly an intro to a supernatural-themed version of the SCP foundation (complete with the motto 'Observe, Learn, Protect'). You are handled a big sheaf of background world-building and given a test to see 'what kind of agent are you?'
Then there is a narrative section about you returning to your hometown, which the player quickly realizes is very anomalous.
The game cuts out quickly after that. Everything up to this point is great; the trouble is that the 'core gameplay' hasn't really been shown yet, which means that we haven't really seen how romance, combat, or investigation will work. In my experience, this makes such games more difficult to complete, so I wish the author all the best. Either way, I'd definitely play more games by this author.
A promising detective game that doesn't completely deliver, July 7, 2021I'm a big fan of the detective genre, and it's always nice to see a long-form game come out.
This is a big game, spread over a dozen or so locations and three days. It's ambitious, with many scripted events, NPCs, and action scenes.
These kinds of things are hard to pull off. The game handles pretty well during the first day, and I spent a long time with this game up on my desktop trying to work through without hints. As time progressed and I went through the days, there were more and more holes in the system until I ended up relying entirely on the hints, although those had a gap ((Spoiler - click to show)escaping the rope).
The game has a lot of good parts, and credits several testers. The kind of problems that are left seem like ones that are typical for this type of story: one where the author seems to know exactly how each scene should play out and what the player's logic is. The problem is that 'the player will get it wrong', like Stephen Granade once wrote. It's very difficult to guess what people will try unless you have many many testers or constrain the player somehow (by reducing the number of items or by using a choice-based system, or by giving leading hints that increase the more you do the wrong thing).
My overall rating:
-Polish: There are several remaining bugs.
+Descriptiveness: For me, I enjoyed the writing and setting generally.
+Interactivity: The bugs or missing hints threw me off, but I liked the conversation and map movement. Some parts didn't work for me, but overall it was good.
-Emotional impact: Great at first, but kind of petered out at the end. I can't explain why.
+Would I play it again? If it was updated, I probably would!
A long fantasy Twine game with two romance options and high fantasy, June 22, 2021I saw this game on a list of 'Best Twine/Ink games on itch.io' I've been working through: https://itch.io/c/1424718/twineinky-if
This one felt like a good fantasy visual novel without the visuals. It's a longer game with a bunch of mini-quests inside one big quest, a mini-game involving making a potion, and two young and attractively-described characters (one male, one female) who are both interested in you. There's a lot of world-building: you are an alchemist in a fantasy city with a complex hierarchy of Gods and an entire world history.
It's not perfect; the interaction was too often 'click to see what happens next' or 'click to do the clear right thing or not' for my taste, but it should feel right at home for most fans of visual novels. Also, so much gets unused, including most spells and recipes and most of the money system. I enjoyed it overall, though, and the romantic options were fun.
An extended sci-fi space puzzler on many platforms, June 21, 2021In this game, you play as someone awoken from cryosleep near the end of a long journey when your spaceship encounters an alien vessel. You'll have to explore the vessel with your helpful artificial intelligence unit Io, discovering its origin and purpose and encountering some bizarre alien technology on the way.
I'm not sure where to rate this, so I'll use my 5 point scale:
+Polish: I've read reviews of the earlier versions, and it seems like the Inform version dealt with most of the issues. I definitely would consider this more polished and bug-free than most games I play. Most standard responses have been replaced, most error messages are helpful, and command suggestions are frequently handed out. The game includes complicated containers, text typing into various interfaces, talkative NPCs, etc.
+Descriptiveness: A lot of the text is vivid. The author is clearly enthusiastic about space and I think it pays off. I was able to get a clear visual idea of each room.
+Interactivity: I admit I liked the puzzles. Many recent old-school games I've tried haven't appealed to me, but this is more of a light Infocom style than the more difficult British games. There's a bit more hand holding than Infocom but I appreciate that as someone who prefers lighter puzzles. I did get stuck a couple of times and had to request help.
+Emotional impact: The storyline itself didn't grab me but my natural curiosity and interest in the setting and exploration was satisfied. I felt like there was always something to work on and overall found it similar to a crossword puzzle in satisfaction.
?Would I play it again? I'm torn. On the one hand, I don't think this will become a long-term favorite. On the other hand, it has a pleasant compactness and unity that I could see myself coming back to in the future, especially if there were a sequel (which the name suggests). So I'll award a point here.
To me this game compares most directly with Hugo Labrande's Tristam Island and Marco Innocenti's Andromeda games. They all have a fairly similar style of 'retro aesthetic with modern affordances', a playtime of several hours, and availability on multiple platforms.
I think this game succeeds in its apparent goal, which is to create a product that people who played adventure games in the 80's will recognize and enjoy. The availability on multiple retro platforms definitely helps with that feel. (I'm making guesses here since I didn't play IF until 2010).
There are two types of authors when it comes to feedback: growth-minded authors and marketing authors. Growth-minded authors are looking for ways to improve and eager to find flaws in their products, while marketing authors are hoping to make more sales/move more product and don't want anything negative.
Competition authors are usually growth-minded, but since this is a commercial game I don't know which type this author is, so I'll put the 'growth' comments in spoilers which can be ignored if not desired:
(Spoiler - click to show)Jon Ingold, a two-time XYZZY winning author and head of the Inkle company said recently that the PC should never take action that isn't somehow the direct result of a player's choice, and I think that's true. Too often our character here does something without input, like the data hub; we're told 'it's not powered on, so you decide not to put anything on it'. It just feels weird. I can think of more examples if you like.
(Spoiler - click to show)Also, IO provides very useful information but talking again just says you can't think of anything to talk about. Again it's
kind of making the decision for you, but more importantly it's hard to get the information again. It'd be nice if IO would summarize for you or if there was another way to repeat that information.
Fantastic time loop fantasy dating sim in Ink, June 15, 2021I generally enjoyed the first time I played through this game. It seemed like a twine game with a visual novel-type structure, with a few major choices (mostly what to study and who to romance), a lot of time skipping, and, for some reason, a lot of 'keep doing this or stop now' options. I thought it was okay.
But then it looped for the first time, and I was hooked. This is a game about living many, many lives. The author has a great trick for nudging the player forward while making them think it was their cleverness that got them that far all along.
I played through 7 or more times until I got an ending I really liked, but there's a lot more out there to discover. This is a game offering what feels like real agency (even if a lot of it is smoke and mirrors, where the game puts you into the 'best' options after time) and memorable characters.
I saw this game on several 'best of' lists, both on here and on itch.io, and it definitely lives up to it.
A detailed Twine game capturing an exact scene in High School, June 13, 2021One of the biggest reasons I enjoy amateur fiction online is that when someone writes it's like they share a piece of their soul with you, the reader, and I definitely felt that in this game.
In 5 chapters of varying lengths, you play a young woman who is texting her friends near the end of senior year, arranging an event.
The game makes copious use of styling and external links, most of which are to different songs. I actually like a lot of them; like the main character, I am into cringy melodramatic teen pop songs and movie/musical music (as a kid, I loved Total Eclipse of the Heart and Don't Cry for Me Argentina). Some I might listen to again.
The game has a definite sense of place, person and presence. It treats a heavy topic, so definitely check the warnings if you think there could be problems. Overall it was a sweet experience that resonated with my inner teen, led me to some enjoyable music and impressed me with its visual appeal.
A darker story about Rubbery Men and an experiment gone wrong., May 19, 2021This is an Exceptional Story for Fallen London. In this exceptional story, you are drawn into the story of a scientist experimenting with the rubbery form. This draws unwanted attention for them, and you have to track them down.
There's plenty of new background material for rubbery men here. Rubbery men in general have always served as a sort of allegory for different types of discrimination, although they are also used just as an example of 'cool weird being'. This story stands in stark contrast to their more recent 'advances' in Fallen London society, where a rubbery man ran for mayor, several have nice stalls at the bone market, and options to be violent towards rubbery men have been reduced, all seemingly stepping away from the 'rubbery men represent oppressed minorities'.
This story emphasizes the 'otherness' of rubbery men. They stink, they gurgle horribly, you feel uneasy around them. It felt weird to me, to be honest.
The main story has some surprises I won't go into, but much of your time is spent in a kind of homeless rubbery camp under a railway bridge. The mechanics here are unusual but work once you experiment for a while with passing time. You learn more about the rubberies and their ancient ancestry, and have a difficult choice to make at the end.
Overall, the writing and mechanics here are interesting, but a few things took me out of the story, such as the more grim depiction of rubbery men.
A small game with clever mechanics: swap any similar objects, May 17, 2021This game is complex and rich for a small game written for a jam. You are a djinn and have the power to APPRAISE objects to see what they're made of, then to SWAP similar objects.
John Evans used to write games with similar powers a couple decades ago, and those games didn't have many restrictions on what you could swap or summon or create, so it often ended up buggy and a mess.
This game gets around that problem by putting very tight restrictions on what you can and can't swap. In fact, there was only a single pair of objects I found in the entire game that I could swap, although I'm sure there are more out there. Overall, I found the game well-implemented and fun.
A small, underimplemented puzzle game with some intriguing backstory, May 17, 2021This game takes the basic premise of the PunyInform jam (starting in a pub with a knife through a note in the wall) and take it in some fun directions. I enjoyed seeing the author's backstory developed for the main character.
The puzzles generally aren't too hard once you know what you need to do, although, like most of the games in the jam, it would benefit the most from more beta testing.
The main idea of this game is that you are a sort of revenant or mummy that can be resurrected over and over by use of a mystic knife. You have to speak with an inspector to help solve crimes. It's mostly a prologue of a longer story idea.
A sprawling and bare game made in puny inform exploring an abandoned city, May 17, 2021This game has you exploring an abandoned town after exiting the broom closet of a pub.
Most locations are described in little detail. Puzzles are fairly dependent on searching, but past that the puzzles involve some tricky wordplay/intelligence test-style thinking.
The game has some good moments but overall felt a bit frustrating. It was not polished, but was fairly descriptive. The interactivity didn't work well for me, and I don't intend on playing it again. However, some parts were satisfying to figure out/complete.
A tiny game with some fun twists, May 17, 2021This game is perhaps the shortest in the PunyInform jam, and it isn't perfect, but it has a lot of distinct advantage over its competitors:
-it has an overarching narrative
-it fits several twists into a 3-move game
-most objects are implemented more than the other games implement their objects
As surprise is the main feature of the game, I suppose I won't say much more. You start in a pub broom closet with a knife holding a note onto the wall.
A shortish pub adventure with one brilliant puzzle, May 17, 2021Having now played several punyinform games in a row, I now realize that many design features I thought were poor choices are actually 'baked in' to punyinform: specifically no UNDO and pedantic phrasing for disambiguation.
It also seems that most games in this PunyInform jam were written by newish players who aren't part of a culture of intense beta testing or familiarity with recent parser games.
So that puts a lot of things in perspective. Given this background, this game isn't that bad. I had to look at the itch page for some hints on how to proceed from time to time, but besides that it's fairly straightforward. You have a few chores to complete before your boss arrives, and much of the difficulty is figuring out the right commands to fulfill the actions required.
The one thing that elevated this game for me was an excellent puzzle involving cigarettes. I've never seen a puzzle quite like this and I think I might nominate it for an award next year, if I remember.
A short and simple adventure assembling a cocktail, May 17, 2021This PunyInform game was made by a parent-child team, and it's pretty complex for a game made that way, but not as complex as most finished games made for competitions are.
Your pub has been cursed by a ghost until you make a drink for them. Each component of the drink is found by solving a different puzzle.
The number one thing the game could use is more feedback from testers, who could have caught things like undescribed objects, exits not listed in the room description, variations for trying to figure out what to do with the shaker, etc.
A short and fairly buggy geocache hunt, May 17, 2021I tend to be very positive in reviewing but almost every interaction I had with this game was troubling.
Leaving the first room puts you immediately in a losing position, where you have to answer a question or die. I only figured out what to do by googling, hoping that it was an obscure reference, and I found out that it was (I read the books years ago and loved them, but I didn't form a strong memory of this particular creature).
After the first room, most reasonable directional commands don't work, requiring the use of 'ENTER ---' instead. An object that is essential to the game is undescribed and can't be interacted with most verbs (that describes several objects). The main way of gaining points is a verb that is nowhere indicated in the game. And the final puzzle of ending the game requires an exact, non-idiomatic three-word phrase ((Spoiler - click to show)BOARD SHIP REALLY).
Fortunately for the author, all of this is avoidable in the future by having more testers. If this had been tested by a few people who could give good feedback, it would be just fine, and so it casts no aspersions on the author's skill.
Edit: Also, UNDO is disabled, despite having insta-deaths without warning.
A compact pirate puzzle game, May 9, 2021This game is part of the PunyInform competition. It's fairly polished, and features an quest to go looking for pirate treasure.
In the tradition of classic adventure games, the puzzles don't really make much sense, but they're fun. One involves a 2d block pushing puzzle (easier than the infamous Royal Puzzle from Zork III, but generally similar), and there are some math and logic puzzles.
The game has two endings, one easy to achieve and another harder. The game eschews walkthroughs and hints, but I decompiled the game to find the 'good' ending, which is significantly harder.
The largest negative in the game is the pedantry. Very frequently the game knows exactly what you want to do but forces you to phrase yourself a different way.
Examples include:
">UNLOCK BOX
I think you wanted to say “unlock wooden box with something”. Please try again."
and
">ROW
I think you wanted to say “row something”. Please try again."
A particularly egregious example (spoilers for the 'good ending'):
(Spoiler - click to show)
> lock chest
I think you wanted to say “lock treasure chest with something”. Please try again
> lock chest with golden key
Sorry, I don’t understand what “golden” means.
> lock chest with gold key
First you’d have to close the treasure chest.
> close chest
You close the treasure chest.
This is the equivalent of eating at a restaurant but the chef occasionally grabs your hands to make you move your knife to the other side or to drop your salad fork and take your regular one, to ensure that you are eating the meal in the proper way.
Overall, I think this will please people who primarily look for IF to have fun scenarios and puzzles that aren't immediately solvable but are fair.
A humorous mummy game with some repetitiveness, May 9, 2021I purchased this game on my own recently because I wanted to explore the less-played games on the Hosted Games app on my iPhone. This game was the least-rated one on there, with 3 ratings since 2018.
I was expecting something much worse, to be honest, but it looks like Hosted Games' requirement for a public beta test ironed out a lot of problems that you might see in, for instance, the least-played IFComp games. I found no bugs and only one grammatical error ('would of' instead of 'would have').
Storywise, you are a host for an antique appraisal show when someone comes in with a mummy to get appraised. A horde of people come in chasing the mummy, including someone with a scroll that brings it to life. The majority of the game involves trying to stop the mummy with the scroll.
+Polish: No problems with the game.
-Descriptiveness: A lot of it feels bland. I have trouble picturing any of the characters.
-Interactivity: A lot of the choices are the same.
-Emotional impact: The jokes mostly didn't land for me.
+Would I play again? Honestly, yes, it was a pleasant way to pass a short amount of time.
For me, the game felt pretty flat. Characters are generally indistinguishable, with everyone's personality being 'kind of selfish and likes to make witty remarks'. Most scenes are the same: you try to take the scroll and someone stops you. Most of your choices are the same throughout the game, either 'pick one of these punchlines for the author's jokes' or 'keep filming/help someone off-camera'. I think this kind of general ambiguity is the main thing that decreased my overall enjoyment.
I still finished and it definitely wasn't terrible, and took me around an hour (would have been 30 minutes if I read quicker). Overall, I'm definitely pleased by the quality of the least-played Hosted Games, especially since my own game is one of the least-played Choice of Games.
A compact game with reasonable puzzles and interesting characters, May 4, 2021This game pulls off a difficult feat: there are 3 characters you can play as and you can swap between them at will. That's fairly difficult to pull off, but the game does well.
Puzzles are reasonable, as intended for a 'tutorial'-type game. The story is kind of random, but the characters are well-defined, have distinct personalities and see and interact with the world in different ways.
Your friend ends up locked in a strange compound after a tour and needs help escaping. You have to go and save him!
Overall, I didn't feel a real emotional investment in this game, but it was pleasant, one of the smoothest to play out of this game jam.
Cute inform/vorple kids game about eating magical plants, May 3, 2021I beta tested this game.
In this vorple/inform game with illustrations of plants, you play as a young creature eager to eat every magical plant you can get your hands on.
As per the text adventure literacy jam rules, you are expected to only use 2-word inputs and have simple language.
Caleb is a great author, and this game shares features with his earlier work, Starry Seeksorrow. It is intended for kids, but I enjoyed the puzzles, and I especially appreciated that solving them all is not necessary for winning. When I beta tested, I missed a couple the first time around.
Somewhere between the time I tested and the time it got put up on itch, the vorple framework seemed to get weird (maybe from itch interactions?), so that each image only shows up halfway until more text appears underneath it (such as when hitting enter).
It's a simple game, but I'm giving it a 5 as I found it polished, descriptive, enjoyed the interactivity, felt an enjoyable emotional impact, and would play again (and did play again!)
A dungeon crawl with randomized loot and monsters, May 2, 2021This game was pretty fun, although I think it could use a bit more hints or subtle nudges for incorrect actions.
It's made using pre-existing 3d RPG assets, including chests, goblins, skeletons and spiders. These form static background images for an adventuron game.
This is like a little AD&D 1st edition dungeon as a warrior, with randomized loot. You explore different areas, find hidden traps, etc.
I thought this game was too hard for me, but I found that carefully noting all items and examining things helped quite a bit.
The game suggests there are non-violent solutions to some encounters, but I fought through most of them, including the werewolf, where I had to restart the game a few times until I found both helmet and armor. Apparently I missed one secret room (probably the one hinted in the note), but otherwise did okay.
I would have been a bit less frustrated if the game had hinted more when I was doing things the wrong way. Otherwise, pretty fun if you like TTRPG fantasy modules.
A very solid graphical treasure hunt game that requires careful attention, May 1, 2021I found this at first to be one of the best games in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam, and one of the better games released this year, but I got a bit worn out by the end.
The game handles the narrator/pc split of parser games well by having you, the player, command a robot. The robot goes around measuring scientific things like light levels and oxygen percentages, and collecting specimens which are hid all over.
The graphics are great, the puzzles are interesting, I really like this game. But I got a bit overwhelmed. There are so many different specimens to find, I got kind of worn out by the end. Perhaps if I had approached this over a longer period of time and played with another, it would have been perfect.
Creative, short adventuron game about dealing with an unexpected cat, April 30, 2021This game has a cute theme: you wake up with a strange cat on your chest and must deal with it.
The name of the game changes: it starts with 'don't wake the cat' and goes on to other names, each hinting at the required action.
There aren't pictures, but I found the puzzles fun, as I had to think outside of the box a few times. Unfortunately, there were a few times I knew the solution but didn't know how to word it (especially with the front door). Overall, love the idea but could use a few tweaks here and there. If you like cute pet games, though, definitely check it out.
A fun bite-sized exploration game with graphics and sound, April 30, 2021Someone's been talking on the IF forums recently about games that don't have involved puzzles or deep narratives, and I think this is a good example of how to make a successful game without worrying too much about these things.
This is a small adventuron game with a compact, 3x3 map. There is pleasant music, pixel art with lots of abstract triangular textures, reactive NPCs, a variety in types of interaction, and some fun responses to player actions.
It's a simple game, designed for the text adventure literacy project, and I think it's done really way. I don't think it has much in the way of replay value, but other than that it is a rewarding and fun short game.
A collection of random genres and puzzles with some fun parts, April 30, 2021This was part of the Text Adventure Literacy Jam. It starts off in a creepy, horror-type room, then moves into more fantasy or abstraction.
Each room has generally forgiving puzzles, and overall I generally enjoyed the atmosphere. However, there was no real connection between anything, and there were a few odd bugs (for instance, a door in one room affected passage between two other rooms in what seems like a buggy way).
I don't think a game has to have a coherent narrative to be fun, and a game doesn't have to have clever puzzles to be fun, but I feel like this game could use something more than it has now before it is entirely enjoyable.
A detective game that could use some more bug fixes, April 28, 2021This is a game for the text adventure literacy project. It has some nice art and is written in adventuron.
I struggled a lot with this one. To begin with, LOOK doesn't work, but only LOOK AROUND does. Since LOOK usually works with adventuron, I can only assume the author intentionally disabled it.
There is a strict inventory limit of four items, although almost all items in the game are pretty small.
Many commands that should work are not recognized. The game has a helpful tutorial mode, but many of its suggestions do not work. There is a walkthrough provided on the game page, but much of the walkthrough is incorrect.
At one point, following the walkthrough, I forgot something, so I tried to get back to the office, but locked myself out of victory with all items inside the castle. I was frustrated, but replayed to the end.
There is a second day available, but the first story was complete, and as the second day has less bugfixes, I'd rather not play it until it's more tuned-up.
The game does, though, have some fun art.
Find 5 reflections in a cozy puzzle game, April 28, 2021This game is part of the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.
You are tasked with finding 5 reflections of yourself. There is a helpful tutorial that's optional.
There are about 10 locations, and the game has some graphics that add quite a bit to the charm of the game, and to its utility, with the map.
The puzzles are fairly simple but hard enough to be rewarding.
I had a few hiccups here and there. The game wouldn't recognize commands like X RED, only X RED CRYSTAL. Overall, I found the game charming and with a few fun surprises.
A straightforward mysterious mansion game, April 26, 2021This Adventuron game was designed for the Text Adventure Literacy Project, and it seems designed to be safe and simple. Only two-word commands are used.
It has a fairly large map with around 20 locations (?) and a few puzzles, including a combination safe, keys, and examining puzzles. The idea is that you are exploring an old mansion and discovering its secrets.
There aren't a lot of surprises here, except perhaps the ending. There is a light puzzle that was kind of interesting, though.
Sci-fi exploration with a map, April 22, 2021I beta tested this game.
This is a Twine game with great multimedia. You are exploring a derelict space craft under the auspices of an evil capitalist organization. Something is following you.
There is a map on the lefthand side, different uses of text coloring and some impressive animated pixel art.
Gameplay consists of moving around the map, picking up items (you can hold one at a time except for a few special items) and learning more about the spaceship.
I find the writing funny and the art well-done. The map and the sense of movement makes this at times a fairly difficult puzzle game.
One thing I could have wished was for more items with easily apparent uses. Other than that, this is a fun, funny, replayable game.
Nice engine, fairly straightforward murder mystery, April 17, 2021This game is written using the Strand Games engine, a nice and smooth interface that was developed to 'restore' the Magnetic Scrolls games from a few decades ago.
I like the way it looks and moves, it feels very smooth. The voice acting option (I think it was different text-to-speech readers, at least for some of them?) are a nice change of pace after how hard it is to get sound working in Inform.
The game itself isn't quite as alluring. It's a collection of fairly tropey characters in a fairly tropey setting (a major, a dilettante child, a butler, etc. in a manor). And the puzzle seems to consist in just asking who was where and figuring out which one person was lying.
A quick 2-room parser game about walking the dog, April 17, 2021In this game, you have to get your dog to go outside and take a walk, solving a few puzzles on the way.
It's an inform game, and I believe it's the first one by this author. There are a lot of things here that are common to first games: a detailed depiction of mundane tasks in a familiar setting (here, an apartment/house), some white space errors, puzzles that are interesting but perhaps underimplemented.
I feel like the author's writing voice has a lot of personality, and I bet that the feedback from this game will help the next game be even better. Right now, though, there's just not much there.
A prototype for a summer fun game about dogs and divorce, April 17, 2021In this game, you play as a corgi who comforts a girl on a summer vacation with one parent soon after a divorce.
There are many minigames you play over 8 days, building up seashells to upgrade your shanty.
Each day you sleep you get more story, with one interaction per story segment.
There are a lot of games implemented, but most of them are somewhat confusing for now or simple, and I think that's what's going to be tweaked later on.
The story is sweet but doesn't have real emotional stakes, in a way. Tension only builds during the 'sleep' scenes but could benefit more from significant changes in the game world over time. As a reader, we know the girl will be sad, then come to accept the divorce, so it would be interesting to have some extra tension as well through a side story, maybe one the parallels the main story.
A raw quest file that is in no way finished, April 16, 2021This is a raw, uncompiled Quest file with a few locations and items. Many actions are built in to the descriptions and the only properties that seem to be used here are descriptions, locations, items being portable or not, and containers. For instance, the front door is a location you can enter and it contains a lock.
There is no ending, but there is a suggestion of an ending given in the description printed when trying to take some items.
This is essentially an outline for a game.
An alien puzzle game with codes and racial dynamics, April 16, 2021This game is about you, recently immigrated to an alien planet, learning to handle the customs since everyone speaks in 'puzzlespeak'.
In reality, this means the game has three different threads: one about your emotional life, one about the political and racial situation on the world, and one where you solve puzzles.
I like puzzles, crosswords, cryptograms, etc. but I wasn't feeling some of these puzzles. Like a beta tester recently said about a game of mine, some of the puzzles are obviously telegraphed and some aren't communicated very much at all. I left 3 or 4 of the puzzles unsolved, such as the ascii one and one that seemed cryptographic but had some kind of twist that I couldn't figure out. Others may have more success than I did!
Storywise, I liked the friends subplot. I thought the racism subplot was a mystery story, not realizing it was just straight-up racism. And the mom plot seemed kind of disconnected from everything.
The game has a couple of built-in failures, which I think is tricky in a game like this. Specifically, there are times when solving the puzzles prevents social embarassment, but there are times when you experience it no matter what due to your character's (not the player's) failures, and I think that's not a good design strategy. That only occurs rarely, though.
A gay love story between superhero and doctor, April 15, 2021This game is primarily about the romantic relationship between two men, a superhero and the doctor boyfriend that patches him up all night. It focuses on feelings, passion, includes photographic images of the main characters kissing.
It's quite long, and has a recurring mechanic where you have to select the correct option for treating your boyfriend out of a dropdown menu, using a medical guide you wrote yourself for guidance.
The interactivity is pretty great in this game. The main mechanic mostly worked for me; if you get it wrong, it just sends you back.
The writing was pretty lush (I don't know if that's the right phrase), almost over-the-top. In general, with the plot and writing, it felt like a light romance novel in a dark and gritty setting. Your boyfriend is tormented by the fact that he violently attacks criminals and puts them in the hospital, but feels morally obligated to do so.
There were enough typos that it was a noticeable problem, although many pages had no errors and most that did only had one.
This is one of the longer games in the comp. Interestingly enough, the longest game in the comp is also a gritty doctor-themed romance. Here's my rating:
-Polished: Looks great visually but needs another pass with editing.
+Descriptiveness: Very descriptive, grounded, uses various sense.
+Interactivity: I liked the doctor mechanic.
+Emotional impact: It didn't completely grip me, but I was invested in the characters.
+Would I play again? I might check to see if there's another ending.
A tale of two lives in 6 acts of Twine, April 15, 2021This game seemed at first like many, many other Twine games I've played where someone reflects on their childhood and a person they had a major crush on, only to revisit their feelings as an adult.
But this game turns out to be different in several good ways. First, it's nice visually, with well-thought-out font use, colors and spacing. the writing is descriptive and interesting, with few typos. And the choice structure is actually meaningful, the game putting real stakes on its choices and remembering them (although I encountered a bug where (Spoiler - click to show)I decided not to cut the bike tires but Luke remembered me as doing so). And the relationship with your friend is kept completely real and easy to visualize while also being ambiguous and interesting.
If I had any complaint it's that I thought it ended in act 4 and then had 2 acts after. I think having either a progress bar or other indicator of time passage, or having more of an emotional rise, climax, and denouement might make that easier.
This game has timed text, which usually is a major problem in games, but this game's text was pretty much exactly in sync with my reading, so it didn't bother me.
Fantasy worldbuilding and surreal occurrences, April 15, 2021This game has some great ideas but needs some polish.
In it, you play a tavernkeep in an inn inside a city built inside of a giant hill of ice that is the lair of a now-dead ice dragon. The game opens with a big chunk of encyclopedia-style worldbuilding that is optional. Amusingly, the links you click comment on how exciting and cool the worldbuilding is.
In the game itself, you repeatedly explore a tavern and talk to NPCs with varying results every time. As you do so, you uncover more and more of a mystery.
I love mysteries, fantasy, and surreal things, so this game has a lot going for it. But there are quite a few typos, occasionally raw twine code (I saw 'if(0>0' somewhere), and there was never a real payoff for all the random things. Some of it paid off, but most of the interesting parts of the game seemed to just have no meaning by the end. I wonder if multiple endings could have been better.
Overall, though, I love the concepts, but I think the execution needs work.
Purely exploration. A twine game about an abandoned home, April 14, 2021This game takes on a social problem: America has millions of empty homes but the homeless aren't allowed to live in them.
In this game, you play a homeless couple who breaks into an ultra-mansion. There are tons of rooms, and you can explore them for a long time.
Almost all interactions are choosing which room to see next. There are some fun self-referential moments (like finding a CYOA book and talking about how much you disliked them when younger), but the vast bulk of the game is marveling at the excess and poor taste of the rich owners.
It's hard to sympathize with the PC as they seem more motivated by envy than by higher ideals.
There were a few minor typos here and there (I think there was a stray 'a', like the phrase 'the a'). Overall, though, the writing was vivid. While this game seems to be a complete idea, I wouldn't mind spending more time with these characters in this world.
Search for a governess who has repeatedly died, April 14, 2021This was a great Exceptional Story by Fallen London.
When I first wrote reviews, I wrote a lot of dumb things (a habit I have kept to this day). When I first reviewed Bee, I think I wrote that 'Short doesn't write choice games as well as those like Porpentine who exclusively write choice-based games'. (I've since removed it).
The thing is, by now Emily Short is one of the most experienced people out there in Choice-based narratives, and quality-based narratives. This exceptional story, written a few years after Bee, shows complete control and artistry with the medium.
Your character is asked to investigate the disappearance of a governess who had been killed three times already (death being a relatively minor inconvenience in the setting of Fallen London). To learn more about her, you go an a quest across all the main areas of Fallen London, learning more about how servants in every area live and providing insight into a class of people often overlooked in these games.
In addition, the story has very nuanced characters with individual narrative arcs, like the children and the governess herself.
There was a Flash Lay (a randomized pursuit) in the middle of the story which is a mechanic that I think is independent of the main story in terms of content; I found that a little slow and not as interesting as the rest, but I don't think it was developed directly as part of this story.
A fascinating character study and a satisfying mystery.
Custom windows executable parser surreal game, April 14, 2021This game has many flaws, but I like the heart beating underneath them.
Where to begin with the problems? It's windows only; it requires installing a program on your computer; it is a custom parser that doesn't recognize very many things; it's a game where the game itself is unsolvable without hints but the hints themselves are puzzles; it has a timer that kills you repeatedly (but you can reset the timer by moving up or down, but if you die it doesn't matter because typing in the wrong filename for the 'restore' option brings you back to the moment you died); the INSTRUCTIONS command gives a list of commands, none of which actually are useful in the game except maybe 1 or 2; the game has popups which use pixelart cursive text, perhaps the most unreadable choice of font I have seen; it employs voice acting that sounds like it belongs to a very different kind of game; there are numerous typos and getting the right answer depends on using non-idiomatic English; etc.
Behind all of that, I found the game fun on two levels. One being the surreal setting. Exploring a dream world while in a coma is an old trope in IF, but I always have fun with it.
Second, the game being so difficult to parse out almost made solving it more fun since it gains a second layer of puzzliness, the two layers being 1. figuring out what the solution should be, and 2. figuring out how the author wanted it written.
I only scored 10/18 points, so if anyone figures out how to open the door in the hourglass room, let me know (I already dealt with the hourglass itself).
A short branching twine game about an animal in the forest, April 14, 2021This nice-looking Twine game is by Ralfe Rich, an author I've seen a few games by in recent years.
It's a peaceful tale where you play a kind of wild creature (I imagined a moose or deer) wandering about, choosing whether to be solitary or part of a group, etc.
The branching structure has some early endings and some later endings, allows for some customization of personality but little strategy, as endings generally come as a surprise.
The writing is pretty but vague, so vague that it loses some of its charm. I think it could have been grounded more somehow, with more specificity or data from the senses. For instance:
"You are not sure what to make of such things. You have been fixed in what you know and believe for so long. Such thoughts dance in your mind as you question if your being is taking on a metamorphosis. Changing what you value, what you hold dear.
"
I think this is poetic, but these words could apply to almost every character in every story in every genre. I could use a little more about this story, now. There's some of that later on.
A brief metaphorical Inform game, April 13, 2021This short game has you on a narrow roadway with obstacles on either side, and you have to find a way to get free.
You are carrying several metaphorical objects (a hope, a fear, etc.). There is a single NPC to talk to, and two (that I found) possible endings.
I like the idea of this game, but I didn't feel satisfied with specific elements of the implementation and the writing.
Implementation wise, it seems it just needs a little more polish, like the formatting of the ending text or the whitespace at the end of some of the paragraphs.
Writing-wise, for me personally it was a little too abstract. I have the same feeling with many games, including some of Andrew Schultz's work, which deals with similar concepts of overcoming personal challenges and regrets. For me, it's easier to grab onto more specific examples and wording than to universally applicable truths.
-Polish: The game could use a bit more polish.
-Descriptiveness: I felt that the game could use more specificity.
+Interactivity: I liked the gameplay.
-Emotional impact: For some reason, the situations in the game didn't resonate with me.
+Would I play again? I played through twice just to see a different ending.
The opening chapter of a family-and-memory ink game, April 13, 2021The Back Garden of Spring Thing this year strongly resembles Introcomp. Many of these games are just excerpts or intros into longer games.
Sam Kabo Ashwell has done a lot of introcomp reviews in the past, and one thing he mentions a lot (though I can't find a direct link) is how intros are most interesting when they depict what the main gameplay will be like. In my experience, too, it's good to have the first chapter of your game set the expectation for what the main game will be like.
In this game, though, I get the impression that the rest of the game will be nothing like the intro at all, neither in setting, nor tone, nor mechanics. So it's very hard to get an idea if the finished game will be enjoyable or not.
As for the game itself, you play as a woman invited to a family reunion with people she hasn't seen in 12 years (as well as others she has, like her father). The game lets you choose what kind of attitude to have towards your family as the main interaction. Then there is a twist.
The overall writing was descriptive and had a distinct voice. I often felt like my choices didn't make too much of a difference or allow me to characterize myself consistently, and I would have liked that.
An intro to an autism travel game/visual novel, April 13, 2021I've had a lot of friends and students with autism, and they're all different, so it's nice to see a well-described point of view from a new author.
In this visual novel, you play as a sort of guiding friend/telepathic connection to a young adult with autism who is travelling alone to a concert in Hungary.
Interestingly, the visuals respond to the PC's feelings, turning more colorful if you navigate situations well.
There are some good explanations of Spoon Theory and features a lot of things that I've seen in other literature by and about autistic people (like using sensory inputs such as music or textured objects for soothing).
Storywise, I felt like I had some action, the varying amounts of detail in the pictures was fun. This game is incomplete, but I'd like to see it finished.
A murder mystery in a fantasy dimension, April 12, 2021This game seems to have been completed as part of a university program, possibly at University of Central Florida. The game list mentors but not beta testers, which would make sense.
If this game was made for a university program, it would probably be at the senior project or thesis/part-of-thesis level. It is a large game, with custom art and a UI designed from the ground up.
There is a lengthy, mostly-linear opening sequence that allows you to customize yourself. This part is an interesting story about how you, a deceased god, have been temporarily reanimated as a statue (a nod to Galatea, which is referenced in both the credits and in the name of the game itself). You go to a house occupied by the president of the 4th dimension in order to investigate your murder.
There is then a much longer segment where you can explore several different locations, some of which have worldbuilding and some have suspects. Some state is tracked in interesting ways.
The game ends with an accusation. You can accuse anyone; the game calls these 'fake endings' but doesn't list any 'true' ending. That, with some other comments in code, leads me to believe that this game doesn't have the full scope the author intended, and it may possibly be expanded in the future.
Overall, I had a very positive experiment. There were only a few flies in the ointment. Perhaps the most obtrusive one was the the '>' symbol used as a 'next' prompt. While keyboard presses can be used to move the game forward, you can also click that symbol, which is pretty small and hard to hit. Then, when you have choices, that symbol appears in front of each choice, but it is no longer clickable; instead, you must click the choice next to it. This led to me 'misclicking' a lot, and could probably be solved by just adding the word 'next' after the clickable '>' symbols and then making that the thing you click instead of the '>'.
The other issues were a missing image (studying the portraits led to a missing link) and maybe some scattered typos (I had the impression, but would have to go back again to check). I think this is a good game, the author seems talented, and whatever program is assisting the production of games like these seems to be doing great.
A short uncompiled Quest file about stealing stuff, April 12, 2021This is a short Quest game about theft in a very unpolished state.
The game is a raw quest file. There are a few objects scattered around a big map, with descriptions, and some are take-able and some are not. There is a single condition you have to meet to win.
Your character is a woman who has frequently lusty reactions to things around her.
I think I saw this was a school project. As a school project, I think it's great; I've taught game design courses before and having something like this that is both winnable and has things mostly described is actually pretty great.
But under my usual rating system, I would consider this unpolished, with uninspiring interactivity, little emotional impact and not one I plan on revisiting.
A short game about getting the courage to begin writing, April 11, 2021I found this game somewhat stressful, as it reminds me of writing my big novel.
In this Twine game, you sit down and have to focus and begin typing your grand novel, kind of like Violet, where you have to sit down and type out 1000 words of your dissertation. Also like Violet, the main goal is to overcome your distractions.
The similarities end there. This game is fairly short, and the main gameplay doesn't have the puzzle (although the hints in the download show (Spoiler - click to show)how to solve a hidden puzzle to get a true ending).
The struggle of writing is real, and a lot of this game is relatable. Although it focuses on how hard it is to get started, for me, it was hard every day to pick up where I had left off.
While I found the game well-done, with a nice opening animation, there were some things that could be improved. Some paragraphs were spaced apart, while some were not, for instance. And, overall, it felt like it needed just a little more 'something', a 'je ne sais quoi'; I know that's vague, but that's the only way I can put it in words.
A purely branching Quest choice game with fun art, April 11, 2021This game has some great art, and played smoothly in the downloaded version.
This is a pure time cave, i.e. a game where every choice gives a different branch and none of them ever converge.
In fact, the first choice between 3 characters gives entirely different games with seemingly no connection to each other (I got 1 ending for the first 2 and 4 for the last one, and didn't see any connection).
They're mostly about heartfelt and kind coming-of-age stories in a fantasy world with a lot of fantasy races and animals.
+Polish: The game was polished. Occasionally the text would glitch then fix itself, but I think that was just a loading thing.
+Descriptiveness: The story, setting, and characters were distinct and vivid.
+Emotional impact: I thought the game was cute.
-Interactivity: The branching structure gets exhausting after a while, because more and more time is spent re-reading the same text.
-Would I play again? I didn't finish getting all the endings and don't feel like I need to.
A graphical game packed with tons of endings, April 11, 2021This game is an unusual format for IF, so it makes sense it was put in Spring Thing, a competition known for its interesting experiments.
In this game you control a 2d sprite walking around a game that has been unexpectedly paused right before the big fight. You can talk to people, asking them about each other, and swap items with them.
Then, you can unpause the game through various means (the easiest being (Spoiler - click to show)giving the Crown of Agency to someone). This gives you a 'what happened to everyone'? ending.
Overall, I found the game charming and some of the interactions pretty funny.
Where I had a bit of trouble is the 'flatness' of the game. Essentially every important choice is available all at once right from the beginning, so if you want to see everything, you have to click through 8 or so people to ask each of the 8 about themselves and each other. If you just want to focus on the other mechanic (swapping things), every swap is available from the beginning, and only 1 or 2 swaps are important in the game itself (not counting the ending).
So for me, there was a very, very long period of just trying everything and not getting any plot advancement or mechanical changes. It was almost like browsing a 'behind the scenes' book for an MMORPG.
There are an enormous number of endings. I found 5 or 6, then got help to find a couple more, but the state space is so big that I felt too exhausted to find every ending. I did enjoy the ones I found, though.
I guess one thing is that, even though all the characters have very different backgrounds and personalities to me, all the text started to kind of run together eventually. I think that's because, like I mentioned earlier, everything's open at once so there's not really a narrative arc to the overall game (except for the one thread involving (Spoiler - click to show)Jimmy). That's okay and it seems intentional, but I was less engaged than I otherwise would have been.
I'm glad this game exists and think this kind of experimentation and fun is great.
A branching Twine game about a robot apocalypse, April 10, 2021This game is written in Twine, and features you, a programmer, working on a secret government project when things go wrong.
It uses colored text for emphasis. The structure for much of the game is a small section where you pick 3 options in any order, then moving on, sometimes with a branch when moving on. The branches are big, with no coming back together in the end (essentially a 'time cave').
The overall storyline isn't bad, involving a kind of robot apocalypse.
There are several errors. One of the largest is that in the Twine code, many of the sections check the 'history:' feature of twine to see if you've visited a passage, but types the names of the passages wrong, so you never get to proceed unless you load it into twinery and proceed by yourself.
This, connected with the semi-frequent typos, leads me to believe that the other never played through the finished game or had testers try it. Having someone play through your game from end to finish really helps when submitting to a competition!
I agree with the other reviewer that this game's protagonist has problematic views. They're part of an overall bigger issue, which is that he is more or less a jerk. I've noticed when looking at choice-based games that while many people like being a 'bad guy', very few people like being a jerk.
-Polish: The game has gamebreaking bugs.
-Descriptiveness: The game's text was most interesting when describing the robots, but was otherwise fairly vague.
-Interactivity: The bugs threw a wrench in things.
-Emotional impact: I felt disconnected from the protagonist.
-Would I play again? Not until it's polished a bit.
I would definitel bump up the rating if the major bugs were resolved!
A multimedia wonderland of a game. Spy thriller, 4th wall breaking, April 10, 2021This game has truly great multimedia. I had some troubles with it (mentioned later), but I've never seen a Twine game at this level when it comes to video usage.
This spy game has constantly changing background animations that preserve a high degree of readability. There's a great score, and the videos/animations are just so crisp and readable.
The puzzles are honestly very clever, but again a technical mishap got me.
These were the things that I had trouble with:
-When I first opened the game, I had no sound.
-I restarted the game, but that popped up several javascript/Twine errors
-Then I restarted again, and the audio worked, but then....
-The AR thing seems to require a very specific set of technology that I could only solve with weird finagling. I had to (description of partial solution of this puzzle) (Spoiler - click to show)scan a QR code, so, since I was playing on the computer, I used my phone. But that took me to a twine game with a constantly moving link to click. That just straight-up doesn't work in Twine on mobile safari. So I copied the url into my email and sent it to my computer. Once you solve that Twine, you get sent to an AR. But the AR requires motion tracking, so I again had to email the url to myself so my phone could do the AR. This could all be solved by removing the text movement portion of the twine minigame you get sent to when you scan the QR code and replacing it with a different cool thing.
The storyline broke the 4th wall a lot but was honestly genuinely funny. There are some great lines here, and the audiovisuals and writing put together are very impressive. The tech troubles I had are the only thing keeping me from 5 stars.
Features strong profanity, some gruesome violence.
An incomplete Python game set in a theatre, April 9, 2021I rarely review a game without playing it to completion. To explain my omission in this case, I'd like to describe my play experience.
This was the second python game I played in this competition, so I had a better idea of how to get it running than I did on that one.
There are two ways to compile it: command prompt or web version.
I first tried command prompt and found it very slow, so then I tried the web version.
The web version has a several seconds pause between each line of text. This is somewhat frustrating, but not too bad. But the web version also blanks the screen frequently, and on a timer, so important text gets overriden by incidental 'flavor' text, making the text sometimes too slow and sometimes too fast.
The slow text, while a drawback, would have been manageable if not for the fact that:
-the same text pause happens when you make an error
-the game doesn't recognize most standard parser commands
For instance, you can't LOOK AT, W means WAIT instead of WEST and N means NEXT instead of NORTH. TALK TO is also not recognized. There is a HELP command, which lists helpful things to do, but in the web version sometimes typing HELP just gave me the environmental text, and HINT never worked.
So, much of my gameplay consisted of trying commands, getting errors, trying other commands, getting errors, all at a fairly slow pace.
The main game concept seems like it could work, but I can't proceed right now.
A heist game in 3 acts with puzzles and conversational mechanics, April 9, 2021This game does a lot of good things, and really drew me in.
You play as a nouveau-riche socialite who is also a catburglar/art thief.
Gameplay revolves around two mechanics: conversation and puzzles.
The conversation consists of choosing one of three attitudes: Friendly, Direct, and Leading On (?) (I can't quite remember what they stood for). Most conversations last 2-4 choices and you have to use the feedback you get from the NPC to determine if you are making the right choices or not, so there is some allowance for mistakes.
The puzzles consist of both strategizing (often the choice is between being fast and risky or quiet and slow) and text-entry. I liked the last puzzle quite a bit.
I found the Gwen character a little annoying, but enjoyed the MC a lot. If you're a fan of Alias the Magpie, I think you'll enjoy this too.
Note: The many save files available were great. I decided not to try and get a perfect game, but I did use one save once to recall what someone had said many turns earlier.
An Ink game about saving a mining town after an earthquake, April 9, 2021This is a Spring Thing game written in Ink. In it, you play a young man in a mining town where a disaster has struck. There are several chapters, each of which has 3-4 binary choices to choose from, with several paragraphs of text per choice.
I'm going to rank this on my five-point scale:
+Polish: I could have sworn I saw some typos but not sure. Game looks nice, generally polished.
+Descriptiveness: I quite liked the descriptiveness in this game, the characters were interesting and the mine scenes were excellent.
-Interactivity: This is a hard one. It's better than many games I've seen, but in general it's very hard to figure out what kind of effect different choices might have. It branches wildly, but seems generally forgiving. In a perfect world, I would have hoped for choices that have some kind of pattern, so I could make a plan, but unexpected surprises, so I'd have to adjust that plan.
+Emotional impact: I really got into my character and my feelings for the town.
-Would I play again: Even though it branches a lot, I didn't feel a strong desire to replay. Glad I played once, though.
An unfinished demo for a long twine game set in world of Cyberpunk 2077, April 8, 2021Like many of the Back Garden Spring Thing games, this is a demo for a much longer game in the future.
As in Bez's other games, the writing here is well-done, and the characters are well-defined with distinct personalities (for me, at least). The audiovisuals were excellent, although I didn't see any easy way to mute the music (for, for instance, taking a phone call while playing).
The idea is that you work at a store in the background of Cyberpunk 2077 (a game I have never played, so I may be missing some nuance here). You have a boss that literally monitors your thoughts and docks your pay when you step out of line.
I feel like the game suffers in how its message translates into interaction. The game has a good message which is completely reasonable (the use of surveillance tools by employers and other features of a police state are bad). But sometimes it feels like the game looks like it offers a choice but not really; your character is asked about your feelings but you are also told your feelings. I feel like it might be better to have one or the other: have no choices about how you feel but a lot about your actions (the way Howling Dogs or their angelical understanding does), or allow choices about how you feel and let the player stick with it, even if the consequences are dreadful (like Lore Distance Relationship). As one older author wrote, you can't act unless you're enticed by two contrasting things, the sweet and the bitter.
A python-based diner game, April 7, 2021I don't think I would have played this game if I hadn't been committed to reviewing all the Spring Thing games. Downloading Python 3 was tedious and frustrating, having to type exact commands was rough, and restaurant sim's not my favorite genre.
Still, I was engaged by this game and played through till the end. You run a diner on the moon (or Mars, although I didn't try that diner), ordering food, finding what customers want, making recipes, serving it up, then taking care of the diner or hanging out with a friend.
I enjoyed the little narrative snippets when hanging out with my friend the good Doctor. She gave me lots of cool trinkets and talked about space.
Auto-complete was a lifesaver, although I have to ask, why go to the trouble of using autocomplete but then have so many customers whose names start with O? It'd be way better to have every customer name have a distinct letter, or at least spread them out roughly uniformly (unless, by a cosmic joke, they were uniform and I just got 'O' tourists over and over again).
This game was okay, but I felt like I was fighting the system all the way. The question is, what's next? If the authors were trying to learn python better or demonstrate their use of python, then that's great, this is a cool program. If their goal is to create awesome IF, I would ditch python and go with a specialized language like Twine or Ink.
A short spy game with fun puzzles but a bit undercooked, April 6, 2021This game describes itself well on the Spring Thing page, where it says:
"I’ve entered it in the Back Garden section because it is
not very large, it has had insufficient testing and consequently has some rough spots. It should anyway be playable through and hopefully provides some enjoyment along the way. A walkthrough is available in a separate file. Have fun!"
I found the puzzles pleasant and the overall atmosphere light and breezy, but there were several typos or bugs.
Overall, you're trying out for a spy type job and have to infiltrate a house. Puzzles are presented one at a time, generally, with each solved puzzle giving a clue to the next one.
The hints could definitely have used some fine-tuning, but the author seems well aware of that. I had fun, but could have had more.
A charming short Twine game with many endings, April 6, 2021This game is short but has a lot of different branches. It's not really a time cave, since some branches come together, so it's interesting.
There's a girl at your school who is icy-cold and intimidates teachers to keep them from saying her name. Therefore, no one knows it, so you take a bet to find out.
There are a lot of paths, most resembling cute high school movie tropes.
I liked the game; the writing was cute, the characters charming. The backstory seems a bit sad but relatable. I always felt that writing a game is like sharing a bit of your soul with others, and reading/playing that game is a way of honoring and accepting that.
I guess my main drawback for the game is that it mostly amounts to guessing what each action will do, and I wish there was a way to puzzle it out more; but that's just me and not everyone may feel that way.
Excellent multi-act game in gothic urban fantasy environment, April 6, 2021This is the kind of game that comes along only once every few years, especially recently: a polished parser game that lasts far longer than 2 hours.
The author is inspired by Anchorhead, Blue Lacuna, and City of Secrets. Of those 3, I find this game to be closest to City of Secrets in both play style and prose style.
You are a medical student trying to solve a mystery: a mysterious black plague is destroying people in your city, and you have to help them.
To solve this, you need to go through 4 acts (plus a beginning and interlude) to reach the depths of the mystery.
The map for this game is quite large, and it comes with an in-game graphical map that looks great.
Like Anchorhead and Blue Lacuna, gameplay is divided into days. Unlike those games, gameplay is narrowly funneled. This game reads more like a movie than a novel, with an emphasis on scripted conversations and scripted action scenes. Only rarely are there simultaneous puzzles, and the most difficult puzzle is generally learning to navigate the impressively large and responsive city environment, which has both randomized events and time-based changes.
This is a love story, too, with multiple love interests and multiple endings. Romance plays a key role in numerous scenes. It uses other movie-like techniques, including a lot of foreshadowing and an emphasis on visual and aural descriptions (okay, that's not just in movies, but it just feels like a movie).
There have been two really negative reviews of Anchorhead in recent years, criticizing that game for not being 'funneled' enough, for having too open of a world, too subtle of story, not enough romance, etc. This game directly addresses all of those issues, with its constrained gameplay and copious allowances (such as a GO TO feature, in-game map and journal with a list of goals). On the other hand, for fans of the open world, exploration, and difficult puzzles of Anchorhead, it may pose too slight of a challenge. Blue Lacuna was in a similar spot, and offered two versions: a story version and a puzzle version.
For me, though, I enjoyed playing through this game, and truly consider it a rare game. I think it will do well in the XYZZY awards for 2021, and makes me want to try my hand at something like this, although I expect it would take as many years as the author's original did.
The polish on this game is impeccable, the setting and prose is descriptive, I'd definitely play again, the interactivity is a bit narrow but has several fun puzzles (including [mild spoilers](Spoiler - click to show)a nice math one), and emotionally was satisfying. Recommended for fans of story-focused parser games. I spent around 5 hours on this game.
Review for 2017 Spring Thing preview:
This game is advertised as being incomplete, but a very large chunk of it is done. Playing it is like playing 'episode 1' of a large series.
The setting is unusual: you are in a large and decaying city where magic and science are blended together. Scalpels and anesthesia blend with goblins and soul magic.
I found the opening to be a bit constraining (which is something I do in my own games, too), but that after that the game was rich and rewarding. Locations have several interactible details, conversations feel natural, and I felt like a real detective.
I enjoyed the large feeling of the city, something difficult to do right in an interactive fiction game. I did get a bit lost from time to time. Locations were unique and vividly described.
I would love to see this finished.
An incomplete murder mystery texting game, April 5, 2021While this game is unfinished, I found it a pleasant surprise. In format it reminds me of Lifeline, a once-popular game where you were texting with an astronaut and guiding them around a planet.
In this game, you have a nosy mother who is very interested in the death by fire of her neighbor. You give her advice as she learns more about the death and investigates.
I found the characters well-depicted and funny. The writing needs polishing, but it might be fine as-is since it represents the way the characters talk in real life.
The text timing and animation could use a little tweaking. Something about it seems a little off, making it hard to read.
Overall, I'm looking forward to the finished version! If possible, I'd love the final version to have controls for text speed, audio, and saving.
An unfinished game about competing hackers, April 5, 2021This seems like it will one day be a complex game about 4 different games competing in a simulated hacking competition.
For now, though, it is incomplete; all paths I checked stop when dice are rolled for the first time. There are sentences missing, fragments of code, and notes like 'TODO: add GRU and NK later'. The text that is available has typos.
What is available looks to be interesting and deals with a subject I'd love to learn more about: American election security and vulnerabilities that other countries can exploit.
The game is descriptive, but its incomplete state meant that, for me, it was limited in its interactivity, emotional enjoyment and polish, and I wouldn't play it again at this time.
If it were complete and polished, I would certainly give it a 4 or 5.
A long choice game about life as a home-schooled child, April 4, 2021I had mixed reactions to Bee by Emily Short, most of which were favorable. I compared this game in my mind to Bigger Than You Think by Plotkin, which is another choice game by a famous parser author.
The game is in a completely real-life setting. You play a homeschooled child over three years or more as they prepare for the national spelling bee. Time is organized in months. Each month, you can choose from a variety of activities usually three), and within each activity, you can control your reactions to events and sometimes some big choices.
The game allows quite a variety of choices; the first time I played, I practiced my butt off for the finals. The second time I played, I goofed off as much as possible.
The game was enjoyable; as someone who entered competitions like this as a kid, it was fun to study for the test and get competitive. The interactions with neighbors were fun, too.
But the game got pretty monotonous, perhaps because I tried to be so focused each time. 36 months, with multiple actions a month, makes for a long game, and there was not enough material to fill it all up. Instead, many scenarios were repeated five times or more.
A game that wants you to hate someone really bad, April 4, 2021I am so, so glad I played this game, but not for the reasons the author intended (unless it's a cool reverse pscyhology thing, then it turned out perfect).
I've played some games before about topics that were good and I agree with (like caring about trans people or not being racist) but which seemed like they forced on an opinion on you or hard rigid black-and-white morality. I thought those techniques weren't effective, but I felt bad writing a criticism since I agreed with the game's principles.
This game is about something where absolutely everyone on earth can agree it is good (the game is about opposing (Spoiler - click to show)kicking puppies). But it is railroaded so hard it sucked out all the fun for me. It showed me that no matter how good the cause a game promotes, forcing the player to adopt renders it meaningless.
The game sets you up to hate your boss as much as physically possible, and it just assumes your intent at every step. It's like the game thinks it knows exactly how you would feel, like that one coworker (thankfully I don't have one at my current job) that's always try to schmooze you and assume he knows you.
I didn't have fun, which I think is essentially the game's point. The game was shooting for an emotional impact of being annoying, and it worked perfectly, I am now annoyed. It was very descriptive. But the interactivity didn't work for me, and I don't think I'll play again. It was very polished. So, according to my rating system, I'm giving 3 stars, but I genuinely disliked playing this.
The epitome of truck stops, April 3, 2021I am still a fairly prudish person, and happy with that choice, but growing up I rarely left the house and just read books most of the time, and went to school and church. I had some vices and saw friends and family doing extreme things, but it all felt distant.
So for me, when I stopped at a truck stop across the Wyoming border on a trip for the first time, it seemed like a frightening place filled with evil and temptations. Pornography magazines, tons of kinds of alcohol, t-shirts with wild slogans or charts comparing breast sizes, everyone smoking or buying chewing tobacco, tough-looking truckers. It blew my mind.
This game brings back a lot of those memories. You're a truck driver (who, as you discover, has recently [early spoiler about character] (Spoiler - click to show)undergone some major changes regarding gender), and you're about to drive over Devil's Taint, one of the most dangerous roads out there (which also reminds me of driving to and from Utah). You have to get help from biker gangs, a 'lot lizard', a smoky waitress, and more to fulfill your dreams and get ready to brave the mountain range.
The author used to write in Quest but has switched over to Inform, and I definitely prefer it. There were a few errors here and there (mostly in trivial things), but it was generally pretty smooth.
I still haven't recovered from my childhood shock, and, frankly, fear of the scary mountain truck stop. But this was a medium-ish, fairly entertaining piece of entertainment.
A fan wiki for a 'lost show', April 3, 2021When I had heard that JJ and Grim had been working on a huge Twine project, this isn't what I expected, but I enjoyed this nonetheless.
This is a fake wiki, a sprawling website with links to tons of different actors, directors, characters, episodes, and even fan theories. It reminds me of the wiki game Neurocracy, although I believe they're gated differently. In this game, the wiki is being updated as you go, with new links appearing after you explore others.
The beginning was, as another reviewer mentioned, a bit difficult; with so much information at once, I just sort of lawnmowered through it, saving the fun stuff for last. So I ended up reading the 'people' page, then 'characters', then 'planets' and then the episodes.
It was slow going, with no real plot beats in those first segments because they were order independent.
But it was fun for different reasons. This project seems to have several different goals: to be a sort of 'lost episode' creepypasta-type story, to be funny, to provide a window into 70's culture, to honor and parody Dr. Who and original Star Trek (among others), and to impersonate and parody fan wiki culture.
That's a lot to deal with. One interview snippet from the wiki is an apt description of the wiki itself (mild spoilers):
(Spoiler - click to show)"In the end, I think we were all just pulling in different directions. Carson and I wanted this quite serious Space Opera, if you like, edgy, with political undercurrents and elements of folklore. Jerry (Newbaum) wanted a children's show to compete with Doctor Who, and Derek Farland, well, he really should have been writing kitchen sink dramas. In the end, the show just sort of tore itself apart."
One issue with writing 'creepy' or 'weird' TV shows is that a lot of TV shows are both intentionally and unintentionally weird, and you run into Poe's Law.
There were three threads in the wiki about its own origins, of which I found two pretty compelling (heavy spoilers from here on out):
(Spoiler - click to show)I enjoyed the 'curse' aspect, where the crew enacted an unholy Crowley-based ritual in Glastonbury Tor, invoking the 'thelema' of the producer to enact his will, and thereby dooming the entire show to obscurity.
I also enjoyed the 'Tulpa' idea whereby the whole show (and possibly all of human existence, according to 'Hantises') is a form of haunting or mass delusion or collaborative psychic projection which, once disrupted, fades away forever. If you're a fan of this idea, I recommend this game itself (of course) and also SCP-3930 (http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-3930), a similarly masterful telling of this idea.
The least compelling to me was the idea that it was just a lie.
There's a lot of humor in the game. My favorite line was "It was later found that a fried lentil from a packet of Bombay Mix (Newell's favourite snack) had become lodged in the cavity left by the write-protect tab."
Like I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of insights about the 70's. I liked this line about that (spoilers for ending)(Spoiler - click to show)Strikes, shortages, sexism, and the Black and White Minstrel Show. Yet the way people talk now, anyone would think they were Britain's glorious heyday. And that's the point, you see. You can't go back to the way things were, because they never were like that in the first place. We create our own past, we invent it. We make it whatever we want it to be. But the reality of it is, there is only now. The eternal now.
The final theme of the wiki seems to be around (Spoiler - click to show)loss and the past, as that last quote describes. For me, the real 'ending' was when I read (Spoiler - click to show)about how the documentary-writer's friend had had an 'incident' and pulled away, in conjunction with the final episode summary about saving the world but no one remembering you. The actual ending itself was less satisfying, but I see its purpose as (Spoiler - click to show)you need an anchor point for people to say 'okay', I've seen the whole game. Perhaps I just didn't understand it. In any case, I enjoyed my own gradual realizations of the themes shortly before the true ending.
I initially was going to give this 4 stars, with a point taken off for the overly spread out info at the beginning, then 5 stars as I approached the end, then 4 again for the mild letdown I had with the actual ending. So I'll just go with my formula:
+Polished: Immensely polished. It doesn't really get better than this. Also appreciated the art, which I hadn't mentioned before.
+Descriptiveness: Incredibly detailed. More detailed than some real wikis I've tried to use to look up shows before.
+Interactivity: At first, not so much, but as it went on I enjoyed it more. A real wiki dive.
+Emotional impact: Left me quite thoughtful at the end.
+Would I play again? It doesn't really lend itself to replay. I was planning on making this a '-', but I love the story of Excalibur, and maybe one day I might (with the author's permission' do some fan fiction in the world, as it's truly delightful. But that would be far in the future.
Finnegan's Wake meets Antony and Cleopatra, April 3, 2021This game is a 22-chapter work relating the story of Cleopatra in Egypt told with a dense, symbolic word style.
I am a fan of the play Antony and Cleopatra and interested in the history around that time period, and I also have at times enjoyed dense symbolic text.
That enjoyment didn't crystallize this time. The game describes its own writing very well:
"Pour pen terrene this dysnomia volta syschronicity to formendulate paragraphs smashed into spare fragments of evocative semiimagery, mimetic shards that don't quite cohere to any generative idea."
They really don't cohere to any generative idea.
When the portmanteaus include French and Latin it gets even less 'generative':
"drunken nothings fuzzed up to retend in the mode prior to resolution beatified immolution densigravitas of the decolor demolition, wickedness we entrenched cheri in jouissanceunteurre catapulted in the cancers cant,"
(I prefer when the game's language is simpler, such as 'Slurp you up a jello mistake.').
I think there are times when this writing style works wonders: when it is used to tell an brilliant and exciting story, hiding the details behind a wall of words; or when it is used in a very short game, like B Minus does, allowing the player to have time to digest and process.
But this story seems largely hung on the traditional story of Caesar, Octavian, Antony, and Cleopatra, almost as if the author wished to write as much as possible, and used the old story as a framework to drape their own words around. The end result is a like a wedding cake made of a wooden frame with heavy fondant draped over, no cake inside.
I found specific moments fun: (Spoiler - click to show)Octavian hiding, the birth of the twins, the deathloop. There are hints of a larger trans narrative, but only in the middle and later parts and even then just vaguely alluded to.
The book itself is well aware of these faults, the author offering to be attacked for the content. In the end, the best description of the book is the one given by the characters in the primer:
"Unfortunately, the finished work appears to have become a bizarre mess of unreadable nonsense. The author appears to have been far more interested in playing obscure word games than telling our story in a way that people could actually understand."
A musing, contemplative game waiting for a tram, April 3, 2021This Twine game is about chilling waiting for a tram. There are several things to explore in a world that's kind of a mild fantasy/tech blend, like FF7 or Zork.
There are a few minigames and things to explore, like gambling or buying equipment. There's a lot of fun unexpected consequences.
Overall, I enjoyed the idea. The game could use some more polish, maybe throwing it through Grammarly could help get rid of some typos.
The game doesn't really have anything tying it all together, which I think I would have appreciated. But it is a good game for meditating and feeling peaceful.
I played through twice.
A short scientific fiction puzzle game in Twine, April 2, 2021This is a charming little game, partly poetic and partly puzzle.
You are an alien on your home planet and a creature has crash landed. There are 4-5 different locations you can go, each of which allows you to sleep and look around.
Time passes, and it's important to the game. Some events only occur on certain days. There is a nice graphical change when this happens.
The puzzle involves doing the right thing at the right place, and requires a fair amount of travel.
Unfortunately, this game makes the crucial mistake of combining slow text with gameplay requiring repetition. This means that if you need to check a location really quick, you have to wait several seconds to travel there, several seconds to click on a link, and several seconds to click back. If I were the author, I'd update the game to remove the pauses, as I've never seen a review praise slow text in games and many against.
But as it is, this was fun. The puzzle is simple but satisfying, and I enjoyed the ending.
An ornate and sprawling blend of the supernatural and history, April 1, 2021This game is like a text version of the Winchester mystery house. That house was built upon continually for over 30 years, with constant extensions added, some leading nowhere, others connecting with each other in strange patterns.
This game was one of the earliest Choicescript games, and with that has some of that early-choicescript strangeness (now manifested primarily in its large number of stats and the occasional habit of the narrator addressing the reader directly). Since then, though, it has been expanded on considerably. This game contains 4 sub-games, two of them free and two not. So it's simultaneously one of the oldest and one of the newest choicescript games.
Its overall structure is very different from other titles from CoG. It has a periodic narrative arc. Instead of tension rising to a peak and falling in one grand swoop, it features a single vampire moving about America throughout the 1800s, experiencing a variety of historical events in addition to dealing with vampire society and the curse of immortality.
This episodic structure gives a sense of deja vu and ennui to the main character, as you see so many historical fads and people come and go.
Just like the Winchester house, there are a lot of dead alleys and lost construction. I tried beta testing the game before, but died in the second sub-book. Playing it for this review, I died twice at the end of the fourth book. Similarly, there are huge chunks of the story that can be skipped out on, such as romances, and the opening is completely different depending on your chosen background.
In another departure from Choicescript games, this game addresses race in a very direct way. This game is largely a history of black people in America, with each chapter containing large segments in relation to black history: the liberation of Haiti, the Exodusters, Cuba, lynchings, vodou, the treatment of former slaves after the civil war, etc. Black characters speak in heavily accented text, and for most of the game they are the only ones to do so, with Germans, quakers, and Jews receiving some accents later on.
A game that deals so intimately with black history and black stories risks embracing stereotypes or profiting on stories that don't belong to the author. However, I've seen in the forums mention of several sensitivity readers, although I don't see them listed in the credits the way that Fox Spirit has done (might be worth considering). From what I've seen from PoC authors on Twitter, many consider sensitivity readers a way to make sure that PoC voices are heard, considered, and paid.
The history in this game is detailed and heavily researched, especially in the fourth chapter. If you're interested in silver arbitrage resulting from the Coinage Act of 1873 or the invention of the modern celebrity via Oscar Wilde, the 4th act should appeal to you heavily. The third act deals with a lot of letter-writing and numerous social engagements with other vampires leading to political maneuvering. The 2nd act deals with the Civil War and deprivation, while the first has the most material dealing with you, yourself, as a vampire, and your feelings about that decision.
This game will appeal to a certain type of reader, those who consider themselves interested in philosophy and history or fans of vampires in general.
The game is not yet complete, but due to its plot structure you can pick up and stop off just about anywhere in the journey. A unique choicescript game, huge and detailed.
Long choice based game about escapism, choice, and the moon, March 26, 2021I've often pondered on my reasons for reading novels, playing IF, reading stories online, etc. I've talked to my family about it, and my answers to why we escape and whether it is good changes fairly often. I also was oncea professional video game developer.
This game, then, drew me in completely. This is a choice-based game about someone who is trying to understand escapism, its role in life, its benefits and drawbacks, the meaning of art, etc.
It was fun to play the character as myself, giving the answers and reactions I would. I was happy with my ending.
It was funny to play this game after Ultra Business Tycoon III,and reading online debates over whether that game is winnable, and what it would mean if it is not winnable. I don't necessarily recommend playing that game first (Porpentine has better games, like Howling Dogs), but it was interesting.
Lynnea Glasser tends to make very good games. I didn't like Tenth Plague on philosophical grounds, but Coloratura was fantastic.
This game contains several instances of strong profanity near the beginning.
A charming story of mist and mystery, March 25, 2021This Fallen London exceptional story is pretty good.
Fog has encroached on London, and out of it steps a bizarre foggy figure that walks around your house, using your stuff and playing chess a lot.
As you investigate this disturbance, you learn more about a cult and a conspiracy that draws in some of the strangest features of Fallen London: (mild spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)unusual biology and the Elder continent. Emotionally, this game deals well with a certain kind of loss without becoming too maudlin.
Unlike most exceptional stories, this has some very different endings that can be hard to achieve. If you're really invested in one outcome and don't want to pay money for a reset, it's worth looking up or getting advice online.
A miniature, procedural pirate infiltration game, March 25, 2021This is the only game out of Choice of Games 123 existing titles I've played that I'm giving 3 stars to. Most titles are the result of years of work and careful oversight by a large crew of editors, copyeditors, testers, etc. that result in a game that is at minimum polished, replayable, descriptive, and having some kind of emotional impact or good interactivity, which are the criteria I judge games by.
This game is the smallest game made since Choice of the Dragon, is experimental, and is buggy. The size is due to it being one of the free (with ads) mini-size games available to anyone playing on the omnibus apps. Unlike the other mini games (Zip! Speedster and HMS Foraker), this one seems like it was written to be me small, with a new kind of gameplay not seen before in Choice of Games.
As an experiment, I'm not sure the game works. It has some randomization (so, for instance, going to the stats screen and back can change what day you're on). Each day is a journal entry, presenting a choice with yes/no options. These are either 'what faction do you favor' out of 3 possible factions, or 'do you try this beneficial thing that checks which of your stats are good' or a combination of the two. In this way, it kind of reminds me of Amazing Quest, a controversial tiny game entered in the 2020 IFComp.
If any of the three factions hates you, you die. The game is supposed to let you restart that day, but a game-breaking bug instead sends you back to the beginning of the game, leaving some of your stats intact which causes a couple more errors.
The randomization and binary choices make the game pretty difficult, with the bug rendering the game permanently in 'hard mode'. I did get to an ending.
I enjoyed the character Lookout and the two different machine animals I had on different runs (a copper snake and silver wolf). I love all the rest of Marquis's games, so I enjoyed getting more lore here about Empyrean, and the captain's mysterious locked room reminded me of Bluebeard, one of my favorite characters (I've sometimes considered Duke Bluebeard's Castle my favorite opera).
So, while this has many redeeming features, I can't give this 4 stars due to the fairly severe, easily reproducible bugs and with my dissatisfaction with the interactivity. But I think Marquis can handle it, as he's an amazing writer with some of the best games out there (like the Vampire Masquerade game).
I'm also looking forward to his next Pon Para game!
An entertaining sequel focused on a school competition, March 24, 2021Grand Academy of Villains is a game I first played years ago. I found the writing funny and the class interesting, but I wasn't satisfied with the ending because I found it abrupt.
Now, after playing through essentially every Choicescript game, I realize how high-quality the first Grand Academy game is in general, with lots of valid choices and good writing. I still think the ending has some issues (with some stat checks that are too high, imo), but overall it's one of the better games.
This game builds on that, but in a way some people disliked. Grand Academy 1 had very different endings depending on your choices, but this game funnels all of those towards one 'main' choice.
I know several people were unhappy with this choice, but I saw the complaints before I played, and wasn't surprised or, really, disappointed, since this game is all about multiverses and changes in reality.
Anyway, this game was fun for me. There is a big competition all year between houses (Thriller, Horror, Sci-fi and Fantasy), overseen by an outside group. In addition, a powerful new student with destiny enters the school.
The writing in this series is exceptionally funny (if you're into parodies of both academia and writing tropes), and stats are generally clear. I do think, though, that the game suffers a bit from stat checks that become progressively more difficult, meaning that the chance of you failing during the finale is high.
Another small problem is that, due to numerous options, each option gets less time. At one point I had a choice to impress people with my grades despite never going to class and not having any grades (i.e. my grades were listed as 'unknown'). I had plenty of time to spend with my 'nemesis' (this game has both normal romances and nemesis similar to romance but with hatred, kind of like that homestuck thing), and my current romance. But everything else seemed fairly stretched or thin. Again, though, this was only due to the large variability in the game.
Some people have said in reviews that 'your choices don't matter' which isn't really true, the writing is extremely variable. However, there's an art to making it clear in writing that your choices aren't important, and I think that wasn't communicated properly here.
Overall, very glad to have played the series, and would rank it in the top 20 at least.
An epic meta-narrative tale about a villain, March 23, 2021This game was a fun ride. You play as a new villain in a school for villains.
Everything is very self-aware; there are villains from every genre, and you study plot-twists and narrative arcs. Henchmen are trained on how to miss the heroes when shooting, etc.
What I think this game did exceptionally well was balancing your choices: there are 2-3 major things I wanted that I just couldn't do all at once (especially pleasing mom and becoming a monster).
I'm giving it four stars instead of five because I felt like the denouement was a bit rushed and I didn't feel properly satisfied at the end. However, I've had that feeling before with a few Choice of Games games (like The Sea Eternal), and usually I find a more satisfying ending on replay.
This game would make a great introduction to Choice of Games for people new to the company.
Disclaimer: I have worked for Choice of Games and received a free copy of this game.
Edit: Now that I've played through all the choicescript games, this one is high on my list for voice and character. I've bumped it up to 5 stars.
The conclusion of the Hero Project. More policy than power, March 22, 2021This game is the end of the Hero Project duology, which comes after the Heroes Rise trilogy (and has connections to (Spoiler - click to show)the author's Versus series).
I've really enjoyed Zachary's other games, but felt that the last game, Redemption season, was a bit more constrained. This game takes that further.
In this game, you take on the final episodes of the Hero Project reality show while dealing with a new independent city-state in the wilderness made up of former enemies trying to make a home for minority superheros.
I had an experience early on which really soured me on the game. In the previous game, (Spoiler - click to show)I followed Loa's instructions to the hilt, believing that she could save us. But she had said before that if I didn't win the Hero Project, the earth would be doomed. And the game also likes you to be consistent and to help your sister. So I had to choose between helping my sister and losing the project (thus dooming mankind). It felt pretty harsh. I tried to get some insights from reading the choice of game forums to see if there was a way to still win, but I couldn't find anything helpful.
Beyond that, though, (an issue which probably would have been just fine in the long run), this game feels like 80% reaction, 20% action. Over and over again, you're told what your hero does, and what other heroes do, then you're asked:
Did that make you feel:
-excited?
-scared?
-determined?
Or, someone will give a speech, and then the game will say:
In your heart, you think:
-All superheros should work together
-My type of superhero is persecuted, so we should stick together
-I don't care, as long as my sister is safe.
And these two interactions are what most of the game is. What drew me to Sergi's earlier games was the exact opposite: more action, more dramatic-feeling choices.
The high points of the game for me were seeing my old main character as a respected and powerful superhero, and the last chapter. I enjoy the character of your sister, Jelly Kelly, quite a bit, and your main character's power set is pretty cool.
Overall, I wouldn't have finished playing this one if it weren't connected to the overall Sergiverse. But it's one I wouldn't skip if you have played the other games, as it ties up a lot of loose ends.
A strong superhero story with restricted interactivity, March 20, 2021This is a somewhat controversial game, but it was only able to achieve that controversy by being popular in the first place.
The author had an earlier 3-part series called Heroes Rise, that focuses on a superhero getting powers, beating their first enemy, going on a reality show, then becoming an influence on the whole nation.
This game is a side story with a new protagonist, a hero with a very clever power: you are an animal/human hybrid, but the animal you're mixed with changes every day.
The focus of this game is different from the earlier series. Your character is a representative of several persecuted minority groups (the animal hybrids, those with uncontrollable powers, and another one I can't remember). The main themes of the game revolve around the treatment of these minority groups. Also, your sister's powers are killing her, and a mysterious benefactor has offered to cure her in return for several unnamed favours, to be collected.
The focus on the minority groups has led to a lot of reviews and forum posts describing the game as having 'too much politics', which is usually a dogwhistle for alt-right people who don't like LGBT representation (which exists in this game; there are trans and non-binary main characters).
However, I feel like there are some issues here, but not with the content itself, rather how it's presented. The first Heroes Rise games were all about action, but this game is largely about reaction. Instead of picking what you do, frequently you're told what you or others do and then given the choice of how you feel about it. Quite frequently choices are forced on you, and you can go several pages without a choice, more often than the earlier games.
I believe that if the game had been rewritten to feature more action and choice that the number of negative reviews would have gone down a lot (except for virulently anti-LGBT people), because a well-written game can handle all sorts of diverse politics. For instance, the Heart of the House prominently features a nonbinary main NPC with non-standard pronouns, but you see a lot fewer negative comments about it.
The Sea Eternal had a similar issue, I believe, where you were frequently told what you were doing and what you thought, and I think that it just doesn't make for an enjoyable game experience. And I think it's possible to have games with strong pro-LGBT messages that give you freedom of action and feeling: Howling Dogs, Birdland, With Those We Love Alive, and Tally Ho come to mind.
Another thing that may have dinged this game's popularity (although it's still a very popular game, just not as much as the other games by this author) is having forced failures. There are situations in the game where you have to pick between 2 very bad outcomes, and Choicescript games that do that tend to suffer.
However, I've noticed that those same ingredients that are drawbacks as games (reduced interactivity and forced failures) can also help make your overall story better. It's no coincidence that the Nebula writing award nominated games tend to sell poorly: they all tend to have tight, railroaded stories with lots of failures to build up a big character arc.
Anyway, I did like the overall story of this game, I'm glad I played it, and I look forward to the next game and the eventual crossover with the author's other series.
The simple pleasures of pirating, March 19, 2021Alana Joli Abbott is a prolific Choice of Games author, having written Choice of Kung Fu (a very good game), Showdown at Willow Creek (very short but fun), and Blackstone Academy for the Magical Arts, which I felt had good ideas but less exciting execution.
Also, I had previously played another pirate game (by a different author) from choice of games, "7th Sea: A Pirate's Pact", which I thought was fun but that didn't highlight the exciting parts.
This game, for me, improves on Abbott's other games and on the other pirate game, because it's fun. It highlights all the best parts about the pirate life. We get ghost ships, flamboyant and treacherous captains, refined but insidious Crown operatives, sea monsters, owning a fleet, getting a hook for a hand, etc. Very little time is spent on the trivial or boring.
The stats are great, too. They're clear to understand, you have many opportunities to increase them, and they're clearly differentiated early on.
There are some things I didn't like too much. I tried to get a haunted ship at the beginning, but failed too many checks in a row and lost miserably. But the game handled it with optimism and reassured me as the player that things would be okay despite my setback, and that gave me the confidence to keep playing without retrying.
I'm not sure exactly how much branching there is; the way it's written and the wordcount given makes me think you largely experience the same set of events each playthrough, but the game offers you a lot of freedom in your intent. And there is definitely some branching; I completed the entire game without finding the identity of one of the people in the relationship bars (probably because I refused to work with the Crown at all).
Overall, lots of fun, can recommend.
A grab-bag of investigation, outlaws, Ute indians and science, March 18, 2021This is one of the shortest choicescript games sold by Choice of Games. Coincidentally, at 72,000 words, it's longer than any parser game I've written. But in the world of choicescript games, it's fairly slight.
But it uses that time better than most short games. You have a variety of stats that are clearly differentiated from each other during the first chapter, different factions to support against each other, a resource (money) that can be used for many things, etc. There also is a play between supporting science and supporting the wild countryside.
But each thread is somewhat underdeveloped. You play as a sort of private investigator with a single case: finding a missing young woman. This case will take you to the houses of the rich and poor and to the Ute indians, which seem to have been researched fairly well (at least, the relationship between them and the settlers is similar to what I've seen in histories from that time and area).
There's only one case, and romance options only have a few opportunities to interact with them. Your overarching goal evolves a lot in a few short chapters, making the game lose focus.
Of all the < 100K games, though, I'd put this down as one of the best, along with Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides. I just think that a length between about 200K-400K would have allowed more space to to develop the core ideas.
The one other thing that keeps me from completely recommending it is that the game frequently puts you in spots where you have to pick between using stat A, using stat B, and running away; since there are several stats, this means you often just have no luck.
A brief and fragmented journey to discover mermaids, March 17, 2021This game is well-written on the line-by-line level or even scene-by-scene but doesn't know what it wants to be. It starts out seeming like a promising kid's fantasy, then changes to a bit older (you're told that all the patrons at the science society are hot and get divorced all the time because of it), then into more slapstick comedy, with some magical adventure thrown in.
The main thrust of the game is that you saw mermaids as a child and want to join the Marinological Society to study them when you are grown. You need to pick a patron to support you (and the game informs you that patrons are often romantic partners), then you go to the island to look for evidence of mermaids.
Parts of it were actually pretty great and/or funny, while other parts were a bit more weird. Instead of skills you have only opposed stats, and once you pick a patron if you want to please them it determines a lot of the choices you have to make.
There were some big choices to make near the end, and I ended up alone and sad, but at least I kept my promises.
On the shorter end for Choicescript, , March 17, 2021This one was hard to review: didn't like it at first, liked it a lot more near the end, but not sure about it overall. So I'm going over my 5 point scale in hope it helps me.
+Polished: I didn't find any bugs or typos, which is normal for Choice of Games.
+Descriptive: The game was certainly descriptive and vibrant.
+Interactivity: There were a lot of options to fiddle around with: your sound, your relationship with your frequently-annoying brother, whether to sign with a record label or not, going solo. The ending was somewhat abrupt but fit in with the rest of the story.
Some people have pointed out that a few key points are forced on you. In one very late game move (involving relationships) (Spoiler - click to show)you find yourself in a relationship with a famous artsy person. This wasn't a problem for me, as I was pretending to be Paul MCcartney the whole game, playing bass etc., so I was fine dating 'Yoko' and splitting up the band by going solo. I suspect that a lot of the choices I made worked out for me because it was the 'ordained path'. A lot of the reports I had heard from other people seem to confirm that (for instance, the game seems to favor your brother).
+Emotional impact: I had fun. I disliked it at first but grew to like it.
-Would I play again? I feel content with my choices, and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of wiggle room, so I'm not sure I'll revisit this one.
A brief nugget of nautical military history retold, March 16, 2021This game has a little bit of history, much of which I don't know. It's a sequel to the original Choice of Broadsides, a navy battle game, but by a different author, Paul Wang, author of some games I enjoy quite a bit (mostly fighting games).
The original game was low in wordcount but long in feeling, spanning an entire career in the navy by having quick narration and choices that could affect months or years at a time.
This game is longer than the original but feels shorter. It is a 3-chapter game that essentially retells a specific part of history of the War of 1812, as described by the author at the end.
I believe it is related to the free games Zip! Speedster of Valiant City and Sky Pirates of Actorius as being commisioned by Choice of Games as shorter games to offer free on the omnibus app. I may be wrong there.
I think that the reason this game feels shorter is that it reads much like the intro to a longer game. Like I said in my review of Zip! Speedster, both games feel like instead of being constructed small from the get-go, it took a larger setup and shrunk it. There are very few possible changes to stats, and the plot arc seems to start slow and never really take off.
I saw a comment on Twitter by Dan Fabulich that suggested the timespan in-game can contribute to a feeling of length in a game, and I think that's true. This game takes place over a couple of months and covers the lead-up, action, and denouement of a single action.
In any case, the historicity was fascinating, but I don't feel this game succeeded in its 'small package' design. I do enjoy the author's writing quite a bit, though, and as a game free on the omnibus app and relatively short I feel that any fan of history should try this out.
A charming and well-written episodic kid detective game, March 16, 2021This game placed highly recently on an 'underrated choicescript game poll'. It's pretty easy to see why it placed highly and why it's underrated.
The strikes against it are it's size (it's in the bottom 20% in terms of size) and the fact that it is centered on younger kids (Choicescript games that appear to be for kids tend to sell less, including my own).
The good things are the writing, the stats, and the strategies.
Writing-wise, the game has an episodic structure (about 5 mystery cases) and a lot of freedom in how your character can approach them: greedy, secretive, friendly, etc. Each of the main characters seemed fully-fleshed out to me by the end. The finale seemed fairly abrupt, but it makes sense for a game that is more a string of episodes than anything else.
The stats were great. It was generally very clear which stats applied to what, how to raise them, and where you stood.
The game kept it interesting by strategizing. Staying secretive sometimes benefits everyone but sometimes keeps you from getting money or making certain friends. Similarly, having integrity locks you out of many options but feels good.
Some events had risks you could take with rewards or failures that were logical but unknown ahead of time. I like this better than randomness (from playing a random game earlier today), but it still provides some tension like randomness does.
A career-spanning major league baseball game with randomization, March 16, 2021One nice thing I've noticed through playing Choice of Games entries is that they're willing to take chances with games, leading to some nice results like Nebula-nominated games or niche works that appeal very strongly to specific people (like Cannonfire Concerto, for me).
This game, I think, is an example of an experiment that didn't work out too well. Specifically, it relies heavily on randomization. You can train in 5-6 different kinds of pitches like curveballs and fastballs, and then a big chunk of the game is you facing different hitters with you pitches. It lists the chance for each pitch of getting a strike, a 'ball', or them hitting it, and using the same pitch several times in a row makes the batter more likely to hit it.
I appreciate the idea but both gameplay and roleplay-wise I wasn't really feeling it. In general, I just chose the best strike option, although I realized near the end that choose the lowest 'in-play' option was a different strategy. But then much of the story ended up as a result of these randomized choices.
I don't think randomization is horrible, but most games that use randomization well are games that have frequent save points and involve repeating the same tasks over and over (like gambling mini-games, RPG combat grinding, etc.). In this game, with no save points and no second chances, it's rough, and that's playing as a 'power player' (the game's easy mode).
Outside of that, the game has a lot of threads towards interesting ideas but doesn't really pursue them in depth. I did enjoy the freedom to go to a completely different country for a chapter and playing on the moon was cool. The last few chapters have a focus on preparing for your life after baseball and that was by far my favorite part, as you strategize things that might hurt you in one area (like your friendships or future income) but help you in another. Very cool part.
I can't help but compare it to Slammed!, which for me did a better job with making a story about humans. Ironically, my character in Fielder's Choice was very analytical, and when I first tried out sports broadcasting I was told to back away from the stats and focus more on the human element, and I think that this game itself could probably benefit from that advice.
I received a review copy of this game.
Determine the fate of animalistic deities, March 15, 2021This is a shorter Choicescript game from 2017. In it, you play as the avatar of the recently-dead god Wolf, in a pantheon shared with Spider, Gazelle, Eel, and Bear.
The game draws on mythology from several different cultures. It is fairly quick, but has several replay options.
Most of the game feels like a spiritual journey, like an ancient Odyssey. You constantly run into the avatars of the other gods, and you are essentially judged on which God you become the most like.
Simultaneously, you can choose to ally with a group of anti-God soldiers.
There are actually quite a few Choicescript games where you play as a powerful champion of the Gods and must decide whether serve them or destroy them (the most well-known being the aptly-named Champion of the Gods). I have to admit, it's a genre I'm a big fan of.
The stats in this game are communicated fairly well, although it can be hard to know when a stat is tested vs changed. There were some story threads I feel could have been deeper, but I feel that Avatar of the Wolf succeeded for me both as a story and as a game. It has the single-mindedness and simplicity that made me like Sword of the Slayer.
Worldbuilding, building a world, and a huge personality test, March 14, 2021This game highlights Sergi's unique approach to choicescript mechanics.
This is book 2 in a series. You are in an alien competition among the most powerful beings in the universe, and you have to pass three intense trials to see if you can join a powerful faction.
Unlike most successful choicescript games, there is definitely a right and wrong answer to every question (based on your past choices). But what Sergi does is constantly give you feedback about your stats so you are at all times aware of your strengths and of what your possible strategies are.
Each choicescript game is both story and game, and this feedback makes the game part significantly more engaging.
There is a lot of worldbuilding in this game, including literal worldbuilding. As the description states:
-Create a planet and culture in your own image
This is a big chunk of the game (at least 15-25%), and is pretty fun.
Another big chunk of the game is being sorted into different personality tests, essentially like horoscopes or Meyer-Briggs or Harry Potter houses, but with bigger consequences. There are at least 3 or 4 major sortings that happen. I found it pretty fun.
Overall, I look forward to the finale, but I enjoyed this game by itself.
I received a review copy of this game.
Alien gladiator game with lots of worldbuilding, March 13, 2021I've been going through the last of the Choicescript games by order of size from largest to smallest, and I'm near the end. Most of the smaller games don't have as much punch as the bigger ones.
But this game was actually pretty great. (spoilers for first chapter or two): (Spoiler - click to show)You're an alien from a planet where people can absorb others' abilities and memories. In the middle of a deadly war, you're taken to a gladiatorial planet.
The variety of characters is a big plus in this game. There are robots, gods, blob-things, etc. with one character being a superhero from Millenith, a planet where everyone is a superhero (a reference to Millenium City, the setting of the author's Heroes Rise trilogy).
The game is generally fast-paced. There was a giant chunk of world-building near the middle that was a bit hard to digest (and involved a lot of 'Next Page'), but besides that I found it very engaging.
Sergi's games often do the things that I find annoying in other games, but makes them work. His games tend to have pass/fail stat checks and some routes definitely 'win' more than others. However, he liberally sprinkles help and suggestions throughout, and offers an in-app purchase for hints. I'm not a fan of IAP's in general, but by having this one as an option and not getting it, it made me feel more motivated to try to 'win' fairly.
I look forward to playing the next one. I had heard for years that the third versus game has been more or less delayed, but I believe it's moving again. Either way, I don't think stories have to be complete to be enjoyable.
I received a review copy of this game.
A spy thriller without thrills, March 11, 2021This game is a spy thriller, just like the last Choice of Games entry I played, 'It's Killing Time'.
But in a way, they're kind of opposites. 'It's Killing Time' was a series of one blood bath after another with overwrought emotions.
By contrast, Undercover Agent is, at times, bland. You are an agent for a generic government agency, and you work undercover at a fairly generic company. Everything in this game is done competently, but it just didn't 'pop' for me.
The stats had some good variety, but most choices for stats were fairly simple. The big choices that you could make in the game were 'like your bosses and be nice to them' or not, and 'blackmmail people or not'.
In a lot of ways, this game reminds me of my own game I wrote for CoG, so I definitely don't think I could do better, personally. But, just like my game, I feel like this could have used a little bit more. I think that as of now, my favorite spy game from CoG is 180 Files: The Aegis Project.
Shoot stuff and kill people, March 10, 2021This is pretty much as straightforward as you get with Choice of Games. You are a professional assassin. In this game, you kill people and watch people get killed. There is also some professional association with other assassins.
There are some plot twists, but the majority of the game is violent shooting and fighting scenes, in the vein of John Wick, Jason Bourne, or that Shooter movie.
That's never been my genre (I haven't seen John Wick, for instance), but even from a position of inexperience I felt like the big moments in the story didn't fully land. Frequently the game takes over for a few minutes to pilot you through some actions that you do.
Stats are straightforward but meager. My highest stat was 27/100 by the end of the game and you get an achievement for getting 30/100. Some checks have pretty high difficulty, and I failed several times.
The high points for me were the pace of the action and the several mysteries threaded through the game.
I received a review copy of this game.
A unique game about psychic secret agents with lots of built-in failure, March 7, 2021This is definitely an unusual Choicescript game. You are a psychic that steals bodies, and you're caught in a war between two psionic organizations.
In a way, it contrasts with Jim Dattilo's A Wise Use of Time. Both are Choicescript games where you a human with an exceptional power (in that game, stopping time; in this game, possessing other people with your psionic powers).
The time stopping game worked really smoothly but had fairly dull uses of your power: taking a break before work, keeping a kid from scraping her knee.
This game shows off all sorts of psionic powers in amazing and creative ways, from the first chapter to the last. The aspects of having and using an awesome personal power really stick out.
Storywise, it worked very well for me, one of the stories I've most enjoyed in the game. And, having played a lot of Choicescript games with weird choice sets, I felt comfortable picking a path through much of the game.
However, I see this game down by mine near the bottom of the sales charts almost every week. Why?
I think a lot of it has to do with the inherent failures in the game. One thing I learned from playing and writing parser games is that no one will ever find a puzzle where you have to die to proceed, because dying is perceived as failure and people will UNDO to win.
But there is no UNDO in choicescript, and most games provide no saves. Every game is in hardcore mode. So when the game pulls things that feels like failures, you either have to accept that your whole run is ruined or restart. And if it happens more than once, you might as well give up.
There are several times in this game where you have to either go against some major principle you have or lose much of your skills. One major choice can completely reset one of your opposed stats. Often the game will tell you you messed up or did everything wrong.
I think that this 'fighting against all odds' improves the story, but it makes the gameplay pretty grim, and I believe that has contributed to the low sales of the game.
This game has faults, and I don't think I can recommend it for a pleasant experience, due to the above issues. Content-wise, it has strong profanity, moderate violence and optional sexual encounters. Despite these things, it satisfies all 5 points of my 5 point scale (being polished, descriptive, has good interactivity, emotional impact, and I would play again).
I received a review copy of this game.
Anthropomorphic animal game about a dystopian city, March 6, 2021This was a fun game, and I thought about giving it a 5, but it has a few issues. But it's not that bad, and if the subject matter interests you, I'd go for it.
In this game, there are 20,000,000 or more 'moreaus', or sentient creatures resembling mammals which are the result of genetic experimentation. They are second-class citizens.
You, an ordinary citizen, have a rude awakening when your building is bombed. You have to navigate between two gangs, the cops, the press, and a ton of people (both human and moreau) who are very attracted to you.
I enjoyed the game overall, but it does have its problems. Pacing is one of them. In the beginning of the game, a bomb goes off so you stand outside of your apartment. That event takes up 3 of the 10 chapters just by itself. There's just not a lot of meat to the chapters, with only 1 or 2 significant things happening in each (but with each event having a lot of detail).
The characters are both expressive and generic in a weird way. They were memorable and distinct in my mind, but don't really express themselves strongly about things and don't have much backstory.
The stat gains and checks are reasonable (although there seemed to be a lot of 'cunning' checks which isn't a listed stats) up until the end, where as others have said it gets really hard. I died, but the epilogue was just long enough to be satisfying, especially as my death fixed essentially every problem.
This game contains explicit sexual scenes, strong profanity, animal-type violence (all of those in moderation) and many mentions of both drug use and suicide.
This gryphon is pleasing but a little toothless, March 5, 2021In this game, you play as a 'thrall' (a member of a servant caste) in a community where gryphon riders are trained for war against wrym riders.
One day, a gryphon mom rejects a small egg. You hatch it and raise it, which is against society rules.
Most of the game is about hiding and raising the gryphon, with a slightly smaller chunk involving the aftermath of being discovered.
The game has a very small number of stats for yourself (with several more once you get a gryphon), but manages to be fairly confusing with the stats. It's pretty hard to know which stats are being tested when.
The game itself is oddly toothless. It sets up some worldbuilding but doesn't do much with it. There is tension between 'thralls' and 'keepers', there is a war, but what is actually going on? Everything is so vague. Are you 12, or 16, or 24? (That may have been answered somewhere, but it's hard to tell). One second you can be what seems like a highschool kid, and another you can scare a guard by saying you've killed people. The wyrm riders are different from you, but how? Do they speak another language? Wear weird armor? You are in the wilderness for months. What does that do to you, mentally and physically?
Nothing really gets answered. And like other reviewers here and elsewhere have noted, there's not really a climax; you kind of wander around until the end, with the ending final scenes very similar to scenes from the middle of the game in terms of tension and result.
All that said, the best parts for me were the ones interacting with the griffin and training it. In that respect, this game reminded of The Last Monster Master, but with less systematic training and more individual personality.
A CS game based on real New York history with slow start but stronger finish, March 4, 2021This game was pretty good overall, but had some sticking points.
You play as a Broadway theatre owner in 1849. You mingle with many historical figures such as Horace Greeley and Herman Melville.
The main challenges are to balance the demands of the people with the demands of the elite; to work with the mayor and the real government or the Know-Nothing gang; to befriend or destroy Hamblin, the rival theatre owner; discovering a supernatural mystery; deciding what kinds of plays to run; and handling romances.
I thought the opening chapter was fairly boring, but by the middle I was invested in the story and found it entertaining.
Stats were a mixed bag. It was very confusing telling the difference between acting and showmanship, between authority/negotiation/producing, between streetwise and notoriety.
The game very frequently forces you to make choices then pick why or how you do it; I was writing down every time it happened but it was too frequent. It's especially jarring since these forced choices can directly contradict your play method. For instance, (Spoiler - click to show)I worked with Ned Buntline and the gangs from the start, with no interest in the 'fancy' part of town. But the game forced me twice to confront Ned about things, and forced him once to attack me, despite us doing everything together and me keeping his secret. Similarly, you are forced to accept a possible spy into your midst, you are forced to rescue an attacked news person, etc. The effect of all of this was to feel a lot less in control of the story. Of course, it makes the overall narrative tighter since the author is in control of most things you do, but it was frustrating.
The stats are very meagre, as well. After the first chapter, I had only 3 skills which were above baseline, each by only a single boost for a total of 3 boosts. If I had chosen differently, I could have boosted only 2 skills with the other boost going to an opposed stat (which could later be erased by other choices). The author solved that by making essentially every choice in the game winnable if you have even a single boost in a stat, but made it more difficult by obfuscating which stat helps with what.
Overall, though, it was a positive story experience, and made me interested in early New York.
A Choicescript war game with solid opening but a weaker finish, March 4, 2021This game is, I believe, by an author who has achieved some success in traditional publishing, and I think it shows.
This is a war game in a futuristic setting, and most of the game features tactical missions and decisions like advancing, retreating, calling in strikes, and broadening out to politics in general.
You are a brand-new commissioned officer sent to the planet Cerberus to deal with rebels and deal with a vaccine distribution that people are suspicious about (this was written pre-covid).
The stats are easy to understand at first glance, but become more muddled and confusing as the game goes on. For instance, 'diplomacy' and 'charisma' are especially difficult to distinguish, and there is a frequently-reoccurring set of choices that don't seem to correspond to any stats (essentially being cautious, being reckless, or being in the middle).
Especially confusing are options related to 'mission', 'honor', and 'leadership', as I thought I had those pegged at the beginning but they become increasingly obfuscated over time. I ended up with all less than 60% and no matter what I picked, the people I talked to laughed at me for my presumption at thinking I had honor or supported the mission.
As other reviewers have noted, there is failure baked into the game in ways that are indistinguishable from player failure, so even if you're doing everything right it feels like you're losing.
On the plus side, there are several romance options. For mine (the dropship operator), things progressed really quickly at first and then we were an established couple the rest of the game, having 4-5 more scenes together after becoming close. This felt like an unusually high amount in a good way.
Overall, the line-by-line writing was good, and I think any war buffs are definitely going to want to try this one out; it's near the top tier of CoG games for dealing with things like strategy and tactics.
I purchased this game with my own money.
A mini version of an outsized hero story, March 1, 2021I enjoyed playing the Heroes Rise trilogy by Eric Moser before [edit: it's been pointed out to me that Zachary Sergi, not Eric Moser, is the author of Heroes Rise; I would never have noticed without someone pointing it out!], so I was interested in seeing this game. I knew ahead of time that it's a 'mini' game, free on the omnibus apps. designed to be a bonus to whoever downloads those apps (together with another 'mini' story, Sky Pirates of Arctorus by Kyle Marquis).
Overall, I think this game is quick-paced, charming and fun. You play a super-fast hero who is getting old (sadly, their 'old age' is pretty much the age I am now) against an enemy called 'The Sloth'. You're married, but to a person who cheated on you, and there is another romantic option (but not one you are required to pursue). The other main things you can do are getting a shoe sponsor deal, running for mayor, or training your sidekick.
This game was good, but it felt like a regular 100K-200K story that had parts removed instead of being built for a smaller game. For instance, it has well-defined, clear stats and clever use of resources, but the opportunities to build and use those stats are limited, and there are quite a few (I think 6 major skills). Contrast this to the even-smaller Choice of the Dragon, with 2 major stats (although Choice of the Broadsides has 12, so it's not hard and fast).
Another 'big game made small' feature is the numerous story threads that aren't given much treatment: your relationships with spouse, sidekick, romantic option/rival, and the CEO of a company; your background with the Sloth; handling the outbreak of other minor villains; etc. I feel like if each theme got twice the screen time it could have been stronger.
I don't have any suggestions on how to write shorter games (I know a lot of great authors have tried it over the years to varying success). This game wasn't bad, and is free with the app, so if you're thinking of getting into Choicescript games, it's one of the better free options on the omnibus app.
A gory horror/demon parser puzzle game with illustrations, March 1, 2021This Adventuron game combines high-quality art with fairly interesting puzzles to make an entertaining game. It's about 30 minutes long (for me) and features a lot of location art and a pretty big map.
It's not huge, and I generally knew what I needed to do. I felt like several times the implementation got in the way; this isn't too unusual with Adventuron games, not because it can't be programmed in, but because many Adventuron authors emulate an era where 'smoothness' wasn't as valued. (although looking at the author's itch page, they mentioned not being able to do more than VERB NOUN, which explains why a lot of my attempts like USE NOUN ON NOUN or VERB ADJECTIVE NOUN didn't work).
The game is definitely a gore fest, mostly through text (the images, even when gory, tend not to depict the bodies themselves). Lots of dead and mangled corpses are described.
You are late to a birthday party and discover a demonic ritual gone wrong. There are multiple endings.
Overall, here is my rating:
+Descriptiveness: The writing is vivid and clear. The cleverness is a good part of the game.
-Polish: see next
-Interactivity: There were some rough edges with interactivity, knowing what I had to do but not getting it able to work which was a bit frustrating.
+Emotional impact: Definitely creepy
+Would I play again? Yeah, this was a great Adventuron game.
An exceptional mystery story mixed with zany reality show, February 27, 2021I don't know much about drag culture, although I have friends and family members who are or have been drag performers. This game was a real eye opener for me, and I ended up learning a lot more about things like Drag Race, drag queens, faux queens, etc.
I went back and forth a lot on the rating here. I really don't like the first chapter. It's a huge bombardment of concepts, people, very stylized writing, that just felt like so much. I'm sure it'd be less overwhelming to someone already familiar with drag culture, but for me it felt like I was reading some fantasy book where the author spends the first chapter introducing all the kingdoms and using new words they made up ('and the hrothgus, or town constable, rode forth on his vytnrewr, an insect-like steed). Take that, and make it a sassy drag queen version.
It also ran into Poe's law a bit in that chapter, where I couldn't tell if was portraying drag accurately or mocking it/parodying it, it was just so over the top.
Fortunately, it calms down a lot in the later chapters, and becomes a story about people and what was for me an excellent, compelling mystery, one where, even having solved it, I'd love to go back around and dig in to find out more motives, more background, more viewpoints. The drag queen aspects themselves became more thoughtful, funny, and pointed. The characters were complex and rich.
Another reason I thought of knocking it down a peg is the humor. Not because it isn't funny; it has plenty of lines. But in this fictional world, these are top-tier meme makers, comedians and dramatists putting out their best efforts, and while the author is genuinely funny or dramatic, sometimes seeing the writing and having the audience (or the narrator) say 'this is the funniest thing I've ever had' just kind of falls flat.
But a point in its favor is that the game manages stats well. I always knew what each stat did, had plenty of chances at the beginning to increase them, and basically didn't fail any stat checks till near the end where my particular mix didn't hold up (smart, funny, confident).
Now, I know that makes it sound like the game is 'too easy', but the real game is in strategizing between cooperating vs going solo, investigating the mystery vs preparing for the competition, sabotaging people or helping them when they are potential rivals and potential future judges, and deciding what to do with the seemingly cult-like abbey.
At the end, I felt somewhat uncomfortable recommending this game to general audiences as it has some raunchy and sexual material (almost all in jokes and skits), as well as frequent opportunities for drug use or binge drinking (you are a recovering addict). But I can't deny the overall quality of the game, and I'm putting the mention of those things here so that you can get an idea before you play.
Edit: having played through it now, I can see why it doesn't have a ton of ratings on the omnibus app but has one of the highest ratings. The offputting first chapter may have kept people away, but the solid remaining portion of the game probably led to higher scores. Also, people went out of their way to rate it highly in opposition to a campaign by trolls against the game.
A story of manners, magic and daemons, February 25, 2021This is an engaging and well-written game where you play a somewhat-wealthy member of the gentry returning to your childhood estate upon the death of your guardian.
Your city has bargained with daemons and weyrds (treefolk) to survive. Everyone lives on the edge with the daemons. Do well, be scandalous, attract attention, and you'll get more magic currency. Do poorly and lose it all, and the daemons come to suck out your soul and make you their slave.
There is a lot of variety in terms of romantic partners and factions to side with. I intend on replaying as I saw tons of material about the daemons but almost nothing about the weyrds (my choice).
I would heartily recommend this game, but I really didn't like the narrative direction regarding one of the possible romances.
Your childhood friend is recently married, but they hit on you, and the game encourages you to have at least an implied affair with them to generate more scandal. If you press, she hints that her partner is okay with it. Later, even when I was engaged to someone else, it pushed for us to be together, saying that your partner would understand.
I get that they're going for polyamory representation. I'm not completely opposed to a certain form of polyamory: my ancestors in the 1800s were polygamous, and I think that was fine. But this is offputting, even with 'modern' polyamory, which is completely about trust. I met the husband later, and he seemed 'chill', but she could have plied him with a fake story about you; and later, you are encouraged to be with her without your spouse knowing (you have a 'feeling' they'll be okay with it). If you look up anything about polyamory, it only works with everyone's explicit consent. What's in the game is just cheating, and it's pushed on you multiple times.
Honestly, I find that pretty gross, and for that reason I'm not recommending this game in general. The rest of it is pretty great.
Edit: Narratively, I have no problem with games allowing you to bad things, as it makes your choices more real. I don't like it telling you in your own voice that this is okay and that you kind of want to do it.
A humorous, polished old-style IF set in ancient Greece, February 23, 2021The style of this game should be familiar to those who have tried Portcullis or Draculaland by the same author. You wander around a fairly small map in the Scott Adams tradition of short descriptions, 1-2 items a room, and well-characterized NPCs with a few interesting lines.
Like those games, this game evokes the same feel of adventure and exploration as the early text adventures. However, the author has managed to remove a great deal of the frustration inherent in those games by providing well-thought-out hints and gentle guidance.
You play Xylophone (pronounced in four syllables), a Greek woman accused of various crimes and given 3 labors to perform. You travel to Minos, Hell, and Troy to complete these tasks.
The game is chock full of puns and mythology jokes. It made me chuckle.
Some of the puzzles felt a bit tedious in the middle, as you were mostly matching things (Iron door? Find an iron key. Need to get past a bear? find some honey. Not that these are real examples). This isn't necessarily bad, but some of the other puzzles were quite clever (giving some nice Eureka! moments), so it made me wish for more.
Classic fantasy with monster slaying, encounters, dungeon, February 23, 2021Honestly, I got into "text-based games" with paper-based Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks and fantasy CYOA books. Even years later, that stuff really appeals to me (like the Sorcery series, the parser game Heroes, the twine game Tavern Crawler, etc.).
So when I say I love this game, that's the background I'm coming from. This reminds me so much of the 'intelligent weapon' rules from AD&D 1E, where you'd have a legendary weapon with intelligence that has a benefit and a drawback, etc.
You find an intelligent magic sword and swear an oath to train in swordsmanship. You find a mentor and start attacking monsters, eventually coming to the attention of Demorgon (with a name very similar to the AD&D 1E demon Demogorgon), as well as several others.
The stats are generally easy to understand, although each fight seemed to have an option to attack quickly, hide, or defend, and that didn't seem directly connected to any visible stat.
The characters are admittedly not too fleshed out. There are about five or six factions, and each needed to have like 50% more text included to be more interesting. I've worked in the last year on expanding my own choicescript game, and I think S. Andrew Swann would benefit a lot from that (even 10K more), although I think he's got a different contract he's working on. I was personally okay with this, as the AD&D modules I compared it too have similar levels of detail for side characters.
I was definitely looking forward to playing this. I'm familiar with Swann as author of one of the most popular pages on the SCP wiki (with his name on it, 'S. Andrew Swann's Proposal'), and I'm so glad this wasn't disappointing.
Finally, a lot of steam reviews suggest the ending is fixed for you to win. I wish! I had to replay the final chapter 4 times to actually survive. I'm so glad he added a save feature, which works beautifully. Very happy with this game, and I plan on replaying it.
At 180K words and with a lot of branches, it does feel shorter than some other choicescript games, but satisfying.
I received a review copy of this game.
A mid-length french inform game about an abandoned space station, February 22, 2021This french game is written in Inform and reminds me a bit of Starcross, as you spend the first part in a spacecraft while approaching a cylindrical space station.
The game alternates between linear, exposition-based segments where people tell you things and unusually difficult or illogical puzzles, where being illogical is the point.
The game seemed well-implemented, and the writing was interesting. The author went to a lot of trouble to implement a ton of different responses.
I guess if I could change anything, it would be that the conversation near the end was no conversation at all, just hearing one side of everything. I wonder if some kind of menu system might be good here, since it would fit with the theme of that section. Anyway, I'd be interested in seeing the finished game.
I used the walkthrough the entire time, as there were a lot of words I didn't know!
A bizarre and poetic french choice game about an old robot, February 22, 2021In this French comp game, you are a robot that wakes up to be greeted by a cute little helper-AI that has a little emoji face.
In this Moiki game (a relatively new and complex engine for choice games), you have to explore everything around you to see if you can be repaired and fixed, as you are close to dying.
Everything you see, though, is rendered in poetic language, as someone has hacked you. A supermarket becomes a body, where you explore the heart, the colon, etc. and a repair shop has become a church.
I probably missed a lot of figurative language due to not being a native speaker, but the concept and execution worked really well. It can be gross at times, but is more often funny or charming. Great game.
A French gangster sim, February 21, 2021This game is a money-based procedurally generated French twine game.
You take the role of a leader in the mafia who is in debt. You go on missions (each giving a certain payout, lasting a certain amount of time, and having a certain downtime, while requiring a certain number of gangsters), get money, and either die after 24 hours (which usually happens), or, if you made enough, win. Your debt and your savings persist from round to round.
It's a pretty short loop, and you'll see the same text a lot. There is some variety, and things change as the game goes along, but I think the main story just wasn't very compelling for me.
It was polished, though, and had a distinctive 'voice'. I spent a while looking at the code after, and it seems very complex.
A magical school game which could use a little more oomph , February 21, 2021In this choicescript game, you play as a new student at a high school for magical kid. Kind of like Harry Potter, which the game lampshades with a character who constantly compares things to Harry Potter.
You attend classes and prepare for a sky sailing competition while dealing with periodic magical disturbances. There are also magical non-human creatures who are fighting for rights. You can decide to help them or help the government agency which tries to hide magic from the world.
This game has a lot of good elements, and it was quite a few ratings on the omnnibus app (though it has some negative reviews on Steam). Overall, I feel like everything would be great in it if things had a little more weight.
Magic itself is probably the biggest culprit here. The first chapter has almost no magic in it except for some feelings and a throwaway line or two. Essentially, what happens is:
-You cross a causeway to the school, noticing nature is in balance,
-You get a room and a roommate
-You get told what your classes are
-You get told about an athletic competition
and that's about it. Magical things start happening later on, but it never really feels like a vibrant part of your life. Your class discussions are mostly about mortal philosophy and folklore, your dates are mostly non-magical things.
And it felt like the game was controlling the character for me a lot, almost like unskippable cutscenes in video games. This happens throughout the game, even for a crucial scene near the end where it could put you in a ton of legal trouble.
Overall, though, I think other people enjoy high school slice of life games more than me (like The Fog Knows Your Name), so I would recommend trying out the demo, as it's a very accurate representation of the game itself.
A pastiche of older dark fiction with a revenge plot, February 19, 2021This game is essentially a love story to all things old and creepy, mainly gothic horror but also the Barsoom series of books, mythology, urban legends, weird horror, and other such things.
You play as a Frankestein's monster-like character, brought to life by the power of science and lightning. Like the Count of Monte Cristo, you realize that you had been betrayed by someone you once respected and swear vengeance.
The game has a lighter side. As an example of the game's tongue-in-cheek nomenclature, you live in a city called Baroque whose principal enemy is the city Rococo. Other cities and people are torn from famous (and less famous) works of fiction, including speculative fiction from the Bronte sisters.
There is a chapter similar to the Phantom of the Opera, a chapter like the Red Death, a detective chapter, etc.
I found this all to be great. Near the end, it turns to weird horror, as many dark books in an older setting do, but it does it well.
One drawback is that there are very few opportunities for stat increases (you will likely end the game with most skills never having changed). Another is that many threads are brought up and then lost again. For instance, I received a modification that allowed me to have perfect photographic recall. But it never seemed to come up again, even in situations where it might be useful (searching through a pile of artifacts, trying to learn a secret name from a page, etc.)
Overall, I found the story fun and interesting.
Education, political intrigue and strange romance, February 19, 2021Surface stories generally aren't my favorite in Fallen London. To me, it feels like being in a dark room telling ghost stories at a sleepover, then going out into the brightly-lit kitchen to say hi to your parents and grab some snacks before going back in.
That said, the player agency in this story is impressive, and mechanically it is one of the best stories, and has poignant moments of writing, especially the drawn-out ending. Reading this made me feel that Failbetter made an excellent choice hiring Short as their creative director; the grasp of the world of Fallen London as a whole and the creative mechanics are exactly what I'd hope a creative director would bring.
In this game, the oldest daughter of Queen Victoria, called the Empress's Shadow, is the only normal child she has left, and is coming down to the Neath to visit for unknown reasons. She is the empress dowager of Prussia, just like in real history.
You want to get close to her. It turns out that she desires a revolving suite of new servants to keep from getting too close to anyone or revealing too many secrets. So, for you to get her secrets, you become a teacher at Sinning Jenny's finishing school, training your own set of spies (chosen from 6-8 of the factions already in Fallen London), and using them to find out more about her.
Her motives include both romance and power, which is interesting, and the game gives you a permanent carousel that can result in a favor (although I failed the 50% luck check all 3-4 times I tried, which is just what luck is).
The only drawbacks to me personally are the lack of engagement I felt with the surface-based story. Otherwise, it is very well-done and was interesting to play.
A silly and fun court intrigue story with constrained choices, February 18, 2021I have to admit, I didn't have high hopes for this game coming in. My own game is usually near the bottom of the barrel sales-wise (according to the 'bestselling' section of the iOS omnibus app), but Sorcery for Saps is usually right around there, too.
So I was pleasantly surprised by the involved and intriguing mystery story that played out over the couple of hours the game lasted. You have to impersonate your master sorcerer at the king's court, where he has been cursed by an unknown person at a critical time in negotiations.
There are many suspects and many side-intrigues going on, and it all ties together nicely. Even if you guess some of the secrets, it's still fun to see the others.
But this game had a few things going against it.
For me personally, I disliked that many choices were forced on you. So instead of 'Would you like to talk to the servant or do one of these other options?' the game would say, 'You've decided you like the servant, feel sorry for her, and go out of your way to cast a specific elaborate spell to fix her problems and gain her confidence. Why did you do that player?'
Imagine someone doing that when making dinner plans or game mastering. Instead of, 'Where are you thinking of eating tonight? We could go to Taco Bell or Mcdonalds since they're close,' it's more like, 'Well, I can tell already you're going to tell us to go to Taco Bell and get supreme burritos because you love their beans. What made you think of it?'
It makes for stronger storytelling, because you (the author) have complete control of what happens, and perhaps that's one reason I found the story so engaging. But I found it less engaging as a game.
The second issue that a lot of games lower on the bestselling list have (and mine does this too, though I've updated it a bit to work on it) is 'bad stat disease', where you can end the game with pretty much all of your stats between 50% and 60%, and your opposed stats at essentially 50-50, due to a combination of infrequent, low stat boosts, confusion about what tests opposed stats vs setting it, and difficulty figuring out what skill is used in each test.
The last thing is that the game has zany, silly humor, especially in the first chapter, with spells like 'CTRL-Z' or 'Thingius stoppius' (not a real spell, but similar to ones in the game). I've noticed that games with silly humor tend not to do well, even if they're actually pretty fun (like For Sale:Haunted House, Yeti's Parole Officer). The same goes for anything that seems targeted towards children (like my own game or Demon Mark).
So, if the authors read this, I really liked your game, and I think there are some things that can be improved, but overall your mystery was great and I'm going to be thinking about it for a long time. Loved the characterization of the ferret.
The gruesome details behind the royal family, February 18, 2021This game was ranked highly on the 'best exceptional story' poll on the fallen london reddit recently, and I wanted to check it out.
Turns out that it gives out huge chunks of backstory and lore regarding the royal family. This one story helped clear up the plots of Ambition:Nemesis, Sunless Sea, and Sunless Skies more than any other single story I've read on there.
You are given a strange doll, and it eventually leads you into the depths of the Shuttered Palace. There you encounter the royal family as they now are, after the transformations of the fall.
It's not as long as some of the other fate stories (most of CMG's are longer), but it has a hefty chunk of content, especially if you slow down and read everything. In terms of impact of the lore revealed, it is very high overall.
The writing on this piece was well-done, exactly the kind of thing you want in Fallen London (where you're left wanting more, but then more is offered...at a cost).
A short demo of a 'birth to death' game in Ink, written in French, February 16, 2021This game has a cute concept but needs a lot more work.
Right now, it starts when you are born and stop right when you get to school.
It will detail an event in your life, possibly unlocking a new skill. Then you can use a new skill, continue, or pick from different baby language like 'gaga' or 'ouuiiiinnn' ('whaaaahhhhhh').
Choosing to use your special skills generally seemed to have no effect except possibly on one occasion. The baby language was confusing, and the game ended very quickly.
It definitely has promise and possibility, but needs far more work before it is complete.
-Polish: The game is not finished
+Descriptive: The text is fairly generic, but it's engaging enough that I would have kept reading.
-Interactivity: Hard to know what options do, many similar choices
-Emotional impact: It was hard to engage due to all of the above.
+Would I play again? If it were finished. And I would definitely increase the score then!
Excellent and moving French sci-fi visual novel about a summer trip, February 16, 2021I am absolutely not a fan of visual novels usually, as they're harder to pick up and put down due to timed text and the graphics usually take up most of the screen making it harder to multitask.
Despite that, I found this game great. It's an entry in the French comp for 2021. The gameplay is spread over 4 days and several locations, each with their own theme music.
While art isn't usually part of my review criteria, they really nailed it here, and the art is very responsive, with parallalax movement following your mouse, different animations at key points, etc.
The characters are all unique and I definitely had favorites early on.
There's not many choices compared to a typical Twine or Choicescript game, but they seemed to have some kind of longer-term effect. There is one huge choice at the end. I translated it for my son who was walking by, and we cried a little at our ending.
Great game. I thought of giving it a 4 right after playing it, but after several hours I definitely think this is a 5 game.
Fly a giant robot to blow up other giant robots, February 14, 2021This game is just straight-up a 'you are piloting a giant robot, go out there and fight' choicescript game. And it does really well.
The plotline is exciting. You are one of the best ace pilots in a resistance movement, and there is a hotshot pilot on the other side who keeps challenging you while both sides work on superweapons. The game is set at the culmination of a 5-year war.
Characters are varied, each with a couple of strong traits. I didn't romance anyone in my playthrough, but that's because I played a completely aggressive jerk.
The stats are simple and easy to understand. Difficulty comes not from guessing which stat to use, but about weighing your decisions, with some decisions and plotlines better motivated by different stats. So, for instance, you might have to choose between being cautious and saving civilians or being bold and striking the enemy while they strike you, with different stats helping different strategies.
I ended up with what I'd consider a 'bad' ending, but the game is smooth and varied enough that replay wouldn't be bad. I wouldn't say the game is short at at all, but it went by faster for me than most games of its size due to my interest in the plot and the lack of obstacles in terms of stat confusion.
I believe this one was very popular in past years and probably popular now. It makes sense; it's fun.
A hidden gem of a game for people into books and fae, February 13, 2021I've noticed that most Choicescript games' quality matches up pretty well with the total and number of ratings on the omnibus app, with most of the lower-scored ones ending up being confusing or dissappointing.
This game proved the exception for me. While it had problems, especially near the start, I ended up enjoying it quite a bit especially the ending.
In this game, you play as a monk/scholar in 1000 AD who is entrusted with a book of marvelous prophecy called the Chronicon Apocalypticon. At the same time, you discover a disembodied hand running around. You embark on a quest to save (or destroy) England, meeting many weird characters and discovering the magical side of the world (with undead, elves, dragons, etc.)
The NPCs all are very different from each other and creative. They include a beekeeper and his special bee helper, a Joan-of-Arc type woman, a conflicted nun, a bard, and others.
I enjoyed the fact that 'being good at reading' is a superpower in this game. At least, it's a skill that can be used to save the world.
Overall, the main characteristics it has with other less popular CoG titles is its weaker/confusing stats and it's lack of flexibility when it comes to romances (there are romances, but gender of ROs is fixed and many will only specific types of romance or none at all).
By 'weak stats' I mean that I ended the game with almost all skills at 50%, one in the 60's and two in the 50's. This can cause a lot of problems, such as trying to figure out if you just screwed up your stats royally, or figuring out what's enough to pass challenges. My personal analogy for stat growth is that it's like walking speed in a 3d game: really low stat boosts are like having a character move at 1/10 of normal speed.
By 'confusing' stats, I mean that it can be really hard to figure out which stats are which; for instance, the game frequently asked me if I would do things myself or work as a team, but I cannot identify any skill that that corresponds to. On the other hand, there are many tracked stats that I can't for the life of me tell how they apply in the game.
Many people in reviews for this game mention difficulty with stat checks, which I think is a result of the above issues.
So that's a lot of time spent on the weaknesses. The good thing is that the game is at its worst at the beginning and only gets better with time. The final chapter was great, on par (in my opinion) with Heroes of Myth, another excellent Choicescript game. The actual last page was one of the best I've seen (in my playthrough).
As the game progresses, you can figure out the author's signposts for the stats. It's usually the simplest possible: he mentions the name of the stat in the choice.
As the game goes on, there are many factions you can choose between and many ways to influence the world. The choices are great. The whole game story was really compelling for me, better than most of the games I've played in the last few weeks.
I think this game most appealed to me because of my love for reading and my enjoyment of monastical, historical, and/or fae-based narratives with a bizarre cast of characters, as well as my patience for puzzling stats. If that sounds like you, you'll probably enjoy this game.
Great author and great concept with some problems in the execution, February 11, 2021Jim Dattilo is a good interactive fiction author. He's great at creating a variety of characters.
The power to affect time is a fun subject in IF, and has a lot of potential.
However, I think this game misses at its aims a bit.
You play as an insurance salesman who one days realizes they can stop time. You can use this to enrich yourself or help others, and you can attract the attention of many might people or romantic interests.
I think where the trouble is is that Jim's strengths are a vibrant cast of NPCs and a superhero game's strength is the hero's growth, and they don't mesh well.
Your character in this game has almost no development; all the interesting personal plotlines are pushed on to other people. There is an enemy, but they enter pretty late in the story.
The problem is the NPCs with the interesting plotlines don't have powers, so the game basically alternates between two chunks: interesting, non-supernatural segments with NPC's personal lives, and exciting but aimless explorations of your powers. So, for instance, you might go to a party with someone and learn about their childhood, then go out to a park and decide to steal a bike or help a kid not scrape their knee. And that's the bulk of the game.
The writing is good, though, and over time I found the characters interesting. The workplace subplot is fascinating. I definitely feel like playing this game was not a waste of my time.
The other main problem I had was a 'sudden death' ending in Chapter 12. I don't mind sudden deaths in Choicescript games, but these are essentially 'hardmode' games where a death wipes your whole file and you have to restart. If there was some kind of denouement to your death (like in Mask of the Plague Doctor) or options to restart a given chapter (like Choice of Rebels or Cakes and Ale), it would be a lot less painful.
So I can't strongly recommend this game, but I can recommend it to fans of Dattilo's other work and fans of slice-of-life style superhero works (or corporate drama; honestly, if you're into that, that subplot alone is a pretty good game in and of itself).
Harvesting life-force-filled tongues for a secretive government org, February 10, 2021This game has an awesome concept. You are a Death Collector. You have an invisibility cloak, pretend to be death to get people's tongues wagging before they die, then harvest the tongues which now contain that person's memories.
There's all sorts of creative worldbuilding, with different houses, abundant hidden secrets, etc. This is a long game with tons of tiny effects on the text due to your stats.
Unfortunately, there were several aspects of the game that I did not enjoy.
First, I was very confused by the stats. It's typical in choicescript games to have fluctuating personality traits represented by 'opposed stats' that add up to 50%, allowing the player to change over time. You also have skills that (generally) only go up, representing your wisdom over time.
In this game, your 'skills' are all things that seem more like personality traits: 'procedural', 'intuitive', 'cunning', and 'charming'.
This wouldn't be that bad, but they overlap in myriad ways with the opposed stats. For instance, if you decide to break rules to sneak into a room, are you being 'cunning', or not 'idealistic', or 'shameless', or 'maverick'?
If you talk kindly to someone who's dying, is that 'charming', 'honorable', 'empathetic', or 'idealistic'?
This makes it almost impossible to guess which choices affect which stat; similarly, it's hard to tell if you're adjusting a stat or testing a stat.
It's like playing a racing game that never explains which keys do what and sometimes randomizes them; it increases difficulty, but not in a rewarding way (for me).
The tone is very negative as well. It's basically choosing 'what kind of loser are you'. For instance, here are the options for one choice:
-I'm horrified this place is riddled with incompetence. Something must be done.
-I don't want to jump to conclusions. It might backfire.
-Pretend I disagree, so I can use the knowledge later for my own ends.
-I have no sympathy for whiners who blame their problems on others.
So you can do snooty, cowardly, sneaky, or haughty. I know some people enjoy playing as 'the bad boy/girl', and I've enjoyed doing that in other games, but it's not as fun when it's forced on you.
Finally, the narrative just kind of drops out at the end. At what feels like a couple of scenes before the climax, the game just stops with one page. It would be like if, in Empire Strikes Back, right after the scene where they meet Darth Vader in the 'dining room', they got on the Millenial Falcon and fly away, with the credits scrolling.
Despite my many troubles, the basic idea behind this game was great, and I encountered very few bugs/typos. The writing was interesting (it was several strong profanities, as a caution), and I thought the scenarios were individually compelling.
Very long, mostly-linear french twine game about space and Greek Gods, February 8, 2021It took me (an anglophone with moderate French skills) about two weeks to finish reading this, on and off. I expect a native speaker could finish it in 1-3 hours.
This is a very long twine game about a future earth where we have been visited by aliens and a New World Order is in charge.
It's in several segments that differ quite a bit from each other. The first is working on a space station; the second is engaging in combat and exploring ancient greek ruins underground; and the last is fighting in an arena.
The worldbuilding is intricate and silly (spoiler for midgame): (Spoiler - click to show)the gods you discover are Athena, Ares, and Trollus, who writes in emojis only.
The biggest drawback is the extreme restrictions on freedom. There are only 3-4 'real' options in the game, and those options are just which order to experience content in. The vast majority of choices are 'continue'.
This is listed as just a prologue. Overall, I found it funny, but would have preferred more real (or even pretend) agency.
A twine game about a sailing ship with some looping, February 6, 2021This entry in the 2021 French Comp is a Twine game where you are in a kind of random loop for most of the game.
So you sail, then you can check your inventory or scrub the deck, then you sail, and you can get drunk or raise the sails, etc.
After a very long time (seeing every scrap of text 4-5 times), a big event with another boat happens, which can have several endings.
The randomness looks complex and the concept is interesting, but in execution I felt it was too tedious. I would have reduced the main loop to half its size or less so the action could happen earlier.
Like a tapestry of beautiful threads that was never completed, February 6, 2021This game is a bit different than I was expecting. Instead of being a game about, say, Norse gods or Zeus, it's something more like Avatar or similar shows. You are a constructed being in a race that has control over wind and water naturally, and fire and earth through technology.
The weather is out of control, so you have to stop it, along with a kind of sentient bio-organic robot servant and some human friends. You meet a human city controlled by 5 warring, corrupt houses and you also meet others of your kind (and their enemies).
The game opens strongly, with cool scenarios like jumping off a cliff to test your flight abilities.
The issue that I had with the game is that so many things are set up without being followed up on or resolved. Part of that, I believe, is that the author put some very important story beats into only a few of the possible playthroughs, making multiple playthroughs almost a necessity to really understand the game. That's not bad in itself, but it makes each playthrough a little weaker.
I didn't watch Game of Thrones, but I remember a lot of people talking about how the winter badguy had been built up for the whole show then was over in a surprisingly easy way that was disappointing. That happens here in many ways. In fact, your 'climactic battle' between whichever final opponent you choose is almost indistinguishable from every other battle in the game, and if anything seems less momentous and intense than the others (like fighting off an army of hundreds of robots).
Like other reviewers on other platforms have said, the individual writing is good. The worldbuilding was creative, to me, and the types of characters were varied. Like other parts of the stories, each character's arc felt unfinished in ways, but had enjoyable parts. I particularly enjoyed Humil's story arc.
Despite my mixed feelings, I overall enjoyed this game and definitely believe I'll play it again in the future.
Hard sci fi that grows more complex over time. , February 4, 2021I was prepared not to like this game at first. It's title seemed vague, and in the first chapter it almost felt like neutral sci-fi, like The Fleet without managing, or Choice of the Star Captain without weird humor and aliens, or I, Cyborg without all the crime.
But over time it actually really came together. Little hints about characters that would just be slight traits in other people became full-fledged storylines. Macguffins become actually plot-relevant. The people I found least interesting at first all had really well-put-together storylines.
The choices worked well for me later on, too. At first, there were a few annoying choices (like one where the game decides you must answer a distress call, and you pick the reason why, instead of whether you do it). But as you go on, the game becomes a lot more about managing who you spend time with and which of the many factions you support. One of the best things the game does with stats is tying the stats to storylines and people. So instead of 'pick which of these four options is the stat you maxed out at the beginning of the game', it's more like 'spend time with the doctor using your medical training or use your engineering training to make weapons'. Maybe it's just the same as other games under the hood, but I felt like I was making real choices.
I also appreciated the science aspect. Out of all the space games, I felt like this one dealt with realism the most. There are some handwavey aspects (like artificial gravity and the main Macguffin), but a trip across the solar system takes you months, and you have to use magnetic boots in a derelict spacecraft. I thought that was neat.
Overall, I'd say it's a great scifi game with a slow start but a great finish.
An extremely long fanfic-style dark fantasy story , February 2, 2021Edit: There are several alternative takes on this game available in the comments.
This story is one of the main games displayed on the front page of ChooseYourStory.com and has been upheld by some in the community as some of their best work.
ChooseYourStory's corpus was downloaded and used to fuel the original AI Dungeon (although the new version, I think, uses other material), and quite a few on IFDB and intfiction were very interested in AI Dungeon, so I thought it would be interesting to see the source of it.
From the outside, the CYS community is very different from the other writing communities I've been in. For instance, the SCP wiki mods, Choice of Games editors and IFComp voters are obsessed with games being free from typos and errors. So in that sense, it's more like the Wesnoth campaigns and creepypasta sites, where the focus is more on just size of writing and worldbuilding.
Edit: several comments about CYS as whole were removed.
This game is an example of all of these things. In content, it reminds me of nothing more than when I started browsing some fanfiction. The worldbuilding is very detailed, and the content is huge. Reading every branch would easily take over 10 hours.
Structure-wise, it's more like a long chapter-based novel where the next chapter is determined by your choices at the end of each section. Choices are usually binary, unless they are 'reference' choices that give you optional backstory. Out of the binary options, one is usually a death. The graph of this game's choice structure would generally be a tree.
In fact, it's almost like three games in one, since one of the earliest (maybe the very first?) choice lets you pick one of three branches that offer different perspectives on the same story.
Content-wise, this is a dark power fantasy. You are essentially like Darth Vader but in a fantasy world, in the sense that you are a ruthless murderer and assassin in the service of an emperor.
The content is labeled as 'grimdark'. There is content in it that I found offensive, especially (Spoiler - click to show)the main character's penchant for violently raping women before killing them, or the way many women want to be raped, the way that the character helps run a concentration camp to eliminate another race, the character's joy in sexually humiliating or physically defacing others, or acting like King David by sleeping with a married woman then killing her husband discreetly. Interestingly, the only thing that the player regrets is accidentally sleeping with an enemy by mistake when she was disguised as his true love, with him later realizing that it was rape and he feels upset.
I generally just stop playing games in these situations, but in this one, the game was oddly distant from the graphic situations, generally because there wasn't a lot of lead-up. I've been deeply affected by traumatic scenes in stories before, but usually because there was a previous investment in character development to make me care for the people involved and an expectation of normalcy established that made the later broken barriers seem shocking. Like Ethan Frome, for instance, which I hated. Or Vespers, the game, which led me to try actions with awful results with no one else to blame but me for typing them in. In this game, it was more like 'you walk into a room and slit someone's throat to establish dominance'. In any case, I only finished so that I could give an accurate report for my first CYS review (although I did review Briar Rose before).
The author himself seemed to eventually tire of the rape-murder fantasies, leaving much of the second half of the game devoted to political intrigue.
My grading scale is not designed for this type of game, but I'll give it a go anyway:
-Polish: There were numerous typos and other errors.
+Descriptiveness: The worldbuilding was detailed and vivid.
+Interactivity: The game had a lot of real choices, with even dead ends having thousands of words poured into them.
+Emotional impact: Not always ones I wanted, but it was there.
-Would I play again? No, and in the future I'll heed the warnings available on the site for various games.
Edit: It should be added that this game has over 8000 ratings and over 400,000 plays on their website, far outstripping any IFComp game.
EditEdit: I should also say that Champion of the Gods is a game I loved that has a fairly similar concept but without any non-consensual encounters. In that game, it was fun playing a wild barbarian, but the justification for it was much stronger. Also, I played this game with a profanity filter in the browser.
Play as a cyborg copy of a smuggler in the wild west of space, February 2, 2021This game is one of the best Choicescript games I've given 4 stars to, but some of the interactivity dragged it down a bit for me.
This is a large game, at 330K words. In it, you play as (what felt to me) a cyborg version of Han Solo: you're a smuggler, you can charm, lie, shoot, and fly, you can choose how morally ambiguous you are, etc.
In gameplay, it almost feels like a wild west 'slice of life'. You spend a long time on a space station on the edges of civilization, dealing with 3 criminal syndicates (or 4, if you count the corrupt police), as well as an old flame who represents the more civilized side of life.
The man you were a copy of, though, has left a trail of spurned lovers and slighted enemies behind, causing you a lot of trouble. In addition, your sensory implant (which handles all of your input) is dying and replacements are scarce.
I think this game handles overall coherence pretty well. It's not too hard to get a feel for what the world is like and what you need to do. It can be hard to keep track of all the characters, but you get tons of opportunities to interact with everyone.
Choicewise and statwise, there's some good and some bad, at least the way I see it. What's good is that there are some areas where you get very significant choices, contributing to the game's large wordcount. For instance, there are different jobs you can take, factions you can join, etc.
What's a little rougher is that the main use of stats is pass/fail checks, but made pretty difficult. One chapter in particular involves a long impersonation attempt where you have to keep 4 or 5 factors in mind, and failing even one can get you busted.
In other places, events that could have been written in as outside circumstances are instead made to be player choices that are forced on you. For instance, I didn't like the Sphinx character much, but the game assumed I'd be their buddy at least a little.
Perhaps most distressing is that there are quite a few choices you make where the game immediately says, 'but actually, instead of what you just chose, this happens instead'.
Overall, I'm glad I played it. I can recommend it conditionally for sci-fi fans, especially for those interested in ai questions. If you ever liked a Data-centric or Doctor Hologram-centric episode of Star Trek, you'll probably love this.
A vivid fantasy story with less freedom but vibrant characters , February 1, 2021In this Exceptional story, you investigate a man and a doctor who love each other but who are willing to go to any lengths to help each other, even against the others' will.
This ends up with you and them being pulled into a jousting tournament in the land of dreams, where you must decide who to support and whether you'll take the prize for yourself.
The characters in this are drawn broadly from mythology, including the legends of Reynard the Fox, Arthurian legends, and Fallen London's own chess mythology/lore. So figures include red queens and white kings, magical stags, etc.
The bright point to me were these characters, as well as side characters (including a snake jousting with multiple lances).
The drawback to me was that it was fairly constrained. We've been spoiled a bit by very nice Exceptional Stories in the past with a variety of mechanics. The bulk of this one lies in one continuous string of actions, with the main choices being who to talk to each day and who to support in the jousts. It felt like I didn't have much agency in the story, which probably helped it be more focused and well-written. It's hard to say what they could have done differently.
In the end, though, it was a fun play and one I think I'll remember fondly.
A short Twine game in French about passing the challenges of the Gods, January 31, 2021This game is part of the French comp. In it, you and a bunch of other students accidentally summon the Gods who give you two tasks to complete. Once you do so, you earn a special secret from the Gods.
I thought the idea was generally entertaining, but the game could have used more 'something'. More options, or more details, or more focus.
Here is my overall rating:
-Polish: There were various typos at different times.
-Interactivity: It felt pretty constrained most of the time. The best part was when it opened up to a whole island, but most options there had the same results.
+Emotional impact: I felt like it was a fun, silly game.
+Descriptiveness: I thought the author had some enthusiastic and fun descriptions.
-Would I play again? It's pretty much the same each playthrough.
A long, complex fantasy game with massive worldbuilding, January 31, 2021Having played (almost) all of Kyle Marquis's games, I can say that there are some definite trends. They tend to be very long, with complicated skill checks and intricate worldbuilding.
In particular, the worlds he constructs have certain similarities, almost like half-remembered versions of the same fever dream. The worlds tend to be man-made by ancient, superior versions of humans, who are now gone, and have bio-mechanical or magic-scifi hybrid.
I like all of his games, but I think this one works particularly well (although his Vampire the Masquerade game is, I think, his best). Years ago, a group of heroes saved the world, and two of them had you as a child. When news of a foreign army comes, you have to travel across a huge continent and a variety of locales to warn others of what is to come. In the end, you have to travel to the Great Southern Labyrinth to get aid.
I can only describe the structure of this game as 'baroque', in the sense of being almost excessively elaborate. You have statistics for personal skills, as well as statistics for things you are trained in. There are many subplots running through the game (such as the fear of the gods, a lengthy murder mystery, political intrigue, your character's backstory, control over temple worship, an artifact that possesses creatures, etc.) and 4-5 villains, each of which would work fine as a main villain. It's over the top, maybe even overwhelming at times, especially given the size of the game. The great labyrinth itself is huge, but it's only in one or two chapters.
There are a lot of ways to fail in this game, both due to bad stat checks and due to built-in-failure.
I found your two main travelling companions (who also serve as ROs) interesting and varied.
Overall, a game I'd recommend if you've liked the author's other work or if you try out the free demo and enjoy.
I received a review copy of this game.
Excellent, long slow-burn horror/medical drama, January 28, 2021This game is pretty much exactly what you would imagine a 400K-word game about being a masked plague doctor would be like.
It's a fairly grim tale. You are a travelling doctor forced by the crown to enter a city in quarantine due to the Waking Death, a plague which makes its bearers sleep-deprived until they die.
You work with two others, a man wearing a boar mask and a woman wearing a fox mask. The town is surrounded by starving soldiers who want to sack it, is run by a despot mayor, and has at least two insurgent groups inside and multiple religious sects.
Although many exciting things happen in this game, the writing is slow-paced and dense. Here is a description of stars, for instance:
"The stonework of the courtyard fountain feels cold and uncomfortable against your back, as you gaze up at the sky. A persistent wind, the same one that caused you to bundle up your robes and seek shelter behind the stone structure, has left cracks in the relentless march of clouds, allowing occasional points of light to blink through. You ignore the creeping ache as the winter night assails your bones, focusing instead on those distant glimmers. Are they miniature suns? The faraway eyes of watching deities? Or simply another act of nature, like the snow, or the rain?"
I enjoy this style of writing. Given the large wordcount of the game and the dense prose, it took me several evenings to finish this game. And it branches quite a bit. My playthrough went against the grain, so to speak, as I supported the despot mayor at every opportunity and sought after (and found, to my detriment) the forbidden knowledge at the heart of the town.
Despite my 'losing' ending, it was written very well, with a lengthy epilogue that made the game very satisfying. It's always a huge bummer to get to the very end of a choicescript game only to have an abrupt 'you lost' ending, so having this 'you lost and here's what happened to the shattered wreck of your mind and body, and all those you loved' is definitely refreshing.
Also, I found it fun to roleplay as SCP-049 in this game.
Comparing this to Heart of the House, another long, slow-burn horror game, I'd say that Mask of the Plague Doctor is more like The Haunting of Hill House or The Turn of the Screw (more philosophical with more implied/ambiguous horror) and that The Heart of the House is more like a Stephen King novel or Dracula (events that are clearly supernatural and terrifying). Fans of both games may also like Blood Money, which has you playing a more cutthroat character.
I received a review copy of this game.
A french parser game with a compact dungeon filled with traps, January 23, 2021This is a polished parser game entered in the French IF Competition. It comes with nice feelies and runs on retro devices as well as in-browser.
You wake up in a dungeon with four exits, wearing an empty scabbard and some armor. In each direction, there is some kind of threat: a trap, a monster, a guardian, etc. and you have to defeat them all in turn.
I thought this was fun, but also very hard. It includes some forms of interactions which I consider unfair, like having to die to progress. I was very happy the author provided a solution! (although one line of it provokes an error, but it's okay and doesn't affect the end result).
The author seems to enjoy IF a lot and I look forward to any future games.
Heroic choicescript game with great freedom and decisions about truth/lies, January 23, 2021I love this game. It combines two of my favorite genres: high fantasy (such as Heroes of Kendrickstone or Choice of Rebels) and contemplations on the nature of storytelling and truth (like Creatures Such as We or the opera Capriccio).
You play as one of four adventurers who years ago staged the end of the world, with yourselves cast as the saviors. You, an illusionist, were crucial to making the world believe that a demon horde was going to destroy them all.
Unfortunately for you, the omens etc. are repeating, and it's not you doing it this time.
While there is a lot of action in this game, there is just as much or more political intrigue and contemplation about your past and your roles.
Most choicescript games (mine included) lock you in to certain paths after a time. This game has a lot more freedom, letting you choose over and over whether to reveal the truth about your lies or not, whether to fight the demons or befriend them, whether to pursue a romance or not.
Some people on the forums disliked that, feeling that it was the game heckling them to change their mind. On the other hand, I've been frustrated by other games where you can't change your decision once you get new information.
The author does a great job of making choices about balancing your interests and not just pass/fail. The game sets you up to be loyal to certain people before you discover awful truths about them, and sets you up to hate people before discovering wonderful things about them.
It is possible to 'fail'; early on, I had three goals when a demon came through a portal, and I failed all three, and considered restarting the game. But I didn't, and ended up having a good time anyway.
I also appreciated the ending. It provided satisfying conclusions to all stories (at least my ending did), with the characters you were invested in all going off to do their own thing and asking your final advice. It gives you a way to choose for yourself how to wrap up their character arcs. It does the same thing for you, offering you many final positions.
So, I think this game is great. If you don't like frequent philosophical introspection, it might be better to go with one of the other 'high fantasy games' (like Kendrickstone, Affairs of the Court, Choice of Magics, or Choice of Rebels), but if you're interested by the idea of dealing with a web of lies of your own creation, this is a game for you.
It's also very long. I played every evening for 3-4 days before completing it.
An educational CYS game about covid with math tests, January 23, 2021This game from the CYS website is a difficult, branching game about Coronavirus. I found it surprisingly informative and I learned some things I didn't know before.
You play as a professor recruited by the government in the early months of Covid to help them understand the spread of the disease and to make recommendations about it. If you do well, you have the chance of moving up and influencing public policy.
Part of 'doing well' includes doing well on difficult math questions about things like exponential growth and infection transmission.
This kind of math test hasn't always done well in IF before, with games like #vanlife and A Final Grind inserting frustrating calculations in the middle of otherwise normal stories. But in this game, the choices are fair, and undo is available at any time. It uses math to teach instead of punish.
That being said, it's pretty hard, and the questions involve policy as well. In my best run, when I thought I was very successful, I only ended up with 14/50 points!
+Polish: The game is generally well-polished.
+Interactivity: I'm not usually interested in 'only one right path' games, but it's fair and gives you a chance to try again.
-Emotional impact: The topic and mechanical approach left me feeling distant from the story, making the whole thing a thought exercise (though a welcome on).
+Descriptiveness: Especially good at putting difficult concepts into understandable language. I swear a lot of people should try playing this to understand coronavirus better.
-Would I play again? It was interesting, but it more made me interested in looking up what it said to understand it better rather than replaying.
A mid-length French Ink game with art and animated logic mini-game, January 20, 2021This is a game in the french comp which is very technically proficient and uses figurative and descriptive language (which left me running to Google Translate more often than not).
You are a bestselling author who ends up on an island looking for inspiration for his next book. You have a phone with little minigames on it that remind me of Lolo on the SNES (mostly involving pushing sliding blocks around).
The island is fairly small, and soon bizarre plot twists happen.
I believe there is some branching in this game. In my branch, I found a minigame where you use a radio to solve a maze and another minigame where you visually push blocks around (like the cellphone puzzle) to open a door, but Jack Welch said he found a Towers of Hanoi minigame, which I did not encounter.
Overall, the story was interesting and it was complex, but I'm not sure how well the disparate elements tied together. Overall, though, it was polished, descriptive, compelling, and had good interactivity.
A shortish and adventurous game with an unconvincing plot, January 18, 2021This game is fairly short (170K words but with a lot of branching, so smaller playthroughs). In it, you play as a young academic who has invented time travel. You use it to go back in time to study, hunt, or film dinosaurs while dealing with a rich kid who has stolen your credit for inventing time travel.
Skills were fairly easy to figure out, although they didn't vary much throughout the game. There are a few romance options, although most are on your rivals' team. The writing in each scene was well-done, and I felt like I had a variety of goals I could accomplish.
The overall plot, though, just didn't make sense in my head, and didn't mesh with my experiences or expectations. The way that people react to the existence of time travel, the things your character fixates on, the way people react both in the past and when you return, it just doesn't make sense to me, personally. But the rest of the game is not bad.
An army simulator and adventure game set in Slavic folklore, January 17, 2021I really went back and forth on this game. The overall storyline is compelling to me: you are a new chieftain of a nomadic tribe in the steppes which is rapidly being overcome by an evil warlord who uses dark magic. The gods tell you of a safe haven in the far north, the Valley of the North Wind.
Gameplay generally consists of choices that affect your whole tribe and choices that affect only yourself, sort of like Choice of Rebels or Stronghold: A Hero's Fate.
This game is often morally ambiguous. There are outlaws that you can ally with to destroy towns or fight against, with little immediate impact. Frequently you yourself will be alone or in a small group and come across strangers who you don't know if you can trust or not.
It makes for an interesting game. It's also a hard game. There are several options that are literally 'go left' vs 'go right' with absolutely no strategy possible, just dumb luck. And there are definitely wrong choices in other parts of the game. I used a lot of my money early on and soon found myself with 0. It locked off major portions of the game, including one agonizing scene in a large city where you are there for three days, but every single option requires money, so I had to just pick 'do nothing' for three days in a row.
Overall, I'd say the game is a mixed bag. I definitely enjoyed it, though, and would rate it above average. Since I went back and forth on the score, I'll use my standardized scale:
+Polish: The game is very polished.
+Interactivity: Despite the randomness, I felt the game was responsive to my choices.
+Descriptiveness: The writing was pretty great, I felt.
+Emotional impact: I was invested in the story.
+Would I play again?: Yes, there were several mysteries unsolved, like the nature of the 'Eight'.
Short, branching zombie survival game with lots of replayability, January 16, 2021This is another game from near the very beginning of Choice of Games, and I think this one works well.
It's different from more 'modern' games in that each playthrough is short and there are a lot of ways to mess up or die early. So if you screw up everything your game can be significantly less than an hour, with a 'successful' game being a lot longer.
But the shortness of the dead-ends go well together, since it encourages replay and (more importantly) this game has a lot of different paths to success. You can meet completely different characters in different playthroughs. I'd say about 30% of my two playthroughs was repeated material.
I enjoyed how the stats were clearly differentiated from each other. Although, the game kept relationship stats hidden. There doesn't seem to be any romance in this game (though sex is mentioned). Each stat gets used in a variety of ways.
The characters all have different interactions with each other, some of them detesting each other.
All in all, it was short and fun.
An early choicescript game with a dissolute archaeologist MC, January 15, 2021Well, if you enjoy games where you can play as a hard-drinking, cheating professor, stealing artifacts, snorting lines of coke and hitting on students, this is definitely the game for you.
That's not really my style. This is an early choicescript game. In the beginning, they had 3-4 pretty great games in a row, but they didn't really know what worked, and that resulted in a string of very short games with weak use of stats, unfulfilling scenes and hit-or-miss humor that was often miss. After that, they hit their stride with some games that are still awesome to this day (Slammed! and Choice of Kung Fu, for instance).
That said, this game is still well-polished, with few, if any errors, and the interactivity generally worked for me. I had to sweat over a few choices, and they had actual consequences.
At 68,000 words, this game is a tenth of their most recent game (Luminous Underground) and a little less than half of the average game.
The story is about you, an archaeologist, hearing rumors of an ancient Incan city, the 'City Lost in the Clouds'. You have to dodge Columbian militia and ancient spirits to explore the city, and then safely make it back.
This game was recently in the 'Most underrated Choicescript games' poll, and was second to last (before Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck, which I actually like). If you play even 1 or 2 choices of the demo, you'll instantly know if you like it or not.
Sing,O Muse, of a complicated game, child of Homer and Choicescript, January 13, 2021This game, in my opinion, faithfully captures much of the feel of the Odyssey.
In it, you play a greek hero (or from a neighboring country), child of a god (which one is your parent is selectable), trying to get home after sacking Troy.
It recreates many of the familiar scenes but leaves several surprises. So, for instance, you can visit the Lotus eaters or the cave of the cyclops, but you could just as well end up recreating the Labors of Hercules.
This is currently one of the top contenders for 'Most underrated game' on the choice of games website, and it makes sense, both that it is underrated and that people like it.
It makes sense that it is underrated because it uses loss, failure, and fate for a stronger narrative. I've seen before that Choicescript games that focus on those tend to be less popular, since they make players feel like their choices either are wrong or don't matter.
On the other hand, they do combine to make an interesting tale, and I felt like the ending choices especially did a good job of setting up competing interests.
It was a bummer that the game sets you up as married and also as having many possible love interests. It's completely faithful to the original story, but it makes all romances besides your wife cheating.
Overall, the writing on this is strong, at the expense of reduced player freedom.
A spy game with many different branches, endings and items, January 13, 2021This chooseyourstory game has a setup that's a lot more complex than most. You have an inventory, stats you can train, etc.
You are an ordinary man in an ordinary job when a mysterious package changes your life. You're taken to a spy agency and given a dangerous mission.
The opening segments have an inventory with clickable links, but later on that seemed to disappear in favor of choice-based inventory (like when choosing what to take out of your trunk).
The pacing is good, with a strong overall narrative arc. Some of the endings happen a lot sooner than others (I think there are at least a couple dozen endings), so it can be worth backing out and trying again, even if you get a good ending on the first try.
Here's my five-point scale:
+Polish: This is a pretty complex game and I didn't run into any bugs/spelling errors.
+Interactivity: I really felt like I could dig in and strategize and try different things. Even with unlimited undo's, you can get so far into some branches that it's hard to cheat the system, which is nice.
+Descriptiveness: Most of the characters are just spy stereotypes, but the level of action was good.
+Emotional impact: I felt interested in the game and enjoyed seeing what came next.
-Would I play again? On the one hand, the game has a lot of endings and different replayable parts. On the other hand, I feel like the whole thing could use just a little bit more 'something' to be completely compelling, like a really cool opponent or a love interest (or someone who's both!). I know that's not very specific, and maybe that already exists in one of the other branches, so this is totally subjective.
A very long Choicescript game about shooting ghosts in an alternate timeline, January 9, 2021This is a very long game. At 600,000 words, it's only half as long as Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale, but has much less branching, I believe, as my total playtime was over 10 hours, a first for a Choicescript game for me.
Just the first two chapters alone felt longer than most Choicescript games.
You play as the leader of a two-person team of ghostbusters. It's an alternate world where the year is about 1100, there are different gods, different timeline, etc.
There's a lot to admire in this game. The last few chapters are exciting, and some people on reddit and the CoG forums seem very happy with it. Overall, it's a polished experience.
But I feel like it suffers from several structural issues.
One of the biggest for me personally is that the first 2/3 is relentlessly negative. The game starts with you failing something, and you fail over an over again. Frequently the choices are between 3 ways you messed up. Your character is pretty negative too, with a different choice being 3 ways to express you are hopeless, or 3 ways to express that you think other people are jerks. This game also has a lot more choices where you have to pick which of your stats go down, more than any other Choicescript game I've seen. Some people like this; someone said on reddit that they're glad it's not just another Chosen One story like most others.
I'm naturally optimistic, so I found the negativity grating. The last 1/3 is definitely more cheerful.
Another issue is repetitiveness. The first 6 or 8 chapters have the exact same pattern repeated a dozen times:
You're called into the subways to deal with a threat. But, this time, it's going to be just ordinary. Ah, but you get a sinking feeling that something's wrong. You experience a minor ghostly threat and finish it off. Then you encounter something magic-related that no human has ever encountered. Then you go home.
Some relationship choices are forced. You'll always feel sorry for Alice, you'll always decide Junker is a jerk (for most of the game, at least).
I think Choicescript games thrive when the author uses external forces on the player instead of internal. That's why school, war, and high society games work out so well: if your principal says you have to do something, you have to do it. If your rich uncle says you have to do something, you have to do it. If your enemy blows up the bridge, you have to find another way around.
But this game will frequently just decide for you what your player will do in situations where it would be natural to let you choose for yourself.
Overall, I think this game will appeal most to people who love to sink into an alternate world. Its length is enormous and there are definitely different paths I'd do in a replay. I was negative about a few things, but I definitely feel like this game is worth its cost. But I definitely think that the author should write another. Nothing helps as much as experience, and the later chapters with more action tell me that they learned as they went, and the length of the game shows they can make content.
Edit: Some other positives that came to mind are the large cast of characters. And it's true there is a crewmate that takes over the show, but I kind of liked there plotline, which was bizarre and seems like a very specific but fun fantasy. I felt like I had real choices in the final chapter, and sweated over a few in a good way. Finally, the blend of fantasy and sci-fi was done masterfully.
A city simulator in a fantasy setting with many relationships, January 3, 2021This game is definitely my style of game but may not be everyone's. It's a city simulator in Choicescript (like Silverworld, Ironheart, or The Fleet), but it's set entirely in a Dungeons and Dragons-type setting, with liches, goblins, and dryads.
The game has a large scope with each element having less focus. It's like the opposite of Cryptkeepers of Hallowford, which has the entire game focused on a single dungeon over a couple of days. Instead, this is a youth-to-death game, starting with when you found a village and ending with your death.
During those decades, your main choices are romancing people, dealing with 3 sets of interpersonal conflicts that fester over time, and managing your village's economy, defenses, education, etc.
Some events are recurring, like a choice on what public buildings to work on or what part of the economy to prioritize. Other events are special, like getting a chance to find magical books in a tomb underground.
The first chapter is significantly different from the other chapters, as it has no sim features.
My ending was pretty abrupt, as I died in battle and got one page afterwards. I'm not sure if there are longer endings for the other paths, but it was generally satisfying.
This game is pretty polarizing in interesting ways. It has over a thousand reviews on the iOS omnibus app and is usually high on the bestselling list, but it has a 6/10 rating and < 4 on google play store. A lot of those ratings are from people who hate games with transgender and non-binary options, which this game has a lot of.
Also, there are reviews complaining the game is way too short and others complaining it drags on too long. I feel like it's a game with a ton of threads, each of which is passed over fairly quickly, including your personal narrative. Has a lot of replay value, though.
Like a classic CYOA book. Get sucked into a fantasy world, January 3, 2021This game probably recreates my childhood experiences of reading CYOA books more than any other.
The chooseyourstory format is adapted more to CYOA books. Most Twine and Choicescript games have shorter text and more frequent choices that frequently meet back up later because it allows you to reuse a lot of text and code. Making a game where every branch goes somewhere different is usually too tedious to code, although some people have done it (like the game Animalia or Porpentine's Myriad).
But a lot of chooseyourstory games seem to get over the problem of needing to write a lot of text by just writing a lot of text, ending up with games with hundreds of thousands of words.
This game is meant for kids, I'd say between 10 and 13 or 14. You are sucked into a fantasy world where you meet strange wizards and adventurers.
There are few choices in this game but a ton of text in each one, and each choice branches a lot. Some are dead ends, but the engine lets you go back and retrace your steps quickly, which the game seems to encourage. This makes the small number of choices make sense, since each replay goes quickly, like paging through an old CYOA book.
I enjoyed it overall, and it gave me some ideas for my own writing.
A well-told science fiction story about a space espionage mission, January 2, 2021In this game, you play as a youngish spaceship pilot and former spy. You come across two strange young twins and accompany them across space on a quest involving sentient computers.
This game has a lot in common with other games like Rent-A-Vice, The Martian Job, The Road to Canterbury and a few other games, in that it sacrifices player freedom for a better overall storyline.
For instance, in this game, there are times where you have four ways to be skeptical, but no way out of it. Or you have 4 ways to agree to a reckless mission, but no other options. Most of your choices are about how to react to dramatic outside events rather than acting on your own.
This technique has some advantages, which is perhaps why all the Nebula Award nominees use it, since it makes story beats more effective. But gameplay suffers, I think.
The overall mystery surrounding the twins was fun to see play out, and the plot and worldbuilding are interesting. As for the stats, there was a lot of overlap between them (how can you tell if a specific check is for Gregarious, Smooth Talker or Social Butterfly?), bonuses were few and far between, but the story seemed to handle failures well.
Overall, it was definitely worth playing, but I believe that it could have used more meaningful player agency, especially in choosing how to roleplay.
I received a review copy of this game.
A bloody Exceptional Story that uses lodgings creatively, January 1, 2021This game (the first Fallen London Exceptional Story of 2020) deals with an auction at an abandoned taxidermist's estate, where the mysterious Vicomte de V________ shows up (where rumours abound that his reflection cannot be seen in mirrors, that he likes his meat VERY raw, etc.)
Interactivity is unusual in this story, and it seems like Groover is still playing around with new ways of getting interactivity in the Fallen London format.
(Only mild spoilers follow about the story structure, but I'll tag them in case people want to be surprised)
(Spoiler - click to show)You are provided four different new lodgings in this story, each of which you have to move into at different times. In each lodging, there is at least one repeatable story you can use to farm things, as well as an unlimited draw deck that lets you either explore the lodgings or attract the Vicomte's attention. If you attract too much attention (or do it on person), he comes.
Following that, there is a final confrontation and denouement.
The rewards are interesting, seemingly strongly focused on the bone market. I gathered more bones than I've gotten anywhere else in the game, as well as substantial amounts of Nightsoil of the Bazaar and (the biggest thing) (Spoiler - click to show)a Soothe and Copper longbox.
The different lodgings all seem like 'haunted' versions of regular lodgings, which I thought was nice.
I wasn't captivated with this story, but the mystery was a good one, and the finale definitely made me more invested. Also, having a permanent lodging as a reward is also nice.
The overall concept is a great way to take a familiar concept and make it work in the game's universe. It reminds me of Dr Who doing similar things, using sci-fi to explain stuff like witches.
This is not my favorite Groover exceptional story, but not the worst, and definitely better than most other exceptional stories
Here's my score:
+Polish: Eminently polished
+Interactivity: I'm intrigued by lodgings, and seeing them used in this way worked for me. The card deck required some stumbling around to operate, although I suppose all the details were in a handy pinned storylet.
+Descriptiveness: The lodgings were distinct and unique, and the Vicomte himself was disturbingly written in conflicting ways that left me unsettled.
+Emotional impact: Mostly unsettled and surprise at the ending.
+Would I play again? I would definitely be interested in seeing other paths.
An Elisabethean fairytale farce with Shakespearean influences, December 30, 2020This is a good game overall from a great author, so I have no doubt that most people will enjoy it.
I had a good time with it, but I wished for a bit more. I love the works of Kreg Segall, and I love Shakespeare, but I felt like this game missed both my favorite parts of Kreg Segall and my favorite parts of Shakespeare.
You play the child of a local nobleman who has arranged your marriage to a much older noble. Your father is in ill health and also in ill temper due to predations by forest bandits and advances by rival nobles.
You escape (in cross-dress) to the forest where shenanigans ensue.
I found the ending satisfying, but the start felt a little slow and bloodless to me. I admire Segall's game design most when it offers a variety of competing goals and interests, while I felt like the only real goals here were 'deal with your dad' and 'find someone to love'. A lot of the story felt constrained to hit certain plot points (such as having to eavesdrop on your father, having to remain in your disguise at points where it would be logical not to, etc.).
These choices would make sense if they were forced by being faithful to Shakespeare, but very little of the play is in the game. Only lovers in the woods, the existence of fairies, the play and a few side references are in it. But we miss out on the warm-hearted buffoonery of Bottom, the complex feelings that come from desperately loving someone who always spurned you but now woos you under the influence of a spell, the contrast between the ridiculous and silly poetry in the villager's play compared to the intelligence of Puck, the mystery and elegance of the fairies in general, the silly puns and slapstick humor of the villagers, and the nobility and grace of Theseus and company.
So I guess that while this game is satisfying, I feel that it just missed out on too many good opportunities from the author and the source material.
I received a free copy of this game.
Byzantium-punk heroes travel to alternate prehistoric times, December 29, 2020This is a great game. I've played 4 Kyle Marquis games now and have noticed a pattern. They tend to be very large games with intricate worldbuilding, have high stakes (usually involving the creation or destruction of the world), have a large cast of characters and feature some kind of alternate tech timeline.
In this game, you are in an alternate world where the Byzantium Empire is dominant during what would be Victoria's reign instead of the British Empire. The world features more domes than spires and more bronze and gold than iron and steel.
This world is very different than ours, with explicit Gods and a history numbered in the thousands of years. But an experiment changes everything, plunging you into prehistory.
There, you enter a village where you can play a sort of 'city simulator', deciding to focus on arts or defenses or trading. In the meantime, you have to deal with rival civilizations, some of them non-human, and with the threat of an enormous silver mountain in the sky coming to destroy the world.
The game did feel a bit bogged down in the middle and the climactic battle at my village was over just an action or two faster than I thought it would be, but it was fun. I also had fun investing a lot of relationship time with Vecla when I though she was an old worm before discovering that wasn't the case.
Finally, this is a very long game. Took me well over 2 hours to finish, reading fast, and it is definitely replayable.
Extreme TTRPG-style power fantasy--ascend to the gods, December 28, 2020When I was a kid, I read tons of Dragonlance books. My brother and I owned over 100, read them, laminated them.
I always liked them better than Forgotten Realms because the Dragonlance characters were more human. At the beginning of the Dragons of Autumn Twilight, everyone is pretty low level. Raistlin doesn't even know fireball.
But the Forgotten Realms books were always super over-powered. A character murders gods and becomes a god. Elminster goes to a fireball competition and explodes a fireball the size of the sun. Stuff like that.
This game is more like Forgotten realms. You play as an incredibly powerful archmage (much more powerful than a level 20 D&D character) who is ready to ascend to Godhood, but someone is sabotaging your plans. You have to find a way to keep yourself alive and in power long enough to ascend (or to take over the world, or many other goals).
There is intense worldbuilding, with dozens of characters, creatures, spells, artifacts, etc. in a traditional RPG style setting (dragons, plane shifting, wizards, bards, knights, etc.)
I'm usually all over this kind of thing, but as I said earlier, there a couple of flaws for me.
-The narrative arc is flat. There's no real growth; you start out as super-powerful, then become more super-powerful, then even more super-powerful. By the later chapters, it makes more sense, and feels better, but the first few chapters made me feel like I had nowhere to go and no real stakes since I started out having already 'won'.
-The character is pretty much evil or close to it, but I didn't really get a motivation for it. I can compare this game to Endmaster's Eternal in some ways, a game I recently played that also has a notably villainous PC (although Eternal is much darker overall), and even though Eternal had an even more evil protagonist, it's motivated more because you're a servant sworn to work for a master. In this game, you answer to no one and nothing. Many of your choices are just evil for evil's sake. I guess it's the difference between being an anti-hero (like in Eternal or Champion of the Gods or Metahuman, Inc. or even Megamind) vs being a straight-up villain.
But these are minor quibbles. The writing is clearly good. The game is very large, one of the longest (in playtime) that I've played for Choice of Games, and most of the problems I mention go away after the first few chapters.
So if you play the demo and enjoy it, it only gets better from there and is worth the price.
As a final note, the game does a brilliant job with changing the stats screen to reflect your situation, and I wish there was some 'best stats screen' or 'coolest Choicescript trick' award I could give the game for that.
A fun and tricky puzzlefest in Santa's workshop, December 27, 2020This is an Adventuron Christmas game that is quite large. You have to find out what 9 kids want for Christmas and make their toys after finding all the ingredients necessary. There is a large system of free shops and recipes for toys.
There are many locations and as of this writing all but one of them has art.
The puzzles range from fairly easy to the very obscure. The hardest puzzles were those involving guessing-the-verb or lack of in-game responses to incorrect actions.
This is large and complicated and I enjoyed it overall.
A complicated present fetch quest in Adventuron, December 26, 2020This is the last 2020 Adventuron Christmas Jam game I played, and it was pretty good.
There is a large map and several independent puzzles to solve, as well as many red herrings that add to the interactivity instead of taking away.
You are an elf who has to find a present Santa lost before catching up to all the other elves on vacation.
Everything was competently coded. I had a little trouble occasionally guessing verbs but not a great deal. The art and writing are good, but I feel like everything was 'good' but could go even further somehow to be 'great', like it's missing some final ingredient. But I'm impressed over all!
Compact christmas puzzler with hidden achievments, December 26, 2020This is a smaller game with about 4 rooms but a lot of tiny puzzles.
The girl you're baby sitting has gone missing and you have to find her. On the way, you find that Christmas needs your help! But just for a second.
The puzzles are fairly small and mostly well-clued. The game makes it clear that searching things in various ways is the path to success.
The achievements are perhaps the best feature, basically puzzles that would otherwise be unfair are not part of the main story, instead giving you achievements to reward your curiosity.
A verbose Adventuron game about Wodehousian antics, December 26, 2020This Adventuron game has more words than any other I've seen. It's firmly in the Wodehousian vein, with a butler named Gieves and hijinks caused by upper-class British misunderstandings.
It was quite clever and parts of it were very funny (including the ending). It suffered from a certain problem that many humorous games have, which is that the author clearly had some very funny solutions in mind, but that requires several leaps of intuition that aren't always fair.
Overall, though, this is a hefty game with good writing and clever puzzles. I think this would have done fairly well in IFComp, placing in the top half.
A medium-length humorous Adventuron game about pigeons, December 26, 2020This is an Adventuron Christmas game where the Reindeer are knocked out by your 'special potions' that Santa keeps in barrels. You have to recruit someone else to help!
The art is superb here, adding a lot to the game. The puzzles are a mixed bag, including a logic puzzle and a visually-based minigame where you have to guide pigeons across windy terrain.
Overall, I found the writing to be funny. The whole thing felt a little light, which makes sense since I suppose additional time went into crafting visuals. But it's worth a fun and silly 30 minutes, and I didn't run into any implementation issues.
A minimal parser game with graphics about trapping Santa, December 26, 2020In this brief Adventuron game, you have to set a trap for Santa to make him give you a present.
In writing, graphics, and gameplay, this resembled nothing more to me than a single puzzle (or maybe two) in a Scott Adams game. Everything is stripped down bare, and you have to get things exactly right for the game to recognize your answers.
It works overall as a puzzle, but here is my score:
-Polish: Everything is bare-bones.
-Descriptiveness: Same, the writing is minimalist and mostly just lists of present objects.
-Interactivity: I found the main puzzle frustrating, not in figuring out what to do, but in figuring out how to communicate it to the parser.
+Emotional impact: Despite the above, I found it fun to solve.
+Would I play again? It's brief enough that it could be fun to check out next year.
A complex Adventuron puzzle in Northpole, December 26, 2020This is perhaps the most complex Adventuron game I've seen.
You play as a falsely-accused elf who has to find 7 missing presents. There are two main areas (an outside one and an inside one) as well as an endgame area. There are numerous NPCs, as well.
This game has its own share of Sierra-type-logic (such as there being 4 different sharp-bladed instruments, each of which can only be used on one thing) and adventuron implementation issues (the biggest being error messages not disambiguating between default statements for correct commands on non-interesting present items and correct commands with non-present items).
Fortunately, there are helpful hints in every room. Even with that, though, I had to comb through the itch pages (I found three different ones: the regular page, the submission page, and some comments in the community page for the jam) to finish off the game. Art's very good, and fortunately no puzzles require the art, for people who are visually impaired.
Clever puzzle concepts with plenty of implementation issues, December 26, 2020This Adventuron game has you using a teleporter to access three different areas with interlocking puzzles.
The story idea is clever: Bigfoot has been implicated in 3 different acts of mischief and is on the naughty list. He asks you to clear his name.
In a world of perfect implementation, this would be a fairly fun puzzle game. It relies on some visual puzzles included in the graphics.
Unfortunately, there are numerous errors. Adventuron doesn't let you know if an object is undescribed or you typed it wrong, so that caused a few issues with things like a vital but undescribed rock show ad. The main verbs necessary for solving two key puzzles are implemented weird (for one, (Spoiler - click to show)PUT something INTO something doesn't work but INSERT something INTO something does, and for the other (Spoiler - click to show)you have to UNSCREW something instead of TURNing or RATCHETing when you have a ratchet).
A few other things added up to make it a frustrating experience. If the game were polished a bit more, it would be more enjoyable. Still, it had many charming moments.
A charming parser game with detailed graphics and constrained gameplay, December 26, 2020This is a great game. I went back and forth on a 4 or 5, but there are so many great little details that I'll definitely go with the higher score.
This is an adventuron game with a detailed life sim. You have to keep up your hunger, happiness and energy bars. In addition, you have to solve little puzzles that your wife (or partner?) Pel sets for you.
There are numerous illustrations, especially for the puzzles. The writing is solid.
The story isn't completely original (what is?) but is executed well. The life-sim is a bit easier than it could be but fits narratively. The puzzles are all in constrained environments and occur one at a time, but require ingenuity and creative thinking.
Definitely worth trying out. It does require the graphics as an essential component of the puzzles, though, making it difficult for visually impaired players.
An espionage Adventuron game with multiple graded endings, December 26, 2020This is an interesting setup for a game.
It's an adventuron game with pixelart illustrations of a dystopian future (presumably referencing Cyberpunk 2077, which I haven't played). You are a futuristic version of an elf in a timeline where Santa has sold out and delivers anything to anyone, no matter what side of the law they're on.
There are one or two puzzles at a time, and it requires careful exploration, but the limited verb set means that you should be able to figure out what you need to do, even if you have to think a bit to solve it.
The main puzzles involve codes you have to solve, which I found enjoyable.
I received a B ending, with a few ideas of what I might need to do next. It was fun, but I don't feel compelled to try again.
A solstice-themed Christmas adventuron puzzler with code, December 25, 2020This is another entry in the Adventuron game jam.
It features some nice pixel art of a small village near a lake. You receive a dream message from a mysterious figure requesting your help.
It's a small game, with six or so locations and about a puzzle per location. The highlight for me was a cryptogram puzzle using symbols that you had partial information on, making it different than the regular cryptogram puzzle.
I felt like a few of the puzzle solutions were somewhat unfair, especially finding the book in the library, which dampened my enthusiasm a bit. But it was a fun short play overall.
A cute Adventuron game about preparing the 12 days of Christmas for your love, December 25, 2020This game was entered in the Adventuron Christmas game jam.
One of Adventuron's weaknesses is its parser, which, while strong, hasn't caught up to Inform, Dialog and TADS. This game neatly sidesteps that by making it a limited parser game, with the only commands being TAKE, DROP, EXAMINE, and LOOK.
There are only three rooms: a 'hub' room with a Christmas tree, a storage room containing almost all the gifts (including lords and ladies anxiously waiting around), and a kitchen with materials.
The entirety of the interactivity is picking up one item and dropping it in the right spot, hoping it interacts right. Technically, you could just take everything and dump it together (and I admit I took that course occasionally), but it's too tedious to do that without trying to analyze that ahead of time, especially since you have a carrying limit of 3 items (one of the few games where I think that limit enhances gameplay).
The rainbow colors and sound cues were nice.
+Polish: The game is polished;
+Descriptiveness: The descriptions of the gifts is fairly amusing
+Interactivity: This particular setup worked for me
+Emotional impact: It was heart-warming
-Would I play again? It was fun, but was a bit too long for the main gimmick for me.
A B-minus game with a strong sense of place, December 25, 2020B-minus makes surreal poetic games where you have to puzzle out the meaning, if there is any fixed meaning.
Some of those games work really well for me and others not as well.
This one from a few years ago has a navigable 'map'. It's made in raconteur, and gives an effect similar to Twine.
The map is a house with three wings, each with two rooms, each with an object inside.
If there's any way to combine the objects, I haven't found it. The hint of a coherent structure paired with incoherent elements confused me more than if there weren't any structure at all, kind of like the famous 'Cow Tools' Far Side cartoon.
+Polish: Worked great, looks good.
+Descriptive: Very well-written.
-Interactivity: Not sure what's going on.
+Emotional impact: Some good parts in here, I liked the grave dirt and the opening.
-Would I play again? I'm not sure what to look for here.
Award-winning writing with a design trading autonomy for story, December 25, 2020The Road to Canterbury was nominated for a prestigious award (the Nebulas, I think) in writing, and it deserves it. I felt it was 'okay' at first but as it went on I found the plot, characters and details to be great. It has extensively-researched details on life at the time of Chaucer, making the setting a delight to explore.
This is a good game, so everything else I'm going to talk about is just personal opinion and about my own tastes.
I felt that the choices in the game often sacrificed autonomy for a predetermined path.
That's not to say there aren't a lot of choices. You can bring a squire and knight together or bring them apart. You can seek to learn more about your brother's death, pursue a romance, fight duels, buy a racehorse (which I strongly recommend), etc. And your biggest choice, to encourage war between France and England or not, has many shades of nuance to select from.
But frequently it felt like the game forced my character into specific plot points, not by external circumstances, but by presupposing my character's motivations and desires.
This feels like it makes the overall storyline better (since there are assured plot beats) but it felt weird. For instance, near the beginning, you begin to overhear snatches of an interesting conversation. Without any choice on your part, your character decides to risk discovery by trying to eavesdrop. You get to pick how to do it, but you can't choose not to do it at all, even if it doesn't fit your character to that point.
Many such situations come up where it's just assumed your character will do something pre-determined.
I also had some issues trying to determine whether choices were based on sanguine (vs melancholic) or excess (vs temperance) or piety or generosity (vs avarice). For instance, if if you save money by drinking water instead of ale when a friend wants you to drink with them, is it melancholic (avoiding a large group), temperate (not drinking), piety (since you're only supposed to drink on feast days), or avarice since you aren't spending money? Sometimes it was clear, but sometimes it was confusing.
So for me personally, on my 5 point grading scale, I'd give it:
+Polish: The game is smooth and works great. Editing is perfect.
-Interactivity: Some of the stats didn't work well for me.
+Descriptiveness: Awesome. No wonder it won an award.
+Would I play again? I think I will.
+Emotional impact: The last few chapters were great emotion-wise. Lots of satisfying conclusions (for the specific threads I was chasing).
An extremely hard ChooseYourStory puzzle game with inventory system, December 24, 2020I've been exploring the ChooseYourStory catalogue a bit and taking the advice of previous commenters to check the content warnings so I don't complain about things I should have known about ahead of time.
This game was really interesting and really hard. I don't usually review games without finishing them, but I think it might be a long time before I beat this one (unless I just use the walkthrough).
You play as someone who wanders into a Walmart right when it's taken over by terrorists. You have to explore the various departments and collect items to help you and others escape.
I've probably only reached 1/3-1/2 of the game after a few hours and checking the beginning of the walkthrough. There are tons of items that you can pick up and manipulate, and the game is defiitely 'cruel' on the Zarfian scale, meaning you can irrevocably mess yourself up without knowing.
It reminds me of some of the Infocom games like Deadline or the one where you're a scuba diver, where you have to hit things in just the right sequence or you'll miss out on something important.
There's some grammatical and writing inconsistencies, which is why I'm doing 4 stars instead of 5, but I would definitely recommend this to fans of games that require careful note taking, experimentation, logic, and a lot of replay.
Epic fantasy in Choicescript w/ army simulator and tons of characters, December 22, 2020This game reminds me of nothing more than picking up some epic fantasy series like Wheel of Time or Thomas Covenant, one of those books that has a huge scope, intricate backstory, and tons of characters. It's a different feel than standalone fiction, and I haven't found a new series like that in a while.
Seeing it in Choicescript is great. This is a very large game. I remember thinking "Wow, this game is gigantic, took me a long time to play," and then realizing that I was just near the end of Chapter 2 (out of 4).
It's split into four chapters:
In Chapter 1, you establish your backstory and much of the worldbuilding and start your rebellion.
Chapter 2 is a long chapter spread out over weeks where you try to survive over a difficult winter. I had a very hard time with this, as I wanted to not steal, but it meant letting people die. Really good tradeoff in goals here, love to see this kind of interactivity.
Chapter 3 involves meeting a diverse group of people and discovering problems in your midst.
And Chapter 4 is the climactic battle, from planning to execution to aftermath.
This game has many ways to fail, but mercifully has a 'redo this chapter button', which I was glad for when I died on my first run through Chapter 4.
Playing the first chapter will let you know right away if this is your kind of game or not. What I love about this game is how the stats are completely just there to show the game remembers you, and passing or failing stat checks is less about solving a puzzle or getting rewarded/punished and more about building a story based on your choices.
Relationships occupy a lot of the game. There are characters with great depth who can never be seen if you just kill them off bat. All of the main characters show up enough that they get meaningful development and you know exactly what kind of things might offend them or please them, and they frequently are in conflict so you can't get everything you want but still feel good about your choices.
I liked this game, but fair warning it does take a long time to play. The author intends on writing 4 more books but it stands well on its own, especially when compared with other good Choicescript games that are essentially '1-shot' TTRPG adventures. I liked those too, but this is more like a whole campaign with solid backstory.
Run a workshop in Venice--historical alternate universe with magic, December 19, 2020Every commercial Choice of Games entry I've played is well put-together, interesting, and felt worth my while. So when I rate them, it's usually on intangible personal feelings that may not translate to others.
This game has a cool setting. You are one of three apprentices to a master in Venice near the end of the 15th century. This game features encounters with several of the Medici's as well as Machiavelli (who is very pleasant) and several references to an exiled Leonardo da Vinci. Care is taken in presenting the setting. For fans of this setting (similar to that in Jon Ingold's All Roads) or alternate histories in general, I can absolutely recommend the game for its writing and style.
Mechanically, I have some questions with it. There are many stats, the bonuses to stats are small, stats are frequently decreased, most stat checks require multiple stats at once, and there is significant overlap in stats making divining the correct choice difficult (such as Boldness being an opposed stat and confidence being a skill, or charm being an opposed stat and guile being a skill).
I think these design choices were intended to increase the difficulty and prevent player boredom, something I struggled with in my own choicescript game. But the net effect was a feeling of frustration for me. Also, it's hard to know how to raise some stats. I took every opportunity to be romantic with Dangereuse and ended up with a 53% in the relationship, too low to get their support vs the machine.
I feel like games do best when, if you know what you intend to do, it is clear on what you must do to succeed in it; I think Emily Short and other early parser theorists stated a similar principle, where if you know the solution to a puzzle it should be easy to type it in.
I think instead of throwing stat difficulties in the way, it's better to do what games like Choice of Magics or Psy High do, where perhaps the person you love turns out to be a horrible person and you have to do things you hate to be with them, or you can be as powerful as you want but will accrue a specific penalty that is known long ahead of time.
I guess that's a counterpart to delayed branching (a principle in Choicescript where your choices have effects far down the road): being able to strategize.
Anyway, that's a long aside that's more about a class of games (including this game and my own) than any individual one. For this specific game, the trouble with stats made it harder to make plans and I ended up turning to the Machine to solve all my problems. Fortunately, the ending was well-written.
A deep dive into a tech-based future with cool vehicles, December 15, 2020This is a pretty long retro-future game where you play in a post-apocalyptic world where deep mechanical tech underground is spilling up and a city is split between a corrupt government, a struggling revolution and outside infiltrators.
It has some rough patches and the narrative arc didn't feel well-defined, but its intricate worldbuilding and strong characters pushed it up to a 5 star rating for me.
My introduction to Kyle Marquis was through Vampire the Masquerade: Night Road, which (in addition to many excellent features) had a surprisingly detailed flight of vehicles.
This game also follows that pattern, with multiple advanced flying vehicles described in intricate detail (including the eponymous Empyrean, an experimental airplane that most of the game revolves around) and several motorbikes as well.
This game has deep, deep worldbuilding. There are multiple layers to the government, each with their own agents (often embedded into each other). There are multiple versions of tech, between the revolutionaries, the city itself, the rival city, your father, and the deep underground. It comes with numerous references and explains itself in game.
I was a little disappointed that the stats stayed relatively low, but I think that's because I accidentally spread them out too much early on. Also, I didn't invest anything in physical stats (instead focusing on cunning and leadership), and there are numerous areas where you have to be fast, strong, or a good shot. Fortunately, the game was graceful with failures and I was able to adapt.
Apparently, from reading older reviews, the game has gone through a big revamp. Originally, there were half as many main stats and they were opposed (like cunning vs leadership). Many people felt it didn't work that well, so the game was changed and re-released. That explains the proliferation of stats and the oddities of which ones are used when. I definitely think the current system is better than the old, and I can't help but wonder if the experience with a ton of diverse stats helped the author in writing VtM: Night Road.
The narrative arc could have been stronger. Instead of a long rise and climax, it felt like it plateaued after the first couple of chapters, with events of similar direness and complexity occupying the middle parts until the very last chapter or two. The game felt long, and the final chapter for me felt like a good wrap-up.
Overall, I was pleased with the characters and enjoyed my ending. I was a little confused, thinking that Wesh was a preteen, but that went away quickly. As a fan growing up of pulp sci-fi and hard sci-fi, I enjoyed the worldbuilding the most.
A horror Twine item-trading game with complex code, December 14, 2020This game is polished and well-done, but I think I admire the coding more than the game itself.
You play as an executioner of some sort in a dark castle. This castle seems to me like a prototype of the one in Eat Me, with a similar cast of bizarre creatures and vaguely reminiscent layouts. But castles in games tend to be similar, so it's probably in my head.
You're required to find a head for your master in this game, so you have to explore the castle, finding what you can and trading it for better things.
The complexity comes from two things: the styling (boxes around progress links, none around 'aside' links, glowing words to represent runes), and the way that each character has a unique reaction to each item you carry.
+Polish: Very complex and smooth.
+Descriptive: Rich writing
-Interactivity: While there are some clues, it felt mostly like searching over and over for the right person to talk to.
+Emotional impact: It was unsettling
-Would I play again? It was good for a short game, but I think once is enough.
An expansive alternate history mech game set in the Middle East, December 12, 2020This game was a bit different than I thought it would be, and I wasn't sure how some parts of it would work, but it gelled well together and I had a great time with it.
Specifically, I thought this would be mostly about a giant mech war. Instead, this is mostly about a 'fish out of water' scenario where you, an accidental time traveler, end up in the 12th century Middle East (Aleppo, Jerusalem, Jericho, etc.) in an alternate world where perpetual motion exists and powers giant mechs.
The game covers a lot of ground, from finding your place in the world (I became a squire) to dealing with intrigue and romance (I romance a knight named Ygrite) to mech combat and a surprisingly complex castle management simulator.
Each part felt just a bit thin, but as an overall whole it worked well. What's best is the way the stats tied in well with roleplaying. In a lot of Choicescript games I have to constantly check the stat screen to have any chance of succeeding. In this game, I just picked a character type I wanted to be and the options were so natural I didn't have to check the stat screen until the end. I failed a few times in reasonable ways, but was able to achieve most of my goals.
So I can definitely recommend this as an overall great experience. The combat isn't the best combat, the management isn't the best management, etc. but the overall way it comes together is some of the best I've seen.
As a side note, it includes several things I don't see much in Choicescript games, including a choice of religions and how religious you want to be and a variety of options related to drinking and food.
Descend into the bowels of the bazaar, December 11, 2020This is the last of Groover's exceptional stories that I've played. This one is very large, taking me up to around 80 actions to complete.
In many ways, this mirrors Cricket, Anyone?. Both stories are quite large. Both have fairly silly premises (a last-minute cricket player replacement vs curing a rhyming disease with a mushroom-hunting pig). Both end up uncovering a side-conspiracy that would be a main theme in other stories but is only a sideshow here (Benthic vs Somerset in Cricket and the truth behind the auction in MKfaP), and both end in a wild descent into non-reality uncovering vast truths about the Bazaar.
This is a great story. It has a lot of customization (you have several companions with different dialogue snippets and must choose between which ones to take), interesting mechanics (like bidding at an auction and a portion told entirely through red-bordered cards), connections to past actions (Poet-Laureate gets checked here, as does knowledge of the Khanate, connections to the Gracious Widow, and much much more), and great lore (you can learn intriguing details about the fall of each of the five cities).
I prefer Cricket, Anyone? marginally, but this story is better than almost all others. Flint was my touchstone for a long time on what a good side story should be, and it's intended to be much bigger and wilder than the Exceptional Stories, but I think this story plus Cricket, Anyone? provide better storylines and lore rewards than Flint (although significantly less financial rewards). Worth buying at the full Fate price.
A game about the wayward paths of children, December 11, 2020This game is thought-provoking, and I don't know quite how I feel about it one way or another.
At its core, it's a character generator with 10 options per choice. It's very short, with more than half the play time (for me) dedicated to the achingly slow text in the opening few screens.
It's posited as a generator for the Lost Boys from Peter Pan. However, it always ends up with a darker twist:
(Spoiler - click to show)you are actually creating white supremacists.. The game ends with a scene from your character's childhood, now with a different shade of meaning from the opening scenes.
Production-wise, this is excellent styling, music and css animations, the kind you'd expect from the author of Babyface.
Content-wise, I'm torn. On the one hand, the feeling I get from the game is that (Spoiler - click to show)it 'others' the white supremacists by making them seem like creatures very different from us, the reader, someone with with we have no connection and no relation. I worry that that hides the deeper issues, as I feel like most white supremacy is hidden inside otherwise-normal looking people, and by relegating it to the 'frightening other' in media we neglect looking within ourselves. On the other hand, the narrative is designed in a way to humanize its characters and track their journey, so maybe I'm wrong.
The other issue I think about is the way some things are lumped together. For instance, I know (Spoiler - click to show)many white supremacists, if not the majority, use religion as a pretext. But not all people espousing Christian values are supremacists or terrorists; in fact, white people are less likely to be Christian than either black or hispanic people in the US.
Both of my objections are framed from my own perspective and stem from my own interpretation of the piece, so I can't say it's anything related to the author's intent. Still, it was interesting.
+Polish: It was very polished.
+Descriptive: The text is well-written.
-Interactivity: The slower opening was a bit offputting, and the many menus made me feel like I somehow had less freedom from so many indistinguishable options.
+Emotional impact: It made me feel a lot of different things.
-Would I play again? Technically I did play again once, just to remind myself before writing the review, but I think this is more or less a one-shot game.
A retelling of an old folk horror story , December 11, 2020Tailypo is an old folk tale told around campfires, about a person driven to excesses by hunger and the consequences of their actions.
This game is the quintessential Sub-Q game, with an emphasis on styling, formatting, dense & high quality writing, and short playthrough. There are also sounds.
For me, the text swung back and forth between the frightening and the silly. This is, however, present in the original tale. The writing here was most compelling when describing the hopelessness of the protagonist, and when describing the dogs.
Regarded by some as the best Exceptional Story. Play Cricket for the college., December 10, 2020I've long heard rumours about the quality of this Exceptional Story, and that made me hesitant to play it, as I didn't want to be disappointed.
I shouldn't have worried. This exceptional story is of high enough quality that I thought at one point 'this is the first time I've seen a real story in a Fallen London game'.
Now, that's not quite true, as there are great stories throughout Fallen London and Sunless Skies. But the format usually favors a series of vague allusions that come together in the end to give you an overall impression, although very little is said in each bit.
Cricket, Anyone? is different. It's very large, for one thing. I swear I spent over 80 actions on it, and anxiously waited to refresh my actions throughout the day.
The structure is intriguing as well. Once you get through a couple brief opening storylets, you enter a long cricket match where you make strategic options and, in between inning, investigating the bizarre machinations of the different teams and the trainer.
The story unfolded beautifully; the structure and writing rival a lot of the great sci-fi, fantasy, or modern lit short stories I've read before. There are a series of reveals that individually feel small until you realize what it's building up to and you see that it should have been clear all along. This happens several ways, with the stakes being upped over and over until it's some of the weightiest lore material in the Fallen London canon.
I came in with everybody saying this is the best Exceptional Story ever and was both skeptical and nervous about being disappointed, and I can only say that they were right.
An engaging story of life as a fox spirit, December 10, 2020This was a really hard game to rate, as I went back and forth between 4 and 5 stars. It's definitely one of the best Choicescript games I've given 4 stars, and I think the rating comes down to my experiences with it.
In this game, you play a fox in a Japanese-themed culture whose family is slaughtered by a vicious farmer. When you reach 100 years old, you gain the power to be a fox spirit.
Choices in the game generally revolve around your personality (helpful vs demonic is a big one) and whether you encourage war or not. There are several competing goals (immortality, peace, and romance) and I'm not sure you can complete all 3 at once (I ended up with 2).
The writing is engaging, but a lot of it depends on how interested you are in being a fox. Having seen fox spirits as enemies in other games, I found it fun to be one in this game.
I had trouble engaging with the stats, though. I had very high cleverness but kept failing stat checks about knowing things or being smart. Then near the end I realized that most of those checks were for 'worldliness', which was low for me as I was a godly disciple of Inari. Even after I figured that out, though, there were many many times where I had no clue what was being checked or failed things I thought I'd be great at. Part of that is probably because I was trying at first to be a devout trickster, but most trickster options lower devoutness. So I think my own choices led to that lack of engagement.
The game had a great sense of being an animal in the human's world, which is its best aspect.
I wouldn't have minded having stats look higher, too. Since every choicescript game is different, it's hard to tell if you are good at something if you have, for instance, a 65 in that category. But that's just personal taste.
Overall, well-written and a truly fun set of final chapters. It felt large, and reminded me of the setting of Choice of Kung Fu (which I think also featured Fox Spirits; they'd make a fun session played one after the other).
A complex and moving slug racing story, December 9, 2020This the third Exceptional Story of Groover's that I've played, and I definitely liked this one more than most Exceptional Stories.
In this one, you become entangled in a slug race which, due to the nature of slugs, takes over a month to finish. In the meantime, you must travel all over London to interfere with the race, investigate the mysterious woman behind the race who always plays tango music, and look into the backgrounds of the competitors.
The game was quite a bit longer than I expected, with an extended opening, three phases of the race with two different activities in each phase, and a long and moving finale.
The rewards were good, the lore about hell and the Carnelian coast was good, and the slugs were excellent. Also, I enjoyed having an option to 'Fight the lettuce'. Definitely recommend this one.
Encounter bizarre creatures and meet friends (?), December 8, 2020This is the first of four Chandler Groover exceptional stories I purchased for research for my new game (I've played his other story Paisley already).
Exceptional Stories are mini-games built into Fallen London's overarching scheme. They tend to have both in-game rewards and interesting storylines.
This one starts off well enough, though not entirely exciting. It's mostly hunting various monsters throughout London with a lot of Groover-esque mentions of food or eating until you end up finding and interrogating a suspect.
I thought it was a bit short but well-done, and then I discovered that that was only half the story. The rest takes you out of London and uses some unique mechanics, bizarre rewards, and difficult choices.
The Lore was good, the related art and the ideas behind the items given were good. It wasn't as good as Paisley (which makes sense, given the time frames) but is better than most exceptional stories.
Worth playing for the memorable monster in the second half and the rewards, especially if you are an early player (if not, you may be more interested in the Lore-heavy option that forfeits those rewards).
A million-word Wodehousian comedy, December 7, 2020I'm fairly certain this is the largest commissioned single-author interactive fiction game ever released.
80 Days has 750K words, and Fallen London (with over 30 authors) has 2.5 million.
The Hosted Game (another label from Choice of Games that essentially helps authors self-publish) called Tin Star has 1.4 million words, making it a little bigger.
This game is 100% in the Wodehousian vein. You are a rich and fairly lazy young man (or woman) who is, unknown to themselves, about to join one of London's prestigious clubs, the Noble Gases.
The story is told with a framing device where you are in the club, explaining to others how you arrived at your present situation. You have the option to retell each of the eight chapters, essentially giving you free save points.
One playthrough of this game took me over 4 hours, and seeing even half the content would take more than 10 hours.
The content branches quite a bit. In each chapter you generally have 4 or more options on how to spend your time, each of them conflicting with each other. In fact, the main mechanic of the game is constantly sacrificing one of your interest for another.
I found it overwhelming at times. I strove to be a subservient and friendly person who constantly tried to please his family, yet ended up with only middling relations with them and everyone else more or less displeased at me. The game allows for that, though, with very interesting writing happening when you fail. I intend to play through in the future.
I spent a great deal of one chapter at the opera (at the expense of other parts). In real life, I love the opera, so it was a little sad seeing my character found it boring. The references in the game are very funny and thrown in everywhere (I even saw a reference to Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which I didn't expect).
To me, this felt like 4 or 5 games in one. By focusing on all the family events and good moral character, I skipped out on all the chances to be a thief, much of the romance, and much of the club activity, but ended up having fun with my aunt's foster orphan and my lovelorn cousin.
As a final note, this is part 1 of a 3 part series, and so most threads are loose by the end of the game.
+Polish: I can't imagine the awful process involved in proofreading and editing a million-world novel with adjustable pronouns. I found no errors, I don't know how.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is lush and filled with snappy dialogue, clever allusions, and funny asides.
+Interactivity: This game takes the same approach as Animalia when it comes to branching: branch a ton and just write a ton of words for every choice, so every playthrough is different but long. It's the hardest approach, but I really respect it.
+Emotional impact: Several choices made me very nervous, and several pieces of dialog made me laugh.
+Would I play again? Definitely. It's like a whole new game, I might as well. I could be a crazy jerk lady-thief if I wanted to.
A long and action-centered race story with great references, December 6, 2020This is one of my favorite recent exceptional stories.
There are rumours of a special race going around Fallen London, where only the best captains are invited. Surprisingly, you aren't invited, but you know who is, and you discover a bizarre plot.
This story excelled at two things. First, it really uses your traits. I had a Zubmarine, a Hell's Hymn, successful terms as governor, and a monster hunter's harpoon, two things that take quite a lot of work to get, and the game incorporated both beautifully into the story. Many other things I did not have were also incorporated into the story.
Second, it is strongly connected to Sunless Sea. The race course passes by all of the major near-London locations from that game, so seeing the Sphynxes and the Iron Republic was nice.
The story was very lengthy, had memorable characters, and had some of those GO NORTH-like options (i.e. really bad ideas) Fallen London is known for.
Might be worth becoming an exceptional friend this month, as I think it's cheaper than just buying the story.
A game that is a treat for retro enthusiasts. Explore a large, mysterious island, December 2, 2020This is an unusual parser game in that a lot of its development went into making it accessible on a variety of platforms, including Apple II, Atari, Gameboy, TI-84 and Dreamcast.
This puts some pretty extreme constraints on a game, which explains a bit why this is in a .z3 format. It would also suggest that this game would have to be under-implemented or small.
But Labrande has fit quite a lot of game into this small package, and that's what took this from a 4-star game for me to a 5-star game.
You land on an island after a plane crash and have to both survive and investigate the mystery of the island.
Gameplay takes place in several portions, each of which involves increasingly sophisticated objects and devices.
The first, survival-focused, portion was fairly linear, which was odd to me, and then once it opened up more I realized that this was just a very large game so its opening, linear segment was larger than most.
This game is at its best when it presents mysteries. When the game first mentioned Tristam Island by name I was instantly intrigued. That was my driving force in playing.
The feel is more like Infocom in that you have large maps with a few useful items in each area. This map reminded me a bit of Planetfall, which had several empty rooms to serve for realism's sake.
The biggest divergences from Infocom are in NPCs and in 'pizazz'. There are few opportunities to interact with others in this game, lending it a quiter feel. And Infocom games tended to be over-the-top, with wild circuses or exciting spy thrillers or time travel. This game is completely grounded in reality, and in fact seems to have entailed a great deal of research.
There are some troubles here and there in terms of responses or synonyms, which is why I would have given 4 stars. But much or all of that is explained by the oppressive constraints one has to deal with to fit a game this complex into a small package.
If you are a fan of retro gaming, I can't think of anything better than to play this on your platform of choice. For fans of parser games in general, I can give this a positive recommendation as something longer than any game in this year's IFComp, and polished.
(Note: I used the provided hints, messaging the author and even decompiling to complete this game. With all those aids, it still took me several hours).
A fractured tale in the style of Photopia, December 2, 2020This game seems strongly influenced by Adam Cadre's work, specifically Photopia (for its fragmented story, multiple viewpoints and use of color) and Narcolepsy (which is specifically referenced in the text)..
This game switches back and forth between multiple points of view, including real-life people and fantasy stories. The game is themed around three lights: red, green and yellow.
It uses fancy techniques such as color and even upside down text.
Unlike Photopia, the overall story didn't congeal for me. I see themes; for instance, (Spoiler - click to show)all of the three 'colored' passages involve an option to help yourself or to help someone else and die right before you achieve your major goals.
Similarly, I couldn't really see the connections between the real-life stories. (Spoiler - click to show)While writing this, I realize that Diane went from scared kid helped by Ben to teenager missing Ben to woman on a train getting a call from (or calling?) Ben. But how are George and co. connected?
There are some typos (like a double period somewhere, and some missing letters in the upside down text. If I play through again I'll record it!) More importantly, on my first playthrough, I was (Spoiler - click to show)selfish in yellow and green scenarios and kind in red, and that led to the game crashing (Spoiler - click to show)immediately after getting my POV after the white door where Diane is in the train. The game just stopped and ended with 'press any key to close the interpreter'. I then replayed trying to be as nice as possible, and got an ending.
So, for me, this is technically and narratively impressive, but the storyline remained inscrutable to me.
This game contains segments with frequent strong profanity.
-Polish: Several bugs, including game-ending bug
+Descriptiveness: The fantasy sub stories were especially vivid
+Emotional impact: Again, the fantasy segments carry this for me, especially yellow and green.
-Interactivity: The conversation system required both typing a topic number and retyping TALK TO instead of letting you continue in menu format. This and a few other such things were frustrating.
+Would I play again? Yes, especially if it gets a post-comp release.
An impressive Dialog game with increasingly intricate puzzles, December 1, 2020I beta tested this game in a pure parser format before the clickable version was enabled.
This is a very strong game for the competition, one of the most polished parser games. You play as a young girl who has to go around the house getting stuff ready for dinner. But as the blurb says, this is a game of 'peculiar proportions'.
In fact, it turns out that the main mechanic of the game is (Spoiler - click to show)manipulating objects and altering the size of things by interacting with a scale model of your house. This provides for wildly inventive puzzles that get better as the game progresses.
But, since it gets better as the game progresses, it struggles a bit near the beginning for finding motivation to continue. In a sense, that's a lot like Shade, which has a very similar opening (in the sense that you're fetching objects in a house) and also gets better and better as time goes on.
Dialog is looking strong as a game language here. This is very complicated stuff, with a lot of disambiguation and complicated parser directions, and it's handled beautifully. The hyperlinks threw me off a bit as I was surprised that the mouse arrow turns into a text cursor when hovering over them. I wonder if some kind of color change when hovering (like Twine's highlighting) or turning the cursor into a hand (like both Twine and Windrift), as text cursor doesn't indicate 'click here' in my brain.
+Polish: The game is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: I was going to say that the setting is very commonplace, even with the cool mechanics, and doesn't lend itself to impressive descriptions, but then I remembered (Spoiler - click to show)the little hamster-sized hat you put on the hamster. There's a lot of cute little things in this game.
+Emotional impact: Very fun.
+Interactivity: Love the puzzles.
+Would I play again? Happily.
Gruesome poetry in triplicate, November 16, 2020Like most of B-minus's work, this is a shortish surreal Twine game with haunting descriptions and poetic use of choices.
In particular, this game features several choices in a row, on one page, where for each one you can pick RED, FAST, or BENT.
I originally was going to give this 3 stars, but the layout and format are so nice looking, especially for a game made in 4 hours or less.
I wasn't big on B-minus when I first read their work, but Chandler Groover has always expressed a lot of appreciation and interest in B-minus games, and it made me look at them with more appreciation. I wonder how much of my own reviewing is tangled up in my own experiences and history that I bring to the game. Earlier today I gave a higher rating to an Among Us-based IF game and rated it higher because I liked Among Us. It's weird to think about.
Anyway, I thought this was pretty good.
A short graphics-intensive musing on humanity with rats, November 16, 2020At first, I thought this game was just a link to BBC (which for some reason didn't work for me when I clicked on it but worked when I manually entered it into the search bar).
Then it turned out I could scroll down. It's a multimedia page and it has some interesting features (for instance, you can either scroll down to read more text or click links instead, with some interaction between the two).
The non-working initial link and the abrupt, buggy-looking ending put me off the game a little bit. The writing is vivid and imaginative, though, and the visuals are compelling.
A short replayable escape game in Choicescript, November 16, 2020I debated back and forth on what score to give this game, so I'm going to break it down by points.
This is a short choicescript game where you have to defeat an evil spirit in a test involving an ever-shortening candle.
It has a cool yellow bar representing the candle, and its structure allows for quick replay.
When I saw the timer, I felt nervous, so the game was able to impact me emotionally. I played through to two different endings.
Very impressive for four hours. I know its silly, but I think the yellow bar is what bumped it up from 3 stars to 4 for me, it's just cool to me as a Choicescript author.
A short parser game about the end of the world, November 16, 2020This game is surprisingly complex for a 4-hour game. There's conversation (although only ASK X ABOUT COMET works in general), many locations, a vehicle, rope.
There are a lot of grisly details. As a content warning, this game has frequent references to suicide. That part was a bit too dark for me.
I only found one ending, on a cliff. I'm sure there are other endings (I think other reviewers have found them).
A short story based on Among Us, November 16, 2020This is a very short story about the game Among Us. I feel like I'm giving all the La Petite Mort games 3 stars (which, I figure is what you'd expect most speed-IF to be at most). This game is very short, but I love playing Among Us with my son, so it was fun.
And it surprised me twice. The first one I feel very dumb for not thinking of, given how obvious it is, but the second thing that surprised me is how customized the text is based on the order of your choices.
Short fun.
A short but vivid one-verb game, November 15, 2020This game is directly modeled on Lime Ergot and Toby's Nose, where the main action is found by examining something over and over again, including things mentioned in the description.
It's more rough than those two, with some typos and less direction for the player, but the worldbuilding was intriguing to me and the descriptiveness well-done.
It's a brief game, but I played through it twice and feel there's still more for me to discover.
Monster party shenanigans, November 15, 2020This is a short, styled twine game about having a party with monsters and you having to find some gourds.
It has a world-model, various characters that can interact with each other, and some items.
Everything's just small. There's very little of interest in the conversational options that don't advance the story, and only a few options do anything.
But this was made in 4 hours, and I'm honestly impressed at how much they packed in in that time. And some of the characters are described very well (especially Orlok and Lycan).
A short and straightforward game about battling death, November 15, 2020This is pretty good for a 4-hour-or-less game. You meet death in some sort of spiritual limbo, and you get the chance to redeem your soul through playing chess.
Instead of placing ships on a grid, your position is pre-selected and your guesses come from a menu. I won the first time I played, but I don't know if it was rigged to always win or if it was just random chance.
There are some interesting thoughts on the freedom of the soul, but I feel like the whole thing could use some more fresh takes. But that's hard to do in 4 hours, so I'm overall pretty happy with this game.
A short choicescript game with elaborate character creation, November 15, 2020This is an interesting short game. You have to create a character to run through a short horror story.
But the narrator, Pallas, wants your creation to be incredibly detailed. While each choice has narrow options (as commented on by the narrator), there are many options to be had before the impending disaster.
I liked it. Near the middle, I started clicking fast through several similar/repetitive options, but I think that's part of the experience.
The game overall seems well polished for something made in less than 4 hours. The emotional moments didn't 100% land for me, but it was good overall.
A short surreal game about a pilgrim stopping at a shrine, November 13, 2020This is a short game written in 4 hours in which you stumble upon a shrine on a journey.
It reminded me or Caleb's Cannonfire Concerto, which is perhaps the Choicescript game that personally affected me the most. The surreal atmosphere (which is similar to his earlier games released this year) is splendid.
-Polish. As is expected for a 4-hour game, there is a lot that is not implemented or otherwise confusing with the parser.
+Descriptiveness: A lovely and vivid world, if dark.
+Interactivity: The puzzles felt directly connected to the narrative and lent it more emotional impact.
+Emotional impact: The twig-pilgrim was my favorite part.
+Would I play again? Yes, I like this game.
A tiny tale of terror told in a totally typical timeline, November 13, 2020This game is essentially a small snippet of a horror story told over 4-6 pages. Like the blurb suggests, it's 175 words.
It's completely linear, but I think the interactivity actually works for it here, as it paces the story well and allows for surprise more than would be feasible in a static format.
My rating system is designed to accomodate micro games, so I'm giving it stars for emotional impact, interactivity and descriptiveness but not for polish (there are typos which, in a 175 word game, should really be easy to fix using grammarly or something similar) or replayability. Even with the typos fixed, I would still give 3 stars, as the interactivity is only okay, not great. But fun little game.
A game heavy on worldbuilding with a sense of decay and wonder, November 11, 2020This game reminded me of Princess Mononoke crossed with Hybras from Sunless Skies.
You are essentially a gig worker trespassing in a national park to scavenge various psychotropic mushrooms which have properties far beyond the ones we have in real life. Normal mushrooms give you 1 cent a cap (fairly consistent with real gig jobs like Amazon Turk), while the King's Breakfast could pay off your rent.
It seems that worldbuilding by far is the biggest part of gameplay. More than half of my play time was spent reading the guide book, and it could have served just as well in static form, but it made finding mushrooms later on more fun.
It's weird to say, but I think that later gameplay reminded me of nothing more than the original Zork. I remember playing Zork as a kid and finding some weird stuff and thinking "I have no idea how this all connects", and getting the idea that there was way more out there. I later went and looked at the code of this game and found that there was way more out there, but the effect still persisted.
I don't know if that particular combination of deep lore dive + unpredictable trip in the woods worked for me interaction-wise, but I appreciated the polish, descriptivenes, emotional impact and replayability of the game.
Translate Latin on a spooky evening, November 10, 2020This is a charming short parser game in which you read a text in Latin in your room at night, translating each line as you go (provided with a dictionary and grammar that you can LOOK UP things in). You must frequently match adjectives with nouns that share their declension, so for language fans this is heaven.
The atmosphere in the game was quite nice as well.
+Polish: This kind of thing is pretty tricky to program; I'm impressed!
+Descriptiveness: The Latin itself provides most of the flavor
+Interactivity: As a language fan, it's great.
-Emotional impact: It was fun, but I didn't get creeped out as much as I might have.
+Would I play again? I think I definitely will come back to this at some point for fun.
A meaningful story about lockdowns and aging, November 9, 2020Like Will Not Let Me Go, this story is a well-written long Twine game about the effects of old age and Alzheimer's/dementia on an elderly man and those around him.
It plays out over ten days and ten nights. You struggle as a young at-home attendant for an elderly man named Carl who wavers between lucidity and violent forgetfulness.
At night, you have 4 tasks, the same every night. On the fast version, you do these once, but miss out on some important plot points. On the slow version, you do them 10 times every night, but they're tricky and shift around in very plot-relevant ways.
The 10-times version is hard but rewarding the first night. By the third night, though, I misclicked five times in a row (which restarts the night) and had to stop. It's hard because the image pushes all the text below the screen, so I had to scroll down for each image on a trackpad laptop.
The images are gorgeous and really contribute to the game. I wonder if, for the nights at least, it could have helped to put the image to one side and the text to another.
In any case, the story was meaningful to me, especially talking about divorce and changing relationships with one's spouse. I loved it, and appreciate the author writing it.
A gory Choicescript game made for Ectocomp, November 9, 2020This is a Choicescript game made for the Grand Guignol division of Ectocomp. It's a bloody and violent game about a confrontation in a forest.
I think that every game has different elements that contribute to the overall strength of it. Here's my take on five elements I usually look at in games:
-Polish. This is where the game struggles the most. There are numerous typos and misstatements scattered throughout the text. As an author, and especially as a Choicescript author, I am no stranger to making a ton of typos (I think I had to fix 'its' vs 'it's' 1000 times in my Choicescript game). But websites like grammarly can really help out here, which is what I use, or asking people to look over the text.
+Descriptiveness. This is the game's strongest point. The writing is detailed and vivid. For me, I found it violent and gory in an unpleasant way, but it was only unpleasant because it was so detailed.
-Interactivity: I personally like Choicescript best when it lets you customize who are you in detail or lets you plan out strategies. In this game, choices can be completely arbitrary (like 'go left, go right, go straight') or represent a forced choice where all options are essentially the same (that's not always bad, but in this case you get the same forced choice over and over again).
+Emotional impact: I felt disturbed by the game, which is not an emotion I like or seek out but which succeeds in its goal.
-Would I play again? Due to the content and the polish, I wouldn't do so right now.
Contains strong profanity and gore.
A well-designed, timed Twine game about social anxiety and more, November 9, 2020This game in the Grand Guignol part of Ectocomp 2020 was pleasant to play and looked good. It's written in Twine (I assume), but it's been heavily styled with colors and background graphics.
The design is tight and there are real choices with long-lasting effects. You have a specific deadline and a lot of options.
In this game, you're a werewolf that is at a college-type party trying to fit in, have fun and leave before you transform in an hour and a half.
The lycanthropy can easily be read as anxiety (especially given the name of the piece), and I've had the feeling many times of being at a party and trying to stay just long enough to feel comfortable leaving.
The one thing that keeps this from being amazing for me is the signalling of choices. My favorite choice-based games allow either deep characterization of the protagonist or strategizing, and it was hard for me to do either one here. I feel like having more hints about the possible effects of choices could fix that, but it may just be a personal design choice and not something that needs to be 'fixed'. I had fun either way, and played through three or four times.
A surprisingly rich and complex but difficult optimization games, November 7, 2020I beta tested this game briefly.
I usually think of Ectocomp games as being quick and simple, but the Grand Guignol games have been pretty intense the last few years.
This game has several innovative/amazing features:
1. It's in a custom parser that's brand new but so good that it felt like Dialog or Inform for me
2. It has excellent javascript integration with smooth scrolling image sidebars
3. It has an optimization puzzle that requires in-depth strategy and a lot of spatial thinking.
So it's pretty cool. You're breaking into a tomb (like Infidel) and need to grab a scarab amulet as well as as much treasure as you can carry (which is rough, given you can only carry 4 things at a time in your hands).
The puzzles are harder than most optimization games I've seen. Just getting a successful ending at all will likely take several tries. There's enough complexity here that I probably saw <1/2 of the game when I beta tested it and still there are things I don't understand (like the purpose of the (Spoiler - click to show)map and cursed disk).
The only drawback I found is, like the other optimization games, the puzzle itself detracted somewhat from the emotional impact of the story, as the story is mostly a frame for the puzzles and is repeated over and over each time. Otherwise, for fans of optimised treasure runs, this is a great game.
A grab bag of four Halloween games, November 6, 2020Ryan Veeder's playing a completely different ball game than most authors. It's almost like he just has fun making up things with weird ideas and then polishing them intensely before releasing them. Who does that?
There are four mini-games that I encountered, like the other Balderstone games (with each game serving just fine as a release on their own). They are:
-A complex combat game (Spoiler - click to show)This one reminded me of Kerkerkruip. You have a large map filled to the brim with weapons. You have to fight a lot of different people, but each weapon is destroyed upon use. This was fun but difficult, it took me a while to solve some of the cool sub-puzzles.
-A small game that is more interactive than most interactive fiction. (Spoiler - click to show)This is a mad-lib game where you are asked for a series of words, then you play a game involving that series of words, and it's implemented very well.
-A story told by children.(Spoiler - click to show)This has some surprises in design. Like usual. Ryan seems to think 'What if the players tried something weird and I just ran with it?
-A more traditional game at an abandoned gas station with some narrative surprises.
I thought as I played these games is that one thing Ryan does well is making sure the player encounters every story beat on every playthrough. It's so easy, due to the non-linear nature of games, for players to miss important backstory or details, but all of these games incorporate that into the gameplay itself, which is wonderful.
A speed game about contemplating your sins, November 4, 2020This was an odd game for me. It's very possible that it being in Spanish affected my interpretation of it, because I found it difficult to read due its large number of obscure words (you're essentially a grisly warrior fighting heretics in a fantasy world).
This is a short parser game, probably a speed-IF. You're in a room with a few clothes and some empty containers, and...that's it. There's a door, but it's locked. If you look close enough, you find that key. But the door has no keyhole! But again, that's all there is, right?
I looked at the source (very happy the author provided it!) and it seems that progression through the game involves doing specific actions several times, including (Spoiler - click to show)dropping the key and some actions that I've never really done in an IF (like (Spoiler - click to show)peeing in a jar).
So for me, I liked the descriptiveness and it felt spooky, but the interactivity and polish felt lacking. If this was a speed-IF or first game, it's actually pretty good! But it doesn't measure up to longer parser games.
A gripping supernatural tale about the Spanish Civil War, November 4, 2020I went back and forth on this story. At first, I thought it was one of the best stories I've read in a long time, but I think the second half isn't quite as good as the first, and there were a few minor errors (like an uncapitalized 'la' at the beginning of a sentence).
This game is set in the 1936 Spanish Civil War, and you're ordered to bombard a city that is supposedly harboring refugees. Chaos ensues, as well as supernatural shenanigans.
The characterization was amazingly good, and the detail made me feel like I was there. For me, the realistic parts were the strongest, while the supernatural elements, while polished and well-done, were less compelling to me. Definitely felt happy to read this.
A poetic and imaginative Texture game about Japanese spirits, November 3, 2020This game was entered in Ectocomp 2020.
This is a Texture game, and it presented a double language barrier to me, as it is in Spanish and contains numerous Japanese words as well. So I may have missed out on some of the nuances, but I found it charming and well-written.
The story is about a scholar who is seeking inspiration for a story and so engages in Japanese calligraphy. There are several objects around that can serve as inspiration, each inspiring a sort of reverie or dream that always ends up disturbed by a yokai or Japanese spirit.
I laughed at some parts of it, and was intrigued by others. Parts reminded me of Alice and Wonderland. The multimedia use was lovely. Definitely worth checking out for a chill, relaxing time.
An immersive text experience with a satisfying conclusion, October 29, 2020This game is an ancient relic discovered and remade by Ryan Veeder, who has found all the documentation relating to it. By pure luck, the style of the gameplay has the whimsical charm and quality implementation characteristic of Ryan's own writing style (probably why he was attracted to it in the first place).
This game has a fairly hefty map, with a city of about 12 locations, many with an interior, and another chunk from extra side rooms and a couple of (not at all bad) maze-like locations. (maybe maze-lite locations).
The game has a built-in hint system where you ask your friends for help (which I accessed many times), and Dan Fabulich has made comprehensive invisiclues.
The story is basically what you would get if you had the Hobbit, but instead of the background of the Silmarillion you had a custom story that was a mashup of Captain Planet, Gargoyles and TMNT, and instead of Bilbo wandering around the very edges of the backstory you had a girl wandering around doing random stuff.
And the main theme of the game is (Spoiler - click to show)trading. If you every played the original game boy Zelda game, there was a long, involved trading quest involving everyone. That's basically what's going on here. You wander around town, slowly realizing what everyone wants or needs. Then all at once you find the starting point and it falls like dominoes. Until you get stuck.
The 17 digit key wasn't as hard as I expected it to be, but was computationally satisfying, especially the dichotomy chart, which reminded me of the tree dichotomy chart in the kids' encylopedia I had growing up, where if you identify the tree wrong, you get devoured by monsters on the next page.
I enjoyed the game, and also when I saw the Help text, I felt overcome and rested my head on the table in gratitude. I had fun with this game.
An interesting, short one-room mystery intrigue game, October 22, 2020This game is highly rated, which is why I tried it. It is fairly short, and has two difficult puzzles, as well as some trouble at first until you realize that you have to examine every object in the room (okay, maybe it' s just me).
The first puzzle (involving a sequence of numbers) was very ingenious. I thought at first the answer would involve some experimentation, but it was all very logical in the end, though I didn't solve it myself.
The second puzzle is a bit more obscure, but fun.
Altogether, it is not very long, and I would recommend it only to puzzle fiends. Those who are into intrigue may find it worthwhile to skip the two puzzles via walkthrough.
Discrimination on Mars, October 20, 2020This is a short game with two choices, each one being ‘support protestors’ vs ‘don’t support protestors’ (with a middle-of-the-road option in some playthroughs).
You play as someone on Mars who is in a relationship with someone who is either marginalized or very socially active.
I believe that all people are equal before God and I believe that racism is abhorrent. I believer that I am a beneficiary of a system that benefits white people over other races, and that change is necessary and requires personal effort from privileged peoples to stop practices that harm other races and foster those that strengthen them.
But i don’t believe the choice structure in this game is an effective way to communicate any of those messages.
As a final note, the game was polished and well-written.
+Polish: The game is thoroughly polished.
+Descriptiveness: It was well-written.
-Interactivity: See my thoughts above.
+Emotional impact: It certainly got a reaction out of me.
-Would I play again? I don't plan on it.
Comma use and Christianity in a puzzle-filled house, October 20, 2020This is the final game I’m playing for IFComp, and was pretty good to leave off on.
In this game, you play as the inheritor (with the rest of your family) to the estate of your Great Uncle. This uncle cared a great deal about commas and had feelings about them that were entangled with Christian religion and Greek mythology.
The game has several puzzles (accessed more or less in order) and all are based on commas. It’s hard to write this review without overthinking my comma use. I’ve already removed two, and now I’m scared.
The idea is clever, the puzzles aren’t too bad, but the implementation is very thin. A lot of empty rooms are implemented, most descriptions aren’t written in. There is conversation, which is good, and some complicated things have been implemented. But overall this would benefit a great deal from custom responses (you can see all possible responses you can change when in the IDE by typing RESPONSES ALL). The locations could also be cut down or made more vibrant and interesting.
Overall, though, this was a fun game to end up on. Thanks for making it!
-Polish: Could use a lot more custom responses and descriptions.
-Descriptiveness: Most of the writing is bare-bones.
+Interactivity: I enjoyed the puzzles.
+Emotional impact: Fun from puzzles.
+Would I play again? Yes, maybe next time I'm going to be working on long-form fiction.
A lengthy game showing vignettes of strange experiences, October 19, 2020This game was created as part of an MFA in writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where it was accepted as part of the program’s requirements, the first time a game has been accepted as part of their requirements. The author has also taught classes in Narrative Design in Twine.
This is a huge Twine game. The main idea is that you experience randomly-selected stories, and in between them a greater story builds up. You must acquire certain attributes or tokens to sell to advance.
This game correlates well with my experience of the academic environment vs submitting a game for evaluation by the wide world through publication or (in this case) IFComp.
The academic ‘audience’ is typically 4-5 people, the members of your committee. If its anything like math, the committee will likely spend very little time looking at your work, trusting perhaps your supervisor who has had weekly meetings with you to assure you that the work is high quality. For this game, I suspect the committee likely played for a few minutes until a death happened. In this environment, appearing to be a big time investment is the main goal, and appearing to be deep is another (which this game accomplishes by referencing racism and misogyny).
In the ‘open world’, though, other things are valued much more, #1 of which is a lack of bugs and typos, of which this game has many. For a large game entered into the competition, it needs far more testing, and hopefully publishing a proofing copy on Twinery and running it through grammarly or hiring an editor.
The game also uses very slow text in the middle. It features an undo feature which is very helpful, but if you reach a segment where you have to pay more tokens, even very late in the game, and you die, there is no choice but to restart, playing through the entire game.
I definitely think this work is valuable and I think that this is worthwhile to make, but it’s difficult to please two groups of people at once, and making a game that appeals to a wide audience is something that takes practice and a lot of help from others.
-Polish: Needs more polish.
+Descriptiveness: The game was very descriptive.
+Interactivity: This was good for the most part; the tokens are what got me.
+Emotional Impact: This game made me think a lot about my own past in academia.
-Would I play again? No, it felt a little too dificult to go far and the tone of some of the segments left me cold.
A short contemplative Twine game, October 19, 2020This is a game seemingly designed to be inscrutable. The prose is dense and hard to comprehend, and the structure in the opening sequence is a series of almost randomly highlighted words that lead to musings on those words or the reason you selected them.
Overall, I’m not quite sure if the author succeeded in their goal. Was it contemplation about our place in the universe and its effects? Was it poetry? Was it a meditation on life? I’m not really sure.
And what effect did the Thief have on others? Make them believe only the Thief mattered/existed? I’m not sure what that means.
+Polish: I didn't see any errors.
-Descriptiveness: I found the text vague and imprecise.
-Interactivity: In the first section, it's hard to know what to pick; in the latter portion, there's only one thing to pick.
-Emotional impact: This game didn't land for me.
+Would I play again? I might take it for another spin in the future to get more impressions.
A medium-length Ink game escaping from a Dino Park, October 19, 2020This is a medium-length Ink game where everything breaks loose at a dinosaur park.
I saw this game with one of the authors guiding us through it at the Seattle IF Meetup. I appreciate the witty humor and the world model that lets you travel around.
I think there are a few things that need to be ironed out. There are instant deaths without undo, but it does have save points to help you restart. A bit more troubling is that there is often not any indication of what path is most likely to lead to success. This was typical of CYOA books, but those books allowed instant undo and instant traversal to any page at any time. I’ve often thought that successful ‘puzzly’ IF is based around making the player feel smart, so giving them hints to pick up on is really helpful.
The other thing that I think could be improved is the story pacing. I think the big moment in the middle needed a bit more buildup. It’s possible that there were more clues hidden in some of the options, but as Emily Short has recommended in the past, if you’re writing a branching game make sure that it’s impossible for the player to miss your story. If a beat is essential to understanding what’s going on, make sure that story beat is hit in every playthrough.
Otherwise, I found this game fun. I couldn’t get to an ending (in the Frogger version, the best I got was rescuing a guy out of water before dying, and in the lab, I got in a weird repeated cycle where I kept getting ‘sneak’ and ‘distract’ and one other option, and I couldn’t figure it out). Glad to see Ink being used!
-Polish: There were a few typos (like helicoptor) and the laboratory ending with the dinos seemed off somehow.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is full of interesting descriptions of things.
+Interactivity: Even though I was frustrated, I felt like I had real options near the end.
-Emotional impact: I felt like there needed to be one or two additional scenes for buildup before dramatic sections (that set up the feeling or more tension)
+Would I play again? I'd like to find a successful ending.
Experience a sidewalk chalk contest through multiple viewpoints, October 19, 2020Ryan Veeder has been one of my biggest influences in game design. His games are generally the model I use for quality and ease of play.
One thing I’ve always admired about his work is how he makes the most trivial parts of his games as elaborate as possible and simplifies the important parts. In the first review I ever wrote of one of his games, I said:
"The game gives you explicit directions on what to do at first. I love ignoring directions in parser games; in some games, like Bronze, the game just doesn’t move forward at all if you ignore the directions. In this game, ignoring the directions gives you a lot of different, fun results.
[…]
The conversation system seemed at first incredible, and then very annoying, especially with the main favorable NPC. You have a lot to say, but 95% of it is completely irrelevant."
I no longer really see that as annoying, because now it’s something I look forward to. And those two quotes above could easily describe this game as well.
This game is a multi-perspective look at a sidewalk chalk contest in 2011. Given Ryan’s predilection for going whole-hog into fictional backstories for his game, I think it’s likely this is entirely fictional, but there is a great deal of worldbuilding behind the scenes included in an epilogue. It’s especially interesting that the intent of the epilogue is to construct in the player an image of Ryan and his personal life, giving the game a pseudo-autobiographical nature.
The actual gameplay is walking through a sidewalk chalk contest multiple times as different people, together with some flashbacks and some flashweirds where things go bizarre. The game is abstract enough at times that you could put any personal interpretation on it, and I enjoy the interpretation where the sidewalk chalk contest represents IFComp. Funnily enough, it represents this comp very well, with games with heavy worldbuilding, a game that is entirely a political statement/slogan, games that are mostly decorative, games based almost entirely on other media by other creators, and sexy games that some judges feel are too sexy (guess that judge is me!).
So I enjoyed the game, it had exactly the kind of things I look for in a Ryan Veeder game. It’s always a pleasure to see the directions his mind takes him. If you liked this game, I could recommend Winter Storm Draco for a generally similar style. If you want more puzzles, I’d recommend Taco Fiction, The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening, the Crocodracula games or Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder.
+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again?: All 5 categories are satisfied here.
Short RPG maker game about genre conventions, October 19, 2020This is an RPG Maker game. Its goal seems to be to take genre conventions and turn them on their head.
I guess the real question is, does it succeed? I’m not too concerned about the format, as very little happens in the game outside of the text boxes and the player’s choices. At least in my playthroughs, it always ended after one specific action.
I feel like this is old ground. I swear Zelda games have made the same kind of point going back to the first Game Boy game, and so have many other RPGs (I swear the Soul Blazer trilogy does this at least once). The concluding segment reminded me (in a good way of Chrono Trigger).
It just seems a bit silly. And there are tons of pop culture references, including to Adventure Time and Lord of the Rings. So I just consider it a bit of fun. If anyone finds a ‘correct path’ that doesn’t lead to the main bad ending, let me know!
+Polish: I didn't find any errors.
+Descriptiveness: There were several funny lines.
-Interactivity: I didn't enjoy slowly clicking through interactions with tons of items, but I also didn't want to miss anything.
-Emotional impact: I kept waiting for the payoff.
+Would I play again? I am interested in finding a better ending.
A very well-written story about Halloween and college life, October 19, 2020This game reminds me a little bit of the IF game Eurydice in tone and opening setup.
This is a longish Twine game that is almost entirely choiceless. It consists of several pages, each long, containing a detailed story, with some click-replace links and a few 'asides' (where you read them and come back). An early segment allows some options in the order you explore three scenes. It's styled with orange-on-black text, and is set at a 1999 Halloween party.
The structure of the game means that this game depends entirely on the quality of its story, and I think it excels there. There's real tension, especially if you read the content warnings ahead of time. There are surprises throughout, and I think overall this is some of the best writing of the comp. In a way, that made some of the links a little more frustrating; I didn't want to miss any of the good writing, so I just clicked on everything in order, going back and forth on the asides. I wonder if I 'notation' system like Harmonia's would have worked better.
If the author reads this, I loved the story. Very meaningful!
+Polish: I didn't see any errors.
+Descriptiveness: Great writing.
-Interactivity: I was a little frustrated by it.
+Emotional impact: I teared up a bit after.
-Would I play again? I liked it, but I think it will stick well enough from 1 playthrough.
A short branching Twine game about a universe and a cat, October 18, 2020This is a cute game, and I had fun with it.
You’re a subatomic particle in a universe that’s constantly getting destroyed and recreated by a great cosmic cat.
The structure is basically the Time Cave type, where branches can take you down divergent paths. There are 5 permanent endings and many restart endings. It’s short enough that replay is easy.
The graphics for this game are bright and bold. Your cursor can turn into different animals. Your background can get filled with different pictures of the universe.
Worth playing since, if nothing else, its fun-to-length ratio is so high.
+Polish: The game is very polished. Graphics are a nice addition, although they can be 'busy'.
+Descriptiveness: The universe has a lot of detail and variety.
+Interactivity: The short length makes playing through a couple of times worthwhile.
+Emotional impact: It felt charming.
-Would I play again? I think that a few times through was enough. I'm not completely interested in seeing all endings.
+Descriptiveness:
An effective short story about an uncomfortable work situation, October 18, 2020I had a bizarre moment when starting up this game because it seemed 100% familiar. I thought that I must have beta-tested it and forgot, or somehow seen it earlier.
Then I realized that I had seen it earlier, but in a blog (I assume it's okay to link, as the author links to their blog in the end-credits):
https://annwords.wordpress.com/2020/06/23/what-happened-on-the-12th-of-july-2018/
I remember at the time finding it a traumatic story.
This game is very well-done. It's not aspiring to be an epic game or a involved interactive experience. Instead, its a game that tells a specific short story and it does so very, very well.
You play as a teen who was recently hired at a store in the mall. Work is a little bit frightening (you're young and neurodivergent, as is hinted at), and things start to go off the rails pretty soon.
The interaction is generally a 'continue' link, a choice between two similar options, or links which 'aren't allowed'. Usually, this makes for poor interaction, but in this game, it's entirely the point: feeling constrained, or helpless, or swept up by events.
Multimedia use is subtle and effective. Slight changes in the background color, inconspicuous music. I was thrown off for a second by the fact that all links are approximately the default color for already-visited links (which increased my sense of Deja-Vu) but that was just a small thing.
Overall, great game, 100% effective (for me) in what it was trying to do. Crappy experience, though.
+Polished: Very nice effects, everything worked.
+Descriptiveness: I felt like I was there.
+Interactivity: It contributed to the game's message
+Emotional impact: Definitely!
+Would I play again? Yes, and recommend it to others.
A clever wordplay game with a huge world, October 18, 2020I’m always happy to see another Andrew Schultz game in the comp. His games have ranged from large open worlds with large amount of traditional puzzles (like The Problems Compound) and compact, laser-focused games like Threediopolis or The Cube in the Cavern.
This one has open-world elements mixed with a lot of wordplay. There is a specific gimmick/rule for items and things in this game that has surprisingly large amounts of play.
I beta tested this game, and was pretty overwhelmed while testing. The state of all possible solutions is so large (especially when using slang words or words I’d never heard pronounced). Fortunately, since then, Andrew Schultz has both increased the number of available help systems (including a very useful passage to a ‘cheater’ helper) and turned on most of the older hint systems by default.
My most recent playthrough was a lot easier due to these helps, but still difficult. I especially enjoyed the boat-based sequence. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the game is when you get on a good string of guesses in a row. One possible weakness is the lack of uniformity in puzzle solutions; each puzzle might be solved by a song you’re thinking of, a book you’ve read, typing in the solution to a wordplay puzzle, or USE-ing an item. While this theoretically increases freedom, the state space becomes a little too large for me to handle successfully. Available hint items definitely aid this though!
One thing I’d love to see in a future Andrew Schultz game is one where you have to find nouns hidden inside other words (like a ‘shovel’ that produces a ‘hovel’ you can enter).
+Polish: Given the enormous state space, I think this is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: There's a lot of creative uses of the main wordplay mechanic here.
+Interactivity: Despite my frustrations, I had fun. I like wordplay.
-Emotional impact: I didn't get absorbed into the story.
+Would I play again? Yeah, it feels like there's more to discover.
A modern-day Jinn story in Twine, October 18, 2020So this game has you play as an ancient jinn trying to get back some cash from a hustler.
This is a pretty long Twine game, with interesting styling and good sentence-by-sentence writing and also excellent worldbuilding. It also features romance of several kinds and stories within stories.
I found the story and the interactivity fairly good, but I feel like they could go further. There are different layers to games: if they're buggy or full of typos, nothing else really matters, the game's just too weird to play. If it's not buggy but the interactivity is really frustrating or the text is boring, then it just makes you want to stop.
This game clears all of those hurdles (which is a real feat in and of itself), but I think it misses the last one, which consists of things like emotional depth and compelling gameplay.
The characterization of the player and NPCs are all over the place. Sometimes we want to murder everyone, sometimes we're lonely. Sometimes we want things for years, and then a second later we don't. Our main ally goes from assertive to passive to aggressive to loving.
And the interactivity often seems like 'Do things this way or do things the same way but with different phrasing'. I feel like it missed some chances to let you consistently characterize yourself or provide long-lasting effects. There are some choices to do such things though (I especially enjoyed [spoiler]the effects of buying a leopard-print shirt.[/spoiler] )
I think this is a good game, but I think this author is capable of making an entirely awesome game, and that's why I pointed out those specific things. Your mileage may vary!
+Polish: No bugs in my playthrough, nice styling
+Descriptiveness: Writing was vivid and funny.
-Interactivity: I felt like the choices weren't very effective.
-Emotional impact: I couldn't get a read on people's motivations and characteristics.
+Would I play again? Yes, this game was pretty fun!
A collection of short tales in the style of Rudyard Kipling, October 18, 2020This is a series of short stories inspired by/based around Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories. Each story is told over a small number of pages, and there is one or two choices per story. These choices lead to massive changes between replays, to the point where it’s basically a choice between two separate stories.
The writing is good, similar to the original. The poetry was amusingly intentionally bad.
I appreciate the thought that went into its game, especially its sly twist near the end. I wasn’t really a fan of Kipling’s Just So stories before playing this game, and I think that influenced me not really getting a big emotional impact from this. But this game shows the author knows how to plan, write and program an interesting Twine game.
+Polish: The game is immaculately polished.
+Descriptiveness: The writing has a distinctive voice.
+Interactivity: Having the choices make an impact was nice.
-Emotional impact: The game was interesting, but I wasn't invested in the characters.
-Would I play again? I think once was enough. It'll stick in my brain though.
A game about unpacking your office, with some mysterious secrets, October 17, 2020This game falls in the middle of the comp’s parser games for me. It’s reasonably well-polished, has a nice slow trickle of information, and has a well-defined progression. On the other hand, it’s fairly linear and could use some more emotional impact. So it was better than many other comp games for me, but it could use more to rise to the top.
In this game, you play as an academic moving into an office. You have a bunch of boxes stacked on top of each other. As you open them one at a time, you have to find a place to put everything. But there’s only a finite amount of room in the office, and a lot has to go into the trash and storage.
The idea of taking things out of boxes one by one and thinking about them while you decorate an office isn’t all that bad, but it’s not exactly action-packed (I say this as someone who wrote a game where you put things -into- a box while thinking about them while moving -out- of an office). The best parts are where you slowly learn more about the character’s background. In that sense, it becomes a mystery puzzle, and that’s completely up my alley.
The one thing that I think could be improved with the parser is near the end when you’re trying to wrap up. The game frequently told me I wasn’t done unpacking when I tried to leave, but all the boxes were gone (when I tried to leave the room). LOOKing usually gave me a hint, so I think if I could ask for anything it’s that the message for going WEST would change after the boxes are gone to give you more hints.
I was happy to play this, overall, and the name makes a lot of sense by the end of the game!
+Polish: The game was generally well-polished.
+Descriptiveness: The writing had a distinctive voice.
+Interactivity: I was able to make plans and execute them, which is nice.
-Emotional impact: The game's big moments didn't land for me.
+Would I play again? Yeah, it's pretty fun!
An entertaining game set in a mansion full of magical implements, October 17, 2020I played this game over a week before writing this, but put off reviewing it. It’s because I really enjoyed the concept, but found it very buggy (such as every important object being listed in the room as ‘You see…here’ or having scenery objects be takable).
I sent a list of possible bug fixes to the author, who took it under advisement, and tried playing it again.
I really enjoyed this game. You play as the assistant to a magician who was been kidnapped by a logician who leaves clues for you scattered around a mansion. Along the way, you encounter a whacky set of characters and bizarre magical implements.
The overall structure resembles Karella’s other games, but this is the first Glulx one. So there are still some iffy spots, but that’s to be expected: getting all the bugs out of an Inform game takes a long time and a lot of testing. But the writing was funny, the puzzles were generally well-clued and involved very creative concepts (more in the items used than the puzzle structure itself). and I think that overall this was great.
I wasn’t sure about whether I felt good or bad about a certain Christian clown in the game, as it seems generally mocking but presents him as sincere, so I’m on the fence about that. Otherwise, I heartily recommend this game.
++++Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? Yes, yes, yes, and yes
-Polish: Could use some more!
A game about a two-dimensional version of Fallen London, October 17, 2020So, 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.
A leveling-up game about evolution, mushrooms and minigames, October 17, 2020So 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.
A game about fishy religious computers, October 17, 2020In 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.
Ancient greek hijinks in the Wodehousian style, October 17, 2020Well, 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.
An entertaining detective game with unusual animals, October 17, 2020I 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!
Play as a demon altering people's minds. Has graphical map, October 16, 2020I 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!
A creepy Twine game with excellent visual effects, October 16, 2020I 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.
A talking sword and a hero get out of troubles through conversation, October 15, 2020This 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.
A Quest murder mystery with interesting narrative tricks, October 15, 2020This 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.
An intricate horror antique shop management sim, October 15, 2020Man, 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.
A parser implementation of a classic puzzle, October 15, 2020This game is based on the famous puzzle of trying to bring a carnivore, an herbivore and some plant across a river where you only have enough room for one at a time.
It isn’t the first time this classic puzzle has been entered in IFComp. In 2007 Chris Conroy entered an Inform implementation called Fox, Fowl and Feed. That game featured several surprises when you tried to implement the classic solution.
This game plays it straight, albeit with some funny messages (like picking up the bear, which is also something you can do in the 1970’s game ADVENTURE). There is one small puzzle beyond the main one, I should add.
My guess is the author wanted to make a game and decided to code it up and enter. And they succeeded in that. The question is, what’s next?
+Polish: The game is generally well-implemented for what's in it.
-Descriptiveness: The descriptions are very plain.
+Interactivity: I was able to carry out my desired solution pretty quickly.
-Emotional impact: I wasn't invested in the game.
-Would I play again? Once was enough.
An interesting experiment with single-action puzzles in Twine, October 15, 2020This was actually pretty fun, but only because somebody gave me a clue about (Spoiler - click to show)looking at the icon at the top of the screen.
This is a short game consisting of around 10 choices, but the choice is always the same: Move On. In a way, this makes it like the single-action games in the parser world like Lime Ergot, Take, or Eat Me.
But how do you do puzzles in Twine with just a single option? The answer is ingenious: (Spoiler - click to show)there is a moving motorcycle on the top. Clicking before it reaches the end gives you one action, while waiting until it stops gives another. And that's all there is. I love it.
+Polish: The game is smooth and works well.
-Descriptiveness: The text was pretty generic.
+Interactivity: I had fun with the mechanic.
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement.
-Would I play again? I don't think this mechanic would provide a second replay as fun as the first.
An intriguing game about curses and memory but with UI issues, October 15, 2020Okay, so I think I spent more time on this game than almost any other, but about half of it wasn’t playing.
This game uses immersive text, graphics and sound to tell a story of a man with amnesia and a curse who meets another man with the same. Together the two of you must discover a cure to your awful curse.
The overall storyline seems interesting, but this game is inaccessible in many, many ways.
Several other reviewers online have already talked about the slow text (including someone who screenshotted a tweet of mine about slow text), but I still want to talk about it a bit.
Slow text has essentially one use: in short, mostly linear contemplative games like Congee. And even there, Congee loads the whole thing at once, instead of the typewriter effect that’s distracting.
Long games with slow text can be excruciatingly painful to read. But at least you can get through them.
But if you have to replay a game frequently, then being able to quickly click back to where you came from is essential.
This game is full of frequent deaths, is very long, uses slow typewriter text and has disabled the UNDO button. It does let you save, but to know that you have to click on the ‘controls’ button at the beginning of the game to learn that L brings up the load screen, and then you have to guess that you save at the load screen.
These decision weren’t just casual decisions by the author. They are completely baked in. I often go through and modify game code to disable slow text (that’s how I played Lux two years ago, and loved it!) This game’s code absolutely embraces the slow text. It’s baked into every phrase. It’s cooked into a macro hidden deep in the javascript (not the game’s in-Twinery javascript sheet, but the html file itself). Disabling that macro gets rid of all in-game links, as those are timed to appear when the text is done. Restoring the undo button doesn’t restore the picture, just a blank box.
After about three hours of trimming it down, I got it to work. I raced through the game, clicking and feeling euphoria. And then I realized that the main mechanic the game relies on is broken.
According to the walkthrough, if you pick up books you’re supposed to be able to ‘rewind’ at key decision points. But that didn’t happen for me.
I looked at the games Twinery code, and even this is obfuscated. All of the structure is hidden because boxes have generic names (like passage 1-1) and are lined up in exact geometrical rows to hide the overall structure. But I finally found the correct passage, and it has code for the rewind to display, but it doesn’t work.
I picked through the rectangles, trying to glean the story. It seems to me that this game is about (Spoiler - click to show)vampires, which explains (Spoiler - click to show)the reaction to garlic and holy water, and the lack of a reflection.
As a final note, I saw that the author had included a secret debug code accessible by typing D. That suggests to me that the author found his game too tedious to play through repeatedly, and ended up using the debug to test it.
I’ve seen a few other people do that in this comp. I really recommend playing through your game from start to finish the way that you anticipate others will throughout the development period.
Also, another tip that’s been very helpful for me: start beta testing before you’re finished with your tricky coding, so that people can give feedback on the concept. My first version of Alias the Magpie that I sent to JJ Guest for testing was pretty crappy, but I wanted to see if the idea worked. You can even just shop the idea around before implementing it.
In any case, it took serious programming chops to create this game, and I’m impressed by the author’s abilities.
-Polish: Has several errors.
+Descriptiveness: Is very descriptive.
-Interactivity: Very frustrating.
-Emotional impact: The UI frustrations made it difficult to get invested.
-Would I play again? Not without several changes.
A complex custom parser web game with a deep detective story, October 14, 2020I beta tested this game.
This is another custom parser game, but this one is web-enabled, and features a complex realtime murder investigation in the vein of Deadline (which is cited as a direct inspiration).
Just like in Deadline, you have a large building full of independently moving people, time events that change everything, and the ability to analyse (although here we carry our own fingerprinting machine and chemical analyzer).
The parser is not bad for a custom parser; in fact, people's custom parser writing skills in general seem to be improving a lot from year to year. There are some niceties that need some improvement, though. For instance, the game tells you to sample things in the format 'SAMPLE __________', but if you try to sample the wrong things (like SAMPLE PANEL) it throws an error message as if SAMPLE wasn't recognized. Of course, I beta tested it so I should have found and reported that myself.
Deadline was the hardest of all the Infocom games for me to play, and I ran to the hints quickly. This game is also hard, but plays by the same rules as Deadline. Without any hints, I expect this game to take several hours. The mystery is quite elaborate; I only ever found the most obvious suspect, but I'm interested in still looking for the truth.
If you liked Infocom's mysteries, you'll definitely like this, and it's a worthy successor to them.
-Polish: As indicated above, the custom parser could use a little tuning up.
-Descriptivenss: The descriptions are generally small and bare.
+Interactivity: The mechanics are ingenious and the puzzle is clever.
+Emotional impact: I found this game intriguing.
+Would I play again? One day I plan on revisiting this game.
An unfortunately bugged KPop reality show Twine, October 14, 2020This is a KPop simulation game. You have several stats (such as physical appearance, singing ability, dancing) and different challenges you can meet with your stats.
The game is pretty rough, and needs a lot more testing. The overall storyline seems interesting (reality show + mystery subplot). But this is a good reminder that authors should run through their games right before submitting to check if its completable!
-Polish: Too buggy, several typos
+Descriptiveness: The author has interesting descriptions
-Interactivity: Too many options are 'Do the right thing' vs 'Do the wrong thing'.
-Emotional impact: The choppy writing style and bugs made it hard to enjoy.
-Would I play again? Not until it gets some bug fixes.
If you're interested in seeing more of it, you can get past the first place the game becomes impassable by opening the file in Twinery and going to the passage Song A and deleting the first time it says to display untitled passage 12.
A very polished Vorple cyberpunk game, October 14, 2020I beta tested this game.
This is a really technically impressive game that uses Vorple for a cool layout, a single graphic and some fun music.
It’s a cyberpunk world where people jack into cyberspace (presenting Wild West/Fantasy and Ancient Japanese settings in this game). You’re asked to infiltrate a base, but chaos ensues.
The game is exceptionally well-polished, with very few bugs. It’s also fairly linear. Most conversations end up with you saying all available options, and most settings are constrained, with the most freedom being late in the game.
This makes the puzzles simpler, aided by the nice keywords, but comes at the expense of freedom. I’ve realized as I study the comp that players value both polish and freedom, so I’m really interested in seeing where this places!
+Polish: Looks great
+Descriptiveness: I liked quite a bit of the worldbuilding
+Interactivity: I found the puzzles enjoyable
-Emotional impact: I found myself at an emotional distance from this game, and don't know why.
+Would I play it again? I've played this game twice, and enjoyed it both times.
A complex parser game about trying to shave your chest hair, October 14, 2020Joey Acrimonious has been posting great reviews of other games so I was interested in seeing how this one plays out.
This is an enormously ambitious and complicated game. I thought it would be a relatively mild real-world game, but it includes a ton of worldbuilding and even two different protagonists!
Your goal is to shave some chest hair before a date. There are many things to try, almost all of them ending badly.
Your house is absolutely full of stuff. Stuff in the bathroom, stuff in the bedroom, stuff in the closet, stuff in drawers.
So all of this has the hallmarks of a first (or early) game by a talented author: it models an apartment, has lots of extra things, and has a lot of implementation into tricky things while neglecting a few of the smaller things.
What are the smaller things? Well, the game mentions that you can see the exits by LOOKing, but some rooms have no exits listed at all (like the bathroom as Marigold). Room names are all lowercase, which is a common mistake in Inform (you have to capitalize them the first time they appear in the code, wherever that is). When you use the special device, it doesn't indicate a change in location (by LOOKing), which may be intentional but is kind of confusing.
The game indicates several beta testers, and it is more polished than many games in the comp, but I think that having some more people beta test next year that have comp experience could help, and of course the feedback from this year will be very helpful. This game is well-written, funny, complex, and generally polished; but there are some things that I think would be better left off the next game, especially the large groups of unnecessary but well-implemented items. I definitely think there should be a next game, as I would expect this author to be capable of coming up with several interesting stories and some very fun game mechanics, if this game is any indication.
-Polish: The game could use some touchup for sure.
+Descriptiveness: It can be confusing at times, but this game is definitely descriptive.
-Interactivity: I often felt at a loss what to do, and beat my head on the wall a lot as I got lost moving around (probably because the device mechanic didn't make sense to me early on).
+Emotional impact: I definitely experience a lot of interesting feelings while playing this game.
-Would I play again? Not until there were an update.
An Ink game where you are a doppelganger with business needs, October 13, 2020This is a weird game but I'm into it. You play as a doppelganger in a bizarre magical world powered by technology and fantasy. I suspect there are deeper secrets to the game, but I enjoyed my ending (1/4, Humanologist).
Gameplay consists of getting several cases in a row. In each case, you can choose what to talk to your client about, then you become them, then you have several choices on how to carry out your tasks. You get paid different amounts of money depending on your performance. You can then invest that in various things.
I liked this quite a bit, although it's different from most games I like. Every year, I come up with theories on what does well in the comp and what doesn't, and this year my theory is that choice games that give you a lot of freedom of action (like a world model you can move in or completely different paths of characterization with tradeoffs like choice of games) do better than those without. On the other hand, longer games tend to do better, and while this is long, it's not huge like some of the games in the comp. So I predict this will do well, probably in the teens. But my predictions are always really wrong each year, so who knows?
+Polish: The game worked smoothly.
+Descriptiveness: I liked the worldbuilding.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could choose my characterization.
+Emotional impact: I really immersed myself in the character.
+Would I play again? I plan on it!
A short linear Inform game about physicists and time travel, October 13, 2020So this is an interesting game. Basically, it’s a time travel plot involving two of the great physicists in history.
The implementation generally worked well, although it seemed to kind of push me around a lot, especially when entering or leaving the cottage, almost like no direction I went mattered, the game would send me where it wanted.
The writing goes back and forth between very plain and more elaborate. The story is full of grand ideas, but I think it could have used a little more spacing between big reveals.
Overall, though, it was a quick and simple parser game with an interesting concept. At first, I was skeptical that things would have played out the way suggested in the game, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that we don’t really know how great discoveries and scientific innovation are pushed forward, and it’s difficult to understand why there has been such an acceleration in technical innovation in the last few hundred years.
+Polish: I didn't find any real bugs.
-Descriptivenss: The game was plain in some parts, especially the library.
+Interactivity: While I felt like I was being pushed around, it ended up working out smoothly.
-Emotional impact: I don't think the big reveals 'landed' for me.
+Would I play again? Maybe; it's interesting to see the past tense and third person, and to consider the way it pushes you forward.
A very brief game about an odd encounter with a pinecone and a goat, October 13, 2020Like many have said, this is quite similar to The Turnip. It's by the same author, they're both the same length, have the same styling, have the same setup. They also feature large and puzzling agricultural specimens and kindness to animals.
Is there some kind of meta puzzle here? I don't think so, judging by opening up the code and peeking at a few of the boxes. In any case, this is fun writing, and slightly more interactive than the other piece. It reminds me of Sub-Q Magazine's pieces before they stopped printing, albeit a little shorter. I'm glad to have it in the comp; it's not the kind of thing that I'd seek out normally, but it's so short and well-done that I happy to see it.
+Polish: Very polished.
+Descriptiveness: I think the writing is very well-done here.
+Interactivity: There's not much, but it's interesting and a little puzzle.
+Emotional impact: I liked it.
-Would I play it again? I think once is enough.
Very fun wordplay game with dozens of hard puzzles, October 13, 2020I beta tested this game.
What can I say? I love this game. DiBianca is well known for making themed games with constrained commands and one type of puzzle.
This is the first one not to include movement (at least since Grandma Bethlinda’s Variety Box), and instead we have a series of dozens of word puzzles.
This is a big game, and, as many many reviewers have found, it sucks up hours of your life if you’re into wordplay puzzles. I spent easily more than 4 hours as well as thinking about the puzzles quite a bit, and this is with emailing the author for hints.
I haven’t played all the way through the newest version (just the first few puzzles again, and I already see some improvements). I’d love to wait a few years to forget most of this and do it over again, maybe with my son when he’s older.
There is an overall story that, for me, became more coherent as the game went on, but it’s still very abstract. But I definitely think this game ranks up there with Counterfeit Monkey, Ad Verbum and the Andrew Schultz canon as one of the great wordplay games out there.
+++++Polish, Descriptiveness, Interactivity, Emotional Impact, Would I play again? This is exactly the kind of think I like. Love it!
A custom-parser fairytale game with graphics and sound, October 13, 2020Custom parser games only available as windows executables are always a mixed bag, but this is one is better than most.
You play as Prince Charming (or Cinderella) and you have to get yourself and Rumpelstiltskin back to a wedding. Along the way, you have to complete several fairy tales such as Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Jack and the Beanstalk.
The map is expansive, with a lot of diagonal directions and several little colleges.
The parser is definitely better than most custom-made parsers but has a lot of work it still needs. Conversation especially is very picky; I had to use the walkthrough a lot. I don’t think TALK TO or SAY _________ TO ________ or similar constructions work, and you have to use quotations in a way I’m not used to. There is a provided manual, though it is very long.
The puzzles are logical, and the included art looks nice, although it started bouncing up as soon as it came down later.
Rumpelstilstkin got a little annoying as he says ‘Let’s hurry’ pretty much every 3-5 lines.
Creating a parser from scratch is very difficult, so this game is a technical feat. But unless the author is planning on making several games with this engine and refining it over and over (like Linus Åkesson with his game engine Dialog), it might be worth using previously-refined engines instead.
+Polish: Despite the problems with the parser, the setup here is clean and looks great for a Windows executable.
+Descriptiveness: The characters and locales are described in detail.
-Interactivity: I was frustrated by the specificity of required commands.
+Emotional impact: I was fairly amused by a few parts.
-Would I play again? I think I've found everything I wanted to.
A short, poetic story in Twine format, October 13, 2020I suppose this game achieves exactly what it wanted to achieve. It took a fairly funny story (in the way that Kafka would write a comedy if the mood ever struck him), added some interactivity and a lot of polish, and turned it into a short game.
The writing is good, the game is short, and there’s not much to do but read it and contemplate. What does it mean? Besides my Kafka comparison, it also reminds me of Regina Spektor’s song lyrics.
+Polish: Impeccably polished.
+Descriptiveness: Some of the better writing of the last few years.
-Interactivity: It wasn't trying to achieve it, and it failed successfully.
+Emotional impact: It was thoughtful.
-Would I play again? Not unless I forget it.
Serial murder investigation in Twine, October 13, 2020So this one has a lot of good features and some that didn’t mesh with me. I’m not sure I’m the target audience.
This is a long Twine game with a mechanic that I’ve not really seen in IFComp before. There’s a long, mostly linear prologue where you meet all the main characters, then you’re given a bunch of journal entries/case files to go through. As you go through them, you can type them into a database to learn more, kind of like Her Story.
This is a game about a serial rapist/murderer. In fact, it’s the third game I’ve played in this comp that prominently features a kidnapper/sexual assaulter. This game specifically seems heavily influenced by stories like those featured in true crime podcasts and documentaries, and by the Golden State Killer specifically.
+Polish: A lot of work went into this game.
+Descriptiveness: Has a level of detail similar to true crime podcasts.
-Interactivity: The main mechanic was overly difficult to me. Typing in things that I knew were important (like 'bulger') didn't always work.
+Emotional impact: It was an emotion I didn't like, but it did it.
-Would I play again? Not my cup of tea, content-wise.
The graphic depictions in one of the assaults and the extensive profanity/abuse definitely set me on edge, and I don’t think I’m the target audience for it. Writing-wise, this game is good on the individual level, but some of the twists didn’t make much sense to me, especially the ending sequence which changed the genre of the game completely.
The mechanics are interesting, but I think they could use more testing for robustness. I will say if you haven’t played it yet that it keeps a running notebook for you at the very bottom, which I didn’t notice until near the end.
Overall, the author seems very talented. This game was beta tested by several people, but I think the next game in the series could use a couple of more people, especially Twine authors who have done well in the comp before. I’m assuming there will be more in the series, and I’d be happy to see that, especially ones with less sexual violence (for my personal taste, may not reflect all readers).
A bizarre world of constrained paper-people with moral messages, October 12, 2020I beta tested this game.
I've played a lot of the Wobbles games by the Marino Family (although apparently there's a Parrot the Pirate episode I never read?) and this one is definitely my favorite.
The Wobbles series are all written in Undum, a system that was like Twine before Twine and is very powerful but requires advanced technical knowledge to use.
Each game in the Wobbles series deals with a magical house full of foster kids where kids with various disabilities or uncomfortable real-life situations or other things that make them marginalized come to groups with themselves.
It's written at a kid or teen level, and written by younger people, too. I have a son with muscular dystrophy, so I'm glad to see representation in these games of various types of disability.
This particular game has the hero go into a world where everyone is transformed into paper on rails. The world is described with startling specificity that provides a lot of the enjoyment of this game. How would paper people eat? Sleep? Go to school? It's all laid out in excellent detail.
The other main feature I appreciate for this game is the overall. I have to say, I think this has some of the best choice structure in this competition. When I first played this game as a tester, I thought it was somewhat on rails (haha) but on my playthrough today I was able to take significantly different actions and still have it seem like the 'intended story'. That's really hard to pull off, and increases my admiration for this game.
For the detailed worldbuilding and intricate choice structure, this is my favorite of the Wobbles games. If you're going to play, make sure you realize that it is designed with specific morals (although you can go against them), a specific audience, and a distinct narrative voice (that of a talking book). Since most of the games ever entered in IFComp are either adult-targeted genre fiction or avant-garde exercises, this good-natured and marginalization-conscious series is definitely unique.
+Polish: These games are always smooth.
+Descriptiveness: Love the worldbuilding.
+Interactivity: Feels like choices matter
+Emotional impact: The parts with the King and the Queen struck home after my recent divorce.
+Would I play again? Yeah, would like to see different paths.
A mid-length linear horror game with references to other games, October 12, 2020This is a parser game with several grand ideas but rusty implementation in creating them.
It’s a sequel to Two-Braids Girl, a game I had never tried before today but decided to check out. That game was a creepypasta game similar to No End House or The Holders series, but with poor grammar.
This game is a direct sequel to that by another author. It starts right where the last one ends off, then moves through, as others have said, a Shade homage, then wraps things up with a simple puzzle in the end.
There’s nothing wrong with a Shade homage. When I wrote my game Color the Truth, my original idea was to have 4 mini games during the police investigation with each mini-game borrowing from a famous IF game, and one of those mini-games was going to be a Shade homage.
But I took it out because I eventually came up with my own ideas after testing and playing.
And that’s what this game needs; testing and replaying. There are a lot of things to criticize, like linearity, but the truth is that random sequences of events in a linear fashion with only a thin plot to connect them can still do well as long as its really tested. Sorry for talking about my own games a lot, but that’s what I did with Swigian. It placed 22nd, but it was just a random string of linear events held together by one idea.
I think that this game could do at least that well if only it were tested. Tested early, tested often. The best way to test a parser game is to have someone try it and every time the game says ‘you can’t do that’, go back and make it so you can do that. And get rid of bugs. It takes a long time, but it’s worth it.
-Polish: Lots of bugs.
+Descriptiveness: This is probably its best trait.
-Interactivity: I struggled a lot, had to use other people's transcripts
-Emotional impact: Too distracted by the other issues.
-Would I play again? Not right now.
A short Twine game about communication, October 12, 2020This is a short, mostly linear Twine game with some interesting text effects and, to me, an inscrutable story.
You seem to be some sort of supervisor in an authoritarian system. You are monitoring a woman named Orange who describes the different job placements she has had. She has a stutter.
The story seems almost dreamlike (I think another reviewer mentioned that?) and the very ending used simple twine macros to produce an unusual text effect that provides never-ending interaction.
+Polish: It seems completely polished.
-Descriptiveness: Everything was very vague.
+Interactivity: Although there weren't many real choices, I felt intrigued by the ending.
-Emotional impact: I wasn't able to reach any deeper meaning.
-Would I play again? I don't intend to at this time.
A short and sweet story about home, October 12, 2020This is a truly lovely game. It’s written in Twine, and is basically a heartwarming short story told with interactivity, animation and sound.
You play as someone raised in Hong Kong now living in the UK. You are sick and wish more than anything you could have some congee.
The choices are more about roleplaying than about strategy, and that works well for me. Visually, the game is gorgeous, with animated line drawings, animated color scenes, and beautiful faux text messages.
I identified with the message of the game as well, even though I’ve never experienced it to that degree. I lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the Bronx in New York for 2 years after growing up in suburban Utah, and it was a real culture shock. Even now, I live in Texas without anyone nearby, as a single dad. And probably the thing I miss the most was our Sunday Roasts lol. I even cooked one for myself last week in the crockpot and ate the leftovers the whole week.
So, very lovely. It might not place in top 10 due to its short length,but I’d be happy to nominate it for an XYZZY or two next year.
+Polish: Incredibly well-polished.
+Descriptiveness: I could almost smell the food.
+Interactivity: It gives either choice or the illusion of choice, and both are good.
+Emotional impact: A lot, for me
+Would I play again: Definitely, if I ever get down.
A detailed implementation of an old house with independent NPC, October 11, 2020**Last House on the Block by Jason Olson**
This game seems like a classic first-attempt at parser programming by a reasonably talented individual.
It has a house implemented in minute detail, including multiple bathrooms, several empty closets, a tackle box with many different kinds of tackle in it, etc.
The most complex part of the game is an NPC that follows you everywhere, interacting with you and doing independent actions, very much like Floyd the robot in the ways you interact with it.
The main puzzles require some very specific actions that I'm not sure are easy to discover on your own, and the language is fairly plain. While a solid game for a first-time author, I think the next game could use less extra objects and more of the fun NPCs, as well as a more vibrant setting.
-Polish: The game could use some more work, especially in talking with your friend.
-Descriptiveness: The setting and objects are plain and plainly described.
-Interactivity: There are so many objects that the state space of possible actions is just too big.
+Emotional impact: I liked the whole 'view of an older man's life' story.
-Would I play again? I don't think so.
The opening chapter to a big multimedia choice game, October 11, 2020Given the popularity of Flexible Survival together with the excellent production values of this game, I predict that this game will find a lot of success with certain communities after the comp, perhaps ending up as the most-played game form this comp. I also think, though, that it has some features that will end up hurting it in this comp’s voting.
This is a hardnosed combat and storytelling game with furry characters (well, animal/human hybrids, including reptiles). It has very nice-looking screens, including an action video later on when an SUV pulls up that’s certainly the best-produced thing I’ve ever seen in IFComp.
You play as a series of characters in a run-down and dark world where mob bosses rule. Characters can pick up a variety of very specific weapons and ammo.
Gameplay is stat-based, with an initial point buy system and later gains. Every part of the game is turned into a puzzle that either depends on stats or correct choices. Even ‘click-reveals’ (when you click on a link and it expands) are gamified: you have to click them in the right order to get bonus points.
This game is difficult. Without God mode, you have to make very specific point buys to get past even the second challenge (when the truck comes by, if you don’t have quick feet or health, then you get hit for 0 damage, but your 0 health gets checked and results in death.
With God mode, I made it very far until I made a bad choice and got an instant death. I think I could have restored but I had the following bug:
"I can’t find a save slot named ‘AnimaliaBookI4’!►
I tried to save or load the game, but I couldn’t do it."
Overall, I actually like the writing quite a bit. The intense difficulty of the game will likely be a plus for the target audience, as I think this is meant to be a game you replay a lot and have strategy guides about, something like Sunless Skies or 80 Days.
For the comp, though, it makes it hard to play through in a short time, even with God Mode.
-Polish: Great production values, but bugs need fixing.
+Descriptiveness: Nice writing
+Interactivity: For the comp, it's no good, but I like the extra challenge for more replay value.
+Emotional impact: Yeah, I was invested.
+Would I play again? Yes, especially the finished version.
An escape-the-tower game with spirit protagonist, October 11, 2020This is a medium-length Twine game with one overarching, fairly difficult puzzle.
You are a spirit, and have been imprisoned in a mage's tower. Your goal is to possess one of two people and escape. But the tower you're in is protected in several ways, and your quest will be difficult.
The writer of this game is a freelance author, and I found the game as a story fairly satisfying. The characters were interesting and there were several subplots.
Mechanically, it's a little bit rougher. There are usually two choices at a time, and it's usually 'guess the right action', although thankfully you can usually back out of a wrong course the first time. There are clues to the right actions, so it's better in that regards than some of the other games, but I believe it could have been improved by going beyond binary choices more often.
The writing was interesting enough for me to look up his website and see some other work. He's done a lot of advertising copy, and it reads really well. Happy to see more work from this author.
+Polish: The game is smooth and bug free
+Descriptiveness: Lovely writing, great characters.
-Interactivity: The puzzle structure didn't appeal to me as much as it could.
+Emotional impact: I was shocked when one of the guards (Spoiler - click to show)ripped up my permission slip.
-Would I play again? The story was satisfying on its first run, but I wasn't invested enough to go through and try another round.
A short branching Twine game about the Tarot, October 11, 2020My only real experience with the Tarot deck is from the Deck of Many Things in AD&D and also Stardust Crusaders, so games featuring Tarot symbology significantly always mystify me somewhat.
In this game, you play as a deck of Tarot cards brought to life. You help design your own life story, then make several predictions for others.
There’s a lot of metafiction here about how we construct our own narratives. It reminds me of the 2015 game A Figure Met in a Shaded Wood as well as SCP-3939, both of which make the shape of the story an integral part of the narrative.
The graphics here look good. The writing is interesting. I felt it hard to either strategize with choices or roleplay as a character, which are my usual two ways of interacting with a game. This game definitely shows a lot of craft, though, and I respect the one who wrote it!
+Polish: It looks and plays great.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is vivid.
-Emotional impact: I wasn't invested in the character, perhaps due to my unfamiliarity with the tarot
+Interactivity: Despite my struggles, the self-referential nature of the game validated my actions.
-Would I play again? Not at this time.
A promising Twine game about a stranded motorist, October 11, 2020I taught a summer camp in Twine a few months ago. We spent about a week going over adding multimedia, setting variables, beta testing, etc. They liked it and kept working on games even after the camp, some which were pretty cool and impressive.
This game reminds me of that, the game of someone who has recently learned twine and puts in 10-20 hours of work making a fairly complex game. It has a soundtrack, custom styling, and non-linear puzzles.
It reaches for a few things without quite making it. I vividly remember when I entered my first IFComp game, one of the most famous people in IF made a comment about my game:
"I found *Ether* least effective when it explicitly went for pathos in the writing, because it was asking me to empathize[...]and it hadn’t put in the time to build up that empathy."
I was hurt by that at the time, but it's true, and it's true about this game, too. The violence and the blood in the snow aren't as frightening because there wasn't enough buildup. The game is asking us to be afraid or to be disturbed by the death of others, but we know nothing about them.
It wouldn't take a lot to fix that. The difference between an okay story and an awesome story is usually just a few tweaks. In my experience, the best thing to do is just try something, see how people react, and change it if it doesn't work, then repeat. That's why I usually have 10+ beta testers, it lets me work out all the questionable parts of a story before I release it. In this case, if I had to suggest anything specific, I'd give our character some more personality: maybe this is their first cross-country road trip as an adult and they're a little lost and terrified of how dark it is. Maybe they run out of the room at the first sight of blood. If you say something is scary, the reader isn't usually scared. If you say the character is scared, though, then a lot of times the reader will empathize with them.
The puzzle parts of this game weren't too bad. There are a lot of unfair deaths you can't undo, but the game is short enough that you can try over and over again. I still would have liked a few more hints at what works and what doesn't, and maybe expand the story and game a little longer. Overall, I definitely think the author should keep writing; I'll keep an eye out for any future games.
+Polish: I didn't notice any bugs, and the multimedia aspects worked well.
-Descriptiveness: Like I mentioned above, I think the story could use some work.
-Emotional impact: Same as above.
+Interactivity: The puzzle structure wasn't too bad.
-Would I play again? Not at this time, but I would play another game by this author!
A fun short game about pirate literature, October 11, 2020I was surprised to see this game has no relation to the classic Captain Verdeterre's Plunder, but it's a good name style so it makes sense it would come up more than once.
This is a short Twine game with one big idea and it does it well. You are a pirate captain who has been forced to retire to his library. You have only one plan left: (Spoiler - click to show)to reconstruct a pirate crew and ship from the texts of classic books.
It's a nice concept and the books involved are fun to learn about or to remember. The game is over very quickly, so it's worth playing through while the comp is running just to enjoy some of the fun. This review is brief because there's not much to say that doesn't spoil it.
+Polish: The game looks great and plays well.
+Descriptiveness: Yes; some from the source texts and some from the author.
+Interactivity: It's short but has several interesting options.
-Emotional impact: It was interesting but I didn't really feel invested.
-Would I play again? It's a good game, but I think I've seen enough of it.
A lengthy Lovecraftian game based on The Shadow over Innsmouth, October 11, 2020I'm a big fan of 'Lovecraftian' horror, (although I generally like the genre referred to that more than Lovecraft's work himself; I especially like The Willows, which I think was before him).
Lovecraftian horror is a major genre for parser games, including XYZZY- and IFComp-winning games: Anchorhead, Coloratura, Hunger Daemon, The King of Shreds and Patches, Cragne Manor, Theatre, Strange Geometries, The Lurking Horror, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Lydia's Heart. Outside of parser it still does well; I especially like Heart of the House and Fhtagn! - Tales of the Creeping Madness, Anya DeNiros' Feu de Joie series, and the Failbetter oeuvre.
So I approached this Lovecraftian Twine game with eager interest, especially given the extended length.
In this game, you are commissioned as a private detective to investigate the disappearance of her son. The missing young man has been spending too much time at Innsmouth, a city inhabited by strangely fishy people.
As I write this review, I looked up Innsmouth, and realized that most of the story elements of this game are borrowed from the story The Shadow Over Innsmouth (and I now see that was mentioned in the blurb). This actually relieves me, because I felt like parts of the game were echoing the worst part of Lovecraft. The man whom the adjective Lovecraftian was named after is not the best author in his own genre.
This game has a lot of great elements in it; it's smooth, looks good, the writing flows well line by line. But I have problems with the pacing and the interactivity.
First, the pacing. As the opening quote of the game makes clear, fear of the unknown is one of humanity's most primal fears. That's why Lovecraftian games thrive off of slow burn. Outside of maybe one initial bizarre event, most great Lovecraftian stories start with mundane but disturbing situations. Slowly, over time, more frightening (but still plausible) events occur until by the end you are confronted with horrifying unknowing realities.
This game spills the beans really early on, though. An intelligent, sane man explains all of the game's mysteries very early on, with no skepticism, and shows you an impossible artifact. There are no major revelations after that; everything in the game follows directly from his pronouncements.
Despite this, the game follows the usual tropes of the protagonist refusing to believe in the supernatural. Here's some text soon after those revelations:
(Spoiler - click to show)When this case began, you had no idea it would lead you to the old, decaying port town of Innsmouth. You didn’t even know the place existed. Now, the more you hear about it, the more you are filled with a sense of foreboding. It’s not that you believe the wild stories you’ve heard. People living on a razor’s edge of disaster are apt to fill the world with all kinds of fantastical tales and superstitions. But Professor Armitage’s words and seeing the Innsmouth tiara in person give you pause. Still, the world is filled with enough man-made nightmares; the supernatural needs not apply.
Despite the professor explicitly saying [spoiler]the townspeople breed with fish demons[/spoiler], the protagonist is stymied by a genealogy chart:
(Spoiler - click to show)His wife’s name is listed as Pht’thya-l’y, an odd name who’s ethnic origin you can’t place.
My second issue is the narrative structure. It's what Sam Kabo Ashwell calls the Gauntlet is his very good article on shapes of narrative games. Every optional choice is either wrong and leads to death (with an undo, thankfully) or right and progresses the story. There are usually few clues as to which one is the right answer, making it somewhat an exercise in frustration.
I think both of these issues come from adhering to closely to the original story. By having a plot that 'must happen' to match the story, it forces the gauntlet structure. To make sure the stories are connected, the author doles out information at weird times. I had the exact same issues when I adapted some Sherlock Holmes stories.
The very best parts are when the author goes out on his own. I would love to see a game that has a lot more of the author in it and a lot less Lovecraft. The whole story revolves around a sub-species of human that is less than human and is characterized by bulging eyes and flat noses, which definitely stems from Lovecraft's obsession with racial panic; and Lovecraft's treatment of the homeless man and his thick accent isn't my favorite.
So I definitely think this is an amazing author and programmer who made this, I just would prefer an original story and structure next time (and I hope there is a next time)!
+Polish: The game looks great, no bugs that I saw.
+Descriptiveness: The game goes into significant detail about objects and people.
-Interactivity: The gauntlet structure didn't really work for me.
-Emotional impact: The early reveals spoiled a lot of the emotional oomph for me.
-Would I play again? Since there's only one main path, I don't think there's a lot of replay value.
A non-linear storytelling game with lots of visual polish, October 10, 2020I tested this game.
Pseudavid has really turned out to be a Twine master in the last few comps, placing in the top 10 each time and making technically proficient games.
This game is more understated than the other games, but still complex and thoughtful. You, a night guard at a soon-to-be-abandoned housing complex, gets into a fast and stormy relationship with a remarkable woman.
The story takes place over three days simultaneously, with your choices in each day affecting the others (so a choice in the future can be a flashback with affects the choice in the past).
The effects in this game aren't as obvious as in Pseudavid's other games, but the ending I got was very nice. If this game has faults, they lie in it being somewhat opaque or dense, leaving the player to sort through several narrative threads at the same time. But taking that away would fundamentally change the nature of the game, so I'm not sure it's a bad thing.
+Polish: This is what Pseudavid is known for. At least to me.
+Descriptiveness: The characters were so vivid it hurt a little.
-Interactivity: It was hard to figure out what's going on at times. I was a tester, so I had a leg up, but still it was a bit rough for me. Like I said, I wouldn't recommend changing that.
+Emotional impact: I felt very invested in the character I was playing as.
+Would I play again? I'd like to explore other paths.
A multimedia retelling/spin on the Phantom of the Opera, October 10, 2020This game gave me all sorts of different reactions.
First of all, it has nice visuals and sounds chosen from a variety of operas and symphonies.
The text is slow during musical portions, but the game overall is relatively short.
This game is a retelling of the Phantom of the Opera, where you can customize it in 6 different ways depending on the time period and the way you perceive the story of the Phantom.
However, on replay, choosing entirely different options, I found myself with almost the exact same story. I checked the code of the game, and all the stats affect at most one or two paragraphs each.
The writing is interesting and makes for a good retelling, with narrative twists. I felt that the characterization of Christine as seductress was surprising to me and didn't really gel with my version of the character, and then later events further differed, but I suppose that's the variety in retelling a story.
So I honestly don't know. This is in no way what I would consider a bad game, but it has a lot of unusual choices that I need to sit and unpack for a while.
+Polish: Everything worked well from the get-go.
+Descriptiveness: The characters and locations were vivid to me.
+Interactivity: Despite the small effects of choices, I felt like it was interactive, especially the first time.
+Emotional impact: I'm a Phantom of the Opera fan, so it was fun to play it in Twine form.
+Would I play it again? I don't plan on revisiting this.
A short but compelling dialogue between immigrant mother and daughter, October 10, 2020This game had a ton of buzz on Twitter and received a lot of early reviews, so I was interested in playing it.
It turns out to be really good. Raban seems to have a firm grasp of storywriting and interactivity. This is a perfectly well-crafted game, limited only by its relatively small size. I imagine, though, that many judges will be happy to find a quick and enjoyable game with excellent handicraft.
In this game, you are texting with your mother. You come from a family of immigrants, and your mother decides to try and teach you Tagalog over the phone. She quizzes you on your life and choices while trying to introduce you to various grammatical rules which, of course, you could never absorb in a single sitting, but which she seems determined to impart.
This game uses slow text to good effect, which is really rare. I think the keys are having a very short game with well-defined parameters. Here, we know we're in a text message conversation which can't last too long, and the game is advertised as short. The delays are realistic and not too long.
I think the best part of the game is showing the tension between a mother (especially a southeast asian mother), her desires for her American-raised children and the children's own personality and feelings. I think this is great.
+Polish: Very polished.
+Descriptive: The characters really came alive.
+Interactivity: I felt like my choices really mattered.
+Emotional impact: Felt some tension. Worried I'd say the wrong things.
+Would I play again? Sure!
A story about four family members in 1920's catalan, October 10, 2020This is a game about horrible people. It reminds me of a lot of depressing literature, like Six Characters in Search of an Author or Ethan Frome or other books about a collection of bad people gone wrong.
This game is about a family of four, all of which you take turn controlling, and their house and its environs, a map that stays static throughout the game. Each of you has your vices: the father likes lusty young boys, the mother as well; the son spends time with violent anarchists, while the daughter is a haunted by a ghost from the past.
I like hope in my reading, and that’s one reason why Verdi was never my favorite composer. He once said that he wrote operas to convince others of the impossibility of human happiness.
Narratively, this game is strong. The storylines weave together well and the writing is coherent and vivid. Visually, I found the game pretty hard to look at, like tomato soup with basil floating in it.
The game reminds me quite a bit of Pseudavid’s popular The Master of the Land.
In any case, this is an impressive piece of work and good writing. It was interesting to meet Marcel Proust, even if it was in rather indecent circumstances.
+Polish: Very smooth.
+Descriptiveness: The writing was very clear and descriptive.
+Interactivity: I felt like my choices had strong consequences.
+Emotional impact: It was good at making me feel bad, I suppose.
-Would I play again? Not my cup of tea.
A classic-style RPG made in Twine, October 10, 2020This game is a classic RPG scenario. You arrive in a town cursed by darkness, get a quest at a tavern, level up by killing some mobs and getting gear, then take on the big bad.
There have been a lot of attempts at putting quality RPGs in IFComp (and there are several good ones this year, too). This one’s pretty good: lots of non-combat exploration and puzzles, some fun text effects and an interesting backstory.
On the other hand, it could use some spellchecking. One thing you can do in Twine is go to the menu where you can ‘publish to file’ and right above that is ‘view proofing copy’. That gives you an easy-to-read version you can put into grammarly to correct most errors.
Overall, this was pretty fun, but I feel like it could have used something to set it apart from other RPGs more.
-Polish: Could use some fixes to spelling and grammar
+Descriptiveness: The jokes are pretty good in this game.
+Interactivity: It's not groundbreaking, but it doesn't have to be for me to have a good time.
-Emotional Impact: I didn't feel very invested in the storyline.
+Would I play again? I might seek it out later on.
A charming and polished about the village idiot doing quests, October 9, 2020I beta tested this game several times.
First Inform games tend to have a lot of issues from authors not realizing Inform's quirks (like forgetting to describe things or making them portable). Lance Campbell manages to avoid those problems here and make a smooth and interesting parser game.
You play as the village idiot who's out of a job. You head back to the farm you live at and try to find useful things to do around the farm, including dealing with the mutated squirrels you accidentally unleashed earlier.
The writing is pleasant and funny, with what I think of as 'dad humor'. The puzzles are well-constructed, with some animal-based conversation puzzles and some construction problems. While testing, I had some difficulty at times knowing what to do, but the game has numerous hints and a walkthrough that makes it pretty accessible. I had fun testing this.
+Polish: The game is pretty smooth.
+Descriptiveness: It has a definite writing voice.
+Interactivity: The animal puzzles are pretty fun.
+Emotional impact: The game is funny.
-Would I play again? After extensive testing, I think I'm done with this. But if I revisit this in future years I'll change this point!
A compact time travel game with four time periods, October 9, 2020This is one of two games co-authored by Xavid, both making use of the same kind of cool map code Xavid used in Future Threads a few years back.
This game is definitely my sort of thing. I love games with two worlds that are mirrors of each other, and this game has four.
In this game, you’re sent back in time to stop an apocalypse from being cause by a cult. For some reason the cultists seem completely unfazed by your presence, and you can’t understand their spoken language but can understand their written language. But this is a fairly mild concern.
There is a compact map that persists through four different time periods you can warp through. At first, you are heavily constrained, but over time you unlock quite a bit more.
Some of the puzzles were real headscratchers, but other reviews and the in-game hint system got me through. One of the main puzzles and one of the optional ending puzzles rely on urban legends about animals that may not actually work in real life.
Overall, I definitely enjoyed the game. Thanks for making it!
+Polish: Very smooth.
+Descriptiveness: There was a lot of creativity with the different rooms.
+Interactivity: Cool time travel makes up for weird puzzles.
-Emotional impact: It was fun, but I didn't really get 'in character'
+Would I play again? Definitely!
A difficult energy management simulator, October 9, 2020I think this game is too hard.
It's a combination energy management simulator and basic electrical engineering quiz game.
You are a young single adult who is living in a solar-powered van trying to make a living. Earning a living and being happy require electricity, but use too much and you die.
I started this game on the easiest mode possible. Each day I made choices to get money or be happy as it required. When you use electricity, the game quizzes you on how much electricity it will use through simple voltage/power/wattage/etc. calculations.
I'm a math teacher, but always struggled with engineering, and I didn't find the calculations part enjoyable or edifying. I think in the long run you're supposed to get good at estimating, so I guess if I stuck further? But after a few days, I didn't estimate right and died from too much electrical use.
The game suggested restarting and paying more attention to my panels. "My panels?" I thought, not knowing what it meant. I looked all over and couldn't find them.
Then today I tried again, and noticed a small arrow on the left-hand side that opened up to an enormous amount of choices, incredibly specific ones, which detail every single part of the solar panel system.
I was overwhelmed. I just decided to buy the most expensive of everything. Confident, I started the game. On my first choice, with 100% battery and fully upgraded system, I decided to use my laptop for 8 hours.
I died on the first choice, and I gave up.
The graphics are cool, the interactivity is cool, the platform is interesting. But this is too hard for me.
+Polish: This game is very polished.
+Descriptiveness: The game is fairly bare in its descriptions, except for the electrical components: that is incredibly detailed.
-Interactivity: I found this game too challenging for me to handle.
-Emotional impact: This game didn't compel me emotionally.
-Would I play again? I'm too afraid to.
A shortish multimedia Twine game about demons attacking, October 9, 2020This is a fairly short game, and the author’s first game. Because they mentioned trying to learn things, I’ll keep that in mind.
This is a multimedia-heavy game, and it encourages you to use headphones while you play and uses timed text, sometimes fast and sometimes slow.
The game is translated from Spanish, but I didn’t notice for a while because it’s a fairly good translation. But it needs some more work; when running around the room, for instance, one of the links was ‘pedizquierda’.
The story is about being creeped out and attacked by a demon at night. Interaction-wise, you have a sort of maze (that’s not really a maze), a couple of ‘guess the right option’ things and some battles.
Knowing your audience is important. A couple of things to keep in mind about IFComp are:
1.The winning games are often very polished, having been worked on for dozens or hundreds of hours. Not every game does this, but
2. Having your games tested is a plus. Having it tested by people who’ve done IFComp before is an even bigger plus. Having it tested by a lot of experience people, responding to their feedback, and improving your game over months is best.
3.Making fun of the player isn’t as popular as it once was. For instance, if you choose the wrong thing, the game has the demon say:
I think you’re too stupid for me to feel like playing with you.It was the worst decision you have ever made, but thanks for being so stupid.
As a player, that’s not super fun to read. It’s not horribly bad, and I know it’s about the person in the game, but it was my decision, and saying I’m stupid is kind of frustrating.
4. Multimedia and timed text can make a game look a lot cooler, but if you think about, why are people even interested in a text competition? Some people like it because the games are easy to make. Others are blind and use text to speech readers. Some (like me) like having games you can play as fast or as slow as you want, take breaks, play without sound while taking a break at work or at home. So having a lot of your game dependent on keeping up with the text or having to listen intently to the sounds can be hard. That’s why games like Limerick Quest that have timed text have options to turn it off.
Overall, I think this game shows cool programming and a fun writing voice. It’s okay that it has some faults, because it’s your first game. Nothing would be more depressing than having your first game be your best game, because it’s all downhill from there. I think of Victor Ojuel and Ruber Eaglenest who both entered IFComp for the first time with games that were heavily criticized. They listened to the feedback, tried again and both placed in the top 10 with excellent games (and Victor has a job as a narrative designer now).
+Polish: There are bugs and typos, but the sound effects and art are fancy.
+Descriptiveness: The game makes its world come alive.
-Interactivity: I was frustrated by having to choose exactly the right option.
-Emotional impact: This game didn't really impact me.
-Would I play again? As it currently is no.
A well-written longish Twine game about two enemies collaborating, October 8, 2020So the author of this game (I had wondered if there were several, but there seems to be one main author with some help from Norbez) has been advertising this on Twine for quite some Twine, and I was interested to see how it would come it.
Story-wise, this is one of the stronger games in the competition. There’s a delightful tension between the two protagonists (you get to play both): a hero named Lightbearer, middle-aged and with the ability to control energy; and Promethium, a villain who creates synthetic humanoids.
The story takes you through a strange situation where the two of you must work together for each other’s good. I found the writing and storytelling to be witty. Lightbearer is fairly generic as a hero, but interesting as a person. I wondered if Promethium was coded as autistic (reacts poorly to sensory stimuli, has a specific soothing sensory experience, and, as we later discover, ).
The graphics and styling are very nice.
Interactivity-wise, I went back and forth on my feelings. It’s the same kind of model as the successful game Dull Grey from last year, where you make the same choice over and over again leading to a final ending (although I don’t think there are any Dull Grey-style secret endings here). I think that works fairly good here, but I think there’s not very much reason in-game to pursue the ‘be mean’ options.
That’s something I’ve thought a lot about while playing Choice of Games titles this summer. Several of them offer ‘mean paths’, but it’s best when they’re strongly motivated. For instance, in Champion of the Gods, it’s okay if you are wild and kill everyone on site because the Gods commend you and the people around you are glad to be protected. It’s also okay to spare the enemies because the Gods are cruel.
But in this game it just seems set up to always pick the same choice. I’ll go back and try another run. Overall though, the story was great, and I’d definitely be eager to see a new Storysinger Presents game in the future.
+Polish: Very smooth and nice
+Descriptiveness: Loved the writing in this one.
-Interactivity: I felt like my choices could have used a little more oomph.
+Emotional Impact: Yeah, I was definitely curious about the big mysteries.
+Would I play again? I could see me coming back to this in the future.
A short jungle-raiding classic-style adventure, October 8, 2020This game is another parser game (like Elsegar I) that is simple and spare in writing, with a small number of locations, each with one task to do, and generally written in an older-school style. If anything, it reminds me of the older adventures JCompton has been putting on IFDB recently. I will say that it has less empty rooms and significantly more complex puzzles and interactions than Elsegar I.
In this game, you play an Indiana Jones-like adventurer (complete with bullwhip and fedora) that must find the Golden Egg of Man-Toomba, Along the way, you meet a jungle tribe, consult your journal, and interact with several animals.
The puzzles were interesting, but I had some trouble with guessing the verb (for instance, figuring out what to do (Spoiler - click to show)when climbing up the tree or interacting with the sun stone in the temple).
There are several beta testers listed, which is likely why this game runs smoothly in general. The hint system makes winning a lot easier, too. I guess that (like my own game) I feel like this game could be significantly expanded in scope, and maybe give a bit more direction. Otherwise, it was a smooth play.
As a final note, raiding jungle tombs doesn’t feel quite as fun anymore since someone pointed out to me online that ‘jungle tribes’ are just people of a different culture and we’re just taking our stuff. It’s kind of like playing a game where you’re a Nepali breaking into Notre Dame to steal a gilded crucifix. But I was happy that you have to pay the tribe for their skilled services in this game.
+Polish: In what it does, it does pretty well. I'll leave the synonyms to my Interactivity criterion.
-Descriptiveness: The writing seemed a little flat to me.
-Emotional impact: I didn't feel invested emotionally in the game.
-Interactivity: It was hard to know what commands to type even when I knew how to solve the puzzle.
+Would I play again? It's short enough and responsive enough that I wouldn't mind taking it for another spin.
A unity game with 3d cards similar to the Tarot, October 8, 2020This unity game is more of a reimagining of a tarot deck than anything else, like the text describes.
It’s a 3d game with responsive physics. You can pick up a card, place it in the correct spot (or just slop it around), flip it over, flip it over part way.
Cards can be placed in four different positions, and then the game will register the full reading for you.
It’s an impressive use of the 3d engine and the art is great. As a purely narrative game, I didn’t feel a strong emotional connection to the cards or the readings. But this will almost certainly be the most technically impressive game I play in this comp
+Polish: Immensely polished.
-Descriptive: I found the card meanings and descriptions fairly vague.
+Interactivity: Smooth and nice 3d interactions.
-Emotional Impact: I felt distanced from the messages of the cards.
-Would I play again? I'm not sure what I could find in it more than I have. Although to be fair I was always leery of Tarot, which this resembles.
A long "new horror"/religious ecstatic game, October 8, 2020Okay, so there's a certain kind of game that pops up in IF from time to time. It's a kind of game that's part poetic and part heartfelt exposition. The words are abstract, the situation obfuscated or abstracted to a level where the core narrative is hard to discern and the game becomes a kind of blank slate or Rorschach test, where scenes and phrases give deeper meaning but not always what the author's original meaning was.
B-minus makes a lot of games like that, which are usually short. Longer examples are a lot of Porpentine's work, the work of Phantom Williams, and the games Spy Intrigue and Dr. Sourpuss Is Not A Choice-Based Game.
This game has that kind of style, but it also has 'really good animations and music' style, too. The music in this game perfectly complements the writing.
This is a long and complicated game. I played it over two periods of time, as I had to take a 3 hour break. When I first played it, it all seemed a mystery, but when I came back later, somehow it all clicked in my head and I understood exactly what was going on in the story and exactly who everyone was (not the deeper meaning, just the outer meaning).
The game has 21 chapters with some surprises in the middle. Here is a general outline of the complex, non-linear plot as I understand it:
(Spoiler - click to show)The player is (or more precisely, was) a young man named Hank, born in the 23rd century, who had a traumatic incident where they were held up at gunpoint by a black man, and then called the police. The event haunts them, and is one of a giant group of negative events that pile on the protagonist. The hero is also addicted strongly to drugs (one called metafentanyl in my playthrough).
(Spoiler - click to show)To get their fix, they go to the TAV institute, a pre-war group that somehow survived the worldwide conflict (giving them the name antediluvians). A Scientology-like group, they read your body with a strange meter device, and prescribe you your drugs.
(Spoiler - click to show)The leaders, Mother and Father, give you surgery and a new name to make you a woman, Hannah. Mother uses you to further her goals, having you assassinate, steal, and kidnap. Your ultimate goal is to end the bitter cycle of reincarnation and repeated horrible experiences by murdering fate, represented by an Archon. And that's exactly what you do.
There are references everywhere in the game, so many that I can't even be sure if they're references. Is it a Galatea reference when you awake as an art exhibit on a pedestal in a gallery with the name Galene (or is Galene an exhibit near you)? Are some of the Institutes beliefs and practices reminiscent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint's beliefs and rituals? When the author refers to living in a holographic reality re-experiencing traumatic moments, is it referring to Howling Dogs? Is the end of Chapter 20 a visual representation of the scripture that says 'No man shall see the face of God and live'? Some maybe yes, some maybe no.
Other references are far more direct, like when you take on a role directly imitating the hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 during 9/11. Timothy Mcveigh is referenced, Trayvon Martin is referenced, and absolutely everything ties in with trans identity (one reading is of Mother and Father as representing dual natures of Man and Woman inside each of us, with the protagonist's transition corresponding to their love of Mother, and Archon representing the idea of fixed gender identity). But that's only one interpretation.
I frequently compared it to musical albums as I listened. It reminded me of Joni Mitchell's Blue, where she used all of her most tender and/or heartfelt memories and thoughts to make a very public album. After my second session, I thought it was like the Who's Rock Opera Tommy with it's semi-religious overtones and a central narrative mixed up with symbolism. Or The Wall.
A game like this isn't really a game to be 'enjoyed'. This seems like the game you write when you have so many thoughts and feelings in your head you have to put them somewhere. You can either do that directly (I wrote a game called In the Service of Mrs. Claus which is 100% about my divorce, and in a fairly direct way) or you can do it indirectly and jumbledy-complex like this game. When you put out a game like this, probably the worst possible result is that a few people say "wow I loved it" and no one else comments. If you push this hard, you want someone to push back, and so I think it would be 'successful' if many people reacted to it strongly in both positive and negative ways. So 'enjoy' is definitely not the word here.
Despite that, the ending sequence with its visuals and music all came together and it was actually pretty epic, just as a story. Chapters 20 and 21 are just plain awesome, and like I said, I don't know if the author wanted to be awesome. I think a more appropriate response I had is early on in Chapter 6 or 7 where I said, "Well, that's disturbing" out loud.
The credits bring things back to a more somber tone. It's a vast list, including me (!), Sonic Youth, and 'the haters', without which the game would not be possible.
I'll have to revisit this game some time.
Rating this game defeats the purpose, but I'll do it anyway.
+Polish: Very polished. Extremely so.
+Descriptiveness: Equally so.
+Emotional Impact: High for me.
+Would I play again? Plan on it.
+Interactivity: I liked my choices.
Murder/kidnapping Ink game with some rough edges, October 8, 2020This was an Ink game, longer for me than suggested (listed as 15 minutes, I took around 30 to get through), but I think the greater length worked for it.
In this game, you play a woman kidnapped and thrown in a cage by a cruel, murderous man. Gameplay is linear at parts but others felt like it could make a major difference; I'd have to replay to find out.
The game is somewhat visceral. Its content warnings are completely appropriate: " Gore, sexual harassment, physical assault, graphic violence, blood" (not that sexual assault itself isn't in there). It also contains frequent strong profanity.
It lacks polish in parts. There are frequent spelling/grammar errors, mostly capitalization. I thought it might just be an author technique, but a typo in the final line of the game (for my playthrough) made me think that perhaps the game wasn't completely checked for bugs ahead of time.
The action sequences of this game were intense and descriptive and the main NPC has a well-thought out personality and set of actions.
-Polish: Some typos and grammatical errors.
+Descriptiveness: It was easy to picture what was going on.
+Emotional impact: I definitely felt more on edge.
+Interactivity: It worked pretty for me. Options were logical and I could strategize, whether it affected the game or not.
-Would I play again? I think once was enough.
A Unity game with good graphics and UI about a threat in space, October 8, 2020This game is written in unity, and, unlike most IF games written in unity in past years, it actually makes good use of the processor-intensive engine.
It’s a very slick design with hover-over links and a sidebar of choices. The art on this game is great; my son kept popping up by my computer to look at it.
It uses slow text, which is fine in a short game but really not that fine in a long game. Fortunately, you can click to speed it up at least a little faster.
In this game, you are a famous governmental figure in a space coalition between various races. You are known for having caused the death of a cat-like alien years ago, and now you are threatened by the repercussions of that. The different alien cultures are distinct and well-drawn.
It’s hard to know how your choices affect the story. The game never really settled down into a rhythm or gave hints about its length, or provided saves, so I was just kind of flying blind. In the ending I received, there were several loose threads, which makes me believe that the game has multiple paths and significant branching.
The art and UI programming were excellent, and the actual story were excellent, but I wonder if they worked at cross purposes at times. I guess it was the slow text that really inhibited this for me; I think the intent is to get people to read slow, but I have a reading pattern where I look over the whole page, planning which segments to focus on and then moving in. I read non-linearly, I guess I’m trying to say, and slow text really messes that up for me. And what’s the purpose of it? To make sure people don’t miss your text? The best way to do that is just to write only what’s essential. Clicking helped but was still fairly slow.
This is a great team, though. I could definitely see all 3 of them working for AAA if that’s something they were interested in.
+Polish: Very polished.
+Descriptive: Writing was great, not gonna lie.
-Interactivity: I couldn't figure out how to strategize or immerse myself in character, and either would have been fine.
-Emotional Impact: I felt an emotional distance from the character, and the stakes felt low emotionally, due to my issues with interactivity.
+Would I play again? I'd like to see more endings.
A fun, complex card system with occasional bugs, October 8, 2020Jared Jackson is one of the most innovative IF authors out there, always pushing the boundaries in weird ways to test what you can do with text. His previous games, Instruction Set and Language Arts, explored algorithms and text manipulation in fascinating ways.
This game is a card-based game where your attacks and defenses are represented by a deck of cards. There are 3 dungeons to work through, each with a boss, and there are checkpoints and small encounters like gambling, a maze, and a funny recreation of Leroy Jenkins.
I beta tested this game, and I didn’t help much. At the time, I couldn’t help but die really early on, so I felt like I was a bad player and didn’t try much further (sorry Jared!)
As a player, I’ve taken the game up on its offer to give me unlimited respawns with increased health each time. This made the game far more enjoyable. I ended up making it halfway through the middle dungeon as a berserker when the game stopped responding to my link clicks. Restarting the game and continuing my save, I found that I could not continue, as it took my to a blank screen (this possibility is mentioned in the game’s readme txt). I might give it another run as a wizard later. This is probably something I would have caught as a tester if I had embraced dying, so sorry Jared!
I’m not sure if this game is possible to beat without dying a lot. There are no healing opportunities between encounters (except very rarely), and even maximizing your defense actions still won’t be enough to protect you from attacks, so it’s mathematically impossible to keep from dying. Since dying is framed as bad in most games, that’s kind of a bummer at first.
The variety in the game is fun; as a combat system I find it genuinely enjoyable. The complexity though may be its own downfall; balance and bug-hunting become much more difficult with increased complexity.
In any case, I look forward to the next innovative game by this author, and I plan on playing this game again for fun after the comp.
+Polish: The game is complex and interesting. There are bugs, but the art and other systems make up for it for me.
+Descriptiveness: Lots of variety in creatures and objects and cool backstory.
+Interactivity: Once I embraced dying, I really enjoyed the system.
+Emotional impact: It was fun.
+Would I play again? Yest.
A simple broad fantasy game with maze, October 8, 2020This game reminds me a lot of the games the teenagers made in my interactive fiction summer camps.
It’s got a broad, wide open map with generally one item of interest in each room or less. The puzzles are simple and represent broad tropes: find a key, talk to an NPC, kill a monster, buy an item. There are direct references to both Animal Crossing and Minecraft. The writing is spare and simple.
There are several typos in the game (like ‘Mine if I’ instead of ‘Mind if I’); in the future, you can type CTRL+G in the Inform IDE to do spellcheck (although some always slips through!)
Implementation is spare as well. I see that the author posted their draft of the game on the forums in May, and got some responses, but I think that the game could definitely use some more thorough beta testing (although that effort definitely did happen).
Honestly? This is simple and clean. The maze wasn’t my favorite (it looks like it was created by drawing a 9 by 9 grid and connecting rooms with a big squiggly path, and has no special features to distinguish it from other mazes). But I’d much rather play a simple game where everything works than a game full of complex systems that fail miserably. This game, though, could do a lot more to distinguish itself.
-Polish: The game had several typos.
-Descriptiveness: The writing was bare and relied on tropes for your imagination rather than its own ideas.
+Interactivity: The maze wasn't the worst thing ever and I like playing through clean simple games.
+Emotional impact: The game was fairly flat, but at least I had some fun.
-Would I play again? I think I've seen enough.
A very big comedy game about little girls solving clever puzzles, October 7, 2020So I'll admit, I was skeptical before playing this game. Many claims about game length in interactive fiction are wildly exaggerated, and custom engines are typically done poorly. So hearing about a custom engine game with 15 hours of gameplay, I was skeptical that it would be that long and expected it to be quite bad.
In fact, though, this is a very funny game and the mechanics, though hard to get used to at first, end up making sense. I've played about 5 hours so far, using a ton of hints but also taking breaks, and I have explored only about half of the map and still have several puzzles left on that part, so the 15 hour claim is accurate. I definitely intend on finishing it.
You play as a young girl who is asked to chop wood by her mother. You decide it would be more fun to make a friend, though, and that is your first quest. After that, you and your friend have a big open world with many simultaneous puzzles to solve.
The game is translated from Italian, and is generally pretty good (I've sent some possible corrections to the author where I thought it sounded a bit off). The girls' attitude to horrifying or shocking things is pretty funny. The art is also great, especially the background art of the final version that has been shared in a different thread.
The weakest part is the opening. This is a weird system, and most people have trouble adapting to a weird system. That's why many people don't play parser games: you open it up and what do you do? Knowing it's VERB+NOUN and that examining and taking and talking takes some training.
Similarly, this game opens up with a pretty small area (good) but also a ton of menu options from the very beginning. It might be better to give an incredibly easy puzzle right at the very beginning, so easy the game basically solves it for you, with no menu buttons but the one that solves it, just for people to get used to the game, the map, etc.
I found the puzzles engaging and interesting, and it made me happy. They are also hard, and I used all the hints. Sometimes the trigger for events didn't make sense. I had a small period in the game where all the hints said 'you can't do this yet' and I kept talking to people, and eventually a random scene triggered. Several times in the game random scenes trigger that advance the plot and I don't know why (usually 'Let's go talk to so and so').
How does this system compare to others? I think this system is like the programming language C++. C++ is very powerful and lets you do amazing things but it is a pain in the butt to learn, a little scary, and sometimes you feel helpless. I saw that in the graphical version the buttons are replace with pictures, and I think that could help a lot.
Overall, this is a game I would pay money for, especially the art version. Again, I know not everyone agrees. I've realized during this comp that my enjoyment of things is not a reliable indicator of whether other people will enjoy it, and my score isn't always a good indicator of how much I enjoyed things. But I like this game and will score it well, whatever that means to you!
+Polish: Very polished graphically, with some small language problems when I played.
+Descriptiveness: Very funny and easy to imagine.
+Interactivity: Interface was hard to get used to but puzzles were really fun.
+Would I play again? Definitely going to finish it.
+Emotional impact: Very funny.
Procedurally generated prose created by the author's own works, October 7, 2020**You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf by BJ Best**
I beta tested this game.
In regards to the scenery and trimmings of this game, it's polished and nice-looking in the Chapbook format or lookalike (I remember I asked about the format while testing but can't find my correspondence anywhere). It has good music and flows naturally.
Writing-wise, this is GPT-2 (a procedural generation/ai tool). I usually really dislike GTP-2 because it just regurgitates whatever's put into it. Most popular uses of GPT-2 involves scraping other people's content without attribution and then spitting it out, with most of the 'best results' being word-for-word copies of the original input.
But in this case, the person using GPT-2 is the person who made the original content, so that makes it more interesting. I guess, then, that this is like a procedurally generated mirror. It lets the author see themself, and it lets us see that vicariously.
There are fun parts in the writing (the line 'You count the days until Christmas. I count the days when we didn’t know each other’s last names.' reminds me of Arcade Fire lyrics). Overall, it's an interesting experiment, and reveals a lot about the author.
+Polish: The game is smooth.
-Descriptiveness: It's made of interesting chunks, but they don't flow together in larger picture.
+Interactivity: It gives the sense of interaction, a weird sense of pseudo-agency. The footnotes help.
+Emotional impact: For me it was curiosity about the author themself.
-Would I play again? No, one run through seems enough for me.
A translated multimedia .exe homebrew parser about a deep mystery, October 7, 2020Okay, so I think this game actually has a lot going for it, and I also think it will receive less votes than most games and score lower, and not necessarily deserve it.
This game is a windows executable. Historically, windows executables get very few votes.
This game is written by an Italian author and has numerous English grammar errors. Which is reasonable; I suspect that I if I wrote a game in Italian, I would have quite a few Italian grammar errors. But it can be confusing; the kitchen has ‘cookers’, but is that the oven (an openable thing?) or the stove (not openable?) When it says that the bench has a usable bottom, how was that meant to help me open it?
I got fairly far in the game, making it to the city of Radicofani before being killed in the church. This game has a lot of sounds and pop-up images (which mostly must be closed individually). I especially enjoyed the pixelization of the Beatles Revolver album cover.
I suspect the game is on a timer, as when I got further the missing woman’s picture frequently popped up telling me to hurry.
Typing HELP helped me a lot, as did typing words’ whole names rather than parts.
I liked the story, involving some sort of portal in spacetime, the power of the written word, a murderer and possibly demons?
Unfortunately, there is no walkthrough with the game. I’d definitely take another crack at it if I could have a step by step walkthrough (although I’d just follow it exactly so I could see the whole story).
+Polish: Lots of problems with the custom parser, but lots of good sound and images.
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid. Probably my favorite thing about it.
-Interactivity: It was very hard to guess the next step.
+Emotional impact: It was all mysterious and cool.
-Would I play again? Without a walkthrough, no. With a walkthrough, yes.
An Indiana-Jones style game with complex puzzles and a secret, October 6, 2020In Adventures in the Tomb of the Ilfane you play as an adventurer who is running from Nazi scientist Doktor Chirlu while you break into the tomb of Ilfane, ancient Autarch of the Teresten people. You have access to a beautiful mural of Teresten history, a Dais that represents the planets, and a sarcophagus covered in strange runes.
Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:
(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!" by Tarquin Segundo and
"Terror in the Immortal's Atelier" by Gevelle Formicore
and return here if you get stuck after that.
Below is more spoilers for people who've seen the first spoiler.
(Spoiler - click to show)I'm clumping these three games together because they have remarkably similar presentations. The titles all use quotations, their cover art has similar themes, and they all contain the phrase:
"Remember, no knot unties itself. You may need to seek aid from an unusual place."
in their blurb, in addition to using the same names for different characters in their blurb.
In case it's not clear, these games are part of a set, and in particular, they are all parts of the same game.
I've seen some people speculate about this on the forums. This is strongly reminiscent of the Hat Puzzle (see the second-to-last section of https://intfiction.org/t/what-makes-a-best-puzzle/46852).
The large amounts of worldbuilding and lore in each game can be overwhelming. It's descriptive and interesting, but I wonder if we could have gotten by with more names like 'the Knot' and less like 'Willershin Rill', not because they're bad but because it can be difficult to parser, especially since the first game contains several many-page books.
Fortunately, the author(s) foresaw that and put anything that you need to know in flashing lights with the words 'you need to know this' and puts them in an ordered list.
As you can guess from the similarities, the games are all the same game. Once you know that, the puzzles become easy: search everything you can for a password. Find out which game it belongs to and input it there, getting the next password. The final puzzle has the credits.
Overall, I'm pleased with these. I definitely think this works better than the infamous Hat puzzle which was not discovered without hints. The styling (especially on the runes and star chart) is nice while I usually despise slow text, it went quickly and much of it is skippable on replay.
+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement upon solving the tomb and the fade-to-white almost gave me chills.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.
A science fiction game with complex passwords and some surprises, October 6, 2020In Incident! Aliens on the Teresten! you play as a member of the starship Teresten which was attacked by an evil horde called the Ilfane after your scientist Chirlu experimented on The Knot. You have a computer that can unlock the knot if you can chart a correct course on a grid, as well as a dictionary for alien runes and a beautiful planetary logo to look at on the wall.
Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:
(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane" by Willershin Rill
"Terror in the Immortal's Atelier" by Gevelle Formicore
and see my review of 'Adventures' for more detail.
+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: I felt excitement upon solving the star chart and the fade-to-white almost gave me chills.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.
A fantasy game with complex passwords and some surprises, October 6, 2020Terror in the Immortal's Atelier has you fleeing an evil sorceror named Chirlu, Autarch of Telestren, who has stolen the Knot and placed it in the container called the Ilfane, which you have to open. You have 4 books telling you about magical creatures, and a huge table full of reagents you can mix and match in any order.
Below is a spoiler that may help those who didn't see the blurbs and cover art in IFComp 2020:
(Spoiler - click to show)Check out
"Adventures in the Tomb of Ilfane" by Willershin Rill
"Incident! Aliens on the Teresten!" by Tarquin Segundo and
and see my review for Adventures for more detail.
+Polish: This game is definitely polished in appearance and effects.
-Descriptivenes: The proper names were a lot to deal with, and I couldn't picture things vividly.
+Interactivity: Great puzzles. Love it. Maybe XYZZY Individual Puzzle nom?
+Emotional impact: The evil version of 'The Giving Tree' was honestly pretty great.
+Would I play again? I'll check it out again in the future.
A short, replayable board game-like Twine about insulting John Cage, October 6, 2020So this game is something pretty rare for IFComp. It's laid out like a board game, with four different rooms and three independent characters who move around.
Discovering what this game was and what it's rules are was a great difficulty in and of itself. When the game begins, the only options you have are to wander around and insult John Cage. The only things you can do in other rooms is to turn the stove off or on or take a watch (which puts a timer up on the screen).
John Cage starts walking around, and sometimes you can ask him about events that happened. I learned that he got a message from a lawyer, and that was about it.
After dying, I read that I could get hints by clicking a book in the bookcase. But I didn't see any bookcase!
I finally turned to the hints, and discovered that the game requires very precise sequences of events and conversation to unlock more things. Many of those things involve a large group of identical objects, and you have to pick the right one, but the info on which one to pick is randomly given in different playthroughs and most playthroughs won't give you that knowledge.
The writing is sparse and terse, suiting the board game setup. The main goal of the game is antagonizing John Cage, which isn't motivated. Before IFComp, I was playing through all the Choice of Games published titles, and I noticed that games where you could be evil were popular, but only if motivated. Being a jerk without motivation is something very few people find appealing in a game.
This is heavily-modified Twine, and the visual presentation is the best part of the game in my opinion.
+Polish: The game is very polished visually.
-Descriptiveness: This game is terse and sparse.
-Interactivity: I had great difficulty in discovering how to engage with this game.
+Emotional impact: I felt annoyance during the game, but a lot of it was intentional by the author, so it succeeded in its goal!
-Would I play it again? I peeked at the possible endings, and I'm not sure I'd like to keep playing.
A tiny Odyssey game running in an in-browser C64 emulator, October 6, 2020Nick Montfort wrote Ad Verbum, a great wordplay game that predates both Andrew Schultz and Emily Short’s wordplay games (but not Nord nor Bert), and has since then done a lot with the intersection between text and software.
I had heard a lot about this game, mostly consternation and mystery.
I’m happy to take this game at face-value. Without digging deeper, this reminds me of ASCII and the Argonauts, but slightly less complex.
In this game, you are presented with yes/no options on what kind of interactions to have with a scrambled group of towns. It seems that there is a pattern on what to do (and I was able to be right more than half of the time, so either there is a pattern or the game is good at making you feel there is a pattern, which there’s not really much of a difference there).
I’ve always had a fondness for little games done well. I came up with my current star-rating system on IFDB just so I could feel consistent giving the tiny micro-game ‘Creak, Creak’ and ‘Counterfeit Monkey’ both 5/5.
So, yeah, this is cool. Not what I expected from Nick Montfort, but then again I didn’t know what to expect, and this definitely fits his recent work. If more about the game is uncovered, that’s fine, but I kind of like its meditative simplicity.
+Polish: It does exactly what it sets out to do.
+Descriptiveness: I found that it packed in meaning in small chunks.
+Interactivity: I liked discovering the pattern.
+Emotional impact: I'm still pondering on sacrificing to Gods of a dusty planet.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I think I'll take another look at it.
A complex wordplay-based cyber fairy game, October 6, 2020Abigail Corfman has a very impressive Twine record with Open Sorcery (a popular quadratic-complexity puzzle-based commercial Twine game with upcoming sequel) and 16 Ways to Murder a Vampire at McDonalds (which is known for its complex puzzles).
So I was definitely looking forward to this one.
It wasn't quite what I expected. I thought at first it was child-oriented, but I'd rather say it's similar to fairy stories of the darker type (such as SCP-4000 or the poem The Goblin Market).
Gameplay is based on word puzzles. Initial gameplay has word-search puzzles. A long chunk of the game revolves around figuring out complex bureaucracy.
Most, if not all, of the puzzles are optional, as explained in the very brief walkthrough (which doesn't really spoil anything puzzle-wise, only offering ways around it).
I thought I was uninterested in the game at first, but then I found myself going out of my way to find more puzzles to try. In a way, it's almost like a Twine counterpart to Dibianca's Sage Sanctum Scramble, both a fantasy/sci-fi pastiche of wordplay.
I was progressing pretty nicely on the murder when I lost about 45 minutes of gameplay due to a random death with no undo possible (but restoring possible). I hadn't realized I needed to save that often, so it was a devastating blow to my will to go on. I used the walkthrough's cheats to progress to the ending, and found some satisfaction there.
Really not a fan of the random insta-death without undo (I'll admit there were some hints I was acting dangerously), but I liked the rest, so I don't know.
The protagonist is in a wheelchair, and it affects gameplay pretty much exactly how wheelchairs affect real life. I was married for 10 years to a woman who used a wheelchair full-time, and the game's emphasis on spotting out traversable paths, being stymied by a single stair step, and dealing with tedious bureaucracy to get accommodations is true to form.
There are also some personal details revealed through memories (whether of the author or of a created character), which were meaningful.
Overall, very nice experience, but make sure you save often!
++Polish and descriptiveness: Beautiful and lovely, smooth sailing.
+Interaction: My delight with the puzzles overwhelms my sadness about not saving.
+Emotional Impact: I felt intrigue.
+Would I play again? Yes, after the comp when I can dig in deeper.
A small one-room game centered around a cool tech interface, October 5, 2020I tested this game. When I tested it, it didn’t have its flashy index page, which I thought was pretty cool, especially the worldbuilding elements and the cool animation. I had trouble at first though because I thought it was text-entry and not links.
The game itself is small and simple, a one-room game. The main feature here is that you have an app on your cell-phone that lets you connect to items by their ID and manipulate them through reading and writing. There are multiple endings, one normal and one which lets you be a hero.
There are a few niceties missing here and there (you’re told that everyone is working, looking at their screens, but can’t X SCREEN) but given that I was a tester I can’t really complain, can I?
If you like this game, you should try Michael Roberts’ immense game Return to Ditch Day which includes a lot of testing ports and running cable to access devices. Other games for gadget/tech people/fans of oldschool interfaces include Rover’s Day Out and Final Exam.
+Polish. The cool file system makes up for the implementation.
-Descriptiveness. The game is pretty sparsely written, and most objects described are generic.
+Interactivity. Great system!
+Emotional impact. Mostly wonder for the phone access.
-Would I play again? Doesn't have a ton of replay value, but that's okay.
A charming Adrift game about finding a compass for a wizard, October 5, 2020I suspect that this may be a pseudonym, after I had a panic-inducing moment where something I posted in the author’s forum was liked by someone who I didn’t think was an author and who would write a game like this.
This was the first game on my personalized list, but I thought it was charming and wanted to take it slow.
This is an ADRIFT game, which means it comes with that ADRIFT style where precise verb noun combinations are needed and Inform’s and TADS’s automatic feedback systems aren’t in place. So you have to poke around.
This is a fantasy pastiche (with an especially funny moment where the game loads music by Peter, Paul and Mary and invokes the wizard Google) where you are teleported to another world and asked to bring a compass to a wizard.
While the storyline resembles a fantasy teen novel, the game itself is well-adapted to parser fans. It has traps you can fall into without knowing for sure if they are traps, and requires careful experimentation and searching, but it also has multiple puzzle solutions.
I had hoped to do most of the work on my own, and asked a few early hints, but ended up heading to the walkthrough around the bank segment. Given more time, I probably would have just left this open for a month and poked at it.
I definitely don’t prefer ADRIFT or Quest games for their systems, which often frustrate my gameplay style, but I have grown accustomed to their style, and they work remarkably well for menu-based systems (ADRIFT more than Quest).
This game was charming overall, and I had a good time playing it.
-Polish: The eternal bane of most ADRIFT games.
+Descriptiveness: I thought the game was well-described.
+Interactivity: I was often frustrated, but when I took it very slowly, it was fun.
+Emotional impact: I found it charming
+Would I play again? Why not? From the other scores I can see this early on, I might be in the minority, but I got a kick out of this game.
Two teenagers trying to connect through an old digital game, October 5, 2020So I tested this game for the competition.
Like Accelerate earlier, this choice-based game has a lot of visual and audio detail.
When I first tested it, I was struck by the cute neopets-esque game graphics that it contains. But playing the full version, I was blown away by the voice acting. Great audio quality, believable voice, better than most podcasts I’ve listened to. Very impressive, and helps make the animations more cinematic.
I had a bit of trouble with my eagerness causing me to scroll quickly, while many of the animations reload the page. But that was minor.
The story is a long-term (as in 10 year) relationship with a friend on Neopets. You both experience marginalization by your classmates and you struggle with your relationship with your parents. There are hints throughout the game, but it’s later revealed that a major theme of this game is .
The writing is sharp and on-point; the chat feels real to me, and the pacing is good. Bez has put a lot of work into improving games and pushing boundaries over the last few years and it’s really paid off.
Check the content warnings for the game ahead of time.
+Polish: The animations could be smoother, but that's a small thing when the voice and art are so good.
+Interactivity: I've played it several different ways and it feels fairly responsive.
+Descriptiveness: I feel like I'm there when I read it.
+Emotional impact: Definitely feel it. On my 'be mean to stairs but not so much the game ends early' run I felt sick in my stomach when being mean.
+Would I play again? I've played it three times, so yeah.
A smooth and polished game exploring an odd medieval city, October 5, 2020Josh Labelle is a fairly well-known professional narrative designer, so I was interested to see how this game turned out. Skills developed working in a team on graphical projects don't always translate to solo text works and vice versa, so I figured it could go either way.
For me, I find this very successful. I have a soft spot for dungeon crawls and western RPGs (I enjoyed the parser game Heroes and the Choicescript series Hero of Kendrickstone better than most reviewers on average), and this game satisfies that.
It's very polished, with slick menus and nice highlighting and color use. I wasn't even sure it was Twine until I opened the file.
You play as one member of a team of three who has been assigned to kill a dragon then return to town. But once you get back, you have trouble finding where to claim your reward.
There are some complicated stats. It does fall a little bit into the Choicescript meme where you pick one of 3-4 skills and just max it out the whole time, and there's no reason not to accept most side quests; both these options make strategy a little less well-developed. On the other hand, the relationships with your partners and your decisions with the enemies (like the dragon and your employer) have more long term consequences (and many side quests have meaningful ending decisions that last even until the end credits).
Writing, setting and story are all high quality, with huge variety between the taverns in the game and several plot twists. Overall, I think this will do pretty good in the comp; if anything limits its appeal, it might be that traditional RPGs have been considered overplayed in IFComp in the past. It'll be interesting to see where this places. I consider it one of the better games I've played so far.
+Polish: Very polished, smooth, well-designed.
+Interactivity: Even lets you pick how much of the game you want to interact with, by making a lot optional.
+Descriptiveness: The variety in the bars was strong.
+Emotional impact: Suspenseful and funny.
+Would I play again? Yes.
A solid old-school parser game about an abandoned gas-station, October 5, 2020I saw some positive buzz for this game and was looking foward to it.
This is a parser game with a map that slowly expands, starting with a pretty constrained area but slowly branching.
Some have called this 'old-school' and I'd say that that's true, in the sense that the storytelling is mostly environmental, the puzzles are well-recognizable tropes with clever twists (color-coded switches, complicated devices, machines with missing parts, keys and locks, etc.), and the writing is mainly devoted to describing objects and things briefly and succinctly.
The puzzles form an enjoyable whole; I liked figuring out the different ways of handling the fusebox. I ended up needing to use the walkthrough when trying to find the (Spoiler - click to show)spring, and I locked myself out of the best ending accidentally when I (Spoiler - click to show)incinerated the worker and the device for making the cure. I hadn't saved in a long time, so I'll have to go back some time and try again. I got a sub-optimal ending, but still felt satisfied.
If anything could improve this game, it would be additional coverage of scenery implementation and synonyms. Much of the game depends at looking at scenery and looking at its sub-details, yet numerous such scenery objects are not implemented at all or require specific phrases. For an example of specific phrases, I couldn't refer to the (Spoiler - click to show)big red button as just (Spoiler - click to show)'red'. For an example of synonyms, 'push red fuse' doesn't work, but 'turn on red fuse' does. For missing scenery, when you see a faint light in the distance, you can't look at the light.
These aren't major impediments, but resolving this would take this game from good to great. I definitely think that this game will do well in the comp, and that the author could create future awesome games.
-Polish: As described above, I felt that the game could have benefitted from another few rounds of refinement with synonyms and such.
+Descriptiveness: The writing does a good job of describing the various objects you find.
+Interactivity: I enjoyed the puzzles outside of the polish issues.
+Emotional Impact: I felt a sense of mystery and exploration.
+Would I play again? I plan on finding the good ending some time.
A vampire gets a job (and revenge), October 4, 2020I was a beta tester for this game.
I feel like this is the bread and butter for parser games in the comp. Reasonable but interesting puzzles, funny wordplay, an interesting protagonist, and solid implementation.
In this game, you play a vampire who has come to sabotage his rival, who is a real jerk to everyone around him. Unfortunately, you have a lot of weaknesses: running water, death by stakes, etc. Menu-based conversation plays a big part in this game.
I enjoy this game, and could happily recommend it to parser fans.
+Polish: Smooth. Experienced no problems with the parser. Nice cover art.
-Descriptive: Could use a little bit more richness in the descriptions. It was hard to visualize a lot of things in the game, just for me personally.
+Emotional impact: I found it genuinely funny and delightful.
+Interactivity: Smooth puzzles that I enjoyed more than most things in this comp.
+Would I play again? Definitely!
A shortish game big on worldbuilding and branching, October 4, 2020I remember playing a game by Skarn a few years ago about an alien in t.he future, and so I was definitely interested in seeing what this one was about.
Mechanically, this game is very impressive. You're part of an underpaid, understaffed community group who needs to take care of three magical problems: decaying magical protections, dangerous magical books, and finding herbs for werewolf potions.
You have 9 characters that you can split up for these different tasks, with diverse options like Cheshire Cats, golems, centaurs, etc. One person is pre-assigned to each task, and then you choose the other 2. Each task then lets you pick who does what, each with their respective text.
This is a combinatorial explosion like Animalia, although shorter in each runthrough. The fact that the author was able to code in so many special combinations (and even ones that interact with each other!) is absolutely amazing.
I don't know if the tone of the writing matched the game, though. The tone is crisp and businesslike, told at a distance, while the content it is describing is wondrous and magical and deals with people's inner thoughts and feelings and interpersonal relationships. But I doubt that will be a universal reaction.
I'd definitely be interested in playing through this one again to see everything! The cast of characters and the worldbuilding is excellent.
+Polish: Pretty smooth.
-Descriptiveness: The game is quite descriptive, but as I said above I felt a mismatch between tone and content.
+Interactivity: I was impressed by the many options.
-Emotional impact: I felt a distance from this game, emotionally
+Would I play again? Definitely. Got to see all the cool options!
All Limericks, with several clever wordplay puzzle. , October 4, 2020So the original Limerick Heist was something that had never really been seen in IFComp: a game consisting entirely of a constrained poetical form (in this case, a ton of limericks) while still telling a coherent story with items and actions.
It did very well, and defied usual voting patterns (by being one of the shortest Choice games to place in the top 10). It also picked up some well-deserved XYZZY nominations.
I wondered what this game would be like, and its receptions. Did people vote highly for the novelty only? Would a second game that has the same tricks as the first do as well?
Unfortunately, we won't find out because Limerick Quest manages to be just as novel and ingenious as the first game, improving substantially on the original formula.
In this game, you encounter several puzzles involving completing Limericks under various constraints. Your partner (her text in purple, yours in green) gives out generous hints on request. The constraints vary quite a bit, and include timed puzzles near the end (with very short times, so watch out if you use text-to-speech!)
The puzzles were really ingenious. I could see this picking up a 'best puzzles' nomination for next year. I was shocked to see this game get so much mileage out of, for instance, 100 identical objects labelled by number only.
So, I had fun. The visuals were great, with animated text, expressive use of color (especially with voices in unison) and background color changes.
+Polished: Very much so.
+Descriptive: The limericks are carrying all the weight here, and they do well.
+Interactivity: The puzzles were honestly very clever and enjoyable.
+Would I play again? Definitely.
+Emotional Impact: Fun and excitement.
A puzzle-based choice game with interesting mechanic, October 3, 2020This game was interesting, and I think it shows a lot of promise for the future.
In this game, you wake up in an office building that seems fairly destroyed and embark on a search and rescue mission. It was quite a surprise when I discovered that (Spoiler - click to show) someone had taken all my fingers!
The map consists of two floors (for most of the game) with several rooms, each room containing various objects. As you explore the map, you find more of your (Spoiler - click to show)fingers, which gives you greater access to other things.
The UI was smooth and the writing was good. The puzzle structure was a little constrained, though. At most points in the game, it seemed like there was only one course of action possible at a time, so I spent most of the game 'lawnmowering' through choices (trying every possible action over and over). I think that allowing a bit more nonlinearity would make this an awesome puzzle game, and so I'd definitely look forward to anything else the author puts out.
+Polish: Smooth and perfect.
+Descriptiveness: The writing had some pretty clever moments for me.
-Interactivity: The linearity of the puzzles felt constrained to me.
-Emotional impact: Because I was repeating options so often, they lost a bit of their impact.
+Would I play again? I think I would, yeah.
A funny TADS game about summoning a demon for your boss, October 3, 2020This game is related to or part of a school project, which kind of setup hasn't made super successful games in the past (I've run some game camps, and long games take a ton of time; a polished IFComp game is about the same work as a Master's thesis and less like a semester project).
This one manages to be better than most, although it still has some rough edges.
Each of the people who worked on the game had successes. The art for the cover is done well; the writing has very funny moments; and the programming handles some pretty tricky material and multiple solutions to most puzzles.
In this game you play as a young member of a cult who has a very funny reaction to being a parser game PC. Your cult leader wants you to summon a demon, who turns out to be a real mild fellow. Shenanigans ensue.
The weak spots are evident in the game, too. The only file available in the download is a compiled executable for 3 platforms with no t3 file. Some of the conversation feels off (in general, reading your dialogue out loud can help make it stronger). You can't leave your leader's room early on until you ask him certain topics, but there is no TOPICS command or other way I found to remember what you need to do.
All of this can be fixed by general experience and maybe getting a few more beta testers that have experience testing comp games. But I think this is the best school-related IFComp game that I can remember playing, and I'd be pleased to see more from these authors.
-Polish: Could use more polish.
-Descriptiveness: Pretty good, but overall could use some more variety and colorful details.
+Emotional Impact: I found this funny
+Would I play again? Has plenty of replay value.
+Interactivity: Outside of the polish issues, the stuff you had to do made sense. The summoning ritual was very good.
Compact Quest game about exploring a tomb, with timed events, October 2, 2020**Tombs and Mummies by Matthew Warner**
People named Matt W have been doing good work in the math world for a while, including Matt Weiner (mod for this website) and Matt Wigdahl (author of IFComp-winning Aotearoa); so I was looking forward to this game.
This is a quest game and is online-only (you might be able to download an offline copy from textadventures.co.uk, but the download button on the ifcomp page just links to the website). It does not allow undo, has timed events, and if you leave it alone for 5 minutes, it will kick you out and lose your progress.
Fortunately, the game map is compact and the actual solution requires about 20 moves (mostly directions), so if you lose everything you're not set too far behind.
About half of the things you see in the games are traps, and unhelpful, and the rest are useful. Some are both (like the hint machine that hurts you while hinting).
The images, taken from ancient Egyptian art, were lovely, and the puzzles weren't unfairly difficult. I'm glad I'm played it.
+Polish: Nice images, well-thought out design and item placement and responses
+Descriptiveness: The game was very vivid to me.
-Interactivity: The above mentioned troubles with timing out and active events weren't too bad but enough that it impacted my enjoyablity
+Emotional impact: I felt a sense of adventure
+Would I play again: Maybe I would.
A small, thoughtful fantasy cave crawl turned into a meditation, October 2, 2020When I clicked on Neil Aitken’s website, I saw that he is an accomplished poet, with testimonials by other poets including some state Poet Laureates.
So I was interested to see how the game panned out. Games by static fiction authors are often different from games by programmers-turned authors. (Edit: apparently he was also a programmer before too, which explains the smoothness of the game!)
So this game is a cyclical kind of twine game where you wander around a maze of rooms (different on both of my playthroughs, with about half the rooms the same and the other half different). It’s a cave and it’s influenced by standard fatnasy tropes (treasure, magic runes, lizard people, magic pools, etc.) and you can gather various items and use them as well as gathering things like ‘incomprehensible wisdom’ which I thought was a nice touch.
Visually, the game uses neon-style text for important nouns, kind of like the neon in Cactus Blue Motel. I found it visually appealing.
This game was polished: no bugs, no typos that I found. Usually first-time game creators tend to have a few unfinished ends here and there (blank passages, macros typed incorrectly), so that was pleasing.
Overall, I would say that the line by line writing was excellent. I’ve found over time in the comp that a lot of people who try to create poetry in IF fail to inspire me, but I was genuinely into the writing here. As an overall story and as a series of interactions, it didn’t excel to me; it was competent, but I feel it could have been more ambitious. The same could absolutely be said about my own game in this competition. I would definitely consider this a game for the author to be proud of.
+Polish: The color highlighting around important words is nice, and this game had no bugs or typos that I found.
+Descriptiveness: Lovely writing, very nice.
+Interactivity: The overall structure didn't stand out to me, but the variation and the many ways the inventory can be used was fun.
+Would I play again? Definitely.
+Emotional impact: Yes, a kind of meditative, chill emotion.
A menu-based windows executable with combat and inventory, October 2, 2020This is a Windows executable game that I gave two attempts for. The first one I died against the brother, but on reloading (through 2 different saves) the lever puzzle stopped working, so I suppose I should start from the beginning, but I might have to save that for later.
This game reminds me a lot of Eye of the Beholder but without graphics. It’s menu based; in each room, you can look at each of the four directions. When you look at a direction, you might see something like a mural, or you might find items, which you equip. Items can be upgraded through prayer, which gives them special abilities. Combat is turn-based.
Most of the puzzles involve decoding passwords through hints scattered around the map. It’s a fairly compact game, so replay won’t take too long.
The goals of this game seem different from most parser games. Instead of focusing on mimesis or smooth gameplay flow, it focuses on combat and inventory. Worth checking out if you are into TTRPGs with miniatures.
-Polish: I had one crash and a weird bug with the levers. The system had words wrap around lines, being split in the middle instead of moved in discrete chunks.
+Descriptiveness: The scratchings on the walls and the knights you fight were interesting.
-Interactivity: Looking at each room separately and having to use different commands for each menu was kind of a pain.
-Emotional impact: I didn't really get a strong feeling from this game. It seemed more of a system than a compelling story, and that's okay; it just didn't move me.
+Would I play again? I'd like to see the ending sometime!
A charming sci-fi story with multiple paths, October 2, 2020I beta tested this game a while before the competition.
I found this game charming. Time travel and dual worlds always fascinated me, and in this game you explore a town before being sent 40 years into the past.
The goals in this game are simple, and I found the parser responding smoothly to pretty much everything I tried. There are many solutions to the puzzles (I ended up with about 30 points out of 50, happy with my result).
There is a timer in the game, and your watch tracks what happens. Events happen naturally in the city. People respond logically to actions you take, and everybody has a few conversation topics.
I feel like the very first puzzle with Tom can be a bit unintuitive (what exactly are we looking for?) but the state space is so small that it's solvable just by trying everything available.
+Polish: Felt smooth.
+Descriptive: The language of the game is simple, but the town was memorable.
+Emotional impact: the game felt homey. For me, this game had the je ne sais quoi that ties everything together. YMMV.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I think I might revisit this in the future.
Escape from the wizard's tower with a series of complex puzzles, October 2, 2020This was an odd game for me to play. Jim Aikin was an early favorite for me, as Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina was one of the first IF games I ever played, and I thoroughly enjoyed. I later tried other games like Lydia's Heart and found them complex and polished.
This game has a lot of excellent coding and and overall clever design, but I feel it didn't quite rise to the level of the earlier games (which makes sense, as they were designed for a grander experience than can fit into the comp).
You play as a young woman who is captured in a tower, and where your kidnapper is planning on raping you. The game heavily emphasizes this in the opening scene and content warnings, giving the player a sense that perhaps the seriousness of this crime will be justified in the story. But in the actual game, nothing at all depends on the duke planning to rape you. The story could just have easily had you kidnapped for any reason whatsoever and it would have made no difference at all. So I'm not sure why the rape is dwelt on so heavily.
Many puzzles require nonstandard actions, usually involving examining scenery items that are in the middle of room descriptions and discovering extra parts to them, using special verbs (in at least two puzzles, EXAMINE doesn't work but closely related verbs work).
The characters are well-differentiated and have interesting conversation, but for me at least they had all conversation topics available at the same time; so, for instance, I was able to ask the cook about things that I had never heard of, and which I later heard of from another character, and which were involved in puzzles I was very far away from, providing a sort of spoiler.
Here's my final score breakdown:
+Polish: The game was very polished. Most of my issues were with interactivity, not with overall polish.
+Descriptiveness: Characters were well-differentiated and there were a lot of little details.
+Would I play it again? Yes, especially since I feel it has more secrets than I discovered.
-Interactivity: I found myself fighting the parser a lot, and I feel that several of the puzzles were designed in a way that didn't click with my brain.
+Emotional impact: I wavered back and forth on this, but in the end, the game made me feel a lot of things. I wouldn't have played through this slowly and analyzed it the way it did if it didn't have an overall effect on me.
The latest in a long series of big, adventuresome Adrift games, October 2, 2020Larry Horsfield has a long-running and fairly successful series of ADRIFT games with the hero Alaric Blackmoon.
I always have a bit of trouble finishing the games. These games are definitely in the older school fashion, which Adrift is suited for. Adrift only encodes specific verb-noun combinations, although you can set up a few synonyms. So in particular, if an action works in one room, it might provoke an error message in another. To climb down a rope, you must type ‘CLIMB DOWN ROPE’ but not ‘DOWN’. This isn’t necessarily a drawback…it ends requiring careful analysis. These games are the perfect games to slowly pick at over a month or so.
During the comp, though, I rushed with the walkthrough, until I messed up a part with a bucket and got stuck. In the part I saw (about 2/3 of the game), I found some really fun dynamics (like growing and shrinking), intervened in a goblin war and navigated through some crazy caverns. Definitely one to come back to later!
+Polish: It has a lot of effort put into nice color changes and complex mechanics.
+Descriptiveness: I could imagine a lot of the scenarios vividly.
-Interactivity: I frequently had trouble doing what I'd like to with things, and commands frequently had to be very specific.
+Would I play again? I plan on looking at this again.
+Emotional impact: A lot of parts of it were just fun, like crossing the ravine and changing shape.
A short game about the big consequences of small actions, October 2, 2020Equal-Librium is a short, replayable Twine game about how our daily choices affect our lives in deep ways, and interesting topic that I had actually been reading about before the comp began.
The game uses complicated styling, like shaking text and some timed delivery (which didn't really annoy me here as it was fairly fast and the game was short). It emulates e-mail systems.
The story is about being a CEO of a company and receiving a bribe offer with ecological consequences. There are several endings with a suggestion to replay.
I found some typos and a broken macro, but the story was interesting.
-Polish: The effects were fancy, but there were too many typos and errors for my liking.
+Descriptiveness: I found the writing vivid and interesting.
+Interactivity: Branches a lot but is short enough to make replaying feasible.
-Emotional Impact: I got where it was coming from, but for some reason or another the message didn't sink in.
+Would I play again? Wouldn't mind giving it another spin to find more endings (already found 2).
A faux-MMORPG with increasingly cooler scenarios, October 2, 2020So, Hanon Ondricek has a long history of making very unusual and experimental games. I first came into contact with his work in the 2015 IFComp, which we both entered. He had a game called the Baker of Shireton, an unusual game which was a baking simulator with some MMORPG-style elements. One especially odd feature was that it modeled abstract objects as inventory items, like your name, job, and quest. It later turned out (spoilers for this game) (Spoiler - click to show)that you were an NPC in an MMORPG and could hack the game to get out and go on a short quest.
I found that idea fascinating, and I ended up using it in several of my games. So that made the Baker of Shireton get stuck in my brain.
This game is a successor to that one. In this game, you get to play an upgraded version of the fake MMO that the first game was set in. This is a choice-based system instead of parser, and it has great art by Marco Innocenti and music from a variety of sources. The music was catchy; I left it on for much of the day as I played, and my son liked it too.
The bulk of this game is getting and fulfilling quests from different NPCs. There is a complex combat system (I especially enjoyed the 'magic' mechanics which require you to quickly spell some words during combat. There is also an option to slow down combat significantly for people who have trouble with quick time events). While rich and actually pretty fun, combat isn't completely necessary. In a way, it reminds me quite a bit of Porpentine's various comabt systems, and various bee-related events in the game also bear some resemblance to her.
Speaking of bearing resemblance, there are references to a lot of games in here, including many of Hanon's older games as well as Cragne Manor, the SCP foundation and others.
Solving this game was challenging. I frequently had to think outside of the box. Hanon is one of the pioneers (along with people like Agniezska Trzaska) in choice-based puzzle mechanics and boy does this game have a lot of them. I definitely wouldn't feel bad asking for hints (and, in fact, I didn't feel bad; I asked for quite a few).
This is also a very large game. I spent around 5-6 hours beating it.
My overall evaluation:
+Polish: Absolutely polished. About the most polished a game can get. I don't mean bug-free, I mean that every aspect of the user experience has been accounted for and acted on.
+Interactivity: Loved the RPG events, the weird shortcuts you get later on, and the ease of use of the AXMA system.
+Descriptiveness: I especially appreciated the details in Luneybin.
+Emotional impact: The horror-lite sections near the end worked well for me.
+Would I play again?: Definitely plan to revisit this just for fun in the future.
A vivid depiction of hard life in a small Japanese neighborhood, October 2, 2020This game seems like a sequel to Gotomomi, AvB's expansive parser simulation game of 2015 set in Gotomomi, a neighborhood in Japan. In that game, you gathered money by various means (working carrying a bucket of fish, posing as a model, etc.)
In this game, you return to the same scenes, but your path is a lot more constrained at first. The main goal seems to be finding better and better housing.
There are elements of the game that seem surreal, especially near the end. I wouldn't use the term magical realism, because there's not any magic here, but maybe 'enhanced reality'? There is violence in the game more surprising in how it is reacted to than its existence.
Overall, the game's narrower focus than Gotomomi aids it in telling a coherent narrative. However, many required actions are things that, while dramatically sensible, don't make much sense in a typical parser game. I ended up using the walkthrough for most of the game.
+Polish. The game uses an in-depth conversation system and has a lot of interesting moving parts (like a gambling game and holding your beath).
+Descriptiveness. This game is very descriptive.
-Interactivity. I often found myself at odds with the parser.
+Emotional Impact. The ending was very intriguing. I don't know if it was moving, but I'd describe it as a thoughtful game.
+Would I play it again? I'd be willing to give it another go some time.
A short, one move game based on an old saying, October 1, 2020This is a simple game but it made me smile. You play through the classic kitschy saying about Everybody, nobody, somebody, and anybody, and have to assign a person to do a task.
There are very few options, so the game ends quickly. Overall, a nice cohesive game.
A masterfully written Shakespearen-style game with fiddly stats, September 30, 2020I'm actually very torn on this review. I think I'm going to end up recommending this on Steam but not giving it 5 stars here, because the two sets of reviews serve different purposes.
Fool! has brilliant writing. I've read all of Shakespeare's plays multiple times (I got on a real kick in college where I'd read one of his plays after every other book I read), and there are some parts of this game I'd easily believe came from one of his books. It has a lot of poetry and jokes.
The overall backstory seems to be based on Henry IV parts 1 and 2 but in a different setting. There are battles between England and France, a somewhat rebellious Prinxe Hail and a rebellious northerner nicknamed Hotfoot.
In the midst of this, you are an aspiring fool who starts out with an audience of three wide-eyed kids and a stage marked by horse manure and drunks' vomit. Throughout the game, you build up your reputation and make friends (and enemies) along the way until you can end up as high as the King's Court or being one of the most famous players in the land.
It's a large game, maybe 4-6 hours long if playing intently.
With all these good things going forward it, it's hard not to recommend it. But I had to battle quite a bit with the stats. I frequently could not for the life of me guess when a choice was sanguine, bilious, phlegmatic or melancholic.
"Let's see," I'd think to myself. "This option is about cheering up my friends. That's sanguine, right?" Nope. It's phlegmatic, because you're trying to balance your various responsibilites.
Okay, trying to be famous is usually bilious right? No, this time trying to be famous is melancholic, because you're being cynical or cautious about it.
I was trying to roleplay as a confident and brilliant braggart (high blood/bile), and made it to act 3 with almost maxed-out sanguine (after restarting, something I almost never do, and battling back and forth for a while with the stats), and then a series of encounters somehow flipped it so I had extremely low blood and bile. I literally pounded my fist and shouted 'no!' in frustration a couple of times.
My reaction to the stats seems isolated. Fool! is fairly high on the bestseller list on the Choice of Games omnibus app and has very positive reviews on Steam and on the Choice of Games forum. The funny writing, the excellent quality of humor and even silly stuff like the ape companion make me feel confident that I can recommend this game to others and they'll feel like they got their money's worth, and I intend to do so on steam. If you're into Shakesperean comedy or want to max your Bawdiness or Wit then this game is absolutely for you. I don't regret playing it, and intend to return to it in the future.
I received a review copy of this game.
An enormous stat-driven Vampire game with great art, September 27, 2020This game helps fulfill a childhood dream of mine. When I was younger, I always had access to and eventually bought a lot of guidebooks for RPGs. I focused on Dungeons and Dragons (I had over 20 AD&D 2E books as kid) but enjoyed White Wolf a lot. Sadly, although I really wanted it, I never found a group to run a campaign with and never tried playing Vampire: the Masquerade.
This game is exactly what I hoped for if I had played such a campaign. A clever story cooked up by a master DM (or the VtM equivalent), a large number of encounters with chances to grow my powers, and fun dives into lore and characters.
This game is designed to keep you on your toes. In an interview, the author said that his favorite concept in VtM is that just surviving is incredibly hard, and just dumping characters in a big city and seeing if they can live for a week. This is exactly the kind of scenario you have in the game.
You play as a vampire who is coming into Tucson after a long absence. The Prince there brings you into His service and asks you to complete several tasks. These tasks are each there own chapter, and there are 2 sets of 3.
You have many stats (over 30), with your initial stats determined by your clan (together with a clan weakness; mine was zoning out due to beauty). All stats are useful throughout the game, though mental stats are more useful early on.
Between mission you can spend your money (on housing, which is very useful, or cars, which the writer seems really really excited by and describes in incredible detail, with over a dozen options including exotic sports cars), upgrade your stats, or buy new equipment. You can turn NPCs into 'ghouls' who help you with everything. I got a ghoul early on and she factored into literally every mission from then on in an integral way.
True to the source, the game is heavily focused on stats and strategizing. The most important stat is hunger; high hunger makes you bad at everything, including finding more food to eat, so getting high hunger can cause a terrible spiral until you get back home and buy some cheap food. Moreover, using your coolest powers (i.e. 'disciplines') raises your hunger. You can use this to your advantage by using powers to hunt food, immediately wiping away your hunger boost.
I would describe this as a 'deluxe' Choice of Games title, if that descriptor existed. It has incredible graphics when you meet people, it has a great IP connection, and it is LONG.
I play a lot of IF games, and I can finish even very long material in an hour or two. But it took me an entire Saturday and much of the evening before to play this. It's like several shorter Choicescript games bundled together. To get a better idea of its length, I was thinking 'this game is huge' as I was getting close to its end. I was a little disappointed I had been able to raise my stats as high as I wanted, but it was okay. Then I realized that I was only halfway through the game.
There is some strong profanity in the game. I didn't run into any explicit sexual content. I received a review copy of this game. The violence level is about what you might expect from a game about superpowered vampires engaged in a war.
A science experiment in the wasteland, September 23, 2020This one is an interesting game that shows a lot of promise, but has a lot of little details that can make for a frustrating experience. With a few tweaks, it could work pretty well. I'd love to see a longer game from this author with a long period of testing entered into IFComp or Spring Thing one year.
You play as a plant geneticist who has survived an apocalypse. You must keep your little garden of food safe, feed yourself and create hybrid plants. There are 4-5 days of gameplay with time tracked.
The programming here is impressive, from the time tracking to the puzzles involving three nouns at once. But a lot of ground level work is missing, the kind of thing that generally comes with experience or exhaustive beta testing.
Here are my scoring criteria:
+Polish. The game is technologically impressive, with complicated puzzles, active animals, a time system, etc.
-Interactivity. The game lacked exit descriptions in important areas, and some interactions were 'fiddly'. (For instance, to drink water, you must 'drink canteen'. DRINK WATER instead results in 'The Canteen is not open.', since the water is modeled as an object inside the closed canteen.'
+Descriptiveness. The writing is spare at times, but so is the setting. And the author put a lot of effort into backstory and thoughts in 'the wilderness'. I think the writing is good for a parser game, and will only improve with time.
-Emotional impact. The fiddliness of the interactions kept me at a distance from the game. Had the background actions been smoother, I think the feelings would be stronger.
-Would I play again? It was fun to see everything possible, but the difficulties made me loathe to return and tinker around.
The author's other game (The Gateway of the Ferrets) has the same kind of complicated game techniques but adds some cute ferrets that amplify my enjoyment of the game. It's worth checking out!
Edit: The interactivity and polish have increased since I wrote this, so I've revised my score accordingly!
Play the villain (or, supervillain) with lots of laughs, September 23, 2020This game came out in 2015, after landmark games like Slammed!, Choice of Robots, Hollywood Visionary, and Creatures Such as We. But it definitely feels like a game somewhere in the transition point from early Choicescript (which was a lot more trope-focused and experimental, with either few stats or tons) and later Choicescript (where games tended to have unique focuses and more standardized gameplay and stat amounts).
You play as a supervillain focusing on one of three main stats: ingenuity, combat, and terror. I played as straight terror, and pretty much every challenge let me just pick a terror option when it wasn't testing one of my personality traits/relationship. I think this game definitely falls into the 'three stat trap' they've mentioned when training newer authors, where you can just pick one thing and stick with it forever.
I'm planning on writing more about this once my odyssey through Choice of Games's catalog finished, but I think the greatest use of stats in Choicescript games is not in providing puzzles or testing you but in showing the game remembers your previous actions. I think the more compelling way of providing 'challenge' and replay value is in setting up strongly motivated courses of action that directly compete with each other, forcing you to choose one at the cost of the others. This game has some of each style.
This game is definitely comedy-focused, and allows you to have a complete disregard for human life if you choose (I did a 'no kill' run). A lot of the humor is sort of mean-spirited, including a recurring news segment (that does a good job of showing the consequences of your choices) where a divorced/divorcing couple repeatedly insults each other. I didn't really like that kind of humor at first, but there were some genuinely funny segments, especially near the end.
The overall plotline and mystery reveals were pretty satisfying. I had a romance I liked. Two things that didn't work as well for me were a pretty abrupt ending (about four paragraphs were all there were after killing the main boss) and a few times where it did that 'Haha just kidding of course you aren't going to do that action you just picked' thing.
Overall, I'd feel comfortable recommending this game to people who like 'funny' villains or antiheroes more than heroes. This wasn't in my top ten, but I'll definitely replay at some point to see some of the other paths.
I received a review copy of this game.
Sprawling, creepy, non-linear game with great pacing, September 21, 2020"Theatre" was developed after "Curses" and before "Anchorhead", and has many elements in common with both of these games, including some shared puzzles. It is a large, sprawling game, with many puzzles in the find-an-object-use-an-object category.
I found it slightly easier and slightly smaller than the other two games, but it may have just felt smaller because I always felt drawn forward to complete the game. A series of lost journal pages for collection provide a fascinating backstory.
As others have said, the writing feels a little off at times; however, the game gave me quite a few genuinely creepy moments during exploration, similar to the famous (Spoiler - click to show) "you forgot to close the front door" moment in Anchorhead. The game was strangely compelling despite the weaker writing.
As I said, the puzzles are slightly easier than many similar games. I also noticed that the author favored certain puzzles; for instance, there were at least five puzzles where the solution involved (Spoiler - click to show)pushing or moving a large object around.
A couple of times in the game, I thought I had put myself in an unwinnable situation by entering an area without some object I needed to get out. However, I found I was wrong. I don't think there is really any way to lock yourself out of winning, except by using one-use items when you shouldn't (when you have used a one-use item correctly, it will be obvious).
A couple of things, I wasn't quite sure what they did: (Spoiler - click to show)turning the switch in the electrical panel, and wearing the amulet. Also, as other reviewers noted, there were quite a few plot points never resolved.
However, I didn't feel cheated.
The one star off is for the lack of polish and the plotholes. Overall, though this is one of the most enjoyable games I have every played (for reference, the other games I've most enjoyed are Curses, Anchorhead, and Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina). I anticipate playing through it again several times in the future.
(I added the star back later)
A single dungeon adventure with many paths, September 21, 2020The Hero of Kendrickstone was a game that I enjoyed purely for the TTRPG module feel. This game absolutely has that same vibe, kind of like the Eye of the Beholder games.
In particular, this game (longer than the first one and IMO more polished) is a classic dungeon raid. You are a PC in a party and have to deal with the threat of the undead under a town while negotiating between various parties aboveground. There is a money economy, magic weapons, etc.
Some people have called it short on Steam. I've come to realize as I play these games that 'feeling short' often has less to do with word count (though it plays an important role!) and more to do with the narrative arc and setting expectations. It's unusual to have a game this size focus on a single event, and so people expect more, whereas a game set over one year (like Creme de la Creme or Metahuman, Inc.) provides well-known markers like holidays and season changes so players have an idea of how they are in the story and when the end is coming.
Again, like the last game, this is meat-and-potatoes Western RPG style gameplay, so if you love that sort of thing its great, but otherwise you may find it uninspiring. I'm in the first camp, and would definitely play another game in this series.
I received a review copy of this game.
Emily Short's first public game, September 21, 2020This game was announced as uploaded to the IF Archive on February 15, 2000, before Galatea. You play as a pilgrim who falls through some leaves into an ancient shrine. There are three rooms.
It was a proof of concept game. As such, it has some details implemented amazingly well, and others not implemented at all.
For instance, every object is marked as flammable or not; as cuttable or not; etc. but many objects listed in room descriptions are not implemented and reasonable synonyms (such as 'cookies' for 'packet of cookies') are not implemented.
Things this game models include:
-breakability
-flammability
-visibility/lighting and taking pictures
-shaking
-wearing a variety of things
I've played this game a few times over the years, and never got as far as I did today. For posterity, here are a few things that are interesting to do (spoils everything I found):
(Spoiler - click to show)
-SHOOT something (takes a pictures)
-BURN something WITH LIGHTER
-TURN ON LIGHTER before going into other rooms
-WEAR SKULL
-BREAK DEMIJOHN WITH METAL BOX
-CUT CHEST WITH SAW
-BREAK JAR (and look at your inventory!)
-CUT things WITH SHEARS (and repeating it)
-LOOK UNDER ALTAR
-X PANELS in altar room
-BREAK PANEL WITH METAL BOX
-ENTER PANEL or HOLE (can't remember which)
Things I haven't done:
-unlocked the metal box
-found the crayon
As for a rating:
-Polish: Half polished perfectly, half terribly.
+Descriptiveness: Lots of nice extra details. Very vivid, similar to later work.
-Interactivity: Very janky. This was created to demonstrate simulations of various physical attributes, and not to be a smooth game.
+Emotional impact: Despite its numerous frustrations, or perhaps because of it, the game has always held a certain mystery for me. There's just so much to find, and its rewarding. Kind of like So Far, which had a similar impression of there always being one more thing to find.
+Would I play again? I've visited this game several times over a few years' span.
Like playing through a Western RPG module, September 20, 2020I was interested in Dungeons and Dragons at a young age, and I remember reading the first AD&D Player's Handbook with a flashlight when I was in grade school. So any game that manages to recreate the feel is a good one for me.
This game reminds me quite a bit of the parser game Heroes, one of my early favorites from when I started playing IF. In both games, you choose a class (both have a magic class, thief class, charmer class, and a physically powerful class), and then experience the same set of events but through a different viewpoint.
In this case, it's a fairly standard series of Western RPG tropes. I played through as a wizard, and died in my final confrontation. I plan on replaying to see more.
I received a review copy of this game.
You start out getting a specific reason that you are called on a quest. You journey to a great city, having an encounter with thieves along the way. In the city, you choose a patron (with a patron for each main class). Eventually, an evil wizard begins attacking, and you have to choose between 4 quests (again, tailored for the individual classes) to defeat the wizard.
It is possible to fail and die, and there are definitely 'wrong choices', with no save system. There is also a very important money system in this game, with successful quests netting you more money and a variety of things to spend it on.
The RPG-style gameplay is really the whole content here. If you're into that kind of game (such as Sorcery!, Choice of the Dragon, Heroes,etc.) then this may be a favorite of yours. If you're not into that, you'll be disappointed. The reviews on Steam are split, and I think that's the reason why.
I look forward to the sequel, and to replaying (with a different class this time) to see if I can finally defeat the wizard!
I honestly have no clue what I just played. Gangster horror?, September 19, 2020This game is completely off the rails. It started out as weird, segued to somewhat offensive, and then just took off into a bizarre void that somehow improved it.
The main character in this game is perhaps the most despicable MC in any Choice of Games entry I've played. You are a 'headcrusher', a violent enforcer for a local mob boss, and you're famous for torturing and killing people with a jagged, rusty knife. You are in love with your boss's wife and have been given a suicide mission to rescue her within 6 hours.
Now, I have no problem with aggressive protagonists. I've enjoyed taking over Alaska with a robot horde in Choice of Robots and being a slaughtering warrior hero for the Gods in Champion of the Gods.
But both of those games motivated the evil or violence. Before I played NOLA is Burning, I started compiling a list of what I think works and doesn't in Choicescript games, and having a motive for violence is one of them.
This game just kind of throws you out there. I don't know, it didn't really work for me.
Each chapter is a different step on your way to your final confrontation. You pass through an area with friends who practice Vodou, the turf of an Asian gang led by 'The Dragon', the local police precinct, and a strip club.
The game heavily uses slang, such as 'juice' for money and 'large' for (I think?) lump sums of $10,000 each. It uses phrases like 'Let's blow this popsicle stand' and 'hip to my jive'.
No other Choicescript game treats its main character so bad. You're constantly being betrayed or degraded or having body parts deeply injured or removed or having weird stuff shoved down your throat.
It's last few chapters took all this bizarre confusion and made it almost sublimely ridiculous. I had the honor of (Spoiler - click to show)losing my right arm, being possess by a Vodou loa and gaining a bionic bone-shooting arm, confronting the mob boss who was naked and wearing a baby's bonnet in a bathtub full of money before being lured by him into a room filled with robotic spiders.
The only game I've ever seen that can compare with the circus this puts on is Bolivia By Night, which has a memorable segment where you drive an armored hottub that is powered by a DVD from a South American knockoff of the Olsen Twins.
Ooh, boy. I told myself I'd never rate a Choice of Games article below four stars because 1. I love choice of games titles, 2. I wrote one and know how it feels to spend months or years of your life on these things, and 3. they've all gone through a lengthy review process and are generally polished.
So I'm just going to go through my rating system blindly and see where I end up.
+Polish. This game felt completely smooth mechanics-wise. No problems here, no typos.
+Descriptiveness. It had it in spades, often to my regret.
+Emotional impact. Yes, again by the above.
-Interactivity. I felt like the stats were confusing and didn't add up quite right.
+Would I play again? From seeing some others' comments, there's parts I definitely would want to see.
So 4 stars. You know, I almost gave it a point for interactivity anyway because I felt like I had real agency, but I honestly can't recommend this game to people in general, which is what I believe a 5 star review represents. I did not enjoy this game in the sense that its scenes filled me with delight. But as a critic I find it fascinating. I would recommend it to people who are into seeing the weird corners of company back catalogs and other obscure things.
The writer is definitely talented, they just use that talent in ways that give me discomfort, much like the opening scene of this game where I had to chug a bottle of Pepto Bismol after waking up in a dumpster.
I received a review copy of this game.
A short and poignant game about breaking the speed of light, September 18, 2020This game was nominated for the XYZZY awards, and was one of 2 commercial games I hadn't heard of.
This game is based off of the lyrics to the song "Pushing the Speed of Light", which I looked up after playing. I think they add to the gameplay.
This game branches into 3 paths and each of those paths has a success and two failures, I believe (one for too slow, one for too fast). The three paths you choose between give you different backstories and goals.
I thought the writing was well-done, and my opinion of it improved as I replayed. I especially like the 'singing' path. It reminds me of a lot of the sci-fi in the 60's to 70's. It's not necessarily poetical or lyrical all of the time, but it places humans in a situation impossible in our present reality and uses that to give insights into our nature.
Here's my score:
-Polish. The game uses the standard Twine styling, and paragraphs have no line between them, making reading a little bit hard for me.
+Descriptiveness. This is one of the highlights of the game, the detailed descriptions of the technology and its effects, as well as your feelings and the crew's.
+Interactivity. Wildly branching games like this only work well if it's short, and this one is. Does what it's supposed to.
+Emotional impact. Hmm, it's kind of back and forth for me. I liked it but didn't really identify with any of the characters, and I feel like identifying is important for this piece. I'd give this 1/2 a star for emotional impact, but I round up.
+Would I play again? I've already replayed it several times.
Gorgeous graphics in an examine-centered game, September 18, 2020Text-based games are so interesting because they get reinvented and renewed and spring up in different communities over time. Some groups have been making Inform-like games ever since Inform went out of business, while some have recently reconstructed and reimagined Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 style games for nostalgia's sakes, and others still have made text adventures based off of popular culture's depiction of text adventures in TV, webcomics and film.
So this Adventuron game seems firmly in the retro/nostalgia camp, with chunk text and old-style cursor together with beautiful pixel art. Unlike the Inform 5/6/7 stream of games, the emphasis here is less on exhaustive smoothness or synonyms and more on having a small set of commands to work with.
In particular, the main commands you use are LOOK and GET. While there aren't traditional puzzles, there are puzzles similar to those in Lime Ergot and other games where you have to examine something then a detail of something. It also tracks state from room to room, so LOOKing in one room can affect a LOOK in another room.
The story is about gathering mushrooms for a stew of differing amounts of lethality. There are 10 mushrooms to find. Before getting hints, I had only found 4 mushrooms and had no clue how to get more.
Here's my rating:
+Polish: For what it's trying to be (a speed-jam retro adventure) it is very well polished, with perfectly-fitting graphics and a lot of hidden nuggets.
+Descriptiveness: The mental images the game gives are very vivid, especially of the mushrooms, which aren't pictured in the art. The smells were described very well, too.
-Interactivity. The play style didn't gel well with me. Most of my experience involved error messages, and the central puzzle for unlocking more content (finding (Spoiler - click to show)the shears) was a puzzle where I definitely knew what I had to do but didn't know how to type it/bring it about.
+Would I play it again? I've already played it several times.
+Emotional impact: I've gone back and forth on this. I can confidently say, though, that it is charming, and that's a good emotion.
This game has been nominated in the XYZZY awards for Best Use of Multimedia.
Continue your God-fueled conquest across the great seas, September 18, 2020If the first game in this series (Champion of the Gods) had Odyssey-themed elements, this one had ones reminding me of Greek philosophy--if Greek philosophy included brutal rampages across the countryside!
I have to admit, this series is one of the few Choicescript games where I love to play as a bloodthirsty, wild warrior who swears allegiance to the Gods at all costs. If I have any regrets from this playthrough, it's that I started out being humble and stuck with it. I plan on replaying as a completely arrogant jerk instead. In any case, I proved to be a loyal disciple of the Goddess of War.
I finished this game with my jaw open, scoffing, partly because I enjoyed twist and partly because it ends on a major cliffhanger. I felt like the main threads of the game itself were completely resolved; in my playthrough, the main antagonists were defeated and all big mysteries cleared up. But the action definitely sets you up for another surprise.
This game has you voyage away from your homeland. I ended the first game not destroying destiny and serving the Gods. In this game, though, you must travel beyond both the reach of your Gods and destiny. You go across the sea to two contrasting cities, and much of the game consists of investigating the two cities, their customs and Gods.
There is romance in this game, although I chose to stay faithful to the romance from my first game, my wife and queen. We had several romantic opportunities. I believe this game is so large because there are so many paths from the first game.
Overall, this game seemed more contemplative than the first. You are met with several who question your choices. I had a son who followed my footsteps but questioned, and both my mentor from the first game and my companion later on frequently disagreed with me. I felt like the game also made vague references to Plato's teaching, like the Parable of the Cave and the concept of ideal forms. For one like me, driven by the bloodlust of the first game, I was surprised, but I think it helped me as I had to double down on my beliefs and goals.
There is a war training section in the last chapters that is its own little minigame. You have to choose different training styles for both your troops and your ships and use them effectively in battle.
Overall, I found the narrative arc less compelling than the first game but the richness of the choices/branching and the ethical quandaries more exciting.
I've also come to realize that I enjoy series of Choicescript games much more than stand-alones. They allow for so much more depth and so many options.
I received a review copy of this (very large) game.
A great reality-show sequel to the first Heroes Rise, September 17, 2020(Edit: I originally put this review on the wrong page)
I honestly enjoyed this game quite a bit. It kept all the things I liked from the first game and fixed some of the drawbacks.
This is a reality show-format game, like Slammed!, so a lot of the game is choosing what kind of image you want to project and going along with it. There are several romance choices, and I felt like I had more agency.
Now, it's interesting what different groups find appealing and don't. I saw some people on the Choicescript forums get mad at this game because it's possible to make wrong decisions and 'lose'. In fact, you can actually buy (with in-game cash or real money) hints on how to win.
At the same time, I saw a well-thought-out and clear review on this site talking about One Eye Open, and saying that, while it was well-written, it was not that interesting because it didn't have difficult puzzles.
So on the one hand, there is a group of people who want games to mold to their desires and be winnable no matter what. And there are others who want games to frustrate and challenge them. I started in the second camp but now enjoy both types, and I think most people have some overlap between the two.
In any case, this game has some difficult challenges. The characters and plot are written with broad strokes, and that's because, like many early Choicescript games, it was written by boiling down an entire genre.
At 180,000 words, it's not the biggest game, but playthrough length felt substantial. I played steadily and it still took a few hours. I think this one's worth playing, even if you haven't tried the first one.
I received a review copy of this game.
Side-choosing and hijinks with the almost-dead., September 17, 2020This was an interesting Exceptional Story for Fallen London, apparently expanding on a throwaway line in another part of the game (I think the conflict card between Tomb Colonists and others).
This game has a boisterous Tomb Colonist (kind of a living mummy, a creature preserved from death but full of wounds or rot that require bandages to hold them together and keep them presentable) who is trying (sort of?) to be decreed officially dead while leaving his estate to his nephew.
I may be mixing it up a bit with the perhaps more memorable Dilletante's Debut by Hannah Powell-Smith, which similarly featured a tug-of-war involving an estate and family.
And I suppose that's the problem. I don't have any negative memories about this story, but I don't have very memories of it in general besides wandering around the Grand Sanatorium fighting spiders. I do have much stronger memories of earlier stories from this year, such as the memorable Paisley, the very cute Go Tell The King of Cats (by the same author as this story!), and even Shades of Yesterday about a variety of pens.
So I'm giving this game stars for interactivity, polish, and descriptiveness, but not for emotional impact or replayability.
Orange tanner and an underground resort, September 17, 2020This Exceptional Story takes us to a restorative hotel in the Neath where the clientele tend to up with a deep orange tan (sometimes with burning cracks in it!)
I wasn't as impressed with this one as I have been with others. For me, the best parts were the connections with Sunless Seas (which involved hauling around a great deal of (Spoiler - click to show)sphinxstone), and the 'stinger' at the end of the story.
Here's my score:
+Polish: Smooth as always for Failbetter.
+Descriptiveness: I can still vividly picture the glow and the water.
-Interactivity: The main gameplay has a sort of fruitless cycle where you repeat the same things over and over. It made sense in-story but I found it frustrating.
+Emotional impact: Actually, yeah, some of the characters were pretty interesting and I've thought of a certain dreamlike nighttime scene on occasion.
-Would I play again? I don't think I would. But I would read other things by this author! This seemed more like an experiment in form that didn't resonate with me specifically rather than a failure on the author's part.
Frogs and killers, September 17, 2020Fallen London is all about the impermanence of death in the Neath (the enormous cavern below the earth where cities get sucked into when they 'fall').
But this story follows a strange assassin who uses frogs and somehow manages to permanently get rid of people.
It ends up being quite charming. Here's my score:
+Polish: It worked smoothly and seemed well-thought out. Pretty much all Fallen London content is polished.
+Descriptiveness: I played it months ago, but I still remember the frogs and the (Spoiler - click to show)factory that threatens their wetlands
+Emotional impact: As I said it above, it's charming. Johnny Croak is a sweety.
+Interactivity: I definitely felt like I could make real choices.
-Would I play again? You can pay to replay (or play for the first time if you missed it) Fallen London's exceptional stories. This one was fun, but I wouldn't go out of my way to play it again, especially with some other very good stories out there.
A fitting sequel for Psy High. Change time at a summer camp, September 17, 2020I have a fondness for summer camp settings. Birdland is a game I really enjoy and recommend a lot of people, and it's set in a summer camp. Several tv movies and shows from my childhood and my son's are set in summer camps.
Also, Psy High is high on my list of best Choicescript games.
So I enjoyed this game. It's more serious in some ways than the first game.
You play as a camp counselor, and you make a big discovery about the camp. You have the opportunity to radically change your life and the life of others.
More than any other Choicescript game I've played, I experienced a lot of temptation here. I usually pick a role early and play along, and this time I played the 'help everyone as much as possible." But the game sets up competing goals really well, and by the end I had ended up acting very selfishly and killing several people.
I like how the game has truly meaningful choices interspersed with reflective choices; for instance, you can pick your relationship with your parents, which makes you feel powerful in and of yourself.
I saw someone complain on Steam that the game had a high school setting, so keep in mind that this is absolutely a high school game. I loved this game, and intend to play it again in the future, maybe try and change some of the darker choices I made.
I received a review copy of this game.
A fun little game with a complicated device and two NPCs to control, September 15, 2020This parser game was made as part of last year's advent calendar.
It centers around a mysterious sort of room, inspired by Planescape and Land of the Lost but also reminiscent of Myst-like games and machines.
You have a pedestal with all sorts of doodads and contraptions. To get them to work, you need the help of two ferrets of varying talents.
The overall puzzle took me a while to puzzle out, and I was very happy to get the solution in a flash, but I was stumped before that.
The ferrets are cute and have nice little narrative touches, one of the highlights of the game.
The game only needs polishing to be great. A few things that could use improvement:
-The game starts with a wide open state space but only one thing advances the puzzle. I didn't notice that thing because (Spoiler - click to show)it requires examining the gateway and I had spent my first minutes exploring the device and trying to play with ferrets.
-Some actions can be difficult to phrase. In particular, instructing the ferrets to go to specific platforms was quite tricky for me to get (I tried climb to platform, go to platform, go up, etc. before hitting on the correct (Spoiler - click to show)climb mesh and (Spoiler - click to show)jump to w/e commands)
Those frustrations are mostly what made me feel the interactivity and polish could use some tweaking. But as a 'figure out this device puzzle', which I enjoy and I know quite a few others do, I would recommend this.
A large, graphical commercial game about American storytelling, September 14, 2020It's more or less impossible for me to review this game objectively, because (although almost certainly unknown to the authors) this game is tied up in the story of my life.
Enormous backstory behind spoilers for space:(Spoiler - click to show)
In 2015 I was desperately in search for validation in life. I had graduated with my math PhD with the hopes of being one of the best and brightest young researchers out there. However, I found my papers rejected again and again, and realized that I was in over my head.
Feeling like a failure and stung by the reviewer's comments that my exposition and overall writing were poor, and recently interested in playing interactive fiction, I decided to throw myself into writing interactive fiction and become a great writer.
When I began, I had a chip on my shoulder and viewed well-known and commercial authors as distant, vague entities, to be envied and imitated. My first game was well-received in general, but was noted, again, by reviewers as being somewhat lacking in the writing department. I vowed to do better.
Around that time, I joined the euphoria IF community, a discord-like website (that is now, I believe, defunct), where many of the great authors and up-and-coming ones congregated. I wanted to fit in, and here were the people I wanted to be like.
A lot of good came from that. I made my first transgender friends, which cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had from my youth and almost complete lack of experience with anything outside of the gender norm. I found out that a lot of famous people, like Emily Short, were just normal, kind individuals who happened to be very talented at writing.
But a lot of the community had different standards and ideals than I did, and I began changing in subtle ways to fit in, and eventually I realized I didn't like it and cut it out. At the same time, a lot of those same people joined the writing team of this game. As one of those not invited, it deepened my envy and pride. I thought negatively about the game, and felt a kind of smug assurance when I heard it had done poorly.
Since then, I've re-evaluated a lot of things in life; got divorced, changed careers, went back to my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I've found self-value in my church and in my high school teaching, interacting with students. I got a book deal and published a novel, and realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do. And that commercial writing isn't what I want to do. I find joy in writing the games I like, helping others write them.
But some old habits are hard to change, and probably will be forever. When I heard this game was free, I felt my old demons stirring up inside of me. I downloaded it and wrote pages of notes on why I disliked it or it was bad.
I finally realized, though, that my own personal hangups weren't a basis for a good review. And pushing through to the end revealed many good facets.
So what is this game about? Like Sunless Seas/Skies and 80 Days, its closest competitors, it's a narrative game with little storylets spread around a world map, coupled with some stat management in the background.
[Note: I had a lot of trouble finding info online about this game and was frustrated many times, so I'm going into tons of detail here. Spoilered for space]
(Spoiler - click to show)
You walk across America, and have 3 main activities:
-Collecting stories, which can occasionally deplete one of 3 stats. Later on, collecting turns into 'upgrading' where a story is retold to you by a stranger and becomes higher quality
-Replenishing those stats by finding work or buying food
-'Feeding' stories to one of 16 different wanderers on the map.
The feeding part is the bulk of the mid and late game. The strangers have detailed art, and they ask you for stories in one of 5 categories: sad, funny, inspiring, scary, and exciting. The stories don't come labeled, and it can vary from playthrough to playthrough, so you can either guess and check what the type is or try to remember from the first time.
Each character has 3-4 chapters, with 3 being the most common. In each chapter, you have 5 opportunities to find stories that fit their requests. As the nights progress, higher quality stories are needed. When you complete a chapter successfully, the character moves across the map and you gain their story or upgrade it. If you are unsuccessful, they still move but your progress is saved.
The character's stories, as I found out through experimentation, count as wildcards, level 3 stories that can satisfy any request. It can be amusing at time to tell the story of a character haunted by the phantoms of war and have the listener laugh and say how good a joke it was. I beat about 10/16 characters' hardest levels by saving up these wildcards for the final chapter.
My overall impression of elements of the game:
(Spoiler - click to show)
The 2d art and sound in this game are wonderful, with a very Americana atmosphere and some startling changes in the characters.
The 3d art is obviously the result of a lot of good effort, but it felt fairly repetitive after traversing the land over and over.
The writing is very good on a small, prose level, but weak on overall structure. The stories you collect are short little nuggets, and leveling up doesn't give you a new story to read, it just says essentially the title of the new version.
Everything in the game is allusions, allusions, allusions. You're supposed to know tarot cards and their meaning and names, as the font is too small to read if you don't know them. Most of the conversations with the characters goes like this:
-The player: Tell me about love.
-The character: Love? I've loved before. It's a strange thing, love. One day you can love, and what day you can be out of love. Me, I've been both.
There's a reason for that. One is that the writing is necessarily modular in nature. The authors didn't know what order the responses would be given in in-chapter or even if they'd be given at all, so none of them contains any essential information and they don't form a cohesive in-chapter narrative.
The other reason is that it seems to just be the direction they were given. The weakest part in the game is its overall direction/combining the various elements. I frequently thought as I played that I'd love to have all the elements separately: the stories in a book, the music on a CD, the art on a webpage. It's very disconcerting to see a beautiful transformation in the artwork at the same time that the story ends with one of several variations of 'Well, goodbye, I won't see you again.'
The game's controls and the style of play are very cryptic at the beginning. It helps to hit h and look at tips or escape to find controls. If you can push past the first part, it will start making sense.
Overall, my experience only improved as I played. As for my personal story above, (spoilers for uninterested):
(Spoiler - click to show)I came to realize as I played that I didn't need to hold onto the old envy, although I don't know if I'll ever be able to get rid of that feeling for good. I wouldn't have enjoyed writing for this game and I wasn't suited for it. I like on-the-nose fantasy and sci-fi, and I'm unskilled at literary-style text because I haven't valued it or practiced it. The game's direction leans against my values, with casual nudity included in art, strong profanity, and frequent diatribes against God, including by preachers. Getting my wish would have been a disaster for both me and the game, leaving everyone dissatisfied.
I received a free copy of this game, but only because it was on sale.
Congressional campaign manager sim/werewolf rights, September 13, 2020So this game is better, I think, than its steam reviews would suggest. A few people seemed to have bombed its reviews over there. But its not perfect.
The writing in this game is descriptive, and I could picture all the characters clearly. You play as an aid to one of 4 different congressional candidates. Unlike other games that play it a bit safer, this one uses real life US parties (Republican and Democrat). It doesn't seem extremely biased one way or another; someone mentioned the game as treating Republicans as 'evil' but I chose a Republican millionaire and the game seemed just fine with that choice.
In this game, similar to Werewolves: Haven Rising, werewolves have been around for a while and are subject to harsh restrictions on their freedom.
The main threads of the game are:
-Deciding to do a dirty or fair campaign fight
-Making a decision about how you feel about werewolves
-Dealing with the aftereffects of a grisly murder
-Running a monthly budget
Someone said on Steam that the game seemed to assume a female protagonist. You can choose your gender, but some scenes in the game do feel written for a female protagonist in mind. For instance, there is a frightening scene where the protagonist (major spoilers for the middle of the game) (Spoiler - click to show)is being followed on a dark street alone at night, and is attacked in an alley by a werewolf, and is worried for about a month afterwards so it can see if they turn into a werewolf at the next full moon. Its easy to see this as an analogy for (Spoiler - click to show)rape and possible pregnancy, and that's not a theme that's very common in other media (except for the (Spoiler - click to show)Alien series). But it worked for me, and I don't see it as a drawback.
The biggest drawback I do see is that the narrative arc is relatively flat. I didn't feel a real build-up in tension in any of the main plotlines, although there was some there. The overall writing level was great, though, and I felt like my decisions definitely mattered. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to fans of werewolves, political games, or simulation text games.
I received a review copy of this game.
A long monster training simulation with some unusual design choices, September 11, 2020The Last Monster Master is a game very different from most Choicescript games in some respects.
First of all, the bulk of the game is a simulation like Metahuman Inc, another unusal CoG game. About 60% of the game consists of taking 4 monsters with different personalities and strengths, training them and getting various amounts of money for it, spending the money on improved training facilities, and seeing how they respond to different scenarios.
The main stats are discipline/compassion, nerve and respect, but there are also two 'power' stats: telepathy and body language. I focused entirely on body language. These two abilities aren't used to do things directly. Instead, in many options in the game, you can either guess what to do from 3 normal options or use telepathy/body language to get a hint.
The weird thing is that the hint is often not apparently useful, and the game frequently has you try everything from a list, exhausting all your options, with the last option frequently being something out of character. So I'm not sure how useful getting the body language hints actually was.
The beginning is a bit slow, and the end a bit abrupt. The characterization of you, your helper, and your monsters can shift quickly.
But the premise is fantastic, and it allows enough flexibility to make the game overall enjoyable. I guess it's kind of like a Choicescript version of Pokemon, but you can talk to your monsters about their feelings and what it's like living in human society. You get to visit them after they graduate and see how they turned out.
Be warned that the game changes the goalposts on you frequently.
Definitely recommended for fans of simulators, not so much for others.
I received a review copy of this game.
A Greek mythology-inspired game that grapples with destiny, September 9, 2020Pros: It was much easier for me to choose the stats I wanted to have than other games, and to get them high. I chose to be like Heracles, and was a completely brutal and narcissistic champion of the Gods. The game absolutely let me take this path, and justified it in-game as being a champion of the goddess of war.
I enjoyed the writing quite a bit. The characters were on par with other good Choicescript games, but the overall plot and themes are what resonated with me.
There are several romance choices. At least two are thrust upon you in terms of their attraction to you, but you have a lot of agency over what you'll do.
This game is inspired by Greek mythology, but has its own pantheons and cities. I suggest that you try the opening before buying to get a feel for it. I'm excited to try its sequel, which is substantially larger.
As a final note, this game does something I've never seen in a Choicescript game before: (Spoiler - click to show)it has you switch to another character briefly mid-game, with a different stat set you can adjust to.
Cons: The game has a fairly linear main story (though I've only played once, many choices seemed to converge, and other reviews confirm it). Until the end, that is. However, in a game centered around destiny, that's not so odd a thing. But I bring it up because some have questioned its replay value. It felt quite long to me, though, and it had enough choice in characterization that I feel who I was as a character could be completely different from playthrough to playthrough.
I received a review copy of this game.
Gothic horror at its best. Explore the mysteries of a cursed manor, September 7, 2020This quite large Gothic horror game reminded me of quite a few games and stories over time.
In its early phases, it has much of the feel of Dracula or the Mysteries of Udolpho (one of the stories inspiring Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey). You are in a small town where a beautiful and sensual Lord or Lady (depending on your choices) presides and where strange disappearances happen, like that of your uncle.
The bulk of the game (15 or 16 chapters, each substantial) reminded me of Anchorhead, or of Udolpho again, or of Curses!, my favorite IF game of all time. A giant mansion filled with odd and horrifying characters and objects (like a mysteriously strong 90 year old butler, or a door wrapped in wrought iron vines that seem to prick your finger no matter how careful you are).
The game overall tends towards 'weird fiction' in the latter half, a genre commonly identified with Lovecraft but which here seems to align itself more with other works such as Algernon Blackwood. There are no cults here, no bizarre combinations of consonants and very little of madness. Ghostly horror is more of a theme.
There are several rewarding romantic opportunities. Like all of Choice of Games' titles, there is a lot of diversity and inclusion, but unlike some games that reviewers have complained of, all of the diversity here is very well-explained and genre-sensitive. After all, a strange manor in a strange town where the owner is known for startling and forward-thinking views is the perfect place for a non-binary character or for same-gender romances, much like the early vampire novel Carmilla, which is even referenced in-story.
Gameplay revolves around choices to be trusting or distrustful, to be physical or charming or spiritual, to investigate more or to help others, etc. There are several layers of mystery, and the game seems very replayable. I'd especially like to replay as a completely skeptical investigator.
There are some questions that I still have, and hope to explore more (especially about a figure you see in the very first chapter).
Overall, I'd say that this game in the Choice of Games canon occupies the same place as Anchorhead in the parser game canon: a long, replayable, evil house horror game that is very popular and basically great for everyone to play.
I received a review copy of this game.
A great teenage super-power game, September 5, 2020This is definitely one of my favorite Choice of Games so far, for my personal tastes. It manages to make you feel powerful while forcing you to choose between competing goals, and has great options and fun writing.
It has a lot of mysteries and it has a character with psychic abilities, and both of those things are personal favorite genres of mine, so I think others may not have the same response I did. But I can definitely say I enjoyed it quite a bit!
You play as a clairvoyant teen in a high school where much of the student body has unusual powers which sprang up the year before. Other students look to you for investigating strange or missing things, and there is a general conspiracy.
It had a lot of good romantic options. One is kind of pushed on you (in regards to your feelings), but in a way that feels true to my experiences in high school, when your emotions and feelings are out of whack anyway.
One thing that I've noticed is that as I play more Choicescript games, I enjoy them more. A lot of them have similar rhythms and expectations, and it helps me strategize and find a way to enjoy them more. I would definitely put this game in my top 10 Choicescript games so far.
I received a review copy of this game.
A deep dive into the worldbuilding of Tekumel that is cut short, September 4, 2020This game is based on the world of Tekumel, a world setting almost as complex (or more) than Middle Earth and created starting in the 40's by M. A. R. Barker.
This game uses this setting well, but relies on prior knowledge of it or the desire to read several pages of backstory in the stats screen. I had that desire, so it was okay.
It's a lush world that incentivizes you to act violent, proud, sensual, etc. It's very interesting, and it leads to an exciting underground adventure.
And then, it stops. I thought I'd have quite a bit left to play, but it ends at what I thought would be the midpoint of the game. There are several pages of epilogue, but I felt like the overall narrative arc wasn't satisfying. It doesn't have to be longer, but the plot threads that are given prominence should, I feel, occupy more time.
I enjoyed it, regardless, and would recommend it to people who want to see if Tekumel and its novels and RPG settings are worth reading. It's made me think about reading them.
A solid pirate game with elaborate worldbuilding , September 1, 2020Out of the Choicescript games I've given 4 stars, this is definitely at the higher end. It's a pirate game, felt fairly long, had great worldbuilding and nice action scenes and romance.
The main thing holding me back from a higher rating was my lack of emotional investment, most likely due to the characters. Outside of the main character I romanced (the pirate captain Redwing), I couldn't tell you who any of the other characters really were or looked like. What side was Maurice from? Who is Lex? Pretty much everything else about the game was enjoyable.
There are a few sea monster fights. The game is set in an alternate Atlantic, with countries similar to England, France, and Haiti, among others. The main conflict is with slave traders.
There was also a bit of an issue with stats. I was disappointed at first that there were many stats and not many boosts in the opening chapters, but that soon went away as the game provides many opportunities to boost stats throughout the game.
But a bigger issue was confusion of stats. There was too much overlap. How can you tell the difference between a check for wits or cunning, or finesse for that matter? What is the difference between your combat skill and being straightforward in battle? I was able to succeed more often than not, but it made me realize that having closely-related skills may be a bad idea (something I've struggled with in my own game, having a stat for being friendly and a stat for having friends).
I received a review copy of this game.
A children's story with influences from Russian fairytales, August 30, 2020This game, like so many other Choicescript games, has a pretty bad beginning followed by a much better middle.
I found the opening very slow, with children's book-style writing and very slow plotting. The second chapter was also fairly slow, and I found it difficult to push through, one of the openings I struggled the most with.
The middle was wonderful. I enjoy being exposed to other cultures, and Baba Yaga is about the extent of my knowledge of Russian folklore. However, every Russian I've seen comment on the game says that it portrays the folklore inaccurately or poorly. On the other hand, though, every such comment I've seen has also included a complaint about how the your sibling is non-binary (which you find out by them telling you they don't think they're a girl or a boy near the beginning). So I can't tell if it's actually really bad representation, or if people hate the non-binary thing and that makes them inclined to attack the rest of the game.
But as a fantasy story in general, I liked the middle. You have a choice of three extremely powerful villains to deal with. I faced a seven-headed dragon and a necromancer.
The ending was fairy tale-like, with simple surroundings and simple solutions. It felt like it fit the story, but wasn't the most satisfying ending, as it didn't tie up every narrative arc (the most thorough tying-up I've seen is in Herofall).
This game's approach to challenges had a lot of pass/fail with no real benefit to failing. That makes sense in some games; but with no undo (like in parser games or in Heroes Rise's legend-point-retry system), a long linear game like this with many chances of failure is too tedious to replay a lot. And another thing this game does that some other Choicescript games do is having a long series of difficult tests right after each other, where failing even one is heavily penalized. Much better is the system in Choice of Robots, Creme de la Creme or Tally Ho where your failures provide as compelling a story as your successes.
Nevertheless, the game was polished, descriptive, I found much of the interactivity interesting and I was emotionally invested. I'd probably give this a 3.5, but rounding to a 4.
I received a review copy of this game.
A great (and oddly prescient) end to the Heroes Rise trilogy, August 28, 2020If you told me there was a game whose villain was catapulted by reality tv into the presidency, who had had several spouses and relationships, who ran on a platform of locking up his enemies and keeping 'others' out of America, who employed his children in government positions, I would have told you that it was a heavy-handed ham-fisted commentary on modern life.
Well, this game came out in 2014, a year before Trump started his first campaign. So it's interesting to play a game that directly speaks to current issues without being affected by them.
This is my favorite game of the series, probably because I'm emotionally invested by now. You have the chance to work with former enTheYour first game let you save a city, the second let you be known to America, the third lets you shape the future of the nation.
This is a hard game, and it's definitely possible to lose. You can buy an in-game hint system for $.99 (or use in-game money if you got rich in the other games), but I followed a playthrough I found online (although they made different choices than me, so I had to adapt).
You can play this game separately from the others, although I'd recommend starting at the beginning. You could always play the first chapter of this game to get a feel for it, though.
I received a review copy of this game
A compelling hero story in broad strokes, August 26, 2020I was interested to play this game, as I know that on one hand it's been one of Choice of Games' best-selling titles for years, and that on the other hand its frequently vilified by a subset of the Choice of Games forums.
It's one of the oldest Choice of Games entries, the fourth one ever made. I've played a lot of the old ones recently, and have a lot more variation between them in length, use of stats, linearity, and romances as the company hadn't settled on a house style yet.
And this game has a lot of peculiarities as well, but manages to be more polished than many early games. The stats are clearly communicated. In fact, they are spelled out in the game. Your choices matter; occasionally you are presented with binary choices, but one is grayed out. That doesn't mean (as some steam reviewers thought) that you never have that option; it means that the game is keeping track of your past actions.
One peculiarity in particular is that there is a single forced narrative of who you are and what you feel. That doesn't really change from playthrough to playthrough; you're always the child of disgraced, incarcerated heroes; you always experience the same trials and betrayals; you always have the same powers. There's only one romantic option, and its fairly forced on you, the game describing in detail how you feel about the other sexually, one of things I found least enjoyable.
What changes, then, is how you get through these opportunities. Do you follow justice or fame? Are you defensive or offensive? Do you have hero worship or work on your own?
So I see why it's popular and I see why people on the forums don't like it. It doesn't fit the ideal of the current, refined in-house style of Choice of Games, with plethoras of backgrounds, branches and romances. But it's also a compelling story with good emotional involvement.
In my playthrough, as a hetero male, all of the female villains and the main romantic option were consistently described as sexy, busty, working in prostitution or seduction. I didn't find that enjoyable, and I considered taking off a star for that. But I believe that many people will enjoy playing this game, and for that reason I'm giving it 5 stars.
Edit: On a side note, after I played it last night, I had terrifying superhero dreams based on it that woke me up with fright. I guess its descriptions are pretty vivid!
I received a review copy of this game.
Huge horror game with tons of gore, August 26, 2020One eye open was an IFComp game much longer than two hours. In it, you play someone being tested for psychics powers.
Without giving away too much, this is a search-the-lab game similar to Babel, but with gruesome gore in the vein of the SCP foundation (like SCP-610, for instance). The horror has also been compared to the Poltergeist.
Somehow Vespers and Varicella disturbed me more than this game. In a way, the horror are not as scary because of the way that they are described, but they provide a coherent atmosphere. There are many endings, many Easter eggs.
There was no profanity, no sexual material. Not recommended for most people, due to the gore. I probably won't play it again because of it.
A great medieval/fairy game sandwiched between two disappointing chapters, August 25, 2020I had trouble starting this game. It begins with a story about you, a squire, helping your lady chase down a rogue baron who may have kidnapped the prince. I found this chapter very lacking, for my tastes one of the most difficult opening chapters of a Choicescript game to get through. Choices were confusing, there were a lot of stats but very few points to go around (my largest stat was a 29 at the beginning, which in most Choicescript games represents dismal failure), and the story seemed fairly dry.
But the middle part of the game was very good for my personal tastes. I love games about the Fae or the fairy world, and much of the game revolves around attending a fair and a tournament. The fair has plausible deniablity with magical involvement, such as a tent that looks suspiciously like a giant flower.
In the path I chose, I ended up in a faery land, and found that part very enjoyable. I left with a strong assurance that I would somehow return.
But the last chapter all built up to a final choice, and I failed that final choice. I didn't die, but apparently I lived a sad life and never had any connection to the faery world again, which seemed a direct contradiction to the earlier paths.
I may need to play again, but I found the last chapter a bit lacking. And as for the first one, I wonder more and more as I play through the Choice of Games catalog whether authors should write the first chapter last, using a small set of 'preset' stats and names for a placeholder for placetesting until the very end. So many Choice of Games titles (pretty much all the ones I've given 4 stars) have mediocre opening chapters but satisfying mid-games. I think that you really get to know your characters and world as you write a game like this, and that you tend to grow as an author as you write. This game has the second-lowest rating on the Apple omnibus app, and I think its opening has a great deal to do with that.
I received a review copy of this game.
A (purposely) ridiculous game about commanding a horde of zombies, August 23, 2020This is a game I went back and forth on for a score (between 4 and 5) for a while.
It's different than most other Choicescript games, but, in common with Gavin's other game, For Rent: Haunted House, it has a very, very small number of stats. There seems to be very few ways to tell what, if anything, your stats are used for and what effects them. There is one point in the game where you can actually ask a banshee what the stats do, but that is only one option out of many, and I didn't try it as I had others I was more interested in.
Most of this game involves you commanding a group of zombies and skeletons (the numbers of which are tracked and change), and basically creating a ton of gore. A lot of intestines and decapitations and devouring.
The game is completely self-aware, and includes outrageous characters (like an romantic option who urges you to complete destruction, or a vampire). The opening is very different from the rest of the game and I would definitely recommend pushing past it.
'Winning' is hard; my run (and most people's I saw online) ended in arrest. Strategizing is difficult in a way that's not entirely fun, and that's probably the biggest reason I'm going for a 4 instead of 5.
Strongly recommended for people that like parodies of horror movies, and there may be some overlap with fans of this game and fans of Robb Sherwinn games.
I received a review copy of this game.
An entertaining farce about being rescued in a fantasy setting, August 22, 2020This is very entertaining title from Choice of Games.
It's a self-aware farce with characters drawn from broad fantasy/fairytale stereotypes.
You play as a royal heir who is constantly surviving kidnapping attempts. The bulk of the game concerns one kidnapping attempt, which involves you and four heroes (a bold knight, a proud Amazon, a peasant, and human raised by faeries) descending layer by layer through an enormous tower full of traps.
One compelling thing about this game is that it rewards bad behavior. Being a helpless drama magnet is one of the strongest ways to make it through the game. So is being selfish and mean, but being kind is okay.
It even makes good use of bad relationship stats. You have plenty of opportunities to decide who to throw in the mix of danger.
Some people have expressed difficulty knowing which stats connect to what. I admit to being a little unclear on the use of strategy vs intuition (neither of which I maxed out), and I stayed almost exactly 50% on 'ready for the ball' vs 'ready to fight'. I think one issue is that much of the humor relies on you making specific choices, so it can feel forced at times because it IS forced due to the humor requirements. I also found it a bit hard to get started.
I received a review copy of this game.
A Choicescript sci-fi game about a crime reporter, August 20, 2020This game is one of the shorter Choicescript entries, around 80K words. It still had a comparable playthrough length to bigger games, so I suspect it just has less paths than most games (my game is in a similar spot branching-wise).
You play as a news reporter who is investigating criminal activity. Unlike most Choice of Games entries, the main character gets their butt kicked frequently. It can be a bit frustrating having so many negative things happen.
There are three main stats, and many parts of the game involve choosing your best stat. When I was writing for Choice of Games, they mentioned the 'three stat trap' a lot, and I wonder if games like this is where that comes from (just having every choice be an option between three stats).
It sounds like I'm being pretty negative about the game. The truth is its hard to design a satisfying story arc for one of these games in 80K words, unless you paint everything with broad strokes and have a lot of life-changing choices (like Choice of the Dragon).
Nevertheless, I enjoyed discovering more about the mystery, and the characters were vividly described, if somewhat one-dimensional (especially villains!). I don't regret my time playing, and the game was polished.
I received a review copy of this game.
A long and tense drama in a Venice-like mob setting with ghosts, August 19, 2020This game is firmly in the drama camp. It had a lot of action and intrigue and less, if any, humor.
The setting is detailed and vivid, and is the best thing about the game in my mind. Its set in a Borgia-era Venice, albeit with different names, and you are part of the crime family. Your parent has died, and there is a power play between you and two siblings. You are the only one, however, who is a blood mage, an illegal type of necromancer who can see and influence spirits.
This is in the category of Choicescript games like The Martian Job or Rent-a-Vice where there are a lot of ways to go wrong and it doesn't feel like you have complete power, as opposed to pure power-fantasies like Creme de la Creme (by the same author) or Choice of Robots.
This game has more options to violent or dark than most Choice of Games titles. Murder is a possible solution to many problems. And there is no way to please everyone. One of your siblings is an ineffectual pacifist and the other is a violent war hawk. At least twice in the game you get urgent messages from multiple people and have to let someone down.
I had a satisfying romantic arc in my game. Some reviewers have complained that romance is less of a focus, but the game was updated this June to have additional romance.
This is a long game. While having a lower wordcount than Tally Ho or Creme de la Creme, the playthrough length feels comparable. I felt like I was playing a quality game. I am glad, though, that the tone is lighter in Creme de la Creme.
I received a review copy of this game.
Treat this game as it is: an experiment in removing the save/restore safety net., August 19, 2020This game treats a really important aspect of interactive fiction: the save feature. Most games, despite any sense of urgency they may try to instill, become slow, measured-out puzzle games with the heavy use of save and restore.
It is almost impossible to overcome the habit of save and restore, probably because most games intend the reader to use it.
This game was designed as a full-throttle, jump-out-of-the-airplane experience. You should absolutely not undo, save or restore this game; in the Club Floyd transcript, one of the users hit undo out of habit, when it seemed that all was lost; but they then undid the undo, and promised to finish the game together, and it was worth it.
This is a short game, and a fun game. I would give it 5 stars in its genre, but 3 stars as a generic interactive fiction game. As it is, I'm leaving it with 4 stars.
A solid superhero mystery game with a satisfying narrative arc, August 18, 2020Some Choicescript games stand out to me in different areas. Choice of Robots has a real sense of freedom. The Martian Job has beautiful wordcraft. The Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck has memorable and original characters.
This game had perhaps the most satisfying story I've played so far. Part of that is my personal tastes. I love mysteries, and Christopher Huang is one of my favorite mystery authors. This game is a superhero game, but it definitely has a mystery feel.
You play as a news reporter who must assume the mask of the hero when your (Spoiler - click to show)twin brother gets kidnapped. You have to face off against three superhero villains to get to the core of the plot.
The story has a definite narrative arc with a good buildup and one of the best denouements I've had in Choicescript games, which usually end quickly.
If I had a gripe, it's in the game having a lot of romantic options but having you start off engaged (though not married). It seemed kind of underhanded, though (Spoiler - click to show)upon replay I felt better about it.
I felt like I had real agency in the game. And Christopher Huang nailed something that I've found lacking in many choicescript games: making failure feel worthwhile. Failure in this game doesn't lead to messages implying "you are bad at this game". Instead, it leads to dramatic tension, the 'calm before the storm.'
Stats aren't superpowered in this version, making this less of a power fantasy. But that makes sense, considering you're a civilian that only recently took up the mask. There seems to be no way to manage your stats to pass every check somehow. But it's okay.
I can see why some people might not like this game. But it has all the things I personally look for in a game.
I received a review copy of this game.
A swords and sorcery game with a younger tone and tons of dinosaurs, August 17, 2020This game is basically exactly what the title promises. It is a sword and sorcery game with dinosaurs everywhere.
Strip away the dinosaurs, and it is polished but generic swords and sorcery. The only real weapons mentioned are swords; there is magic, but it generally just does whatever you want without any sort of system; everyone has a class of some type, either a bard or a ranger or a wizard. The enemies are (Spoiler - click to show)dragons and a necromancer.
It's also oriented towards a younger audience, I believe. The language seems intentionally simple, the romances involve mostly hugging and kissing (which is fine with me). Everything is telegraphed and/or on-the-nose. Although you are an adult, there are segments like seeking admittance to wizard school or looking up info on dinosaurs that are more reminiscent of junior fiction.
None of this is necessarily bad. I think this would make a great Wesnoth campaign, for instance. And it had a definite narrative arc and some great characters. I enjoyed my neurodivergent partner who disliked crowds and touch, as well as my velociraptor Rex.
I had the chance to be evil at one point, and I took it. The game didn't really seem to want to commit to me being evil, but I did anyway, although I betrayed my new ally in the end and sided with others.
A railroad sim with a ton of romantic options but a lot of unevenness, August 15, 2020This game is currently the lowest-rated game on the Choice of Games omnibus app.
That doesn't correspond directly to quality; the two Nebula-nominated games (Rent-a-Vice and The Martian Job) are in the lower third of the app store, and I enjoyed both of those quite a bit.
In this game, you play as a young heir to a railroad line. As temporary president, it's up to you to prove you can be permanent president. Also, your favor wants you to get married.
There are an enormous number of romantic options (at least 8, I think?). There is also a recurring monthly budget meeting, similar to Methuman, Inc. but less consistent.
An unusual feature of the game is that its difficulty is set by the very first choice, which is not advertised to you directly. It asks if you are ready for the game, which I thought indicated some kind of 'intro to choicescript' or stats explanations.
I'm going to break this one down with my 5 point system:
-Polish: The game is very uneven at times. It swerves between the railroad management, playing with your cat, and romances. I found several bugs, including raw Choicescript code, getting an ending saying I never had my company sold to a larger company when I did, and getting engaged, then having a failed proposal, then having a marriage to the same person all in a row.
On the other hand, it has to be weighed against the games big ambitions. The more a game attempts, the more forgiving I feel towards bugs. On the other other hand, even larger and similarly ambitious games like Creme de la Creme and Tally Ho seemed more polished.
+Interactivity:This is a bit hard to measure,as I accidentally chose the greatest difficulty. I felt like I had real agency. I got frustrated with the money management so I sold the company, and the story let me do it, presumably changing quite a bit. The romantic direction I pursued had several scenes set up for it which were clearly tailored towards just this person. I was able to enter into and back out of anything I wanted at any time (except once when my father offered me a favor; I didn't have the chance to turn it down).
+Emotional Impact: Well, I certainly felt a lot of things while playing. The unevenness of the game blunted the emotional impact, but I was genuinely invested in my character's life and quite alarmed by several developments (in my hard playthrough, I had disasters ranging from passenger to death to industrial sabotage to extortion).
+Descriptiveness: This game is very descriptive. I was able to vividly picture everything. This is perhaps its best trait.
+Would I play again?: Yes. The numerous branches and the different difficulty levels make me want to return to this one eventually.
Grander scope than the original, but less personal touches, August 14, 2020The original Superlatives game (Aetherfall) is one of my favorite Choicescript games. It provided a tale of a small group of young Victorian superheros trying to survive without leadership and exploring a fascinating world built by the author.
This game more or less puts that at a distance. Your powers and friends from the first game are shoved away. Alternatively, you can start a new character without a connection to them.
This time, you aren't weak, you are essentially an envoy or almost an angel for higher powers. Everyone respects the authority you bring.
This makes the game (as others have sad in reviews and discussion on other sites) that this is less a direct sequel to the first game and more its own standalone game. I agree with that, and will evaluate it as such.
This game has a lot more big politics. The two main threads are a delicate balance between three parties (Earth, Mars and Venus) to a peace treaty, and a series of strange rifts bringing strange and violent people.
The political balance was interesting and delved into worldbuilding. The rifts scenario had a twist halfway through the game that made it far more interesting.
The writing for this game is good, I think even an improvement on the first. I wrote down or screenshotted a few things that I thought were especially good. The love interests in this game are detailed and have their own private dates and side quests.
Overall, as a game, I loved it. As a direct sequel to the first game, pretty good. I would feel comfortable recommending it even to people who haven't played the first one, if they're interested in things like major diplomacy and dating spies.
I received a review copy of this game.
An excellent Victorian superhero team game, August 13, 2020This was one of the most enjoyable Choice of Games titles I've played. You play as a new recruit to a superhero society in Victorian London. It has an HG Wells feel, with brass mechanical creatures, airships, and aliens from each planet in the solar system.
You lead a team of superhero trainees in an attempt to discover the fate of the more trained superheroes, who have disappeared. Your team is very diverse: some essentially human, others from other planets, and another that's quite a bit like you.
The game offers a satisfying narrative arc and a variety of ways to interact. In one part, you can choose between three missions. In another, you explore a house for clues to a combination. In others, you choose how to allocate your assets and can even end up in a courtroom trial.
I thought it was great. Some of the achievments are a bit difficult to achieve, but I enjoyed it immensely, and look forward to playing the sequel.
I received a review copy of this game.
Three games put into one: cat life, politics and music, August 12, 2020My rating for this game went back and forth quite a few times while I was playing it.
This is a very long game. I played this over two days. Its wordcount is 610,000. There are only 2 other published Choice of Games titles bigger than it.
Tally Ho, one of the games that is slightly larger than it, has a shorter play length, due to having more branches. This game has 9 very long chapters.
It's really three games in one, each of which could be separated into its own, shorter game.
The first is cat life. You are with a family and there is a kid and a dog and a wild neighbor cat you can interact with. Over and over again, you choose where to sleep, how to get the best scraps of food, and how to treat the humans and other pets. This is fairly entertaining at first, but gets pretty repetitive by the end.
The second is Claire (the mother) and her political career. She is an MP trying to win power in a party that centers on ecological concerns. You can influence this by affecting her mood during talks, distracting her during important moments, or trying to 'show her a sign'.
Similarly, the husband, Andre, is working on a musical career. He's pretty bad at it, and the grouchy neighbor behind you is a musical producer. You can influence him like Claire.
Of all the plots, I found the beginning cat bits and the political segments the most interesting.
One frustrating aspect was the large number of overlapping stats that were constantly being both tested and changed. For instance, is looking sweet to get food a test of being manipulative v demanding, of being audacious vs cautious, of being feral vs domesticated, or of contempt vs affection? Or is it a way to change one of those stats?
I became invested in the storylines eventually. I know one of the paths can lead to divorce, so I managed to avoid that. I imagine there are many branches possible, so I may have to replay.
I received a review copy of this game.
A purely strategic Choicescript game set in space, August 11, 2020This is a Choicescript game which feels like a streamlined, story-fied text version of some war game like Alpha Centauri or one of those boxed set tabletop games with hex maps (but only in spirit; it's shorter and more linear than those games).
You have stats like energy reserves, fighter pilot strength and fighter pilot numbers, etc. There is no romance at all, and all of your decisions are on how to manage your fleet, its strengths and its political positions.
I enjoy simulation games, but this one had a few flaws that prevented total enjoyment. I had trouble deciphering why some of my actions led to some of my skill changes. One complaint I've had with a few Choicescript games is that it can be difficult to tell when your stats are being tested vs when they are being changed.
Another issue is the lack of narrative surprises. For me at least, everything was telegraphed from very early on and never really changed. I read something about tips for writing heist movies and novels once that I think applies here. Paraphrased, it said, "Either the audience knows the plan ahead of time or the plan works perfectly, but never both at once." There just wasn't enough dramatic tension.
Fortunately, the strategic elements were engaging and well-thought out. Overall, worth playing if you know what kind of game you're getting into and enjoy that genre.
I received a review copy of this game.
A Choicescript game that really gels together. Lots of action, power fantasy, August 10, 2020This is the 'old school' Choicescript at its best, like Choice of the Dragon. This is a power fantasy stretching over decades from your time as a student to (in my game) your final question to the legendary Dragon Sage.
The game is set in a fantasy version of China. The author is a blackbelt in Shaolin Kempo Karate. I wondered about cultural appropriation a bit, but the game turned that on its head near the end in an enjoyable way.
You have quite a few stats, and you can get them very high. Following your stats lets you win several fights. There are other challenges where you need to play to your strengths, but I found that consistent roleplaying let me solve these challenges the 'right' way every time, as opposed to a lot of other games I've seen where you have to just guess what the author's thinking.
There were several romantic options in this game, but I didn't have spend much time with them, as I chose an arranged marriage and devoted most of my time to monkly things.
The game isn't super long but it felt like a complete story arc with a significant investment in the overall story. I look forward to reading the other games by the same author.
I received a review copy of this game.
An amusing shorter sarcastic haunted house game, August 9, 2020Choice of Games started with Choice of the Dragon, which was a great game but pretty short at 30K words. From there, it's grown to where there are now games over 1 million words long. In the last year or two, though, they've commissioned two shorter games as a sort of free sample for their omnibus app (those games are Sky Pirates of Actorius and Zip! Speedster of Valiant City).
Besides those three games, this is the shortest among all Choice of Games titles at 56K words. It's also one of the earliest, the 6th game ever made.
I think it suffers a bit from early experimentation, which produced some amazing games and some that were more lessons for the future.
This is a very funny game, don't get me wrong. I enjoyed trying to keep my tenants from demonic rituals or getting possessed. But some parts really show their age.
For instance, there are only three main stats in the game: one relationship stat (with your boss, non-romantic), your Ruthlessness, and your Activity level. These, along with your income and work-life balance, are the only things visibly tracked by the game.
This hampered the classic Choice of Games scenario where you can strategize your statistics, making difficult choices between them. Instead, it felt more like a branch-and-bottleneck twine game, with exploration and trying to find 'the right option' in each case. Those things aren't bad, but it's not what I was hoping for here.
Also, the story kind of puts a snarky and competitive viewpoint on you, and I wish I had an option to choose not to be like that. But those kinds of options are the things that make games longer, and again, this is one of the shortest.
Gavin makes great games in general, though. He's written several Exceptional Stories for Fallen London and Hana Feels is one of my favorite hyperlink games, and one that's touched a lot of people.
I received a review copy of this game.
A space-based pirate game with odd logic and math puzzles, August 8, 2020This game has some very unusual features for a Choicescript game. But I'll get to those in a second.
Like Treasure Seekers of the Lady Luck, this is a Choice of Games title where you find yourself abducted by alien pirates, met with a few friendly faces and others out to get you, inducted into the party, and sent on a heist. Both are named after the ship you find yourself on.
This one is a bit shorter, with 6 chapters to play through that go by relatively quickly. There is one romance, as far as I can determine, and one major mission you go on.
As opposed to Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck, which had a crew of very diverse aliens, this game has humans (mostly), making it a bit harder to differentiate between the crew members.
As for the odd features, I had a feeling when I was playing at first that the game was intended as some kind of intelligent test. It had a lot of pass/fail logic and math puzzles at the beginning, and it included math conversations that (as a math professor) I felt were worded in intentionally confusing ways.
To my surprise, in a later chapter, you actually do take an intelligence test, quite a long one as well. It was pretty frustrating to work through and get every question right only to be stymied by a low relationship check later on with the person I'd spent the most time with.
There were a few stray coding oddities (I received an achievment twice, and the Choicescript code for your significant other was left as {so} instead of ${so} at one point, so it displayed incorrectly). But the intelligence puzzles were technically impressive, and I could see several people purposely seeking out this game as perhaps the most puzzle-heavy 'official' Choicescript game I've played. (The Race is a Hosted Game, meaning it wasn't vetted through the long Choicescript process, but it also contains numerous puzzles).
A Celtic-centered retelling of the legend of King Arthur, August 7, 2020This story had me in the beginning and slowly lost me over time. I was pleased with the overall result, but it didn't have staying power for me.
To begin with, this game was all the Arthurian characters, but with Welsh names, like Bedwyr for Bedivere and Emrys for Merlin.
Also, for the first half of the game, it seems like a non-fantasy, more realistic version of King Arthur, with Merlin being basically just a Roman-educated scholar and troublemaker and the Sword in the Stone just being a symbolic trophy laid on a table.
It offers you romance early on, and has some good stat variability (I put all my stats in Violence, Bravado, and Christianity/Rome).
But all of that changes in the later part of the game. I encountered only a few romance options, and the realism took a sharp left turn into (Spoiler - click to show)wolf-demons and spirits, and somehow all of my stats got cancelled out into one big neutral mess, all almost exactly in the middle. I've never had that happen in a Choicescript game before; I'm certain it was from my own actions, but it was very odd.
The game has a lot of good features, such as the distinctive Celtic feel and a habit of doing omniscient narrator sections in italics.
I received a review copy of this game.
A choicescript game heavy on history and consequences, August 6, 2020I've been approaching this game and review with some trepidation. I've known Joey Jones for quite some time and admired his work (including the excellent Sub Rosa and the short but sweet Andromeda Dreaming). I was also aware that this game, like my own, was shorter and less-discussed in the forums and reviews than many recent Choicescript games. I was worried about writing a negative review for a game that took a great deal of effort from someone I respect.
I was pleasantly surprised by this game, though. I think I understand why it's less talked of by the fanbase. The best-selling Choicescript games are decadent games where there are no wrong choices and no consequences, power is yours to grab, a half-dozen people are interested in you romantically, and ultimately you have power over everything. These games aren't bad, but they have common themes.
This game goes against almost all of those things. You are essentially a bounty hunter in a grim London. You have very little money (or a lot of debt). You are frequently powerless. Romance is scarce. Each attempt at solving (or committing) a crime has a high chance of failure, and often there is only one right path to victory in a given situation. Your actions often lead to brutal deaths, and there are grim reminders of the harsh conditions of 18th century London everywhere.
But I found those same features intriguing, especially after playing a few silly-hijinks games in a row. The writing is historical and ornate, like water from an oaken bucket. The setting and language are meticulously researched, as is the money system and the kinds of people involved.
It's a fast-paced game. There are 11 chapters, I believe, but they went by quickly for me. However, this game has more replay value than most, due to its difficult puzzles. The fairness of these puzzles is a bit in question; could someone solve them without any prior knowledge? Some of them I did, but not others.
The most enjoyable part of my playthrough was freeing ten people from prison to join my gang, and learning their backstories. The most disturbing part of my playthrough was trying to decide whether to help the family of a condemned man to kill him faster or not to end his suffering.
I received a review copy of this game.
An early Choicescript game with zany antics that grows more serious, August 5, 2020You know, I've found a pattern with Choice of Games titles. On quite a few of them, the first chapter or two is pretty dismal, almost to the point where I don't really want to play any more. But they've always paid off in the long run.
As someone who's written one of these games myself, I think I know what's going on. I had never written longform fiction before, only parser games. But the standard in non-interactive publishing and Choice of Games is to write the first chapter first and keep going, getting paid as you hit milestones.
For me, that meant I approached Chapter 1 as inexperience and untalented as possible. By my final chapter, I had 2 years of writing experience and study under my belt. My first chapter is, frankly, hideous.
When I write parser games, on the other hand, I write the whole game at once, starting with a skeleton and expanding it. The opening scene is often something I add at the very end when I realize it needs 'something more' to kick it off.
That might explain why this game, Choice of the Ninja and others have such flat openings that don't connect with the rest of the game. On the other hand, experienced Choicescript writers like Hannah Powell-Smith or experienced fiction writers like Natalia Theodoridou have strong opening chapters.
I bring this up because the opening of this game stinks. I only had one choice that affected my main stats (I think you can affect more stats if you play it right, but it was odd), the computer was a real jerk and it felt flat overall. The humor seemed fairly dumb, intentionally.
As I played longer, I got to go on interesting missions, I got caught up in the storyline, it was fun modding my ship, and the humor improved. All of the annoying parts of the beginning turned out to be important plot points in the end.
This isn't the strongest game in the Choicescript lineup, but as an entire game, it was actually fairly satisfying. It kept me guessing right up till the end and had good plot twists. I still don't really like the idea 'jerky computer companion', though, but I think some people will like that. And it feels longer than other games from its time period.
I received a review copy of this game.
Edit: The point where I started enjoying the game was when it let me fulfill my desire: I always wanted to be the element xenon.
A short branching Twine game about a ritual and your child, August 4, 2020This is a fairly-well put together Twine game with background sounds. You are driving down a road late at night, and you need to abandon your child in the woods.
The writing was descriptive and the game was fairly polished, but it felt a little short for the heavy themes being developed, and many choices lead to early deaths, making it more of a gauntlet structure.
As a small, self-contained Twine game, though, I think it's successful. Maybe I just wanted a longer and more involved version of the same story?
A werewolf jailbreak/outlaw game, part 2 of a series, August 4, 2020This game is part 2 of the 3-part Claw, Shadow and Sage series.
I really enjoyed the first game, and this game lets you import your save directly, with a lot of different opening scenarios depending on how you ran the last game.
This game opens with a couple of chapters of a jailbreak sequence, a genre I enjoy but which sees little play in interactive fiction.
Once you escape, you (in my playthrough; it branches a lot) joined a camp of essentially outlaws trying to survive in the wilderness.
As opposed to the brutal Colonel Williams in the first game, the standout character in this game is Maker, a werewolf scientist who stays in her human form a lot more than she ought to and seems to be around anytime trouble starts.
I look forward to the final game, when it's released. This game is very replayable, and has several romances with adjustable levels of detail in your relationships.
A post-apocalyptic werewolf game that leans heavily on worldbuilding, August 3, 2020I just wanted to comment before the main review. I plan on reviewing every single Choicescript game. My 5-point rating system is weighted heavily in favor of these games. Every game I've ever seen from Choice of Games is polished, descriptive, replayable, and has some form of good interactivity.
So I don't anticipate giving any number of stars either than 4 or 5, unless there is something deeply offensive in one of the games.
With that out of the way, this game is fairy hefty in length and in content. You play as a young werewolf in a world where werewolves have been hunted almost extinction and forced into an internment camp on the east coast of the US.
Unlike most works that deal with 'other-humans' that are persecuted, like X-Men, the werewolves in this game don't seem to be a code for human ethnicities or sexualities.
Instead, at least in my violence-and-fury centered playthrough, it seems to be an honest attempt to see what it would be like to be a predator, thought sentient. My hypothesis is bolsetered by the large number of friends and others I see online who discuss and write about being sentient animals. The story deals with bloodlust, and in no way does it punish you for violence and murder, treating it as natural for wolves.
There are several romantic options, and quite a few opportunities to act on them.
The worldbuilding is the main focus here. There is an elaborate back story, characters with huge histories (there's got to be a spreadsheet or book of lore kept by the author somewhere), detailed topography (that book/spreadsheet has to have a map attached).
The plot is designed to get you through this worldbuilding and the main plot points. Others online commented that they felt railroaded in this game, and I can see where they're coming from. But I enjoyed the setting and the characters, especially the storyline around the main rival.
I received a review copy of this game.
Game centered on a short loop, with use of video and sound, August 1, 2020This game has you working in a call center with 99 calls to finish. There are only a few options, including going to a cafeteria or looking out the window, before you go back to the main loop.
It uses video a lot; it seems to be autoplaying youtube videos that are so enlarged the youtube gui is off the screen (only autoplaying after you click a link, since Chrome disabled regular video autoplay, I think).
It's very abstract, and the game slowly changes. I played before looking at other reviews, but later sought ought more in case I was missing something big. I thought this game reminded me of Degeneracy (a parser implementation of the same concept), and I saw that Emily Short said the same thing years ago.
I rate games on a five point scale.
+Polish: A lot of effort went into this, and it was smooth.
+Descriptiveness: The sounds, videos, and text made the message clear.
-Interactivity: I was left wondering if I was missing something, and so it didn't work well for me.
-Emotional impact: I bounced off the high level of abstraction.
+Would I play again? I might; it was interesting, and I would try different paths.
The second Choicescript game ever: grand adventure on the high seas, August 1, 2020Now that I've played several of the very early Choicescript games, I can see a bit more of a pattern. They are all very adventurous, leaning heavily into the TTRPG/gamebook style of one encounter after another. They tend to have the narrator comment on your actions, are quite a bit shorter than later choicescript games.
That can work well; I really enjoy the fast-paced dramatic action in Choice of the Dragon, and the first third of Choice of Romance (which was the only part initially available) is likewise a quick fun play.
This game didn't do it as much for me. But I've never really liked seafaring stories, besides Moby Dick (which was more of a whale encylopedia, which I am into). For some into Horatio Hornblower or the like, I think this would be amazing.
It has a fairly satisfying rival set up, providing the best moments of the game, and lot of action. There are 3 romances (you can't romance your rival, but there is quite a bit of underlying tension there).
Again, this is a great game, but it pales (to me) in comparison to some of the other great Choicescript games out there, many of them inspired by this one. It's kind of like Ditch Day Drifter, a game which kicked off the whole TADS movement but which was surpassed by its followups.
This game is also notable for letting you genderswap the entire world, making women the fierce and soldiery types of the world and men the gentle beaus at the ball.
I received a review copy of this game.
A budget-based business simulator with witchcraft and aliens, August 1, 2020This game is pretty different from other Choice of Games titles. Its core gameplay is driven by a series of monthly budget meetings, interspersed with an ongoing mystery/action plotline.
You play as the new CEO of of Metahuman Inc., being forced into the position after the disappearance of the previous owner. Metahuman Inc. secretly uses both magic and extraterrestrial technology to modify humans. Unfortunately, for legal reasons, they've lost all their previous tech an rely on you to decide what to purchase next.
The core budget cycle is complex. You can invest your funds into different stock portfolios, or develop new personal enhancements (your main source of income), or invest in research to make future products better.
The 'action' portions revolve around the missing CEO, and include opportunities for romance (I found the romance plotline I chose satisfying). The two intermingle as your business decisions impact your personal life, and your personal goals require you to divert business resources.
The first scene was a bit odd for me, as the game labelled me as duplicitous when I didn't feel I behaved that way, but then it took off into a satisfying sci-fi story. I got a lot of satisfaction out of this game, found the characters memorable, and enjoyed the storyline. Many COG titles feel rushed at the end, as (from my own experience writing them) you have to write so many endings that each one can get a bit diluted. That wasn't the case with metahuman.
I received a review copy of this game.
Edit: I realize now that this game reminds me of Actraiser, which had a sim-portion and a fighting-portion, and that was one of my favorite games growing up. This game definitely ranks in the top third of Choicescript games I've played.
A fast-paced and straightforward ninja-based Choicescript game, July 31, 2020Choice of Ninja was the 13th or so Choicescript game put out, and I found it one of the weakest games at first, but it grew on me as I played.
I happened to play this as I was watching Naruto Shippuden for the first time, and the parallels are easily visible. You play a young orphan raised in a village in the woods, and it starts with you having to pass a test at your school to become a full ninja. There is magic, most of which involves invisibility, but becoming a duplicate is another skill. There are other parallels, like escorting a crotchety old man and dealing with a friend on the dark side.
But in a lot of ways its more realistic. Evil monsters are hinted at but not shown. There's no real magic past stealth magic and duplicate magic. So the over-the-top magical fantasy of stories like Naruto are toned down, and the parallels become less and less as you play.
The last half of the game is where I feel like it came into its own. Other reviewers have said that this game is very linear, and choices don't matter, but I felt like my choices mattered quite a bit when it came to the plans on infiltrating the final fortress. It was fun.
That said, I don't think this one holds up as well as other older Choicescript games, especially when compared to Slammed!, which came out around the same time. Slammed! is in the top 5% of all IF games ever, to me, with a story that has you hooked from the beginning and gut wrenching decisions at the end.
So, as an overall IF game, compared to most games in IFDB, Choice of the Ninja is high quality and worth playing, but compared to other commercial Choice of Games stories, I don't recommend it unless you're playing through them all.
Pure power fantasy in a Renaissance setting. Magic, manipulation, and romance, July 30, 2020This game has quite a bit of history behind it. It was the fourth Choice of Games title, when they were all named 'Choice of' (the ones before it being the Dragon, Broadsides, and the Vampire). A year later, it received an update with an entire new chapter, and then another update.
It's power fantasy in its purest form. You are young and gorgeous and everyone wants you, including the king/queen. You can choose everyone's gender in the game and due to magic any two people can have a baby. Tension in the kingdom is preserved, though, by replacing gender with magic. The type of magic you are born with determines who can rule.
Every choice you make has massive consequences. You are constantly romancing someone or making backroom deals or starting a war or revolutionizing the system or jousting in a tournament. I found it very similar to Sims in the way you can meddle with everything and everyone.
Being so early in the history of the company, it has a lot of odd quirks. It has three major paths you can choose, but only one leads to the updated content, the others ending with your old age and death after seeing only a third of the content. There is a lot of customization of your appearance that ends up not mattering. Some of your bases stats are rarely checked. There are a lot of binary choices, and there are several 'huge list' choices where you have 7 or more choices. The narrator comments on your choices to you directly, something I only remember seeing in Choice of the Dragon.
The game is full of the eponymous affairs. I do not support affairs in real life, but this is a fantasy, and more than that, it's a fantasy that shows the real-life problems, jealousies, and conflicts that are the natural consequences of affairs. I think it's worthwhile to play and fun, to boot.
A very fun espionage game that won the Choicescript contest, July 29, 2020As I've been playing through Choice of Games stories, I've found ones that are touching, majestic, goofy, weird, and high-quality.
This one is just plain fun. It's a James Bond-type thriller, and it does interactivity right. I was able to really customize the kind of person I wanted to be, pursue the relationships I wanted to pursue, and have moments where I really felt torn between two goals but knew what I had to do.
The game revolves around investigation of a tech firm that has experienced recent layoffs and a suspicious employee death. There is a lot of worldbuilding, but in a mostly easy-to-understand way, like the enemy agency DIABLO which uses codenames based on devils.
I found this easy to play, engaging, and long enough that I felt satisfied. If Choicescript games were food, this would be meat and potatoes (if you're into that thing). Simple and especially, especially when done right.
Content-wise it's very similar to Bond films. There was one instance I found of strong profanity, some heavier violence towards the end (including alluded torture and some gore depending on your choices). My playthrough had heavy flirting but no explicit sexuality, but the game lets you customize this quite a bit so I'm not sure about other paths.
Would definitely recommend.
I received a review copy of this game.
A straightforward heist game written in Choicescript, July 28, 2020This is the third Choicescript heist game I've played in the last week (the other two being The Martian Job and The Treasure Seekers of Lady Luck), so I can't help but compare them.
The Martian Job had the most memorable writing and setting of the bunch, with more emotional choices, while Lady Luck had more memorable characters and a zany atmosphere.
This game was just pure heist. You learn about the heist, you recruit your crew, you conduct the heist, you leave. There are a few twists, but they are mostly telegraphed, making them pleasant but not anxiety-inducing.
I'm a big fan of mysteries and crime, so I enjoyed this game, and found it polished. Most of the choices made sense, with a recurring choice of 'Sneaky, Brutal or Flashy' showing up, despite not mapping directly onto the choices. I think this helped in characterization.
I guess I didn't really connect with this game emotionally. My enjoyment was at arm's length. I am interested in playing it again, though, to get some of the more unusual acheivments.
A dreamlike and mystical game about music, rivalry, and land wars , July 27, 2020Rarely has a game given me more to think about. For the first time I can remember, I had to keep open a notebook on my thoughts for this review as I was writing, because there was so much I wanted to comment on.
This game felt surreal to me. Caleb Wilson is well-known for his haunting or magical games like Lime Ergot and Starry Seeksorrow. I was definitely looking forward to playing this, and it was one of the games IFDB had most suggested to me over the last few years.
The dreamlike quality pervades this piece. The other works of film or literature I compared it to as I played were Pilgrim's Progress, Dante's Inferno, the film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Amadeus, and the works of Baz Luhrmann. If it were produced as a film I'd expect it to look like The Cabinet of Dr. Calegari, and I wonder if the whole Choicescript game couldn't be reinterpreted as a mental exploration of the subconscious. A major feature of the game is numerous bright stages where you sit alone before a dark and murmuring audience in a towering theatre which features bizarre architecture.
As to the game itself, you are a famed composer and musician. This world is an alternate version of Europe, set after the exile of its version of Napoleon and on the eve of a war between Napoleon and Russia.
In this world, many people are possessed with a parasitic intelligence known as a Genius, which may or may not just be a feature of their subconscious. Your genius has various opposed qualities it can lean towards.
Each chapter is played in a different town, each of which is characterized by an abundance of one thing (and here I think of the works of Kafka [but more cheerful] and Michael Ende, although neither one exactly applies).
There are a cast of distinct characters who shadow you everywhere you go, including a rival, a journalist, several love interests, and quite a few spies.
The text of the game is so interesting. I have a whole file of the most dreamlike and surreal bits, but here is a taste:
(Spoiler - click to show)"You approach a glowing rectangle: the strangely small doorway that must open onto the concert stage. Perhaps it is just the peculiar atmosphere of the castle, but you feel oddly nervous. The room is awash in bright light and for a moment you can't see a thing. When your eyes adjust you find yourself standing at the back of the curiously small stage. The hall stretches away farther than the stage lights allow you to see. There is no applause to greet your appearance: half of the audience is staring at you in silence, while the others—clerks, to judge by appearance—are hard at work, pens scratching at ledgers. It seems that for much of the audience, this is a working lunch. There is a blurry square, lit by dim lights, to the side and high up the wall, which is concave like the inside of a spoon. King Ferenc's box, perhaps?"
and another one:
"An elegant woman dressed in black and purple is standing before a marble mantel. There is no fire, just a hint of ashes; instead she—"May I present," says Peruz, "Countess Zerov, an esteemed visitor from the court of Sclavia!"—is the flame. A dark and liquid flame, like that which smolders unseen, sending up barely a hint of smoke and devouring a building from within."
Why, then, would I give 4 stars to a game that affected me so dramatically instead of 5?
I had some troubles. The enormous multitude of names was overwhelming, and I found the game had no almanac or list of names of places and people. Some kind of accompaniment to remind us might be nice.
I had difficulty knowing when my genius was being changed and when it was being tested. I had spent a great deal of time cultivating a mathematical genius, but then realized I couldn't change it more. A chapter or two later, it had suddenly reversed itself to be as unmathematical as possible. One of my choices must have changed it, but when, and where? Many other challenges were similarly opaque.
Overall, this game is a masterpiece of writing and setting, and I feel it will linger in my mind for many years to come. I had a long, long dream last night and this morning, and when I woke up there was a short time where the dream world felt more real than this one. This game parallels that same feeling, and it was surreal and haunting to play it so soon after that experience.
I received a review copy of this game.
An older Choicescript sci-fi game about joining a crew of criminals, July 26, 2020It's interesting playing two criminal Choicescript games in a row, one from years ago and the other recent (The Martian Job).
This game comes from a time before Choice of Games' had firmly established their game philosophy, it seems, because it breaks it in many ways. There are a lot of binary options. There are a lot of choices where there is an obvious 'right answer' (like an early choice where there is only one escape pod and either you can save a little girl or yourself. Knowing that you're in chapter 1 and the chance of you dying is low, and the chance of a future reward is high, there's really no reason for you not to save her).
Perhaps most unusually, every relationship is an 'opposed stat', which in Choicescript is a pair of stats that sum up to 100%, so raising one lowers the other.
This puts some of the odder choices of the game in perspective. There are many, many options which are just 'be a jerk'. But in this opposed system, being a jerk to one crew member is the very best way to befriend their 'opposite'.
I found this bizarre. Another early facet really put me off. Your first encounter with the crew is with a blue-skinned alien from a 'race of slaves'. When meeting him, he asks you about slavery and three options are how you think it's fine and only one is against it. It's really odd.
As a representative for house-style Choice of Games stories, this is pretty poor. But if I had randomly found this game (such as in IFComp), I would have rated it fairly well. I can compare it the recent '4x4 Galaxy', with which it shares some similarities. This game has a fairly robust money and inventory system. It invites numerous strategies on replay, and despite its small word count, manages to feel pretty large.
I think I'd give this a 4. In a way, though, I'd be more likely to recommend this to people who don't like the Choice of Games housestyle and less likely to recommend it to fans of their other games.
I received a review copy of this game.
An often witty but difficult Shakespeare game in the vein of Scott Adams, July 25, 2020This Scott Adams game was designed with the retro format in mind. The download includes source code with design notes, and it's fascinating to see the discussion of how many lines of text will fit where and what needs to be removed.
This game is a shortish text adventure using the Scott Adams format (short in the sense of 7 treasures and about 16 rooms; it takes a good hour or more to finish without hints, longer if you get stuck like I did). It's based off of Hamlet and contains many joking references to it.
This is a hard game. Much of the ease of modern parser games comes from adaptive hints or helpful responses to incorrect actions. This game has some of that, but only so much can fit into the constrained format. I had to request help and then discovered the (well-commented and organized) source code provided in the download.
While I appreciate the craftsmanship in the game, it definitely is the type to be solved by careful exploration of the state space and deliberative thinking, as opposed to my general play style of 'charge ahead recklessly and see where the story takes me'.
I will say that I think this is much more successful as a game than Graham Nelson's adaptation of The Tempest or my own Sherlock Holmes adaptations.
Solid writing in a space-themed heist game, July 25, 2020I'll discuss this game on my five point scale. For an overview, you are a former safecracker who's running out of money and is looking for a new job. This one's a casino, on Mars. You have to work with a team and pull of the heist; but things go wrong.
Polish: This game is thoroughly polished. Even the stats screen looks nice, and the names of stats are a clever treat (you have three stats about your interactions with Mars, named 'Curiosity', 'Sojourner', and 'Spirit').
Descriptiveness: This is where the game shines. This feels like the kind of writing you'd expect picking up a crime or mystery novel from the bestseller table at a bookstore. It's a higher caliber than most the IF I've played, for sure.
Interactivity: This is where it differs a lot from other Choicescript games, and the area I have the most to say about. Most Choicescript games are power fantasies where you max/min or strategize and get to do all sorts of great things, but at the same time sacrificing other goals. This game felt less powerful and more by-the-skin-of-your-teeth. There are very few opportunities to raise your stats. Many choices were more about reaction than action, and I could see that be why another reviewer gave it less stars. I'm a fan of games that invite reflection (ironically, one of my favorite such games is Polish the Glass, which has a similar writing style and features the same day job as this game's protagonist). There are still power fantasy elements; you can fall in love with many people, change the whole world, become rich. I became rich, but it felt hollow. Maybe I should try again?
Emotional Impact: I felt it. The game had an intense blackjack simulation that I liked. I don't gamble in real life, but in the game it was fun (lost everything, of course). I felt tense at times, laughed at the portrait in the crime lord's office. A strong area for the game.
Would I play again? Absolutely. If I time traveled to tell my past self about which Choicescript games I should play, I'd definitely include this one, and I want to see if I can save Mars this time.
I was provided a review copy of this game.
A Choicescript game about keeping alien criminals in line , July 24, 2020This game is one of the older Choice of Games entries, and one of the shortest.
It's a comedy about you, a parole officer for all of the aliens that live on earth (which is now a galactic penal colony). There's a single romantic option (that I found, at least).
I found quite a bit of it funny, and there was quite a bit of local idioms from different cultures I learned, but this game suffers by comparison. In the six years since it came out, the standard for these games has generally crept higher and it shows.
The text feels sparse, often just a couple of paragraphs per choice. Many of the choices feel very on-the-nose and in-the-moment instead of the slow build-up of small choices leading to big consequences that marks newer games.
Some though, may find these characteristics refreshing, giving a quicker game with less labored choices and less weighty subject matter. In any case, it was polished, descriptive, and funny, and I might play again.
I received a review copy of this game.
One of the best of Choice of Games. Huge, exciting, and strategic, July 23, 2020This game has been at the top of the bestseller charts for Choice of Games since it came out last November. I've been interested in it for quite some time, and it exceeds my expectations.
The best Choice of Games stories are those which allow your decisions to matter with meaningful branches (like Choice of Robots), which have a strong narrative arc (like Slammed!), have a lot of customization (like Hollywood Visionary) or which invite strategy (like Choice of Robots again).
This game excels at all of these features. Set in a fictional, more open version of Europe some decades past, this game features you as the scion of a disgraced family, sent to a finishing school to redeem their failures. At school, you can attend to any number of activities, including academic studies, meddling with teacher romances, witchcraft, leadership, and quite a bit of romance (with 9 possible romances and 10 possibles marriages, including marriage of convenience and a royal).
The last few chapters can really throw some gears into your plans. I planned on restoring my family's honor and marrying the headmistress's child, and achieved both of my goals.
It really captures the essence of the boarding school story, like Jane Eyre's early chapters or an ethically-sourced version of Harry Potter. This game allows quite a bit of customization with regards to genders of romanceable characters, and your own appearance and personality.
It's also very long. While it has a smaller wordcount than the enormous Tally Ho, my playthrough length was longer than any Choicescript game I have played, lasting several hours (although I read everything carefully).
In a way, it was a lot like epic fantasy. Not the Hero's Journey (it's not rigidly in any tradition like that). Instead of a hero from a destroyed village, you're a student from a destroyed family. Instead of gaining experience through battles and sages, you engage with rivals and teachers. And instead of facing Mt. Doom, you face the truth behind the school, which is just as destructive.
I was provided a review copy of this game.
A gritty crime story about dark virtual technology, July 22, 2020This is the one of the darker Choicescript games I have played. In a world where virtual reality can hijack another's senses, people use the technology to live through others: cliff diving, gorging on food, and darker things.
This game includes references to drug use, self-harm, suicide, and more. I didn't experience sexual content on my run-throughs. Each chapter has optional content warnings.
As a detective story, this is top-notch. It was nominated for a Nebula award, and its easy to see why. I've replayed it a few times and it's always fresh.
A fitting end to the Sorcery series, July 22, 2020I'm a big fan of the Sorcery series, with part 3 being my favorite.
This one is an appropriate ending for the series. It's huge, absolutely huge compared especially to part 1, and the magic you can gain here is powerful and mysterious.
The ending sequences can be nervewracking and difficult. The art is great, and the music good.
While I like this episode, I still prefer part 3, as part 4 is a bit one-note with its feel of a final confrontation.
A somewhat buggy game about an old house and a giant mining complex, July 21, 2020This game reminds me a bit of Old Jim's Convenience store from IFComp 2019. Both feature an old, abandoned structure underneath which is a large mining area.
This game is the author's first game, and the lack of beta testing shows. The interesting layout and rooms are negatively impacted by under-cluing and by exits which stop working once you use them and runtime errors.
My 5-point scale:
-Polish: This game is not polished.
+Descriptiveness: It is relatively descriptive
-Interactivity: Bugs cause quite a few problems
+Emotional impact: I found parts of it quite fun (like the result of using dynamite)
-Would I play again?
An educational dinosaur game for kids with graphics, July 21, 2020I played this game on this Apple II emulator: https://www.scullinsteel.com/apple2/
It's a parser game with one or more custom images per location. The parser isn't super responsive by modern standards but is reasonably understandable.
Beyond normal puzzles (like capturing a lizard or shooting an allosaurus with an improvised slingshot), each time you meet a dinosaur you have to type in its name. If you get it wrong, it zooms in and gives you a hint. Getting it wrong again makes it tell you to look at the Dinosaur Handbook which, unfortunately, does not seem to be archived along with this game. I got stuck on a horny-beaked dinosaur I could not identify.
The game was interesting but didn't move me emotionally, and I wasn't invested in completing it.
A very long, complex alchemy game. Polished, and set in a fantasy world, July 21, 2020This game combines an intricate alchemy system with technology aboard a sort of magical spacecraft. This isn't a rocket engine; it's a complex environment that uses magic to translocate in space.
Something has gone horribly wrong on your magical ship, leading to major disruptions in time and space.
You collect what may be hundreds of items in this game, perform dozens of rituals, and visit quite a few locations. In this sense, it ranks with other ultra big games like Mulldoon Legacy or Spellbreaker. However, this game has an advantage in that it simplifies things for you. Any ritual, once performed, can be done again with a single command. There are database type commands that allow you to recall all rooms, all items, all rituals, etc.
The setting is barren and mysterious, with the outside world leading to a variety of mysterious lands.
I couldn't put this game down. Very well done.
Mid-length sci-fi game with a real cinematic vibe and superb implementation, July 19, 2020Andromeda Apocalypse is one of the best-crafted games I have seen. In this mid-length sci-fi game, you explore an abandoned station that is part Sphere, part 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a little part Alien.
The game features a compelling main NPC, a map that flows well in your mind, and puzzles that lead the player on from piece to piece in a natural way.
Instead of traditional scoring, the game includes achievements. At first, I thought this would make the game worse, but the achievements became a puzzle themselves. ('How do I get the 'Ellen Ripley' achievement?', I found myself asking.)
I would recommend playing Andromeda Awakening first, because this game is a sequel. Awakening is a good game, in and of itself, but Apocalpyse is the better of the two.
I recommend this game for everyone.
Memorable creepy Twine game with great use of repetition, July 19, 2020At the time I first played it, this was the only Twine game I'd played through multiple times. It takes less than 20 minutes to play, with some very mild puzzles. The genre is creepy horror (as opposed to grossout or Lovecraftian).
The writing is well done. Of the four main areas, I felt one was weaker than the others, but on the second playthrough, I found it even creepier than the others.
The reason I enjoy this game is something others may not care about. I enjoy it because it almost feels ritualistic, like a Greek mystery play about life. The format, the pacing, the repetition, is very successful, in a way different than Porpentine's use of the same elements. I see myself revisiting this game every now and then for the fun of it. Others may have different responses.
Wonderful short fantasy game with compelling writing and interesting format, July 19, 2020This was one of most vivid games I have played. The story reminded me of some of my favorite books I read as a teenager. I'd rather not spoil any of it here, though.
The implementation was very interesting, using a combination of standard inform commands and keywords for conversation.
The puzzles were simple, and written in such a way that you always knew what you should be trying to do, even if you hadn't figured out how to do it yet. The game seemed thoroughly tested, with multiple endings.
I'm giving the game 4 stars instead of 5 purely because of length. As a shufflecomp game, it is among the very best I have seen.
Well-crafted but difficult science fiction game about reality, July 19, 2020This classic game is exceptionally well-written and implemented, together with a well-done hint system.
The game features a pretty small playing area that is packed with objects and several NPCs that take interesting actions.
The game is hard, and I had to rely on hints much of the time. The puzzles require creative uses of a large number of objects gathered from different areas, and some large leaps of intuition.
The plot is about the nature of reality, and it has several mind-benders, which is why I am not describing it as much.
Vast world with variety of puzzles , July 19, 2020This is a Christmas-themed game with the same gameplay style as Curses or Zork. The character explores a very large shopping mall after hours, trying to get a Christmas present. The feeling of loneliness mixed with wonder gives a nice atmosphere to the game.
The puzzles range in difficulty from very easy to very hard. You should assume you will use the hint system, which is wonderful. Puzzles include mindbenders, find-object-use-object, and some big mazes.
I enjoy games that are too difficult to completely beat on your own, but are large enough and non-linear enough to give even casual players hours of entertainment before turning to hints. This is such a game.
The endgame puzzles are frankly too difficult with too little reward. The game was very fun right up to the time you get (Spoiler - click to show)a ball from Santa. Everything after that felt like work. It may be because I relied so heavily on the walkthrough at this point.
Great game for someone who like Curses and wants a similar experience.
A sci-fi novel in interactive form, July 19, 2020This is by far the largest game I have ever played in terms of text. Unlike most interactive fiction games, the story of Worlds Apart was years in the making, and was the authors main outlet for sharing a world they had imagined their whole life.
This game is set on a completely alien world, with different plants, people, animals, and history. The amount of detail in the game is massive, with NPC's that respond to dozens of topics, every item in the game being implemented in six senses, and a dizzying amount of locations. The game even contains two mini-books, one of which would make a good-sized pamphlet in real life. Just reading the game would take several hours.
I loved this game. However, because of its size, when I got stumped on the puzzles, it ruined the atmosphere. I started looking at the hints once I had exhausted all of the obvious options, because I wanted to read more of the story. But I didn't rush, and I tried to experiment with everything that I could find.
I recommend this game to everyone.
Your PC is a toddler in an epic rivalry with another., July 19, 2020This was the first truly funny IF game I played, and I remember it was one of my favorites when I first played IF, although I haven't been as interested in replaying it. I didn't understand the work that went into IF at that time; looking back, this game must have taken an enormous amount of effort.
You are a toddler trying to get their favorite toy. Your competition is the red-headed toddler, who is mean and wants the toy, too. You navigate around several toddler NPCs who you can manipulate into different actions and movements. There are also several 'Parent' NPC's who carry on a background conversation (some of the best parts of the game). You can manipulate them as well.
This is a mid-length, semi-linear comedy game. It is split into several acts. The main appeal is the writing, although the puzzles are well-crafted. Even side things are well-implemented; you must drop everything to hold the big plush book because your little hands are too small.
A clever speed IF about resisting standard parser tropes, July 18, 2020This game, made for a Speed-IF and never fully developed, reverses standard tropes. It may not even work as a longer game; as it is, could just use a little polish.
You play as one of/a series of young boys applying to be a household servant. As a 'test', you must resist several things tempting to an adventurer: a key in its lock, a partially-open door, a covered dish, etc.
It's cute and short. There are some bugs and it is not polished, but I enjoyed it.
Massive for a twine game; explore an arctic tundra, July 13, 2020TUNDRA was one of the first Twine games I had every played, months ago. As such, I didn't like it at all, being used to parser games. I also thought the game was unfinished, because I hadn't found an important plot tool.
Having played more twine games, now, I see that this is actually a well-crafted game. I just played it through all the way to the ending, and I like it quite a bit better now.
The game allows you to undo at any time, and there is a map to help you move around. You can pick up 5 or more items in your endeavors. I am told there are 3 endings, but I only reached one.
You are in the arctic tundra and must explore. I found the game very reminiscent of Babel.
An entertaining British butler adventure with a huge wordcount, July 11, 2020Tally Ho was recommended for me to play in a poll on Games that Need More Reviews.
This is a big Choicescript game with 600,000 words total. In it, you play a butler in the Wodehouse style.
Your client is a spendthrift who needs to impress a wealthy aunt in order to pay off a debt. Hijinks ensue.
I'm not too big of a fan of actual Wodehouse novels, but this game managed to be outrageously funny in several ways. There are many paths to success, including theft, romance, intrigue, intellectual endeavors, and secret clubs.
The characters are refreshing as well. They are all deeply flawed but also have, generally, good hearts. You generally have many goals at once that completely contradict each other.
I appreciate that the author in fact wrote much of the game intending you to frequently fail checks. It's supposed to be fun and rewarding whether you do 'good' or 'bad'.
An Exceptional Story about the struggle between cloth and creature, June 28, 2020This is a well-written Exceptional Story for Fallen London.
In this one, you find odd pieces of sentient Paisley clothing scattered about Fallen London. As you engage with it, you discover a strange past.
The story ends up ranging around several of game's most important factions.
The writing is tight and clever, with complex characters. There is a climactic battle that is more action-packed than most of Fallen London. Overall, highly recommended. Has Groover's signature creepy style and contains a great deal of Wilde references.
A well-put together Speed IF with a surprising amount of detail, June 23, 2020MTW, the author of this short speed IF, has always had a talent for putting together locations and NPCs. Speed-IFs are usually very sketchy, but this game manages to have a large map, responsive items, good error messages, and even a conversation (which I know from experience is difficult to implement in a short time).
It involves the Voodoo or Voudon religion. While one part of it revolves around the use of (Spoiler - click to show)Voodoo dolls, which just tonight I discover actually originated in European druidism, most of it seems to represent Voodoo beliefs in a fairly accurate and respectful way, the kind of accuracy you'd expect in a game where you visit the Christian heaven.
I think Speed-IFs would be much more enjoyable to play if more of them were this well put-together. I'm not giving 5 stars, though, because even as a speed-IF it still has to compare to longer games.
A long Twine game with illustrations and music about Trump's election, June 23, 2020This game is one of the most difficult to rate that I've had in a long time. Not to play, but to rate adequately.
What does a good rating mean? Is it an endorsement? Is it a message that says, 'Hey, I'm sure you'll like this game?" Is it an objective measure of technical skill?
This game is very long, 11 chapters of text that took me over an hour to play. In it, you play one of Trump's campaign staff as you aid him (with an in-game alias of Truman Glass) in getting elected, and the aftermath.
There's been a lot of talk on Twitter in the last weeks about authors appropriating others' stories. As a white able-bodied man, I have written protagonists as female, or disabled, or hispanic, without really thinking about it.
This game goes a bit further, in that the author writes the experience of a queer woman in America with a minority second-generation immigrant background. And these facets are essential to the story. I see in the credits that others were consulted, so it's possible that this is what they were consulted on.
The minority you are is an option, and Polish ancestry is oddly listed along with Hispanic, Black and Indian ancestry. Is this saying that Polish people have similar experiences with POC? Or is it saying that it's immaterial which one you pick? Other details are off; the twin towers attack is described as happening at sunset, when I remember it happening during early hours at school in the West.
What is the story? It portrays the protagonist as divided against herself, constantly experiencing ill effects that are contrary to the ideals of the campaign she works for. It's not a straight-up retelling of Trump, but it's close enough. It veers between painting Trump as a hideous cartoon and glamorizing him as a tough-guy mob boss.
Politics have belonged in Interactive Fiction for decades, almost since the beginning. Infocom even had a game that was just a big anti-Reagan message (A Mind Forever Voyaging). It's a medium especially well suited to political messages.
I don't know if I felt comfortable with this game's messages. Like Trump itself, it stated controversial things (like saying being anti-vaxx and pro-choice have to go together) and then played it off as satire.
I don't endorse this game, except for players who are interested in seeing a take on American politics. I do give it a 4 star rating on my scale, knowing that this will be effectively seen as an endorsement, as it will be fed into the overall average.
My scale:
-Polish. The game is thoroughly polished, with text transitions, styling, illustrations, and music.
-Interactivity. I am definitely anti-slow text but this was better than most, with fast-forwarding enabled by clicking and a fairly fast speed to begin with. Choices were sometimes clearly not important/not offering real choice, but in general I felt like my choices mattered and they were brought up again in the future.
-Emotion. Well, I felt a large range of emotions playing.
-Descriptiveness. The writing made me feel like I was there.
-Would I play again? This is the star I'm not awarding. I don't really agree with this game, and don't feel like playing again.
A well-written society story with horror roots, June 16, 2020Exceptional Stories are odd games. They are framed within the larger Fallen London game, which takes months and/or years, yet they themselves can often be completed in an hour or two. They have a really, really big wordcount though compared to what it feels like, especially since they often branch significantly.
This one was good. There is a struggling family trying to re-enter society. You can support them or their snooty cousins. All along, though, the butler has his own plans.
I'm not opposed to society machinations, but they're not my favorite. I like Jane Austen but prefer the Brontes. This game has horror depths that I like, but the particular genre didn't grab me as much as it could. Hannah Powell-Smith's excellent writing skills makes it worth playing, though.
A short but effective horror game, June 12, 2020This game is centered around a survey and uses various literary and programming techniques to establish a creepy atmosphere.
I found it inventive and effective. My ratings are adjusted to the length of a game, so I consider this a 5-star game for a short, under 15-minute work.
Otherwise, I don't want to give away too much. Very fun!
A short fantasy tale with good worldbuilding and the promise of sequels, June 6, 2020I rate games on a five point scale. This is a shortish but broad Twine game where you are being hunted by something magical and must use your equipment to survive. It branches heavily, enhancing replayability.
Polish--The art is good, the game seems well-thought out and designed. Pretty good.
Descriptiveness--Very good. I could picture it all in my mind vividly.
Interactivity--It's hard to play without learning by death, so I struggled a bit with this one. And widely branching games are a bit frustrating at times because you have to replay the beginning over and over to see all the different ends, but it's totally a valid stylistic choice.
Emotional impact--I felt moved by the story. I like fantasy, especially TTRPG-adjacent fantasy like this.
Would I play again?--I've already played it a few times, so yes.
An unusual experiment in place and time; horror, June 1, 2020This game was interesting.
In initial appearance, you are in a house and have several options for exploring it, with no option allowed twice in a row but otherwise full freedom.
Over time, the game changes in both subtle and overt ways.
It works well technically, and the idea is good, there's just not much of it, and I feel like the concept needed a bit more time to come to fruition.
In any case, the author is clearly good at both writing and programming, so I'd be interested in further games.
A polished and stylish Night Vale-style game with investigation and danger, May 28, 2020I grade games on a scale of 5 stars, in the following criteria:
*Polish. This game is very polished, with custom sounds, varying backgrounds and images, complex menus and text input.
*Descriptiveness. This game nails the Night Vale voice and has vivid non-descriptions of real things and real descriptions of non-things.
*Interactivity. I felt like my choices mattered and had consequences. The game wasn't quite linear and not quite lawn-mowery, and I felt good.
*Emotional impact. I felt amused.
*Would I play again? I think I would.
This is a game in which you have to track down The News, a wild beast which has escaped in Night Vale, a town where every conspiracy theory is true.
A heartfelt tribute to an Emily Short game, May 25, 2020Emily Short's game City of Secrets is a relatively-hidden gem. Started as a commercial project for a band, it's a sprawling city-based game that has much of the liveliness and intrigue of her later Counterfeit Monkey.
This game takes that same layout and room descriptions, but includes an 'Easter Egg Hunt' where you have to find 10 gems (and 1 super gem I didn't find) scattered throughout the layout of the game.
It does what it set out to well: encourage people to see and appreciate Short's setting and descriptions.
I had some difficulty guessing words (I'm used to Inform's synonyms like SEARCH being the same as LOOK IN), but the game had several hint systems, which was very useful.
A short one-move tribute game with some entertaining responses, May 15, 2020This game was entered in the Emily Short Anniversary Contest.
It's a sequel of sorts to Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die, Aisle, and Pick up the Phone Booth and Aisle.
Like those games, this game is centered on having silly or weird responses to individual actions you can choose. These games usually require a ton of different actions to see all of the content, but this game isn't quite as expansive as the others. There are a few references to Emily Short and the contest.
A cute little game about mutant clothing, May 14, 2020In this relatively short game set inside your house, you wander about trying to deal with your clothing that has come to life. You have to subdue and wear each piece to win.
The clothing acts like NPCs, and are pretty amusing. The puzzles are light and I finished in 15 minutes.
The story is simple, the puzzles are simple, the writing is plain, but the game concept and execution is a lot of fun.
Short fun game.
Edit:
I changed my scoring system after I gave my original 2 star review. My new system uses these criteria:
Polished: I encountered no bugs and only a few whitespace issues.
Descriptiveness: It's a little spare but is packed with jokes.
Emotion: It is funny, if a bit silly.
Interactivity: I found the puzzles satisfying.
Would I play again? Probably not. I didn't think of it until a commenter reminded me.
A heist game with a limited parser--but watch out for the owner!, May 13, 2020I helped beta test this Spring Thing 2020 game.
In it, you play as a someone trying to rob a house for an organization of thieves.
Like DiBianca's other games, you have limited parser options here. All interactions are performed by typing the name of the object you are interacting with.
The puzzles are interesting, with puzzles involving far-flung parts of the house, searching puzzles, combination locks, etc.
The owner can come back at any time, and discerning the patterns of his visits is one of the biggest puzzles of the game, one which I didn't see for a long time and which really surprised me. I'm not sure it worked for me completely, but I enjoyed this game well. If you're a parser fan, this is one of the best parser games released this year, and definitely worth checking out!
A '2-command' game in texturewriter, April 16, 2020This is an odd game. I was excited to see it used texture writer, a system that often produces unusual games.
In texture, you slide 'action' blocks onto 'noun' blocks. This game switches that around a bit, more just sliding one of two nouns (eye, shoulder) onto adjectives and nouns.
It took me a while to figure out the functionality (which is (Spoiler - click to show)'eye' provides a description using several adjectives while 'shoulder' adds the word to a sentence, except at the very end where you get one or more endings.
I didn't really know what to make of it all, but it worked for me, the discovery of the use of the nouns providing the same kind of feel that solving a puzzle does.
My favorite insight was realizing (possibly incorrectly) that the game provides insight into the author's feelings about themself.
A great first parser game that needs a lot more polish to be a finished work, April 16, 2020This is an introspective parser game set in the world of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, one of my favorite artists. It revolves around exploration and small, one-item puzzles in the classic Zorklike mode.
I've seen many first parser games (including my own, a game I never released), and they are almost uniformly buggy and unfinishable.
This game has surprisingly few, if any bugs, which is a welcome surprise. However, it is lacking a lot of polish. I had to decompile the game to find the ending. Some suggestions for the next game:
1. Having one or more beta testers can alleviate almost all problems, if you implement their feedback. Intfiction.org is a good place to find some.
2. Room exits should be listed in every room unless finding the exit is a (hinted) puzzle, like a maze.
3. It's good to have either everything have a description or nothing to have a description. It takes a long time to describe everything, but it's often worth it.
4. Some puzzles may need cluing (like the magpie puzzle). Having a beta tester or two can help here.
5. Having instant deaths and disabling UNDO is a pretty frustrating combo. There's been a lot of debate over the years on whether disabling UNDO is worth it, but it's worth knowing that some interpreters have built-in UNDO that works even if you try to disable it, so some players will always have UNDO.
Overall, I think the author is capable of creating truly great parser games given enough tester support. I'd love to see more!
A clever and complicated collection of poems in interactive form, April 14, 2020This twine fiction has 4 poems presented in different ways.
One offers choices that don't seem to change the story, instead indicating how you personally feel about your choices.
Another uses some kind of randomization to present a series of tiny vignettes with random names. You can move backwards and forwards in time during the vignettes.
The third uses a grid of text, and you can reveal more or less of the grid.
The fourth is my favorite, with a physical space you can move through and some interaction.
The writing has evocative moments, but the choices of interactivity distance me from the text more than drawing me in. I felt more alienated than invested.
This reminds me of a lot of early works by people who are now well-known/professional IF authors, so I'd love to see where this author goes next.
An unusual historical parser game, April 11, 2020I beta tested this game.
Napier's Cache is in an unusual niche of historical fiction, and is based on a family story of the author.
It is fairly linear in story with nonlinear interactions in each 'phase'. You first have a small treasure hunt, followed by a dinner scene, then another treasure hunt and a simple maze.
In design it reminds me quite a bit of Christminster, an early (pre-IFComp) inform game that was well-regarded at the time, that also had you doing things like eating at a dinner with scholars and discovering the history of old alchemists.
Overall, the quality is well-done, and most reasonable interactions are coded for. I enjoyed each iteration of this better than the previous, and I believe this is something to be proud of.
A lengthy procedurally generated space exploration game on a grid, April 9, 2020This game is one of the most interesting of Spring Thing. You have to explore a 4x4 grid of planets, with 4 'safe' planets in the middle, 8 dangerous planets on the edges, and 4 really dangerous planets in the corners (at least, that's how I interpreted it).
The writing is grounded in the pulp sci fi of decades ago, and has a lot of tropes from an older time, like 'impressing the natives' and taking treasures from their holy sites back to your society's museums.
The gameplay has a good rhythm of exploring, buying and selling, kind of reminiscent of Fallen London.
I really enjoyed this at first, but on each of my playthroughs, I hit a kind of wall at the end where I knew exactly what I needed to do but the resources seemed like a lot to acquire. There are some shortcuts (like special ores giving tons of crystals), but I felt each time like the interesting content ran out before the final quest did.
However, that might be due to my timeline in playing every game. Perhaps if I took it at a more leisurely pace it wouldn't be a big drawback, and I don't know if the author should change it.
A kind of confusing Twine game about gangsters and...stuff, April 8, 2020This seems like a first-time Twine author's game, with at least no broken links.
The writing is rushed and seems untested. Here's a sample:
"He pulls out a big rotten fish and throws at you, it hits at at the head and knocks you unconcious."
There is some funny humor, but a lot of it didn't make sense even as nonsensical humor.
I think this just needs to be heavily revised. At its best, it could end up like the madcap game Escape the Crazy Place, but at its worst it still represents a step forward for the author.
An in-depth and fancy-looking cyberpunk crime game, April 7, 2020There are two cyberpunk mystery games in this Spring Thing, and there were at least three last year in IFComp. It's a good genre; Delusions did it back in the 90s, and there have been some other good games in this field.
This game is definitely creative and unique, though. It features some really nice retro-looking UI and some flashing graphics.
The story is about investigating the memories of a deceased individual who had a bionic bow implant on their arm. You're working for the police department.
It focuses on the experience of surveillance and on the way that humanity can be degraded by a police state.
I didn't find deep emotional fulfillment in it, but it gave me a lot to think about.
An Ink game about managing a group of 100 people, April 7, 2020This game is written in Ink, always a smooth-looking choice for an engine. The styling is good.
Some of the language could admittedly be more polished. The author admits that English is not their first language, and it shows.
The interactivity is fairly satisfying but not all the way there for me. The same actions might save you or not in different playthroughs. Is it random or stat-tracking? It's hard to say.
Overall, it's interesting.
A very short Twine story with allusive worldbuilding and implied relationships, April 7, 2020This short Twine game about some disaster making people not want to go out (at first seeming like Covid, later not so much).
It satisfies my 5 requirements for stars:
-Polished. This has great understated use of color and is organized neatly, with an interesting mechanic at the end.
-Descriptive: The house, people, and items and even mood were palpable to me as I read.
-Emotional impact: I could really feel the emotions the game was pushing out, maybe just because of my quarantine experiences.
-Interactivity: The card game was a nice change, and I felt like my choices in general had some kind of impact, if nothing else than in my roleplaying.
-Would I play it again? I already did. I like the feel of it. Might play it again.
Bigger and in many ways better than the original, April 7, 2020Sunless Sea is a cornerstone of narrative-heavy games. Sunless Skies, the sequel, is better in many ways.
But not in all. I bounced hard off this game for a couple of reasons.
First, the controls require more practice. You have a slippery little flying locomotive that can strafe and aiming is hard.
A bigger issue that almost killed the game for me was the pacing. Sunless Sea had islands grouped in sets of 4-6, with the more dangerous and interesting islands found to the south and east. You could sail east and see everything dangerous, die, and restart, but it was all technically accessible early on. The 'safe islands' near the home port were more safe and boring.
In Sunless Skies, the map is way bigger (with 4 huge worlds), but your entire first world is like that 'safe' region. Ports are gentle and nice, and everything is slow paced. I almost lost interest.
But the other worlds are far better for my tastes. London is full of politics. You can join the rich in their fantasy lands that are gilded cages or you can work to rally workers to rebel against their masters. You can betray Victoria or nurture her child.
Eleutheria is full of darkness and poetry. It riffs on one of the most popular Exceptional Stories of Fallen London (Hojotoho) and has the same vibrant and dangerous feel that Saviour's Rocks or the Chelonate had in Sunless Sea.
The Blue Kingdom is small, but its ports have tons of options, and its 'small ports' are bigger than many of the real ports in the other worlds.
The story content here is immense, with more choices that you can take. Descending in a bathysphere through a black hole was amazing, and confronting Victoria with the true contents of the Serene Mausoleum was also excellent.
Highly recommended. I've played more than 60 hours and have quite a bit left to go on my current storyline, and I plan on doing a different storyline afterwards.
A huge treasure trove of gothic horror stories with a boat mechanic, April 7, 2020This game is visually lush and rich, but its heart is storytelling.
In this game, you pilot a boat from port to port. You start on the fringe of existence, able to die from a few hits by passing monsters, losing your crew to mob bosses, or running out of fuel or food. Slowly, you crawl your way up to being able to afford more and survive attacks. It calls itself Roguelike in combat and I feel that's accurate.
But most of the gameplay is stories. You discover ports which come in increasingly exotic sets as you get further away from home. At first, you discover things like an island of liars or a mysterious military station accepting coffins and nothing else. As you expand, you can find a terrifying castle of ice or an island of guinea pigs and rats. At the very edges, you reach the truly horrifying or truly cute.
Stories range from diplomatic negotiations to bizarre rituals to painful torture and so on.
The Zubmariner expansion adds a ton of stories but not much new in the way of equipment. The main Zubmariner storyline (Immortality) is excellent, and the new ports are some of my favorites (I enjoyed slowly turning my organs into crystal and injecting myself with solidified regrets).
I put about 76 hours into the game+expansion, and plan on playing again in the future.
An expansive but unintuitive tribute to Hawk the Slayer, April 7, 2020This is a big Quest game entered into the 2020 Spring Thing.
It's clear that a lot of love and hard work has gone into this game, and it is very detailed and at times evocative.
However, adapting other works, especially static stories like film or books, is tricky. It can, as in this case, end up with huge worlds and confusing maps, tons of NPCs each with small parts, etc. This, plus the randomized combat, gives a feeling of an old western false-front store, designed to look big but needing a lot of work in the background.
A walkthrough would improve this immensely. On the plus side, it made me want to watch the original film, which I think is one of the author's goals.
A young orphan gets tangled up in a fairytale amid a difficult life, April 6, 2020This is a long Twine game entered into Spring Thing. It has a long storyline about a boy who's orphaned and ends up taking care of a younger child while older friends take care of him. He gets involved in a fairy story in a way. The game has long linear stretches with some 'dynamic text choices' and a few binary choices that do seem to affect the storyline.
I grade on a 5 star scale:
-Polish: This game is not polished. There are many typos and other grammatical errors, due most likely to the author being a non-native speaker.
-Descriptiveness: This game is very descriptive, with characters having distinct personalities and voices.
-Emotional impact: I got into the story, so I'm giving a star here as well.
-Interactivity: It was hard to know how much I affected the game, but I affected it somewhat and didn't feel locked out.
-Would I play again? Probably not.
So I would give this 2.5, rounded up to 3.
Classic B-Minus. A short, surreal poem in Twine format, April 5, 2020B Minus makes what I would describe as anti-games. Just like Ryan Veeder likes to do counter-culture things like making very elaborate set pieces that are useless in the game or giving anti-climactic climaxes, B-minus likes to have functionality that's not all that functional.
In this case, it seems like the links might have some kind of strategy or purpose, but instead it's more like file folders, with the game ending if you get too deep.
The writing is opaque and symbolic, with elaborate language and constructions. I learned the word "aubade", a poem appropriate for dawn or morning.
B-Minus is an author that either pleases you or puzzles you, but I feel pleased.
A slightly confusing Exceptional Story about the colors of the neath, April 5, 2020I found this exceptional story rather confusing. It seems to mostly relate around an elaborate pen show. You begin to discover that the seller is using the colors of the neathbow, a set of colors used throughout the game and featured prominently in Sunless Seas. Colors like Irrigo, which brings forgetfulness, or Violant, which fixes things in memory.
There is a love story and a confrontation, but this story never really gelled in my mind. It was my first exceptional story in years, so perhaps I had just forgotten how to read them, but it's hard to say. The rewards were good, though.
A cute exceptional story about a cat reviewing a life ill-lived, April 5, 2020I recently started up my Exceptional Friendship at Fallen London again, and this is the second story I played.
You discover a cat that wants a new start on life, but to do so, you must provide character statements from their old friends. The cat wasn't that great of a person before, so the statements are fairly offensive, and you have to decide whether to share what you learn with the cat or not.
Overall, this was charming for an exceptional story, with some good lore here on Parabola and the King of Cats.
A madcap baby-mecha twine game, April 4, 2020This game consists of the following elements:
-Custom graphics and animations
-Custom sounds
-4th-wall breaking goofy storyline
-A baby in a robot suit destroying things
These elements are all good in themselves, but this could have used a few more pass-throughs. The sound is loud and has no visible controls. The choices imply freedom without granting it or even, after choosing, the illusion of freedom. It implies strategization while taking it away.
The concept is funny, and I laughed, though, which is what the author wanted. So I believe that the author has been entirely successful in their goals.
Food-based horror, love and rituals and an ASCII map, April 4, 2020This is a twine-based game with an ASCII map where you leave little footprints as you travel across the map.
This is food-based horror, a theme that occurs fairly regularly in Groover's repertoire. But it's a bit different this time. This time, you are food: you're jelly, and you're crossing the landscape, trying to get ready for a picnic, and trying to understand what was lost.
It's a live-die-repeat game, where you have limited turns to accomplish your goal. Surprisingly, your actions before death linger, letting you make lasting changes to the landscape.
It's gross, with flayings, immolations, and a lot of devouring, but it's definitely not the grossest Groover game you've ever played.
The final puzzle was beyond me (I didn't realize a certain ordering was different than I thought), but the copious hints smoothed that over.
Weird, and fun.
A first parser game with a surreal world and vivid imagery, April 3, 2020This game is made by 1/2 of the team that made the excellent rabbit-based game Ürs a couple of years ago. It's a first try at making a parser game.
Programming-wise, it has a lot of things covered: edible food, rideable vehicles, conversation, active animals, devices, untouchable objects and other things difficult to program.
I was looking for more cohesiveness in the story or setting, though. I felt like the individual elements were interesting, but as a whole it didn't gel together. Its sparse, linear, fantasy setting reminded me of the Bony King of Nowhere, but it didn't have the common thematic elements that tied that game together.
There is one puzzle in the game which I only discovered by decompiling the source code. The author mentioned how no beta testers discovered it, but that the solution should have made sense.
This is an interesting point. The puzzle involves selecting one object out of many and using it in a location far from where it was found with little indication of any connection.
I've found that 'good puzzles' typically come from either:
-learning a complicated system with learning tasks followed by complex tasks
-setting up expectations and then subverting them, or
-providing a set of rules that players can strategize with.
The author framed this as a kind of learning exercise, and has shown great skill in programming. I believe that with practice, they could create truly great parser games, and look forward to any games they create in the future.
A good first-effort murder cyberpunk murder mystery in Twine, April 3, 2020I love a good mystery in Interactive Fiction, and I was excited to see how this one would play out.
There a lot of ways to do mystery in IF: have the mystery play out linearly or as a results of puzzles (so the gameplay doesn't involve the actual mystery); hunting for specific clues; and actual deductions by either the player or the character.
All versions can be made into very engaging games. This game does pretty well, but it didn't quite reach the level of pure satisfaction.
This game, according to the author, is "a small project I made to learn Twine and experiment with Interactive Fiction in general", and it's much better made than many other first efforts.
Story-wise, it's a cyberpunk mystery where you have to search people's memories (or engrams) on the 'net. Gameplay-wise, you're hunting for a motive, means, and murderer.
A short, pleasantly surprising short zombie Twine game, April 3, 2020This short Twine game has you play as a young character surviving alone after some time of zombie-style apocalypse. You have to make some critical decisions regarding an old acquaintance.
I thought at first that this was just a heavy-handed riff on the coronavirus, but then it took a turn which pleasantly surprised me and which I'd like to see more of in Twine. Thoroughly enjoyable.
The author's conent warnings include profanity and a non-consensual kiss.
A short fantasy love story about invention and angels, April 3, 2020This is a shortish Twine game by Els White, author of the popular Twine game To the Wolves and writer/designer under Spider Lily Studios.
This game isn't meant to be epic, just a simple love story, but it has fairly heavy world-building done through implications. I felt like it explored class politics, transitioning, gay relationships, theology, etc. all in ten minutes.
There are some nice visual effects that add to the play (you literally assemble a visual angel), and I enjoyed the time I spent playing.
A charming and chilling story of nature, photography and love, April 3, 2020This is a Ren'Py story that uses beautiful photography with a mostly linear story broken up by binary choices.
These binary choices always have an immediate effect, but I don't know if their influence lingers later on.
I love the type of story. It's almost like a romantic version of the Turn of the Screw. The hero is confused, foggy--possibly non-neurotypical. They have someone at home--sister? caretaker? spouse? And they encounter someone in the woods. But who and what are they?
The answers are never fully revealed, but gradually hinted at more and more. I found it effective.
A well-written sci-fi tale about belonging with non-linear narrative, March 22, 2020When I was a kid, my dad had tons of sci-fi books from the 50s and 60s, and my grandmother had huge boxes of Star Trek books. I read Asimov and Clarke and all the others.
This story reminds me of a lot of sci-fi from that era: humans and aliens trying to understand each other. I guess that's always been a huge genre, even now with shows like Steven Universe exploring the same thing.
In this story, you play a human in a future version of the universe where aliens have established diplomatic relations with earth. You have tried to renounce your identity and become an alien, and humans are in an uproar over it.
The story is presented non-linearly, with custom-made graphics to take you from section to section. Generally, you can choose to see another cutscene before or after the one you're in. However, going forward and then back doesn't bring you back to where you were; it seems like you always see new material.
I enjoyed the story, and found it polished, descriptive, and emotionally satisfying, but I don't feel an urge to play again. I'm satisfied with the story I found.
By repetition, gain the power to change the story, March 12, 2020In this French IFComp game, you see (in a linear hyperlink format) a teenage couple who are checking out the moon with a telescope.
After one playthrough, you earn 10 points that can be used to go back and change the story at 4 critical points, for a total of 16 possible endings.
The writing is well-done, but as another reviewer noted, it is repetitive, especially since you only get 10 pts per playthrough and any choice you make spends that 10 pts. You'd basically have to play the game 4 times with no choices in order to play the ending that uses all 4 point spending opportunities.
An intriguing take on Celtic mythology (in French), March 6, 2020I love the story of Cuchulainn. I remember learning about it in college, how he can get enraged and have his feet turn backwards and his face puff up with only one eyeball and all sorts of weird things. Then he appeared in FF12, which was cool.
This is a game about Cuchulainn, and it's also a game that largely consists of an unfair labyrinth. Basically, you can go left/right, etc. and it doesn't give you any hints about what's coming up. I would take off a star for that, but Cuchulainn adds it back, so there you are.
I only played to one ending, because it's in fairly complicated French (harder for me to understand than the other French games in this comp). I might try it again though. Interesting game, and I think it's in Ink (plays like it, at least).
A truly clever concept with some rocky implementation, March 3, 2020This murder mystery is fairly compact and has some intriguing characters. It also has extra-fancy design. It's written in Ink, and works by clicking text (with links not receiving any special formatting).
It has lovely images of the murder suspects, whom you can learn about one at a time. You play a police commissioner (I think?) attending the 'big reveal' of a professional detective.
Slow-text didn't really work for me (and I never really like to see it), although it contributes in a minor way to the overall puzzle. I was also confused by the fact that sometimes the same action would result in me being called an 'imbecile' while at later times in the same playthrough it would work. After seeing the solution, I think I get it, but I'm not sure that was a good design decision.
Overall, the French IFComp continues to lead the IF world in technical innovation. I'm excited to see what comes out next year.
A long, obscurely written French Twine game with minimal choices, February 28, 2020This is game that is hard for me to review, in many ways.
First, it was difficult to play. It is in French, not my native language, but it also is written in a very allegorical and elusive style. It is very long, with at least four chapters each with a dozen or more pieces. I encountered a bug while looking at my objects list at the very end of Ch. 3 where the link to return to the main story disappeared.
Also, it's hard to say what score to assign. According to my rubric, I give 1 point for being polished (it is), 1 point for being descriptive (which it also is), and 1 point for interactivity (despite the fact it's linear, giving me a choice to see the objects page or not was in fact useful). But I didn't feel an emotional impact as the scenes were too disconnected, and I was too exhausted by it to play again. I believe that many of these problems would be mitigated for a Francophone.
An amusing French twine game of unintended consequences, February 23, 2020In this game, which has beautiful graphics, you have risen to the throne after your mother was accidentally poisoned by a drunk witch.
You have numerous binary options, and one (or both) options will have humorous, unintended consequences.
It's not too long, but it is polished, descriptive, and amusing. However, I found its interactivity a bit frustrating at times, but I could see my self playing again.
A solid noir story marred by 'guess-what-the-author-is-thinking' situations, February 10, 2020This game is long, well-written in the noir style (where men drink hard liquor and every woman is beautiful.
It's framed as a radio play, and has two acts. You end up doing daring things, with cat-and-mouse chases, throwing punches, etc.
Unfortunately, many of these things are under-clued or involve non-intuitive actions. This makes a walkthrough almost required to play through the game.
A cute, funny French game about dreams and fairies, February 7, 2020I've long enjoyed games about fairies, other worlds, and dreams. This game doesn't branch much, but provides plenty of humor and child-like fantasy.
You play an insomniac who is visited by the dream fairy. The dream fairy attempts to diagnose your insomnia, taking you from person to person to try and find someone who can help.
A game about getting points in the cycle of Karma, February 6, 2020I like the idea of this French IFComp game. You have different stats, and you are constantly reborn, changing your stats. You try to gain Karma during each lifetime, eventually ending the cycle.
I found it a bit opaque (although it was not my native tongue!) Each binary choice would affect your stats, and sometimes you'd have big non-interactive sections affected by those stats, some of which would give you karma.
It was pleasant, and I enjoyed the writing, but I didn't feel like I could strategize despite the UI heavily suggesting strategizing.
A short French potion-making game, February 1, 2020The theme of this year's French IFComp is cycle and/or revolution.
In this short Ink game, you are in a looping timeline where someone knocks on your door, demanding a potion.
You have a grimoire with two potion recipes in it, alluding in a riddle-like way to different herbs. You have to select the right herbs like a combination lock.
Not being my native language, some of the clues were difficult. Also, one very particular path in the opening sequence gives you, in a non-intuitive way, an extra helpful book.
So it was fun and looks nice, but was a bit frustrating.
Daily grind as an RPG-can you survive 62 days? I couldn't, January 29, 2020This game is kind of a blend between micro-text RPGs (like the Twinyjam game 'RPG-ish') and Fallen London (except instead of random cards you get fixed cards with random-ish effects).
It has some actually pretty good 8-bit music and a custom display. You are trying to survive 62 days, keeping your esteem, family, health, and stress at healthy levels.
I liked the conceit, but 62 days is really long. I died around round 39, and had seen a lot of repeated text. Maybe that's the point? Maybe you're meant to die?
I had two different encounters with sexual content, roughly as explicit as a PG-13 comedy in the US.
Edit: The game has been updated, including trimming the timeframe down substantially. Check it out!
A relationship-focused horror game about the fog haunting a small town, January 16, 2020I purchased this game because it seemed interesting. I'm a sucker for good horror stories.
The concept is that the dense fog in your town is rumored to kill those who have wronged others and not confessed. After an argument with a former friend, he dies, and you are the last person to see him alive.
The game is split between two main modes of interaction: deciding which of your many (well-written) friends you'll spend most time with, and deciding whether to believe in the fog monster or be a skeptic and deal with the real-life problems in the town.
I struggled with the first chapter or two, as it was more relationship-focused and I'm more into fantasy and sci-fi aspects of games. But then it picked up steam, and I ended up enjoying both facets of the game, and had a satisfying (though 'losing') ending.
A media-rich space exploration game, January 14, 2020I really enjoyed the presentation of this game. It has background music, and an animated star background.
It has a different emphasis then most space sci-fi, almost like a space retelling of some fairy tale. The worldbuilding is good, with weird creatures. The writing was evocative and clear, although there were a few tonal decisions that I think might have come from the translation. I got stuck on the main puzzle for longer than I had thought I would, but I finished the game in about 15 or 20 minutes.
There's an itch version and an e-reader version, which is nice for people looking for more interactivity on the Kindle.
A pleasant little murder mystery in 1950's England, November 30, 2019This game is a fine addition to the long tradition of murder mystery interactive fiction games.
This is a one-room game. You, Celia Swift, are aiding Inspector Land in researching the mystery of an orchestra member's death.
There are two phases: a puzzle-based investigative phase, and a deduction phase.
The investigative phase requires patience, and the deduction phase doesn't give too much away if you guess wrong.
The one thing that mars this game is the large number of unhelpful responses. If a second edition were released, or a similar game released in the future, I would wish for more custom responses.
A SpeedIF ADRIFT game made in 4 hours. Make your meeting, or explore a city, November 26, 2019This game has a lot of good writing and layout, but it suffers from the 4 hour time limit. Very few actions are implemented, even ones close to correct. ADRIFT is especially poor at using responses to incorrect commands to guide the player toward correct commands, and this is no exception. Even consulting those who've won, I haven't been able to complete it, only getting to the (Spoiler - click to show)Runic Doorway in the icy plains while holding the book and wearing the costume. Then I'm stuck.
I enjoyed the writing, but much of the game is difficult to discover. Well-done for a speed-IF, though.
Schultz's second rhyming pair game, this time with a spooky theme, November 26, 2019Like Very Vile Fairy File, this is a game about rhyming pairs, where you must type in the correct rhyming pair to progress forward.
Like the main game, I found this one enjoyable. The map is short, with 5 or 6 rooms. Some of the rhyming pairs were hard to guess, but unlike the main game, the constrained atmosphere kept guessing from getting tedious.
The Halloween theme was also appropriate, and I feel like the rhymes all made sense.
The use of the word 'queer' in the title would seem to indicate some kind of connection with queer sexuality, but seems to be used in its older sense here of 'unusual'.
Haunting sci-fi horror involving plunging into a new world, November 24, 2019There's a specific kind of story I really enjoy, where people travel to an alternate, darker version of our reality. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the Dragonlance Test of the Twins, the IF game My Evil Twin, Stranger Things, etc.
In this well-developed Twine game (which has nice styling and graphics), you play as a Diver who enters various breaks in reality, trying to reach a specific location that will allow you to rescue a real-life runaway.
It's not too long, about 15-30 minutes. Most of the choices seem flavor-based, which was just fine with me.
A short choicescript game with horror elements and moral choices, November 24, 2019This is a Choicescript game written in less than 4 hours for Ectocomp 2019.
I had a lot of fun with this one despite its size. The author managed to cram a lot in. There's a 'build your monster' segment followed by a series of moral choices. It provided a feeling of agency beyond its substance and had solid writing.
Loved it! If you want more monster stories from this author, they also wrote Each-Uisge from IFComp 2019.
The very beginning of a Halloween game, November 23, 2019I'm pretty sure this game is the result of someone opening up Quest for the first time, putting in some rooms and an object, and sending it out. Probably a younger person as well.
There's nothing wrong with doing that, but it's not really a game. It's three locations and an item and nothing else. In addition, it's released as the code for the game instead of the finished game itself.
I'm glad the author figured out how to use Quest, and if they want to make longer stuff, more power to them.
A branching short story about returning on the Day of the Dead, November 20, 2019This ChooseYourStory game is short but offers real consequences to actions. You play as a recently dead teen who comes back on the Day of the Dead and discovers the truth about their death.
There are 7 endings advertised, of which I found 2. I would consider both of my endings failures, but they were interesting failures.
The writing seems a little off here and there but it's descriptive enough to make up for it. Overall, I found it to be a compelling tale.
A difficult pie cooking game with a gorgeous aesthetic, November 20, 2019Visually, this game is a treat. It does for a parser game what has been increasingly common for high-end Twine games over the last few years: custom fonts, background images, special styling (here marginal notes). I love it, and, having tried for a long time to style my Quixe games, I know how hard it can be.
Gameplay-wise, this is polished for an Ectocomp game. You have a ghost that randomly curses things, and a big recipe sheet that tells you how to cook things.
I didn't do too hot, getting 42 on my first attempt and then (undoing for more chances but messing up) getting a 0.
A clever ghost game with good Twine programming, November 20, 2019This is the kind of thing I really like to see in Ectocomp: an experiment that stretches the boundaries of IF in interesting ways.
In this game, you play a Japanese ghost who frightens people by removing its face. There is an expansive map with different locations to visit and numerous NPCs.
What is clever here (and which I like) is that you have a to-do list you can visit at any time that tells you what your next steps are (without telling you how to accomplish them) and gives hints of what else lies in the game (with obfuscated 'Bonus' achievements).
It also includes a text-entry puzzle, which seems to be case-dependent (since an answer I tried with lowercase turned out to be the right answer when written in uppercase). The game does provide progressive hints, though.
I think the concepts in this game are interesting and worth trying out in a larger Twine game.
A limerick-styled short horror game, November 20, 2019Another Smith limerick game
But this isn't more of the same.
Instead of a jolly
heist or other folly
You're seeking to kill or to maim.
Who then is your target, your foe?
A vampire's the one who must go.
Or 'wampire' I mean
(since that's what my screen
displays as the name of the foe.)
But to my surprise there's a twist!
I had guessed the genre, and missed.
It's truly perturbing
This game is disturbing
So keep it right off your kids' list.
If you liked the Heist game, here's more
That also deserves a good score.
The writing's well done
I found it quite fun
So I'll give this short game a 4.
(Edit: improved with suggestions from A. Schultz).
A story about a terrifying small town, November 19, 2019This game has you travelling to live in a small village where electronics are banned, church is every night and the rules must be enforced.
This is a common theme in horror (like Midsommar), and this pursues a lot of those tropes.
I found the story interesting and exciting. The formatting threw me off, since the paragraphs sort of ran together. All in all, though, it was a fun short horror experience.
An excellent optimization-based treasure hunt with good humor, November 19, 2019I beta tested this game, and I love it.
You play as a contestant on a reality show that apparently involves finding antiques while wearing a chicken suit (?).
You run around a mansion gathering items while a timer ticks down each turn. Some items are easy to find, while others require a great deal of ingenuity.
Knowledge is the key in this game, player knowledge and not character knowledge. You can learn secret codes that help you succeed. There are secret bonuses. On top of all of this, all of the items have an 'optimal placement location' that gives you even more money.
This game has more narrative than most shameless treasure hunts, and a lot of funny lines, but the focus here is on getting the best prize. Your host comments on your score each time, and you are able to replay as much as you want in-game, with it being interpreted as re-takes of the show.
Love it, think it's great, and I think people will be playing this one for years. I play IF for many reasons: love of stories, love of characters. This game satisfies my itch of 'take/drop/N/E/S/W', which is the same reason I love the original IF game Adventure.
This game takes about 30 minutes to finish the first time but hours to get a good score.
A challenging Twine game about dystopia and intrigue, November 19, 2019I beta tested this game.
Visually, this game is nice and polished, and the text is free from typos and bugs.
You play as a man blinded by the government and sent to work. While at work, you encounter a cast of characters entangled in a web of intrigue, and must make your own decisions and what to investigate and who to help. There are 6 different endings, some of which can happen unexpectedly, which makes this game pretty difficult (especially with no undo feature I saw.)
The first chapter's text is incredibly dense, with a lot of big words and long sentences. Once other characters are thrown into the mix, the pace picks up, and the dialogue especially is fresh and well-written.
I would love to see a dialogue-only game by this author (like the very popular games Birdland and Hana Feels). As for this game, I was interested enough to play to several different endings, and felt satisfaction at reaching a good one.
A 'cheesy', compact puzzler, November 19, 2019I beta tested this game.
In this game, you are bullied by cheese. In a bizarre twist, you find yourself in a sort of pocket-dimension blocked by an enormous, rude wheel of Gruyere cheese.
There are eight corridors leading from the cheese, each heading to a different area containing useful items.
Some of the puzzles can be pretty tricky in this game, and some of the concepts can be very difficult to puzzle out (like what exactly is the nature of the (Spoiler - click to show)'hole' you find). But it's compact nature means that there are only so many things you can try before finding the solution. I found this game to be pretty amusing!
If you want to fly higher you gotta train harder!, November 19, 2019I beta tested this game, and was delighted to do so.
This is a big game, DiBianca's largest (except perhaps for The Wand). I played it for well over 2 hours (maybe 4 or 5) while beta testing, although I was trying to be exceptionally thorough.
Basically, the game is full of little minigames which give you better and better rewards as you understand them better and as they synergize. Your airship captain gives you goals to hit and you do them. There's an economy that grows in scope over time, and a lot of little lovely surprises.
There are puzzles here, but not in the traditional sense. It's technically possible to win just by doing the simplest of tasks over and over and over. The real joy here is in optimization, similar to Sugarlawn from this year's comp.
Strongly recommended, and lots of fun!
A loving tribute to/light parody of Andy Phillips in a single room, November 19, 2019Andy Phillips is a figure in the IF community known for occasionally releasing massive IF games that generally feature science fiction of some sort, large maps with a few puzzles available at a time, and deadly women.
In this game, you're a super-fan of Andy Phillips who has been locked in by his roommates. You're wearing a jumpsuit from an Andy Phillips game and you have tons of memorabilia around the rooms, all of which is directly based off of the games.
There are a few start puzzles and then one main one, getting out of the room. I found the starter puzzles not too hard, but the main puzzle requires few leaps of intuition. Given the constrained size of the game, however, it's possible to suss out the solution after time, and there is a great help system.
Pure puzzle with a moving interface. Programming local movement, November 19, 2019I beta-tested this game, but only got to the first part/tutorial.
Now that I've seen the rest, I'm really amazed. I love it!
I don't know if I can recommend it to the general IF populace. In this game, you have a very restricted programming language that moves a block one tile at a time based on conditions that only detect the block near it. This is very similar to my PhD research in almost convex groups and subdivision rules (which were also determined locally by rules), so I have a soft spot for this kind of thing anyway.
The framing story is very light. There might be a big reveal at the end for all I know, but everything else is just sort of fluff to introduce the puzzles. The puzzles are quite hard, and require a great deal of trial and error and a little bit of praying for success or cursing at failure.
A daring experiment and a taxing challenge, November 19, 2019I beta-tested this game.
Åkesson is one of the most successful creators of new parser languages in the last few years. His new A-machine and Dialog language have proven to be powerful and smooth, and its default messages are, perhaps, more appropriate than Inform's default messages.
This game is a great departure from usual parser fare, and a bold choice for IFComp. You are a conductor, and you must follow a real-life score (from the Nutcracker Suite) and cue everyone at the right time. The real score is contained in the game, as well.
This is like no other game I've seen before, and playing it is extremely taxing. I felt like I was burning calories as I played this game. Even slight errors can cause havoc in the orchestra. And if you play perfectly, a problem arises that is outside the scope of the score, providing a 'lousy last point' puzzle.
Is this well-done? Yes. Is it innovative? Definitely. Is it a great display of the Dialog language's capabilities? Absolutely. But is it fun? For me, playing felt frustrating, but winning was truly enjoyable. So if you're going to play it, try to schedule time to finish it!
A compact teen horror game with difficult puzzles , November 19, 2019I beta-tested this game.
This game is is a horror story that effectively borrows elements of both games and pop-culture from the 80s. This is a monster-focused horror game set with two kids driving the boy's car to prom, with the date wearing the boy's ring. It brings to mind the music video for Thriller or parts of Back to the Future.
Gameplay-wise, this has elements from older games as well. There are numerous timers on the game (including one that killed me off at 70 points as I was playing the competition version), a maze, and a complex machinery.
I like this game, both as a tester and as a player. It can get frustrating at times, though. I recommend playing past the first scene and seeing if you like the overall feel of the game or not.
Short horror parser games connected with a backstory, November 19, 2019Like the original Balderstone (which you don't have to play to understand this), you are at a gathering of horror writers who tell 'stories' which are minigames. The order of the stories is randomised.
The games are coded well, and the tone varies a lot, sometimes dramatic, sometimes silly, sometimes frightening, all sort of tongue in cheek. Many of them have twists, whether geographical or as a meta-narrative etc.
I came, I saw, I had fun, the stories aren't really related, so why don't you just go try it out and see for yourself?
A very descriptive speed-IF game with a timer and pretty gross ending, November 19, 2019My reaction to this game was "Wow!" followed by frustrated noises followed by "Ewwww".
This is a speed-IF, so programming and grammar bugs are here, but I was so impressed with the vivid writing and setting as the game began. A mysterious ragman comes into your house and gives you 5 heartbeats (or game moves) to give him what he wants.
But it doesn't tell you what he wants. I spent a long time guessing many different things, and I was frustrated.
The solution was, frankly, gross. Not that I think (Spoiler - click to show)breastfeeding is gross, but the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)the monster would desire it. It's written fairly similar to rape, in the sense that a man is demanding use of a woman's organs.
A short speed-IF twine game with a surprising amount of worldbuilding, November 18, 2019This game is very small, smaller than almost all the Twine games in IFComp. Made in 4 hours for the speed competition known as Ectocomp, it seems the author spent most of the time working on polished writing and world building.
I think it was very successful. I found myself repeatedly surprised as I read, each time realizing how the surprise connected with proceeding material. The author does an excellent job of choosing what to reveal and what to imply. I'd give more details, but it's better to just play it yourself!
There's some violence and brief strong profanity.
A charming short creating tale with a difficult puzzle in it, November 16, 2019This Portuguese game is a nice, compact Twine game about creating something when you are an omnipresent, solipistic being. There are a lot of options, and the consequences of them can be unexpectedly amusing and spot-on.
Many options lead to a sort of puzzle, which gives you more and more hints. I had difficulty with this, especially due to the language barrier.
Overall, the writing and the interactivity was very satisfying.
A bloody and violent short Twine game, November 14, 2019In this game, you are a maniac who shoots all of their enemies with a shotgun at a party.
Half of the game is devoted to saying why you hate people, and the other half is devoted to gruesomely describing the blood and guts that come out when you shoot them.
Their are numerous typos and errors. Given its poor taste, I cannot recommend this game. Even if it's somehow a parody, a non-American's perception of Americans, I think it could have been done less offensively.
A unique way of telling a horror story, November 14, 2019I think this story (and the generally similar piece The Curious Incident at Blackrock Township) shows Bitter Karella's range. Most Karella games are light-hearted dark humor Quest games with characters that are exaggerated, sometimes even caricatures.
This Twine game goes to the opposite end: it uses stately language, academic and poetic, and is built around mimesis. The game is framed as a translation of a German poem, with academic footnotes attached. (Spoiler - click to show)I was unable to find any of the references in real life (i.e. outside of the game). But it was so convincing that I felt I had to find something on some of them. The 'translated folk poetry' bit was really convincing, too. Overall, it gave me a better idea of Karella's range.
The academic process of hunting through footnotes is close to lawnmowering, but I found that it really helped the main idea of the game ((Spoiler - click to show)presenting the narrative as real).
As for the content of the poem itself, I found it really well-done. It reminded me of Gawain and the Green Knight or Der Freischutz.
A Halloween first game based on a song. , November 13, 2019This parser game is surprisingly well-done for an author's first game. It's basically an implementation of a world based on the song "When He Died" by Neil Cicierega. You are a forensic photographer, and the gameplay is actually very similar to Hanon Ondricek's underrated game Transparent, where you take photos of supernatural events in a mansion.
Here is my ratings scale, one star per category:
Polish: This is the star I'm not giving. There are some issues, like repeating the description of the staircase in the first room, and it could overall use some more beta testing to find synonyms and things to implement. Overall, though, the implementation of a camera is impressive, and the game handles several complex commands and interactions in a smooth manner.
Descriptiveness: This is lovely. Many of the good ideas are taken directly from the song, but I've learned from experience that turning good material into a good game is not trivial. Nice background for the PC.
Interactivity: I turned to the hints once, but otherwise I was pleased with my agency in this game and felt like my actions mattered.
Emotional Impact: Again, the best parts come from the song, but they hit home for me. Had a lot of fun here.
Would I play again?: I'd be interested in revisiting this in the future.
If this is the author's first game, I can only imagine what a longer, heavily-beta tested IFComp game might be like. Very good!
A short Twine depiciting a near-future Brexit scenario, November 12, 2019Katie Benson has a specific genre of games she makes that work pretty well. They are Twine games with some light styling and multiple endings, with a branch-and-bottleneck structure.
Structurally, they're all very similar, but Benson has done a lot of exploration of controversial topics, innovating in the subject matter portrayed rather than in the mechanics.
This game is a sequel, and has the player working in a food kitchen in a version of Britain where the British Jobs Act has given subsidies to companies hiring British citizens (I think).
I found two different endings. There was one encounter that occurred twice in the game with identical language (Spoiler - click to show)(talking to the cop), but it was otherwise a smooth experience.
A short Lovecraftian Halloween tale, November 12, 2019I've rated this game on my 5 point scale:
Polish: The red color on the choices is a nice effect, but typos and grammar problems drag this point down.
Descriptiveness: Very good! Lots of vivid images here.
Interactivity: The available choices felt pretty satisfying, especially for such a short game!
Emotional Impact: The shortness and over-the-top-ness limited the emotional impact for me.
Would I play again?: I tried all the options, and I think I've seen everything I need to here.
Edit: Overall, I would say that all of the problems could be fixed by having more time. As a Speed-IF, this is good!
A bilingual javascript game with some inventory management and conversation, November 11, 2019This one was a hard one to score. One of its main features is language. It's bilingual, and part of a project that produces multilingual games, which is something I support.
This means that many of its language errors come from incomplete translation, which means I'm more inclined to go easy on them. The most egregious error I saw was an entire passage in Spanish included in the English version (I'm sorry, I don't remember which passage it was!) There are other errors as well.
The system is interesting. Functionally, it's very similar to Ink: text continually scrolls downward, instead of replacing like Twine, and you either click a 'more' button or select from a menu of choices.
However, it's not actually Ink, I think, and seems to be a custom system that needs some work. Ink and Twine have me used to lovely little transitions between text (not slow fade-ins, but quick scrolling animations and so on). This game just adjoins the new text quickly.
Similarly, punctuation (like ---) are used for line breaks instead of nice horizontal lines. These are all things that can be added to over time.
Storywise, there's an interesting plot about abducted Russian scientists and bizarre experiments. But I was so caught up in the new system and multilingual aspect that I didn't have a chance to immerse myself in it as much as I'd like.
An enjoyable rhyming-based game, November 10, 2019Andrew Schultz makes games by taking a wordplay idea and finding as many examples of it as possible, then building a game around that list.
Sometimes, it feels a little forced. Some times, it feels great. This is one of those great times, at least for me.
I'm not coming in looking for a cohesive narrative. I'm coming in to have pure puzzling fun that hurts your brain.
I would rank this game up around with Shuffling Around, one of my favorites, but a little below Threediopolis, my absolute favorite.
A space horror tale with great elements that don't blend well, November 10, 2019I've played this game 4 or 5 times now, trying to find if I've missed something important (and if I have I'll update this review!)
You are in space, having a family dinner on Halloween through a videocall. You can guide the conversation as your family clashes with each other over things like religion and politics.
Then something happens, and the game takes a more linear turn, then ends.
The twist involves several elements, and I just don't see how they all connect together. I'm a fan of leaving the most frightening parts of horror as mere suggestions, but we have so many things here: (Spoiler - click to show)a time loop, suggestions of being an android, government conspiracy, mind control taken from Bioshock. Each part is great, and the writing is good, but how does it all tie together? The simplest explanation is that (Spoiler - click to show)you are an android and your 'family' has always been fake, and your programming gets reset. But then why change the clocks? Isn't accurate timekeeping important in space? And why have the elaborate video call setup at all?
A short Ectocomp game about a heart warming cooking blog, November 10, 2019This Twine game has an interesting accretive feature: you build a blog post paragraph by paragraph by making different selections (such as for the name, etc.).
It's all fairly mild stuff, but the fact this game has content warnings should let you know it can't last forever.
Presentation is nice and smooth. Good for a quick bite.
A typical MTW game with cool settings, October 24, 2019MTW tends to make games that have similar strengths and similar weaknesses.
Pros:
-Large casts of interesting characters that talk to you and follow you around
-Big maps and inventories
-Compelling plot points and settings
Cons:
-Only one path is implemented
-Difficult to predict correct paths
-Typos and bugs
This game is no exception. A mysterious mongoose/cat and a mysterious woman come into your life, and you investigate a weird house with links to the past.
I used the walkthrough because, from experience, it's difficult to play a MTW game without one.
Edit: For some more specific feedback on this game:
(Spoiler - click to show)Consider the following exchange when meeting the first human NPC:
>talk to woman
That's not a verb I recognise.
>ask woman about woman
sleeping young woman doesn't have anything useful to say about that.
This is a game filled with NPCs. It takes only 5 minutes to put in a response to TALK TO WOMAN that suggests using ASK/TELL instead. The capitalization and/or article usage for "sleeping young woman" is harder but is doable.
The default responses for many simple verbs like JUMP, PUSH, and EAT have all been left in.
Error messages make up the bulk of text you see when playing a parser game, and they need a lot of work here.
The "Hard Puzzle" anti-game aesthetic adapted to IFComp, October 19, 2019The Hard Puzzle games have always been odd-balls. They tend to be extremely fussy sandboxes with mechanics you can use over and over and whose solutions require enormous leaps of intuition, endless experimentation with absolutely everything, or just dumb luck.
This game honors that legacy by having many, many sandbox commands and requiring some outrageous leaps of intuition. I had solved some of the previous Hard Puzzles by decompiling them, and this game has some good-natured nods to people who 'cheat' at games like that.
This differs from the other Hard Puzzles, though, in that it can be solved piece by piece, instead of an all-at-once lightning bolt thought like the former ones.
I won by cheating in three different ways (including (Spoiler - click to show)'decompiling', the intfiction forums, and decompiling).
A polished and massive recreation of Hogwarts in Inform., October 18, 2019This game lovingly recreates Hogwarts, with dozens or possibly hundreds of rooms, down to sub-corridors.
In this huge world, everything Hogwarts has in the holidays is implemented: Hagrid's hut, the owlery, Dumbledore's office, all of the classrooms, the dungeon, Filch's office, Hogsmeade, etc.
In this vast and sometimes overwhelming maze (for which lavishly illustrated maps are available), there is a mystery afoot. After a longish introduction where you explore and look for your wand, you discover a missing student and a professor with a cloud over his head.
This works, but its exceptionally long, and this makes the usual adventuring process diluted. The lack of regular gameplay can be ameliorated by the wonder of exploring a Potter world, but this will vary a lot from player to player.
I played for 2 hours and decompiled to read the ending. It seems exciting in parts, but the great spread-out-ness and the difficulty in finding clues made me bounce off emotionally.
Obscurity and fairy tales, October 18, 2019This game is obscure in many senses of the word. First, it is very hard to run, intended only to run on a linux system. I was able to play it following helpful instructions at http://intfiction.org/t/reviews-for-beta-tested-games/43016/7.
Second, it's obscure because the writing is deliberately vague. Everything is allusions, none of which (maybe one?) is about Alice in Wonderland. Most of the allusions seem to be to Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella.
Third, the way forward is obscure. It is difficult to discover how movement works, difficult to find out how a room is finished, and difficult to go on to the next room. Some basics of movement: (Spoiler - click to show)Typing EXITS shows you the exits. You can move with N, E, S, and W as abbreviations. I took to the source code first and walkthrough later. The source code encourages you to look at it.
I encountered a bad ending that made me get stuck. It was when I (Spoiler - click to show)became a tree. I beat it by typing, not (Spoiler - click to show)run, which was the highlighted term, but (Spoiler - click to show)running away.
Occasionally I used the source to type the right word to move on if I got completely stuck.
One note: all of the major keywords (that give you special results) are (Spoiler - click to show)HTML color codes.
The fiddliness of interaction put me off a bit, and the game either has a few bugs or only has bugs because I played it on the wrong system. Otherwise I was impressed with the design and descriptiveness and would be interested in playing again.
Vast space game, with resources, combat, and many goals, October 13, 2019I would have been happy to pay for this game. I intend to play through this game many times in the future.
This is a menu-based Adrift game (I strongly recommend downloadable play). Basically, you are in space, and you visit worlds. At each world, you can do exactly one thing before you leave.
However, you may randomly visit the same place again in the future. So if you missed out on something, or started something you couldn't finish, you get another chance.
The game has many stats, almost 20, but it becomes more natural over time. The game is right when it says it's better to have a lot of 1's than a few 3's or 4's.
You can pick abilities, talents (which increase abilities and give you special powers or the ability to unlock a new kind of story), and two backgrounds. The backgrounds drive the game, and decide what your win conditions are. For instance, my character had the goal of collecting 30 stories (from the storyteller background) and also the goal of exploring 10 or so new planets (which is how I won).
For the regular backgrounds, achieving your objective ends the game with no fanfare. There are 3 'special' backgrounds that apparently give a more coherent story (I didn't choose them in my first playthrough, as they seemed more difficult).
Progress is slow in this game, and there is a lot of grinding. Probably half of the links are systems where you can scan with Astronomy or mine with Mining.
But this game uses a lot of the principles that make things like gambling addictive. It has infrequent, random rewards that are pretty awesome, so it kept me chugging through the grind.
Loved it overall, and plan on playing it more. There are a few small bugs (like an option the says "Explore Explore [Planetname]" and a choice I clicked on that didn't have any follow-up text). But these were very slight. Love it!
The latest in an epic series of Adrift games. Travel to colonial America., October 13, 2019I've seen the Alaric Blackmoon series suggested to me on IFDB for years, but never tried one of the games.
There are six or more in the series, and they involve a valiant warrior in Europe in the times of swords and armor.
In this game, you travel to America to encounter a Native American shaman.
I'd love to talk more about the game, but I encountered a game-destroying bug. A thief comes into town, and you chase him out. When I killed him, he kept appearing anyway, and so I was periodically kicked out of town and could not reach the trading post.
I'd love to update my review if this bug were fixed!
Edit: There is an updated version that fixed that bug, and I had fun exploring the town. I added another star to the review. I got stuck again, because I couldn't find Henrik, but I'll keep trying!
A game about exploring your apartment and waiting to eat, October 11, 2019This game seems like the result of a talented programmer discovering Inform 7 for the first time and exploring what they can make with it. They take their apartment (or just a generic apartment), implement some fun stuff in it, make an NPC, and share it with others.
As a game, it leaves a lot wanting. The text is descriptive, but there are very few hints at what to do next. Because parser games have so many possible actions to type in, it's really important to suggest actions that might work in the text, and implement any verbs or nouns that do appear in the text.
The author has demonstrated her ability to program IF well. I'd love to see another game that incorporates the feedback from this IFComp.
A very randomized glulx game that invites you to peak into its code, October 11, 2019This game consists of a randomized layout of areas, each containing random pieces of decor, some of which benefits you, and randomized deadly encounters.
As a straight-up game, it has flaws. The text has many grammatical errors, the scenery can become repetitive, and it's hard to know how to strategize.
But an an experiment, I like it. Like many people, I've thought of writing a randomized game, but I've never really gotten around to it. This game shows how it could be done, and I think it would be worthwhile to tinker with the code here. I appreciate the author letting us see the code!
An amusing short mythology game with a couple of errors, October 11, 2019This is a fun little game. You're dead, and you essentially have the option to pick your own punishment.
It draws heavily on Greek mythology with a little swerve into mathematical history. I laughed. I cried. It was fun.
The implementation could be a bit better. (Spoiler - click to show)X LIST or X CHECKLIST didn't work, but X CLIPBOARD did (which I know was highlighted, but LIST is a reasonable synonym). When I did X NOTE as Tantalus, it said 'Do you mean the nothingred post-it note or the blue post-it note?'. POUR WATER INTO BASIN didn't work as Danaid (although again, it was a different command than the note suggested).
A short slice-of-life travelling from UK to Germany, October 11, 2019Katie Benson has a specific style to her games. They are always kind of low-key and chill, focused on a specific aspect of life, with a 'main' path and one or more side paths, and a lot of little exploration choices in the middle for flavor.
I'm always happy to see one, and I find it pleasant. This one isn't quite as developed as her others, but still gives the same enjoyable vibe. 'Flygskam' (or shame of flying) refers to the movement that tries to avoid the use of airplanes to avoid pollution and energy wastage.
This game adds a new feature where at times you restart the whole game. It would have been tedious, but the game is short enough that clicking quickly takes care of it.
A very long epic space Twine game with ingenious puzzles and combat , October 11, 2019This game has some of the most devilish puzzles I've seen in quite some time-and it's in Twine! Twine puzzlers have been getting far better in recent years, and this author has already been one to push the envelope with last year's game Lux.
In this game, you play as an intrepid (but tiny) alien, who must fight against 3 opponents. I thought this would just sort of be a combat game, but very little of the game is actual combat. Almost all of the game is exploring and using inventory objects.
Most of the early puzzles can be solved by changing your color. This strategy is used in man interesting ways throughout the game (although it would have been cool to have a call-back to it at the very end!). Later on, you gather a good deal of inventory items, each of which can be used on any scenery object and on each other, for a quadratic set of possibilities similar to Robin Johnson's games.
This game isn't perfect. I thought the opening was really long and non-interactive, but then once I realized the true scope of the game it made sense. Conversation is just lawn-mowering, which can get tedious. Guessing the exactly correct combination can be hard at times.
But I think this will do very well overall.
A dramatic game about your past and a public trial. Great music, October 11, 2019This game attempts to pull off something big: to take an extremely serious topic (pedophilia) and to say something deep about it.
This is hard. People that try to deal with heavy topics often veer into extreme heavyhandedness ("Do you suppress freedom, or give people liberty?") or into almost celebrating the issue at hand (as sometimes happens with self-harm).
This game manages to have strong writing and good pacing. While pedophilia is constantly portrayed as bad (good!) It doesn't make it super clear how we're supposed to feel and act when someone we once knew is accused. The choice here isn't between 'support pedophilia or not', it's between 'seeking punishment vs seeking truth', and 'retreating within oneself vs exposing yourself to harm).
Still, it can get very heavy, but the music is a definite bonus here. There is a credits section, and I tried watching it a few times (it slowly fades in), but I kept missing the music section, so I don't know who did it.
There's a lot of slow text here but it's manageable. Give yourself a good 30-40 minutes to play it, though.
I'm not planning on playing again. The game is good, but it's not enjoyable in the literal sense.
A highly branching funny Twine game with pencil and paper activity, October 10, 2019This game is fantasy game where you, Lord of a torture dungeon that is not serving its original purpose, must go on a quest to unsee terrible things.
There are many branches, and many variables. Instead of the game tracking the variables, you need to write down on a personal Adventure Sheet. It's possible to cheat, but the game does a good job of checking!
This is a funny game. It has some raunchy humor, but more in a 'nudge nudge wink wink' way than anything explicit. I found it enjoyable, if a bit silly and short.
A game showcasing a powerful new IF engine. A magical island, October 10, 2019This game showcase a new parser, which usually makes me skeptical.
But I was very impressed with this IntFicPy game.
Pros of the engine: Smoothness! It looked fabulous, typing in and scrolling up and down felt natural and very nice, saving and loading was easy. Different text colors worked well, timers, changing room descriptions, conversation was implemented. Many of the hard problems were dealt with well.
Cons of the engine: Could do with some better synonym handling, and especially pronouns (IT, SHE, HER, etc.) It felt sometimes like it was just reading a part of my command and not all of it.
Game wise, I love the worldbuilding here. Not such a huge fan of timers, but it seems forgiving until the endgame. I did well in the first part and then hit a big bump sending me straight to the walkthrough for the rest of the game (finding money was the bump, I think, and I could have solved that, but then the commands I saw seemed intimidating).
You play as a newcomer to a dangerous magical island where the Storm kills all who dare approach, except for you. You go about the island seeking to repair your boat and discovering a village with a large religion.
A good showcase for the new engine. Online play would be a huge boon, though.
A text novel in older Latin America with an interesting graphical interface, October 10, 2019I played this game through to a death after about 30 minutes.
You play a man who has recently moved to a small town with wells, town doctors, taverns, etc.
The interface is wild. On the left is an illustrated book, with lines in slow typewriter text appearing as you make choices. You have three categories of 'inventory': thoughts, places, and things. These appear in the lower right.
The upper right contains the contents of your current location.
Actions are done by dragging inventory onto each other.
It's a good mechanic. It's slow, though, as is the typewriter text. And the game is long. And I couldn't find any way to save, and there are insta-deaths.
So I'm going to keep my rating and review as it is and maybe one day revisit this game. A save feature would help a lot!
A tale of brother's love in a mysterious forest, October 10, 2019I rated this game on the following criteria, one star for each:
Descriptiveness: This game is descriptive. You play a man mourning his brothers death. A bizarre occurrence happens, and you must recover your five chess pieces from a forest full of wizards, dwarves, beasts, and magic.
Polish: This game is not polished. Many synonyms are not implemented and the game doesn't recognize reasonable solutions. I even received the extremely rare 'something dramatic has happened' inform library message (not necessarily a bug, but requires a bizarre combination of circumstances).
Emotional impact: The frequent praying was interesting, but praying for points seems kind of hypocritical. The dwarf seemed kind of like a bad caricature of a dumb Scottish person. Big, emotional moments were compressed over too short a time span (a problem I had in my first published game).
Interactivity: So many commands just didn't work. There were multiple devices that 'revealed' things, and it was very frustrating trying to figure out if, when one failed, it was a bug or intentional. I didn't even know I could reenter my cabin until I read a transcript. Very buggy.
Would I play again?: I would not. Parts of this game were charming, but I believe it's too buggy right now.
(Thanks to stian on intfiction for posting a transcript! Extremely helpful!)
A D&D-esque party plunder a tomb, October 9, 2019This game is strongly D&D-inspired (possibly through intermediate inspirations like Diablo or CRPGs).
You're in a party with a mage, a barbarian, a cleric and a thief. You're plundering a tomb, and you have to choose which of three paths to take. Taking them in the right order with the right strategy can grant you success!
The formatting could use work. All the paragraphs run together, and they need more line breaks (I think you can do that in Twine by adding a completely blank line between paragraphs).
The only woman in the party exists only to be an object of affection, which is disappointing.
This game isn't really trying to push any boundaries or grow beyond its sources, but it it has many of the essentials of a good D&D adventure.
A polished Twine game with music and philosophy, October 9, 2019I'm a fan of 'two-world' type games, and this one fits the bill.
This game starts out with you in a sort of Plato's Cave. Soon you find yourself in Faerethia, and then there is a flashback to (Spoiler - click to show)the real world.
While there is an overarching story (one that has been done by several people, even up to Dr. Who and MLP fan fiction), the real thrust of this IFComp entry is its philosophy. It tries to tackle identity and the idea of continuity of self.
Does it work? It might have been hard once to imagine getting any kind of deep discussion out of interactive fiction games, but there's been quite a lot of work in IF that tackles big issues in a professional and educational way (like the excellent game Hana Feels).
Does this game reach that level? I'm not really sure, but it has a lot of polish, and it's not quite so heavy-handed as many other 'deep' games. I felt my playtime was well-spent.
Some interesting ideas but not really sure where it's going., October 9, 2019This game has a retro-looking font. A button on the lower right titled 'messages' tells you that it was found on some old floppy disks.
The idea is that you're supposed to be able to click on certain words related to grammar lessons in the text on the lefthand side of the screen. I opened up the game in twinery to verify this, and there is code there for it, but it didn't work for me on Chrome.
Essentially, there are 6 'grammar lessons' but they are just an excuse for the creator of the software (in-game) to publish chunks of her novel.
Overall, it's interesting, but it's short, and it just kind of peters out. The chrome bug made the interactivity and polish just not there for me.
The one thing I did like was the writing in the actual novel. It was descriptive and interesting.
A lovely-looking game that falls apart logically, October 9, 2019The programmers and artists did a great job on this game. We have a smooth interface with lush, hand-drawn designs.
The story is not really salvageable, though. You play a judge in death-penalty-era England, and you are asked to review death row cases. The following facts are true in this game:
-You can only appeal one case
-The ones you don't appeal are executed
-You have no choice about these rules
-Your wife acts like you are killing people
and...
-The people you free (Spoiler - click to show)are sent back so that all but 1 die.
So much of this doesn't make sense. And the text is very trope-y and short, almost like a distilled ideal version of truth. The entire courtroom transcript is boiled down to two paragraphs, including "The defendant said 'I didn't do it!'".
The tension with your spouse is not reasonable. These people were all going to die. Your job lets you save at most one. If you didn't do your job, they would all die. So you're literally doing the opposite of what she says; you're not killing anyone at all.
I think games focused on political issues can be amazing, but I feel like this one doesn't quite reach the goal its hitting at. Love the interface, though.
A Scottish horror story in the days of horse-drawn carts, October 9, 2019This game satisfies my criteria for 5 stars:
Polish: This game has been well-tested, includes achievements and stats, has a pleasing choice structure.
Descriptive: The mother, Macleod, the protagonist, and especially the horse were vivid characters.
Interactivity: I felt like I had real choices that could affect the game, and saw the effect of some of those choices.
Emotional impact: I was drawn into the story and could identify with the protagonist.
Would I play again?: I would definitely revisit this. Lovely game.
In this game, you play a young girl who suspects that there is something unusual about her neighbors new horse. She's drawn into a web of tales and choices, and has to decide whether to obey her mother or follow her own mind.
A Groundhog's day scenario with a troubled man, October 9, 2019This game is translated from Spanish, and has some definite language issues.
But the underlying story shines through, and I think it's a fine example of the time loop tale.
Your friend Beto has recently passed away, and you don't feel very good. Nervous and fearful, you are convinced you will die.
The story ends up taking some loops, and doesn't last too long, but I found it to be effective and enjoyed some of the symbolism. It painted a strong picture of the protagonist.
The final link is broken, but it's just supposed to reload the index.html file.
A not-quite-there game about a magical girl on an island, October 9, 2019This Twine game places you in the position of a young witch-girl that gets marooned on an island with an interesting cast of characters.
The beginning of this young fantasy game is pretty promising, but the conflicts begin and end fairly quickly. I found the ending abrupt. In my playthrough, I (Spoiler - click to show)openly defied a powerful wizard with a tiger pet and just found a boat, and the game was over.
I found a passage that was completely blank ((Spoiler - click to show)offering to let Corbin live with you).
I think all of the issues could be addressed by increasing the game length and a little bit more beta testing.
A participatory space western comedy, October 9, 2019Robb Sherwin is legendary for a certain kind of game, one with many creative NPCs, imaginative and creative language, and blood, sex, and profanity.
I love his style, but frequently it gets too much for me. But Enceladus has the wittiness and imagination without as much of the blood, sex and profanity. This IFComp game is like Respectable Robb Sherwin, as if Sherwin's writing were a teenager seeing a cop drive by, doing their best to walk normal and not look like they're high.
So this is a Robb Sherwin game I can genuinely recommend for most audiences. It's not meant for kids, though (there's some gore and it could get pretty scary for them). This is a great chance for more people to discover Sherwin's clever humor (or stupid humor? or both?).
You play as a character on the HMS Plagoo. A werewolf is loose in space, and you soon crash on the moon Enceladus. You have to defeat your enemies while simultaneously taking care mentally and physically of your friends while they do the same for you.
The game is completely linear; the interactivity is "do the next thing we tell you too". There's a few smatterings of puzzle elements, a little bit less than Photopia, for instance, but more than 0.
This style of interactivity made me feel like I was an actor in a play, giving lines at the appropriate part. And since Sherwin's writing has always reminded me of Shakespeare (focusing on witty turns of phrase and a mixture of lowbrow and highbrow), it works well.
(P.S. It may seem hyperbole to compare anyone to Shakespeare, but I'm not saying that quality of writing is exactly equal. I'm just talking about the sense of humor)
A very long pirate-themed parser game that could use some clean-up, October 8, 2019This game is quite large, definitely longer than 2 hours. I got as far as the first walkthrough went.
This game is confused. The simplest problem is language: the author has asked for help in the description from people willing to work on the English.
But even with perfect English, the plot would be bizarre. You're getting wristbands for doing pirate activities, and one of them involves (Spoiler - click to show)Using a durian fruit to bait a hook to catch a man in a manatee suit made of a giant pile of meat that another man sews for you, and somehow this gives you the 'barbecue' badge.
Conversation was simple due to the nice extensions used, but actions were difficult to guess.
The plot, writing and action issues made me not feel emotionally invested in this game.
A James Bond tribute as a text adventure, October 8, 2019This game puts you in the role of a secret agent who is similar to James Bond. The player drives a Jaguar, encounters beautiful women, uses spy gadgets, and deals with corrupt individuals.
The implementation and polish isn't all the way there. There are several typos in the game, which becomes sort of a joke when the main character mentions 'incrementing evidence' and an NPC corrects them. It's clear the author has an exact sequence of events they want the player to do, but it's not clear how the player is meant to achieve them without the walkthrough. The walkthrough itself seems confused with directions at times.
There's some female objectification here, including ASCII art of what I think is a nude woman but possibly may be something else. It seemed typical of James Bond films, but those aren't exactly a good role model.
Overall, I think that a game this size probably could have benefited from beta testers with experience with IFComp games. There were some testers though, and it's clear they made the game better (the car and elevator especially work well). I think it just needed more work. Great parser games can take hundreds of hours of time, or use coding tricks to limit players' actions and look like they took hundreds of hours to make.
A space colony simulator in Ink, October 8, 2019This games is pushing a bit higher than 4 stars, maybe 4.1 or 4.2.
When you put effort into an Ink game, it looks good. This game has nice crisp scrolling and nicely-chosen images from Unsplash. It looks good!
Structure-wise, it seems like it's written by someone with no real IFComp experience, and so it's a sort of new thing not tied down to overused IFComp tropes. This is a good thing; if anything, it reminds me of Ayliff's Seedship game.
You have a growing colony with a lot of stats (resource use, pollution, etc.). The major decision you make is which technologies to import from the earth first. You also have occasional binary decisions to make regarding strategy.
The story is about two people who love each other very much sending letters and images back and forth. There names are of Arab origin and the images seem to be from Africa, so the setting seems to be somewhere in North Africa.
The game has a few problems. I swear I saw a few typos like stray punctuation. The science in the game is grossly oversimplified (a colony of 400 people can create enough incidental pollution to affect the entire planet's climate over a few months) and the 'check stats' link can be overwhelming.
But it was fun, and the story made me think about life. I believe the author achieved the goals he had when making this game.
A troll game (?) portrayed as test prep, October 8, 2019Carter Sande is just trolling us all at this point, I believe.
Last year, his game Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise was a tongue-in-cheek take on edutainment game. He spent a long time in the forums going back and forth on whether his game was actually edutainment or not, and it's still a little hard to tell.
This game has you clicking on a jpg island map to get help in different areas, in addition to taking small mini-tests of three questions at a time.
The tests are a bit hard (and I swear the compound interest one is wrong!). The little story segments between are more story-based and more clearly Interactive Fiction, but they honestly wouldn't be out of place in a real edutainment game.
The only place I found anything odd was (Spoiler - click to show)the very end, where there was no 'end game' link, and I scrolled down and found I 'missed something'. I noticed the replay this time was different, but not significantly so.
I then followed the walkthrough, the game went all (Spoiler - click to show)Zalgo, and the end result convinced me more than ever that Carter is trolling us all. I did reach a final The End after (Spoiler - click to show)destroying the obelisk.
Why 4 stars, not 5? Because, and this is written in my heart:
"Simulated Boredom is Still Boredom"
Otherwise, I had a good time.
A cheerful and big game that needs some fixing up, October 8, 2019Luke Jones has released many games, and has a definite style. His games are whimsical, kind of roguish (with a foul-mouthed pigeon), sprawling, with a big cast of NPCs.
They are also a bit spare. When he started with Quest games, they were above average for Quest games in terms of implementation. Inform games (which this one is) generally have room for smoother programming, and this game could use a litte bit of polish, both in synonyms and in typos (especially the problems with stray punctuation that inform has).
This is a sequel to The Bony King of Nowhere, featuring the same map, just a few years older. I played with the walkthrough, as some puzzles I had great difficulty in guessing.
My favorite part about the game is the frank and friendly NPCs, like Donella or the Wizard of Ounces (Oz). I also liked the tie-in with other games by this author.
A charming little game that takes an idea and runs with out., October 7, 2019This game meets my criteria for five stars:
Polish: I found no bugs, and everything ran smoothly. The game logic was sound.
Descriptiveness: I learned new things. I was intrigued by the game in ways that bled into real life.
Interactivity: This game explores parser space in a way that (Spoiler - click to show)Take, The North-North Passage, and Lime Ergot did. These games take the player-parser interaction and do 'variations on a theme' like composers.
Emotion: I felt a warm glow.
Play again: Sure!
Sobol's been reviewing games for at least 5 years, it's high time he post one of his own. This is a lovely game.
Great programming, terrible idea, October 7, 2019It's a real shame. This game has a sandbox environment, reasonable puzzles with multiple solutions, several endings that require completely different strategies and have distinct results, no bugs or typos that I found. Basically, everything you'd want a comp game to me.
The problem is that it's super offensive. You play a morbidly obese teen that is so fat they can eat anything and smash things with their fists. Your eyes and ears are so full of cholesterol that you have to type 'WUOOO' for echolocation every few turns.
There are other instances of, as the game calls it, 'crass humor and worse'. I didn't like that, not at all.
A pleasant, mid-length witch-based parser game, October 7, 2019'Wizard/Witch's Apprentice' games are very common, from old ones like "The Wizard's Apprentice" and "Berrost's Challenge" to more recent ones like "Charming" and "Oppositely Opal" (one of my favorites!).
This game avoids many of the problems of the genre. It restricts its state space nicely both with regards to books (there are only a few, and only a few topics to look up), locations (only about 7), and ingredients (about 4). Most of these witch/wizard games just open up too quickly.
I found the puzzles very satisfying. My most negative experience was right at the beginning with the crystal ball. (Spoiler - click to show)I couldn't reach the ball, but there were length-enhancing things around (like the duster). It was not intuitive to me that you could climb up).
I felt like the ending could have used a bit more build up or that there could be more details here and there. But that's more of a design preference, and not a bug. This is a solid game that will please parser fans.
A slightly buggy but compelling Twine game about a surreal horror, October 7, 2019This game is currently broken. I don't think it will always be that way, and I'd be happy to change my review if that changes.
You play as a character who experiences a life-changing event that results in the implantation of an alien presence. You shift back and forth between a real world and an alien, and between linear parts and puzzle parts.
There is some strong language. I'm loving the storyline here and would love to see this fixed.
Edit:
The author has made several improvements, although it's not perfect. I completed all three chapters this time, and I really felt a connection with the author. The feeling of impending doom that cannot be escape is truly a relatable feeling after I faced a difficult job search this year.
I love dark, psychological/surreal settings, and this story called to me. Some small things still need tweaking, however.
Rescue the cats!, October 7, 2019This polished but small Ink game has you trying to rescue 7 cats from a cruel breeder.
You have three different places you can go to earn 'coals', the currency in the game. Each cat costs 3 coals.
There are many ways to get money, including some dark paths, some scientific. While the game is very short, it has 10 different endings, and is worth replaying a few times.
I may have given an extra star just because I love cats. But what's wrong with that?
A FMV game tribute to an old FMV game, October 7, 2019This game is essentially a home-made remake of the obscure old CD game Bad Milk.
In both games, there is no text, only videos or audio. You pass out after consuming something bad and must go through puzzles.
The interactivity baffled me here, with spinning icons and bizarre link options.
I don't decide what's interactive fiction and what's not, and I think this is fine to have in IFComp. But I really don't know how to play and find the whole thing pretty opaque.
Majora's Mask fan fiction with timed Twine events and friendship, October 7, 2019This is one of two clear fan-fiction games this comp (the other being one set at Hogwarts).
This game is based on the Zelda game Majora's Mask. You and your buds are NPCs in that game, and since the moon is going to kill everyone, you sit on a hill drinking beer, shouting at the moon and waiting for the world to end.
It has some good animations, and some interesting text effects (such as giving you a five minutes time limit). It has some strong profanity. I found it descriptive and enjoyable.
A great story with no interactivity and some typos, October 7, 2019This is a mid-length story, kind of between a creepypasta and fable in tone, presented as a completely linear story with a single link on each Twine page.
It has a few typos: wading instead of fading, for instance.
So the interactivity, polish, and replay value are low here.
But I liked the descriptions. Not everyone will like this story, but I have a very specific niche that I like, which is games/stories where you are transported to a dark shadow world and must conquer it with the power of light. (Eidolon, Kingdom Hearts, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Twilight Princess).
This seems like it's drawn from some game design, though. It mentions stuff like 'a ladder 30' above you', 'a 10' monster', 'a 10' globe of light'. The character (in this completely static story) collects globes of light to upgrade their weapon.
So, it's interesting, and weird, but I enjoyed the story.
A powerful game about destruction and catharsis, October 7, 2019There are some things that definitely need trigger warnings, and the warning for this game is self-harm.
(Spoiler - click to show)This game uses bare styling in Twine, but it's text layout, pacing and link structure are very polished. The writing is descriptive, with some profanity appropriate to the situation you're in. I felt strong emotions during this, first feelings that drew me in and helped me identify with the character, and then feelings of horror as I chose the 'bad' choices later involving self-harm. I didn't know it would be that bad, which perhaps is how the protagonist feels.
A powerful game.
A sweet little tale re-doing Rip van Winkle, October 7, 2019This game is fairly straightforward design-wise and writing-wise. You are a kid that witnesses a modern-day Rip van Winkle fall asleep.
Instead of focusing on the dramatic event, the game talks about the repercussions over the years, the effect it has on the community.
It's a little too short to become involved with the characters, but I found the whole idea charming and a good reminder of the effects we can have on each other.
A tribe simulation game with a recursive nature, October 7, 2019One star may seem harsh for a game, but here are my five criteria:
Polish: This game has visible error messages every few screens. This is probably all the same error, but it could have been caught. Links to images are everywhere, but are deleted because of copyright. If the author is reading this, try Pexels! Plenty of free images in their public domain section.
Descriptiveness: Everything in this game is bare-bones, functional writing.
Emotion: I didn't really feel a connection to the chieftain or the tribe
Interactivity: The game is very slow in its accretion of resources, and bugs made my choices not work
Play again: Without more bug testing, I wouldn't play it again.
A cute and wicked RPGmaker game about a bad witch, with multiple endings, October 7, 2019Is this Healy's first full-length game? I know Healy best for the many years of starting IFComp prediction threads, so it's fun to see them in action.
This game is in stark contrast to Turandot, the last IFComp game I played. That game was very self-aware, while this game just oozes sincerity. Turandot overturned tropes and cliches, while this game leans on them somewhat.
This game uses RPG maker, so it's very graphic heavy, but that doesn't take away the 'interactive fiction' aspect for me. RPG maker is fairly generic, so the grpahics melt into the background and let the choices and text take front stage.
Basically, you're trying to be bad. So you do bad things. If you get enough bad things, hopefully you can impress your boss. There is one strong profanity in the game (fitting for a bad, bad witch). There are nice little knowledge puzzles.
And there are choices. This game is short (which is the biggest reason for 3 stars out of 5, I don't think it explored its themes enough), but even in that short time, you have true agency. You can have two walkthroughs to two different endings that share almost no text between the two of them and which represent diametrically opposed choices. And that's pretty rare in a text game!
I like this kind of game. Papillon made a game like this decades ago, but it was buggier. If only RPG maker had been there back then! Hopefully, Healy will continue to write. I look forward to more!
An erotic self-aware retelling of Turandot, October 6, 2019Reviews serve many purposes. Helping authors feel noticed; providing feedback for future games; monologuing; and helping players decide what to play and not.
In the interest of the latter, this game is overtly sexual in a crass way. I abandoned it once, and only persevered when told that the large middle portion contains very little of that nature.
Aside from that, Gijsbers has used all of his excellent storytelling powers in crafting this game.
It takes Puccini's Turandot, a story that is very problematic in and of itself. I'm in the camp that believes that Puccini had built up something he couldn't finish: there was no reasonable way to finish the story or the music that could mesh well with what went before. There's no realistic resolution whatsoever.
This game takes that on head-first. The player traverses death and destruction in pursuit of the princess, but there's a sort of in-game fourth-wall-breaking (third-wall breaking?) where everyone comments on the ridiculousness of it. It's all just a joke.
But is it? (Spoiler - click to show)The player's obsession is never really explained. And the neat wrapping up of 'none of the people' actually died ignores the friend. The murder of the guard is glossed over. These huge plot holes are explained away by the overall self-critical nature of the game.
I've noticed that every writing community has it's own views on what is 'great'. I made a chart once displaying where each community lies on the scale of 'earnestness' vs and 'originality' vs 'canon' in their judging. Creepypasta and Battle for Wesnoth both have extreme earnestness in their writing, while IFComp tends to value self-awareness. This game is far in the self-awareness area, almost a parody of self-awareness.
The choice structure is essentially all fake choices. There may be some actual state tracked, but I don't think it necessarily improves the game if that's true. For instance, I chose to (Spoiler - click to show)let the crocodile kill me and the game explained it away, again, in a very self-aware manner.
This game achieves everything it set out to do. I would say it was one of my favorites except that the feelings of shame I get reading erotic works doesn't go well with the pure enjoyment I have from text games. I believe it will do very well in the competition, possibly the top three, unless other voters have concerns about the content as well.
All in all, Victor Gijsbers started out as a good author, and its clear he's only improving with time. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next!
A day-to-day life simulator with a mystery involving 4 sex robots, October 6, 2019So, a few things about this game. First, it's by an author whose work I love, Hanon Ondricek. On the author hand, it's an erotic hand. On another other hand, it has a 'tame setting'.
But this is perhaps the least tame 'tame' setting I've seen. The author is just bursting at the chance for you to sample some of his erotic writings.
Case in point: the whole point of the game is to interview four sex robots and ask them a series of 7 questions to help determine the cause of a murder. But the robots get bored, and you have to do other things to get them to respond. Eventually the only options, even in the clean mode, are sexual. The pictures correspond to the hardcore version, no matter what you pick. Your character still has erotic encounters with bots at the factory.
Well, in any case, this sort of thing in a game comes along with a feeling of shame, which is not what I'm looking for in a game.
Okay, that out of the way, this has some interesting things going on with it. Like Howling Dogs, it has a day/night cycle in a grey cube in a futuristic setting. There's really a sandbox feeling, as you can choose to go to work or not, spend money on things you like, configure your room with different virtual reality setting, sleep in the mimddle of the day, etc.
It can all get overwhelming. I reached a first ending on accident, and my next one implied I had missed a huge portion of the game ((Spoiler - click to show)involving accessing robot memory in-game). I'd replay, if not for the issues mentioned above.
The game is very polished. It is descriptive...perhaps too descriptive, lol. It certainly filled me with emotions, not all pleasant. And the interactivity, once I worked it out, was really intriguing. But I don't plan on playing again!
Zombie dolls, October 6, 2019You play as a doll who was once brought to life by a child's magic, but awakes now when the child is long gone.
You explore a dark two-story house filled with death, decay, and dark magic.
I loved the cast of characters, and found many of the puzzles satisfying. I think I had more fun with this game than I did with anything else in the comp so far.
Quest is just not as powerful as Inform or Tads or Dialog, though. Quest's worst feature is synonym handling. Synonyms apparently must be typed in for each verb combination.
For instance, if something is called ADJECTIVE NOUN, then one puzzle might be solvable by typing VERB1 NOUN, but another puzzle might only except VERB2 ADJECTIVE NOUN. And due to Quest's weaker engine, it won't tell you you're close or detect if you've almost typed the right thing.
Bitter Karella usually does much better than other Quest authors in this regard, but some slipped through this time. For instance, (Spoiler - click to show)TAKE CLAWS or GET CLAWS produced no text, incorrect text, or just baffling text at different points in the game.
Overall though, I love this game. Fun!
An illustrated, short game dealing with the moral choices in Hansel and Gretel, October 6, 2019This is an interesting game. It has custom art and animations in the Godot engine. You play as three characters (well, four characters, but two are at the same time) as you go through the story.
It is very short, with just a few screens and one choice per screen.
It's a philosophical game. In the beginning (which I now realize presaged the end), you are asked to abandon the characters as soon as the game is over (hence the name).
I realize now as I write this that (in regards to that ending) (Spoiler - click to show)I was surprised and annoyed that the game just stops in the middle. I wanted to know more. But isn't that the whole point? That I had promised to not care?
So it is clever, but it left me feeling frustrated. Also, I feel like it could do better in its choices; for a few options, none of them were things I'd like to do.
A mother/daughter relationship told through paintings and pain, October 4, 2019I'll admit, I'm a big Astrid Dalmady fan. From her earliest games like You Are Standing at a Crossroads, I've found her writing comforting and cathartic.
So this game, I ate it up. It's not big on traditional interactivity. You just explore everything, then move on to the next step (on the surface, at least. In truth, the game tracks state and has many endings, but it doesn't appear like it).
What I like about it is the story. The label I'd like to apply is 'magical realism', although that's a subject I'm not an expert in, so I might be using it wrong. A day to day story with fantastic elements brought in that are treated matter-of-factly, for the most part.
What happens is you are the night guard for your mother's paintings, and (Spoiler - click to show)they begin to come to life. You must gather items for a ritual to summon back a lost painting.
You have options. Some choices cause you pain, and others cause you sadness. There are many endings.
Overall, I found it almost like a cleansing for the mind. The deep discussion of the mother-daughter relationship helped me think about my own relationships, and the ritualistic structure was like a form of meditation.
A surreal dream game with dream logic, October 4, 2019This is a lengthy game that has you surviving a fall in a dream, and wandering around the dream landscape.
I love the whimsical setting here, and its very imaginative, especially the whole cloth situation in the market.
The game uses dream logic, though, and I soon turned to the walkthrough and became baffled by the suggested actions. Errors litter the game as well, such as the game saying you have a smock when you don't get it later.
This is a game that needs more polish. Having experienced beta testers run through it over a few months would have helped a lot.
A short and earnest real-life tale in parser format, October 4, 2019Okay, this game is not a comp-killer. It's short, the puzzles are very easy, the plot is linear.
But it's just brimming with honesty and earnestness. This is a real-life tale of friendship and tribute. The protagonist doesn't sound like me; grabbing a 24% THC stash in Colorado and downing draft beers with buds isn't me. But that's okay; the thing I like about this game is that it's a window into another life, a window into a period of bonding and experience. The author has put his real self on the page (or at least made it look like that!) and it's so rare to find something like that.
And the simple game design makes for less bugs. There are some rough spots, but it wasn't too hard to get out of.
Here's to friendship!
A mid-length light and carefree parser game under the ocean, October 4, 2019This game is pleasant, and has a simple map and friendly, talking animals.
You are exploring an island and its surrounding reef, looking for treasure. Along the way, you solve some riddles and help out some new friends.
It's all very pleasant, and it boasts numerous testers, but I feel like the design has some issues. Some puzzles (like Morse code) work great.
But others have trouble. One that comes to mind is the shovel. When we use it, we're asked where we want to use it. It turns out the answer has the form DIG PREPOSITION NOUN. This is a really big space to get the answer right in. Do you dig NEXT TO THE SEA? IN FRONT OF THE TRUNK? When you open up the parser to three-word puzzles, it makes things more difficult.
This happened later for me with the flat stone. You need to use one thing with another thing to affect a third thing. There are just so many ways of typing it, and I had to turn to the walkthrough.
There were a few other things that were similarly open-ended (like the riddle), and so I kind of bounced off that portion of the game and didn't become invested.
Overall, I found this fun, with wonderful imagery.
Immerse yourself in a world of poetry users, and maybe find a special one, October 4, 2019In this game, you play as a new user on a poetry forum. You select from 3 usernames of varying respectability (and they all get commented on). You can then join 4 or so different chat workshops.
Each one has different characters, all reminding me of real-life forum members: the rude ones, the funny ones, the cute ones.
I got the Kanojo ending, which I enjoyed. The game's not too long, but it's replayable and its length suits its purpose.
I didn't feel strongly emotionally invested, but it's polished, descriptive, has good interactivity and I would (and did) play it more than once.
A time travel game about the grateful dead, October 4, 2019Jesse Stavros Doorway is a mid length game about a collection of people with the ability to travel through space and time. There is a good chunk of backstory available in-game.
The game is large, with complex implementation, but it needs more beta testing; there are capitalization errors and "printed name" inform issues.
The setting is interesting, with a bunch of hippies time traveling to a grateful dead concert. The writing is descriptive.
I played with a walkthrough, as many actions were hard to come up with on my own.
A funny game about giant slugs that ends too soon for me, October 4, 2019This is a game that I like, but which I feel could have been quite a bit longer.
It's got fun illustrations, an enjoyable premise (giant slugs attack everything), and the beginnings of inventory- and location-based puzzles.
But then it's over so quickly. It's 10,000 words, and you don't see most of those because it branches a lot.
In a way, it's kind of like Dungeon Detective 1 last year. I liked that game, too, but it was also too short, and the author made a bigger sequel (Dungeon Detective 2) this year that was much longer, and I loved it.
If anything, I just want more of this. Would love to play more games by this author.
Graduate school and scouting: a series of memories and choices, October 4, 2019Hmmm.... this game hit home in several areas. You play as a young man entering graduate school to satisfy his father's wishes. You reflect on your past life scouting as you deal with the drudgery of graduate school.
It wasn't my parents who pushed me, but I did graduate school and also had been a scout. Both parts rang true: boys discussing the forbidden parts of life in tents on trips, graduate school largely consisting of a series of failures aggregating very slowly into a dissertation.
The problem is, and this comes up in so many games: can a simulation of a boring event be fun? And my answer is no. Sure, Farmville and Universal Paperclips simulated boring things, and yet were popular. But they added a social aspect and/or increasing complexity. Just showing the drudgery of graduate school is accurate, but it's just not fun to me.
In fact, the overall structure of the game is pretty dull. Flashbacks are linear, with scattered 'expand' links that sometimes give extra text in-line and sometimes link to another page.
So why do I give it 4 stars? Well, it was just all so relatable. The prose didn't jump out and bite me, but it wormed its way inside of me. The narrator feels like a real person, even though this is a work of fiction. There's just a kind of raw honesty to it all that appeals to my sense of self and my own history.
A cyberpunk mystery about robots, religion and identity, October 4, 2019Writing a mystery IF game is hard, but rewarding. The hardest thing to handle is the deductive process: will the PC find clues before solving the case, or can the player can deduce the answer on their own? Does the player need to link clues themselves, or do they automatically process them?
This is a good game, but I'm not quite sure it nails that deductive process. In this Twine game, you play as a young woman in a sci-fi future renting out an old detective's office for the night. Your father has died, your sister is missing, and you have to search for her.
You have numerous locations you can go to. You have an NPC companion who can examine things for you. You have an inventory where any item can be used with any background link, giving quadratic complexity. You also can deduce things with your companion, linking concepts with, again, quadratic complexity. Dying alters the game subtly.
All in all, it makes for a rich game. But the state space is so large that it's difficult to know where to proceed next. Do you need to deduce in the middle of the game? Is dying essential? Do items need to be examined by your companion, used on NPCs, or ignored? I found myself frequently turning to the walkthrough.
Storywise, it uses some classic sci-fi tropes (techno-cult, do robots have feelings, etc.), but it executes it well. I felt comfortable with this game. The author says 'hire me' at the end, and I would feel comfortable hiring them for a writing project.
A beautifully illustrated and orchestrated game with only one choice-or is it?, October 3, 2019I think I would give this 4.5 stars, but I am rounding up.
Provodnik Games made their debut last year with Railways of Love, a sci-fi game set in a future Russia where you were locked into one path which later opened.
This game is somewhat similar. It is set in the same future (both feature 'spikeheads', robot transmitters). Both games are illustrated, the former in 8-bit pixel art, and this one in gorgeous, smoothly animated black and white art.
The writing is good, with some English hiccups here and there. A son in a lonely outpost needs to enter the real world by choosing a job. There are two job choices, and the choice gets made over and over.
Near the end, you finally break free, but it's tricky to find. The final screen, interestingly enough, shows a breakdown of what final choices people made. Only 15% of people made my choice, which was a partially hidden ending, but apparently there's an even better ending that 1% of people found.
I'm not afraid of choice-deficient games (I loved last year's very linear Polish the Glass), but I feel a bit odd giving this 5 stars when it's more of a computerized book. However, the constrained interactivity does serve a purpose, and reflects the constrained options of the protagonist. On the other hand, this kind of constraint-as-story as been done many times before. On the other hand, just because something isn't new doesn't mean it's bad. So I go back and forth between 4 stars and 5, which is why I've given it a score of 4.5. I'd love to see more from Provodnik!
Truck-based government, October 3, 2019Okay, this is a great game in many ways. Pixel art is on point, characters are compelling, the atmosphere at Dan's shady truck dealership is just perfect, and the storyline comes to a great point.
But I found the day by day gameplay a little less compelling. My choice of which job to pick up didn't seem to matter too much, and neither did my driving strategy. It's possible they mattered, but I didn't see it in in-game, unlike my choice of 'side hustle', which strongly affected the game.
So, I liked it, but found parts a bit tedious. This is a trucking simulator where you make money doing increasingly shady jobs, while individuals begin approaching you for help. Your choices of who to help affect the politics not only locally but eventually globally.
A fantasy/horror game with deep worldbuilding and impressive UI, October 3, 2019This author has become well known for Twine UI work. with many people interested in learning how to make games look the way, for instance, Devotionalia did.
This game has that same rich UI. Buttons instead of hyperlinks, character portraits, rich backdrops, multiple save files in a button in a collapsible menu.
Story-wise, this is heavy stuff, epic fantasy mixed with horror. You are a lone human burying their mother, living on an island filled with huge, sentient insects. You have been offered a controversial position on the island in the religious hierarchy, and life is complicated.
Most choices are about your attitude and response to others (agreeing, disagreeing, deflecting). Others have agency affecting the story. The real replayability factor is in the characters, not all of which you can talk to in one go through.
It's polished, descriptive, interactive, creepiness-inducing, and I would replay, so I'm giving it 5 stars!
A fun little treasure hunt in the Amazon with some parser issues and colonialism, October 3, 2019This game is a remake of a 1985 Danish game (which explains the two authors).
The game warns you that it comes with randomization, hunger timers, etc. and has a really clever idea: allowing you to turn all of those off. I tried playing with them on at first, and it was actually fun, since the map wasn't too confusing (especially with the automap. And Adrift online makes playing a lot better!). The music and images worked well with the text.
Some parts of the interactivity just seem too farfetched to guess on your own, though. I knew I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)find the key in the jaguar, and I knew that (Spoiler - click to show)I had to eat in the game, but I never thought the two would be combined to solve a puzzle. And some tools seem like they could have many uses (such as the (Spoiler - click to show)dynamite). But a lot of this stems from older game design where it was expected the player would only have a few games available and play each of them off and on for multiple days or weeks.
More concerning is the inherent colonialism in the game. I ran into this when adapting Sherlock Holmes in to a game; I left in negative references to gypsies, and the feedback I received taught me a lot more about the negative experiences gypsies have had over the years (including in the Holocaust!) This game does something similar, where the natives are portrayed as more or less dumb and associated with alcohol, and there are no moral qualms about entering sacred spaces and stealing artifacts to take back to Europe. This wasn't exactly unusual in 1985 (just look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from the year before!), but sticks out now, to me, especially since I've also adapted older works with colonialist views. I don't really have any advice, these are just my thoughts.
A micro-game about an important moment in life, October 3, 2019This game reminds me of one I've looked for for years. In 2015, when I started playing IF, I played a parser game where you've just had a fight with your husband, and you eventually find (Spoiler - click to show)a used pregancy test in the trash. It was very short, and it comes to my mind often.
This game is a choice game, but has a similar theme. With only a few links in the game, it manages to be pretty tricky at times to advance the story. The styling has been modified somewhat, most notably by some timed text which is pretty appropriately used here.
It's hard to get emotionally involved in such a small game, though, and there is a tug of war between the puzzly link interaction and the heartfelt story. I feel like the interactivity doesn't pair well with the drama.
In any case, as a person I can identify with this moment and the feelings involved, and it brought back vivid real-life memories. I wish them the best!
A small nugget of a puzzle game, October 2, 2019This author has been writing for almost two decades now. His games are compact, with small settings allowing for experimentation.
This game is no exception. We have a very constrained situation at first, which opens up into a somewhat larger area. We're investigating our uncle's abandoned gas station which we have now inherited.
It took me a while to get the gist of the game. I missed the big twist because I tried (Spoiler - click to show)look under newspapers instead of (Spoiler - click to show)look under cardboard, but a peek at the walkthrough sent me on my way.
The writing is brief, reminiscent of Adventure and other mainframe games. The programming is mostly polished, my favorite feature being that the game remembers your past solutions to transversal puzzles and repeats them for you after you've done it once, like Hadean lands.
There's nothing bad here, I just wish it was more exciting and longer.
A cyclical, surreal twine game with many bad endings and one good, October 2, 2019"Stop me if you've heard this one before," the game says. Well, I have heard this one before. The game replies, "Oh, you have heard that one? Well, okay. Well, I guess you'll just have to trust me on this one. After all, what's the worse that could happen?"
Well, the worst that can happen is that I can have a bit of fun doodling around with this cyclical game before finding the 'good ending'.
The game is very aware of its reliance on tropes. The 'you are in a room, escape and weird branchy stuff happen' is an old one, perhaps best expressed in J.J. Guest's enormous, decades-in-the-making Escape From the Crazy Place. This game is much smaller, possibly created in response to a school assignment (a credit thanks a professor).
None of it is bad, but it doesn't push the boundaries at all. All of the links work correctly, but the styling of the text is standard. There is some timed text, done better than most. The branching interactivity works well with the small, cyclical nature.
I'm a fan of soothing, small, cyclical surreal games (like Astrid Dalmady's early work). If you are too, I recommend this.
A rollicking pirate adventure game in Johnon's signature parser hybrid style, October 2, 2019Robin Johnson is one of the best IF authors of the last few years, putting out games like Detectiveland and Zeppelin Adventure. These games, and Pirateship, use a parser-hybrid engine based off of Johnson's Versificator parser (used in games like the Xylophoniad).
This game doesn't reach the heights that Detectiveland did (which had 4 separate cases to work on), but it's a solid entry that will please fans of his previous games, and of puzzles in general.
You play as a pirate on an island that has a surprising number of inhabitants. There is a lot of conversation, and several complex mechanics (including a diving apparatus and a kind of pirate prosthetics lab). I used a walkthrough for a few of the trickier puzzles.
This game is polished, descriptive, has good interactivity, and I would definitely replay. It didn't draw me in emotionally, as I didn't really feel any kind of connection to the NPCs, or find an overarching story like Zeppelin Adventure. But this isn't a game looking to be deep; it's looking to entertain, and its succeeding. I debated on whether to give a 4 or a 5, but the primary purpose of my ratings on IFDB is to indicate the quality of a game compared to all other IF, and so I think a 5 is appropriate here. Compared to Johnson's other games alone, I would give this a 4.
A long, ghostly mystery parser game with some cleanup issues, October 2, 2019I give stars based on five criteria: being polished, being descriptive, emotional impact, interactivity, and if I would play again.
Polish: This game is severely lacking in this area. There are numerous typos (such as 'wet' for 'west' in one room), synonyms aren't implemented, disambiguation needs work (like trying to look at the books in the library while holding the textbooks).
Descriptiveness: This certainly isn't a lushly described game, but some of the images were vivid, especially the doll room. The author did a great job of ambiance, in my opinion.
Emotional impact: I felt the eeriness of the house a bit, and the sadness of the story, but I think both needed more work.
Interactivity: The differences in functionality between trowel, pliers, and mallet were hard for me to grasp. Alternate solutions often didn't work (for instance, why don't (Spoiler - click to show)the shears work for cutting after you weaken the vines?).
Playing again: This game doesn't draw me back in for replay.
So that's a 2/5. I think that all of my concerns could have been resolved by having several playtesters, including ones experienced in playtesting games. I'd love to see a more polished game by this author, and would volunteer for playtesting it!
Big city mystery with a gnoll detective in a fantasy setting, October 2, 2019What can I say? I loved Dungeon Detective 1, and this is like the bigger, stronger cousin of that game. It's a clue-gathering mystery, D&D-esque setting, sweet interface, a day-night cycle, clever dialogue. This hits up all of my niche interests in addition to just being a well-polished game.
It's not without its faults. As my gnoll explored the city, making money and investigating, I ran into some hiccups on my end. Money took a bit to figure out. Some leads were difficult to pursue. It was occasionally hard to know what to do. But are these faults, or essential parts of the game experience? I got a satisfactory, though not perfect, ending.
I love it, overall. Because mystery and D&D are niche interest for me, I cannot guarantee others will enjoy it as much as I did.
An amusing over-the-top noir story about solving a mystery, October 2, 2019This game emulates the Clickhole type of games, which I haven't played very much, but they are generally very over the top, the kind of writing you'd see in Mad Magazine twenty years ago.
You are a hard-bitten detective trying to solve the mystery of the mayor's death. You have three suspects to investigate to discover the murder.
This game and the clickhole games borrow more from CYOA books than from the overall Twine genre. This means a moderate amount of instant deaths, encouragement to back up an option, and one right path hidden among many others. It's not my favorite organizational style, but at least it does it well.
The writing is funny. It's very wink-wink fourth-wall-breaking stuff, so I found it amusing but difficult to become invested in.
An exploration of the Milgram experiments as a Twine game, October 2, 2019This game has two parts: a simple introduction and more complicated sci-fi portion.
Both parts are related to the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments, where participants were asked to administer what they thought were increasingly strong electrical shocks to strangers.
This game is moralizing strongly, which isn't bad in and of itself. It offers some nuance: what if we misunderstand the situation? What if we don't really have free will?
But it's slight, overall, and not strong enough, in my mind, to bear up the heavy moral implications it communicates. I think this would be more appropriate as a longer story where we could identify more with the characters.
I would definitely play another game by this author!
A short conversation augmented by expressive eyes, October 2, 2019The concept of this game is clever. You're having a conversation with a friend, and every emotion of the NPC is expressed by a photo of eyes. It's the same person, same pose, but with anger, happiness, sadness, etc. in the eyes.
It's very effective, kind of how emojis help express emotion in texts.
The one drawback in the interactivity and emotion of it is that it all seems a bit shallow. The story is toothless, a frivolous problem with hints at relationship issues. This same technique with a deeper story (not necessarily longer) would be splendid. As it is, it's presented in a very polished and well-done manner.
A sci-fi game about VR that guides you in thinking about political issues, October 2, 2019This is a conversational game, a difficult genre to do well. I was pleased at how this game handled the difficulties.
The game puts you in the role of a 'dependency evaulator' who must decide if people are unhealthily addicted to VR or not.
Each of the three people you discuss has strong opinions on political issues that are important to us and exacerbated in their future. Climate change, privatization of police and military, and war have made their mark on this world.
You are not required to feel any particular way yourself. If you hear someone go off on an opinion you don't think is justified, you can put their file in the 'bad' bin. The game doesn't judge you. It doesn't comment.
I liked it. Parser needed some touching up, especially dealing with names and their possessives (for instance, "Brian" wouldn't be a synonym of "Brian's file").
Conversation is usually hard because its either too linear or the state space grows too quickly. This game restricts the state space by telling you what to start with and that all new topics will be nouns in previous replies. Wonderful! Similar to Galatea in that respect.
A clever and witty crime game based entirely on limericks, October 2, 2019This game is a crime game where you assemble a team to pull off a heist. Absolutely everything is in limerick form, even the choices, which are all first lines of limericks.
I give stars in 5 criteria: polish, interactivity, emotion, descriptiveness, and if I would play again.
This game is both very polished and very descriptive. The limericks are clever, and the game uses color very effectively.
It's funny, I'll admit, but the sheer number of limericks was wearying by the end. I often feel this way with poetry (I've never finished Paradise Lost), so I didn't feel very emotionally invested.
The interactivity was a sort of gauntlet style where you could lose at any point in the story making the wrong choice. It makes for less writing (which makes sense with so many constraints!), but I wasn't really into the overall structure. There are some paths that do branch and recombine, though.
And overall, I would play again, and I would recommend it to people looking for something quirky.
A thoughtful parser game with timed text and a peaceful, symbolic setting, October 2, 2019This game is meant to be contemplated slowly. You wander along a beach, looking at symbolic locations, waiting for the end of day.
The walkthrough is especially entertaining. (It only says (Spoiler - click to show)Don't worry about the puzzles., and I listened). Overall I found it peaceful, if a bit slight.
The timed text, though, was rather aggravating. Other readers may not have the same reaction, but timed text goes against everything I like and find distinctive about parser games, and this game contains sections with timed text that takes over a minute to get out a page's worth of text.
The writing and design is otherwise excellent. The portrayal of a beggar seemed a bit classist at first, but the beggar's home shows that perhaps things are not as they seem at first. A lot to think about here.
A parser mystery with satisfying gameplay but some homebrew hiccups, October 1, 2019Homebrew parser games are notoriously difficult to get right. Most are frankly bad, with poor parsing and tiny games.
Bradford Mansion is one of the better downloadable, executable homebrew parser games I've seen. Sensible floor layout, puzzles tied by common themes, most puzzles relying on simple verbs.
But the parser isn't completely up to the challenge. There are small inconveniences (like L not being recognized as LOOK), but larger ones as well. A few key puzzles require extremely precise commands, with anything just a tiny bit off being unrecognized. This makes the game extremely difficult to solve without the walkthrough.
It has some tricky combinatorics/code puzzles, which are not completely covered in the walkthrough (being part of a hidden track). A plus for the puzzle fiends out there!
Collaborative coding mixed with computer dystopia, October 1, 2019This game is clever. It is a python notebook with code that you can run. You are assigned tasks to do, altering the code and running it.
The code is obfuscated, with a large portion of it hidden in a huge string array. Making the code changes suggested in the text portions reveals 'secrets' in the code. Some secrets are a lot simpler than others.
This game is complex and creative, but I found it a bit confusing near the end. The first 'subversive' instruction was difficult for me to follow (especially 'put it in the parenthesis'. Put what in which parenthesis?)
Overall, I was glad I played and love the innovation happening here.
An artistic Twine game with images and mythological-based story, October 1, 2019This game grew on me over time.
Like Pseudavid's previous work, this game is a highly-polished Twine game that focuses on time, place, and interpersonal relationships.
In The Good People, you play as a person descended from the inhabitants of an ancient village which was covered by a reservoir, and which has now only recently emerged. The exact setting escapes me; it seems like Native Americans in the Southwest due to the reservoir setting, but could also be Irish perhaps (?) or South American.
You've started a relationship with a travel writer who is of a different race from you, and you feel alienated from your past and your people.
This slice-of-life opening is pretty good but a little too 'high art' for me. It takes a sharp turn in the middle, though, that resonated strongly with me.
Uses unusual text placements, graphic images, occasional slow text and text animations.
High school ghost investigation with teen romance, September 22, 2019I had this game mixed up with the short Birdland sequel Open Up, and so I never got around to playing this until after the XYZZY Nominations. Then I had to see what it was all about.
Brendan’s writing is what I wish I could write like. Characters are so vivid, and the text takes startling turns of phrase that you can’t help from laughing at. The characters felt alive to me.
Part of that left me with a bad aftertaste in a way that a lesser artist couldn’t do. The events in the game are the kind of thing I was terrified of growing up. My area had a lot of teen pregnancies and deaths from alcohol and drugs that affected people I knew. The idea of going to parties where all the highschoolers are getting drunk, watching each other have sexual experiences, using drugs, and having young men who won’t listen to ‘no’ (like Jayden) wander around seems like a reminder of personal nightmares.
But I don’t believe that’s what the author intended. Games are a Rohrschach test that brings out whatever the reader is thinking. I wouldn’t have had such a strong reaction to the game if Brendan hadn’t written such strong characters.
The rest of the game is wonderful. The use of emoji is like a comedy version of 10pm, and the overall mystery and romance were well done. I liked the use of red options to distinguish paths that were very different from the others. It made choices feel more significant.
I also found the structure really interesting, with conversations like multi lane highways and exploration segments like city streets.
This game’s craft level is very high, and I’ve found myself thinking of it frequently in the last few days as I’ve been working on my own games.
Effective in any language. Chilling., August 26, 2019This game is the French translation (by Hugo Labrande and Monsieur Bouc) of Shade. I found it very useful to use Emily Short's French IF manual (translated by Eric Forgeot).
The translation is implemented very well, with many synonyms and verbs allowed. Due to my difficulty in completely understanding the French, I appreciated having the to-do list; it made completion much better (I had never used it in English; some of the lines made me chuckle).
A worthwhile play, both for Francophones and for others trying to learn French.
A terse, symbolic dark Speed IF game, August 26, 2019Sam Ashwell's games always seem to be from a parallel universe where IF developed in wildly different directions. They don't 'fit in' with usual IF tropes.
In this game which quotes (and reminds me of) T.S. Eliot, you are pursuing a wounded troll across a desert while being pursued by Yellow Dog.
The feel is sort of like a mix between Stephen Kings's Dark Tower and mythology. You encounter a series of obstacles, characters you deal with through menus (reminding me of De Baron. This game reminds me of a lot of things!)
Pure symbolic obscurism can be pretentious or effective. But I'm a sucker for it, so it definitely is 'effective' here for me.
A speed-IF based on A Christmas Carol, August 25, 2019This game takes place ten years after the original Christmas Carol story. Scrooge is very happy now, and things seem to be going well.
But then a wrench is thrown into things, a murder plot is brewing, and you have to speak with the ghosts again.
The game is descriptive for a speed-IF, but it suffers from the usual speed-IF implementation flaws. I liked the story, though it was on rails. A fun little Christmas snack.
Too many spare moving parts for my like, August 24, 2019This game reminds me of reviews I read for Infocom's Suspended, which suggested that the only people who would play that game were would-be air traffic controllers.
This game has much of the problems of Suspended with few of its benefits. You are in a large monastery (with few items implemented) with many, many monks (each with very little implemented) carrying out independent actions, and you have to solve a murder (which occurs after several days (where time moves constantly and always ends up pulling you to the same room (from whence everyone you might want to talk to leaves immediately after))).
This was modeled on a board game, and I think that it would indeed benefit from the visual aspect a board game would bring. I've tried playing this game on and off for over two years, but can never really get anywhere.
A difficult 4-room parser game set at a cocktail party, August 24, 2019This game took 4th in the Jay is Games Casual Gameplay Competition #7, a competition which produced more good games than just about any other competition I've seen outside of IFComp.
You play as a woman who has been stuck talking to a bore at a cocktail party for two hours. Once he's out of the way, you have an explicit list of 3 things you have to do to escape.
Conversation plays a vital role in this game, making the characters more fun. Puzzle solutions are off the beaten track. Logical in hindsight, but difficult to come up with. It does, however, have an extensive hint system.
A short little 'what could go wrong' game about gardening, August 24, 2019This is a speed IF, so it has a lot of rough edges, but the mid-game is pretty fun.
You are a gardener who just can't handle all of the problems going on. You start out with a nice checklist of things to do, but it soon dissolves into chaos.
A lot more synonyms and actions could be implemented. But that sort of thing is exactly what separates Speed-IF from regular IF, isn't it?
A short drama parser game with sounds and images., August 23, 2019This game has good production values. Background colors, images, sounds, real-time text, etc.
It's a drama. You play a police officer involved in a dramatic incident years in the past. Now a disturbed individual is on the loose and you have to stop them.
The story is very drama-heavy, with flashbacks, dread implications, and so forth.
The effort is here, but some of it could have been redirected in other areas. More synonyms, better hinting. And the emotions are kind of hammered in, something I've had trouble with in my own writing.
Long choice-based Quest game with a Holmes feel, August 22, 2019You are not, in fact, Sherlock Holmes in this game, but you are pretty similar.
In this game, you read several paragraphs of text, then make a deduction based off of it. You have to read carefully, and may require occasional google searches, but most of the choices are deducible through logic. Some, though, just seem like guesswork, which I suppose increases the replay value of the game.
You are investigating the murder of a man after being pulled off of a big bombing investigation.
I played online, and it became slower and slower until it crashed near the end.
Achieves its aim: to be a small game depicting a cat's life, August 22, 2019This game was one of the author's first games, and it is small and simple.
However, it matches my ratings system well. It achieves emotional impact in that it makes you think of being a cat very well. It puts you in the mindset of the cat and all the actions are things my cat does.
It's polished in its smallness, and the interactivity work well, as it doesn't feel like lawnmowering to play and the links are placed well, better than many longer works.
It's also descriptive, and that's 4 of my 5 stars right there.
A variety of mechanics involving possessions, August 21, 2019This game began as an experiment in different Twine mechanics. It is a game in five parts, with backgrounds and sometimes sounds.
Each part deals with your possessions, which are similar through the five parts. The people you play as seem quite different, though, unless your character is interested in both men and women and has numerous relationships, swinging back and forth between pessimism and optimism. It's possible, of course, but unlikely.
I enjoyed the game, but it felt a bit bloodless. All of the characters seemed kind of distant emotionally. But all of the scenarios are ones in which characters themselves are removed emotionally from their immediate surroundings, whether through shock or relief.
Finally, some of the background images made the text hard to read. But there is certainly something appealing about the game.
A goofy German game about Perry Mason in a resort, August 21, 2019This game is in German, and it's not just regular German, it's very joke-y German with many allusions and in-jokes. My German was not up to the task, and I only completed with google translate and the built-in walkthrough.
Still, I could see how funny this game was. It's presented as a TV show with intermittent ads and other such artifices. You start the game in a hot tub or something and have to find your clothes while investigating a murder at the resort. There are some entertaining characters and a few tricky puzzles. The game isn't quite as big as it seems at first, as many potential areas are closed off.
I enjoyed it, but I often enjoy games not in my native language, as it adds another layer to the gameplay.
A creepy, surreal Quest game with music, August 19, 2019This game feels fresh despite being a surreal game with deeper-meaning imagery, an amnesiac protagonist, and a lab/medical setting, all of which are overused tropes.
But this game seems like something new anyway. It uses Quest and only requires the verbs USE, TAKE, LOOK, and directional commands. The parser is extremely fidgety if you try and do anything else. Even if you think you ought to do something else, you should not do something else.
Basically, you are alone in a symbolic hospital with a lot of dolls and blood and spiders, and you try to enter new areas. Near the end, there is an extended sequence of strong profanity. The whole game is pretty gory and/or disturbing.
This is one of those games that breaks all of the rules for 'good games' but gets an effect anyway. Worth trying if you like horror.
A gritty and vulgar but descriptive superhero game with battle system , July 30, 2019This was Sherwin’s second IFComp game. It toned down the sexuality, but there are still quite a few inventive vulgar descriptions throughout the game.
This is an intense story (using a menu based conversational system) about superheroes in love and revenge. There are quite a few superheroes in this game, including some old familiar ones (an ice-guy) and also some innovative ones.
Outside of the vulgarity, the story is intriguing and even touching.
A fun but buggy space cat sci-fi adventure, July 26, 2019This game is big and complex, with 6 chapters (albeit some very short), real-time sequences, and a special helper robot.
But in all of its complicatedness, the game frequently falls short. Too many interacting states go unchecked. I couldn't progress past the challenge to the champion, and others have reported many other bugs (although several have played to completion).
You are the last human, a mouse-like man named Irvine. You have to help the cat-aliens (who have a system that reminds me of Star Trek), and prove yourself to them.
A divided fantasy world where all magic has a price, July 25, 2019Choice of Magics is a wonderful Choicescript game. I’ve probably played through 3-4 times and intend to play even more.
You live in a world where magic is banned after an ancient war. There are five kinds of magic, but each takes its toll. Glamor can charm people, but it rots your body. Negation blows stuff up, but it creates permanent death clouds.
There is a church you can work with or destroy, a neighboring land to explore or conquer, and many romantic options with customizable levels of content. And there’s a stuffed monkey puppet.
Even though it has more content, I didn’t quite like this as much as Choice of Robots, which had an undefinable quality to it. But that’s like saying a Da Vinci painting isn’t as good as the Mona Lisa. This is a solid game and one of the best of Choice of Games’ offerings.
One of the best text adventures of all time, even better in Steam version., July 6, 2019Review for Steam Edition:
Anchorhead is a masterpiece of interactive fiction. In this well-illustrated Lovecraftian game, you have to piece together the history of your husband's family as you move to a new town with a dark history.
This edition fixes a lot of the worst puzzles from the first edition, especially the very difficult mill section. It adds some new puzzles, too, some of which I found quite difficult (such as the dinghy), and others less so (the new opening sequence).
The illustrations are very well done, and go a long way to making this worth the purchase price. I love this game, and I'm glad to see it in such good form. I also appreciated the change in the orderly's magazine, which made me laugh. Some of the older texts in the game contain echoes of Lovecraft's racism, and they seem to be written new for the game, not old texts quoted, so I thought I'd mention that.
Earlier Review:
Anchorhead can completely draw you into its world. The writing and atmosphere are classic Lovecraftian horror, beginning as merely dismal and developing slowly into madness. Early scenes take on far different meanings on a second playthrough.
That said, this is a very hard game. I'm not sure how anyone could solve the (Spoiler - click to show)telescope lens puzzle on their own.
However, the depth of the game and the quality of the writing is such that it is still enjoyable even if you have to resort to hints from time to time. Many of the best moments are also the easiest puzzles.
A short mermaid story with layers of duality, July 2, 2019This game only lasts for about 1000 words, so it's a quick read.
It was made for MerMay, so it makes sense it would be about mermaids. But the title has multiple meanings, and the game itself deals with ambiguity and feeling.
This is a slight snack of a game, but it left a good feeling. It reminded me of my time living in Hawaii, in many ways, although I imagine it more as a cold Atlantic ocean than the Pacific.
Sherwin's earliest IFComp game. Sordid shallow life simulator, June 30, 2019According to my rating system, I'm giving this game 2 stars. Here are my criteria:
-Polish. This game has several holes in implementation, enough to be annoying.
-Descriptive. This is where this game (and all of Sherwin's games) really shines. The game puts as a shallow gravedigger who only thinks about picking up women and digging up graves. You are extremely shallow and the game depicts that well.
-Interactivity. I think the game does well here. I felt like I hide control.
-Emotional impact. I didn't like all of the sex, and it made it harder to enjoy the rest of the game.
-Replay. I don't intend on replaying.
Intentional boredom simulator--football edition, June 27, 2019This game shows the life of a football kicker. Which is super boring. You are on the sidelines for about 120 turns, and you are called on to kick a few times. In the mean time, no one wants to talk to you and you can't do much.
It's supposed to be that way, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable. The game is really well polished, though, which makes sense given its constrained play area.
A frustrating game about frustration, June 27, 2019I usually take a star off of most annoying games precisely because they are annoying. But this is a game about a man where anything at all can set him off.
The game makes UNDO act differently, and tricks people who thought of other solutions to puzzles. Its puzzle solutions become increasingly unfair, although some of the most unfair ones are optional.
Sort of like 9:05 played straight, you wake up before work, worried about getting their on time, and have to go through your daily tasks before work starts.
I found it more frustrating than enjoyable. But isn't that the point?
An early CYOA dealing with a medieval Arabic setting and femininity, June 27, 2019This game contains erotic themes, but you’re told you can avoid anything explicit. I found that to be true, and played to two pleasing endings without encountering anything shocking.
Papillon was a prolific author around this time, producing several excellent games before moving on to visual novels.
This game involves you, an Arabic noblewoman, experiencing violence and oppression in the city. You are required to enter a brothel in the game (although one early ending doesn’t require this), providing most of the opportunities for erotic choices (which, again, you need to choose).
The main drawback I felt was that the game felt like it could have developed more. It would have done better as a Choice of Games novel, but such tools were limited or unavailable at the turn of the millennium.
A will that can change in real-time. Short choice game, June 27, 2019This game features an old man who made a fortune in the Congo. It's set in the near-future, with a variety of corporations mentioned.
It is a short game, with the bulk of interactions taking place near the end of the game. Basically, you can pick which character you are, and raid the shares of the others.
It reacts quite pleasingly. But I noticed that the interactivity was fairly opaque, and the story hard to grasp. Marino's later games feature detailed and exciting stories with clear interactivity, which is a development I'm very happy with!
A detective game with a great story but a few unfortunate bugs, June 26, 2019This game was actually pretty good. You are on a different planet, but in a very grungy-noir city. I didn't think of it at the time, but the aliens take the place of non-white races or transgender individuals or any other minority you want to think of.
A murder has occurred, and soon enough the mysterious artifact known as the Myothian Falcon (a direct nod to the Maltese Falcon) shows up missing as well.
Two things make this game problematic: guessing conversation topics (often impossible feeling!) and a few bugs. I asked out an encryptionist on a date, didn't do so hot, was told not to bother again, but when I talked to her, she acted like she was still on the date.
Beating without restarting or using a walkthrough seemed impossible for me, but otherwise this was a great game.
A small comedy biblical game about a sheep, June 26, 2019In this game, you experience a biblical scenario: one of your sheep has escaped.
The game consists entirely of chasing the sheep, with a couple of puzzles.
The map is small, with 5 or so important rooms and then a sequence of minor rooms. The main puzzle is pretty hard to guess, even if you think of the old-testament related clue.
A very small game with extensive conversation, June 26, 2019This game has two characters in locked room. You have a few items around and you can talk to them. There is one puzzle, with multiple stages.
It’s not a bad concept. A problem that arises is that the number of topics is large, and they are all dumped on you at the same time (well, most of them are). If it was gated at the beginning more, I’d give this another star.
But the whole game is bloodless. What makes it all tie together? Nothing, as far as I can see.
I believe the author went on to make some other, great games.
A Quest game with graphics and sound about meditation, June 26, 2019This game, in Quest, has you navigating a mostly-symmetric area apparently seeking for wisdom.
You have a book depicting the 7 deadly sins, which you can slowly fill out by various actions. In addition, there are many religious figures here, including a monk, a fakir, a buddah, etc.
Each room has an image, and many have sound.
However, the implementation is odd, cumbersome, and often interferes with the player. The pictures vary widely in quality, and the game is frankly frustrating.
I didn't finish it, but I did appreciate the symbolic quest.
Munchies simulator, June 26, 2019This game portrays two stoners with a friendly relationship grabbing food to eat. There are four aisles in the grocery store, and most of the game involves selecting different foods and seeing what comes out.
It's weird, it's short, but it works. Scattered strong profanity.
One in a long line of Zorkian master-apprentice games, June 26, 2019This game is so similar to other games that I kept having deja vu. Games where a master wizard gives you tasks are very old and very common. It reminds me of Berrost's Challenge, Risorgimento Represso, the Erudition Chamber, Junior Arithmancer (althugh the twist makes that one amazing), the Enchanter series, etc.
This game doesn't really bring anything new.
I wouldn't usually give 1 star to this game, however, I found it not very descriptive, with a bit wonky interaction via the puzzles, not emotionally touching, and not a game I'm interested in replaying. These are 4 of the 5 stars in my rating scale.
A graphical windows game about exploring space, June 26, 2019This is a graphical game where you click on text buttons to control a spaceship. You find planets and see if they support life.
I've rated the game on the following 5 criteria:
-Polish. The game relies heavily on a graphical interface, but I feel that interface could be tuned up, especially with faster transitions and back buttons that only go back one step in a menu.
-Descriptiveness. Most of the descriptions are fairly plain.
-Interactivity. The slowness is frustrating, and the game's overall pace drags out.
-Emotional Impact. The pace lessened any impact I would have felt.
-Would I replay? No.
I'd love to see a new game from this author, though.
A simple CYOA with now-gone graphics, June 26, 2019I played the archive.org version of this game, which now lacks the original graphics, which I understand were simple 3D graphics.
All that's left is the choice structure, which is meager. You are in a 3d area, and you can turn left and right and go up stairs. I played another game recently using Unity that had similar mechanics, but I can't find it now. (Maybe from Introcomp 2019?)
The game ends after a few moves. Pretty disappointing.
A dark religious romance game with constrained parser, June 26, 2019This game is completely CYOA. However, to make your choice, you must type it in.
This is obnoxious and wasteful. But, on the other hand, it makes choices more meaningful as you must type them out.
I went through 5 chapters, and reached some white text that faded out after a fairly-explicit romantic scene. My game didn't work after that.
I didn't really connect with this game, and the interactivity left something to be desired.
A game about WWI with complex but flawed mechanics, June 26, 2019Mike Gerwat has made several games, and they all share some features. They tend to be enormous, with instant deaths all over the place and complicated walkthroughs that are often slightly incorrect.
This particular game is set in WWI, in the trenches, with a grim and seemingly accurate portrayal of trench warfare. The game is worth trying out, seeing the horrors of war and the sad extremes that soldiers are pushed to.
A game with complex, hidden depths and impressive programming tricks, June 26, 2019The biggest achievement of this game is an impeccable rope. Emily Short once described the challenges of programming rope:
"This is one of those things that has received so much attention that it almost seems pointless to recount the variety of the challenges associated therewith. First of all, a rope has two ends, so you have to remember the state of each (and disambiguate between the player's references to them, of course.) Then there's marking what the rope can be tied to; the possibility of cutting the rope in the middle, making multiple ropes of new lengths; the problem of using the rope as a fuse, of tying it to something in one room and then carrying the other end, of tying the ends together, etc., etc., etc. Ultimately I think the very trickiest part of all this is the disambiguation problem, ie, figuring out exactly what the player means when he says >TIE ROPE TO X (which end? Do we untie something that's already tied, if both ends are in use?) But it's all pretty grotesque, frankly."
All of this is handled in this game except for fire.
Basically, you wake up for an exam in a simulated world, but everything is strange. You have to enter a robot's body and do some odd IP-address voodoo to fix everything.
This involves finding cables, which you can combine or cut, and which trail from room to room.
There is a secret path (kicked off by (Spoiler - click to show)looking at yourself). Fun game!
I just felt a bit of an emotional barrier between me and the game, which makes sense, as you are a robot.
An in-depth look at entertainment life and multiple relationships, June 26, 2019I avoided this game for a while because I thought it was just a polyamorous sex simulator. But, trying it, I found that sexuality played a very small role in it, and even less if you chose not to.
Instead, it depicts what life would be like in a polyamorous lesbian relationship. I can honestly say that it made me feel like that kind of relationship would be a ton of work and not worth the intense cross-connections.
Secondly, it was very satisfying dealing with the work-related portion of the game. I spent the first half as a workaholic obsessed with my career, and eventually realized that fame as a singer was crushing my life, so I purposely torpedoed my job to find freedom from the old ball and chain.
Polished overall. A lot of pages in linear order, but mixed in with enough choices that it didn't feel overwhelming. I don't plan on playing again, as I'm satisfied with my choices.
A poem combined with a combat simulator, June 26, 2019This is an odd little game, and the lowest-ranking game of IFComp 2015. In its own sphere, it's great and wonderful, but it's just not what most people are looking for.
What it is is epic, obscure and symbolic poetry about trees planted over ancestor's graves coming to life to take revenge on their descendants for blasphemy. There is an intentional emotional distance between the listener and the author.
The battle system is similarly opaque. You can attack. You can pray. What do these do? Is not knowing an essential part of the experience?
It starts with Choice of Games-style choices establishing stats before diving in.
Interesting game. To get it to run in modern python 3, open all the python files and change raw_input to input.
A fun parody of Homestar Runner's parody of IF games, June 26, 2019This game takes Homestar Eunner's 'get ye flask' joke and dials it up to 11. The entire game is in ridiculous fake old-time speak. It would be incredibly annoying, but it provides an amusing secondary game where you mentally translate the phrases you see and realize how stupid those phrases are.
The game is very long. I only played to the halfway point or so, as it didn't seem like there was any overarching storyline. It was amusing to found so many 'ye magic [thing]'. And the series of rooms called the bakery, the cakery, the makery, the snakery, etc. was pretty funny.
One of the best Adrift games I've found.
A fancy windows game about chinese martial arts, June 26, 2019This game has an overly-cluttered windows GUI that is very reminiscent of the time period it is from. The top row is cluttered with a row of icons that whose meaning is opaque and whose use is questionable.
The game has side bars, command prediction, and other such features, but they often end up hindering more than anything else. There is a time feature and changing background colors.
The story itself is interesting, but could be better. I think this game is a good example that reinventing the wheel isn't always the best.
An adaptation of a famous sci-fi story with a lovely soundtrack, June 26, 2019This game is an adaptation of A Martian Odyssey, the short story, and one which I liked quite a bit before starting this game.
This game takes a long time to download (and can't be played online) because it's 50 mb, most of which is a truly lovely space soundtrack. I really liked it, and it's context-sensitive.
The game itself suffers terribly from adaptation-syndrome: content not from the actual story is not as good as the original, and you have to guess the correct action to advance the story.
A magician vs rabbit game with overly ambitious mechanic, June 26, 2019This reminds me of a John Evans game. John Evans used to write games that had these absolutely crazy mechanics, like teleporting anything in the game to you or being able to wish for anything.
This game revolves around the mechanic of comparing, where you find things that are similar and say COMPARE [THING] TO [THING], when the first becomes the second. Or something. Not a single time it appeared in the walkthrough did it make sense to me.
The story is kind of odd, too, a bunch of rabbits on a rampage. But it was overall descriptive and fairly fun.
A poorly implemented vampire hunt, June 26, 2019This game has a vote for it on the 'worst IF ever' poll, but I don't think it's there. It's just problematic. I evaluate games on the following five categories:
Polish: Not here. The game's bugs are numerous.
Descriptiveness: Well, it succeeds pretty well here, to be honest.
Interactivity: Problematic. It's very hard to guess what actions you are supposed to do.
Emotional impact: Dampened by the obnoxious jerk professor and the overly objectified Eva.
A touching love story and tale about wolves, June 26, 2019I played this game last year, maybe two years ago, but couldn't pass the first scene. There are so many finicky steps, and its buggy (6 kinds of pill bottles cause a nightmare).
But, following the walkthrough, you find a touching and compelling story. I quite enjoyed it. Many of the surprises you can guess ahead of time, but there are enough surprises that I'd rather not reveal any of them.
The interactivity is really messed up, and its not super polished, but it's otherwise great.
An unfinished occult Quest game with some issues, June 26, 2019This is a game planned on an epic scale. Only 3 chapters were entered into the competition, and the author clearly promised greatness in those missing six chapters. There was to be an entire other complex (or multiple ones), many rooms, etc.
But even these chapters are unfinished in some ways. Many things are unimplemented. Trying to guess the right verbs can be hard even with the walkthrough.
It's also a bit offputting. Woman are all nude and described like meat. Murder is casual. I'm just not that into it.
Cinematic sci-fi game with interaction problems but great story, June 26, 2019The Xen games in general are well-described, with extensive backstory and compelling characters.
In this sequel, the powers you discovered in part 1 are out of control, and the police (and others) are hot on your trail.
The game includes chase sequences, extensive conversations, cutscenes, etc.
Unfortunately, the author didn't find a good way for people to discover this stuff on their own. It switches between extreme railroading and extreme lack of guidance. But I enjoyed it.
A sandbox time travel game that just need a little more love and better hinting, June 26, 2019This is another game that would be better off with extensive beta testing.
You have access to three time periods, and items in one period affect items in another, even in reverse form (so changing the future affects the past). There are no NPCs. This general effect can make an incredible game (look at Dual Transform by Plotkin), but this game doesn't help the player narrow down the solution space enough. There are so many actions that could be useful, but only a few are recognized.
Also, the game could be a bit more peppy. Many of the locations are the most generic thing possible in their timeframe.
Standard Panks game, got disqualified from IFComp, June 26, 2019This game is just a regular Panks game: a village with a central well, with a two-story tavern and a cross-shaped church with altar in a different direction, forest and monsters outside of town.
It's a commodore 64 game, so you'll need an emulator.
This one was disqualified from IFComp due to being released early.
An older windows game with custom interface and battle system, June 26, 2019This game's main features are a fancy window with directional compass, list of actions to take, items, etc.
I found it difficult to run. I got it part way there, but not quite. From the guides, though, it's clear to see that the game mostly revolves around attacking enemies to gain experience with a few puzzles thrown in.
Games like this show the great wisdom in creating virtual machines with backwards compatibility, like Inform or TADS. Inform games have remained playable for decades (except for those using graphics and sound), as have TADS games.
A big mishmash of rooms, time travel, cosmic horror and space, June 26, 2019This game is technically finishable, but I don't have a huge desire to finish the game. It's huge, with rooms that frequently are filled with items of uncertain purpose. There are bookcases that are always closed, and when opened are filled with the author's favorite books which he enthusiastically recommends. SPAG errors are everywhere, especially with quoted text.
It's almost like Harmonic Time Bind Ritual Symphony with worse programming. I quit when I went back in time and couldn't come forward in time.
Short and stupid, both on purpose, June 26, 2019Sometimes I find purposely bad games charming, and others have found this one so in the past, but I think it's just dumb. Especially since you have to open a window in the first room to make a later exit work, for no reason at all!
All you do is explore a lab to find and kill Slan Xorax (an alias for Jonathan Berman). Not much else here.
More fun than I thought it would be, June 26, 2019Wumpus is an old game, and Andrew Plotkin had long since done an amazing remake of it by this point (Hunter, In Darkness). But this Adrift game was surprisingly fun.
You wander through a pretty bad maze (although you can find a nice, hand-drawn map), avoid obstacles, and try to kill the wumpus and escape.
I won on the second try after about fifteen minutes or so.
A regular old Panks game with the same old stuff in it, June 26, 2019Paul Panks made one pretty cool game, and then made a ton of little games which are all very similar.
When I started this up, I thought, "I wonder if I'll be in a village with a 2-floor tavern and a church." Lo and behold, I started in a two floor tavern next to a church. Is my first enemy a hellhound? Yep. Then I fought a dragon. That was new. But the game was over after that.
Not much here, but at least it all works together as long as you're familiar with Panks' style (GET, not TAKE, and WIELD weapons and WEAR armor).
A harboiled occult detective story with a CYOA/parser hybrid structure, June 26, 2019This game is very similar in theme to David Whyld's previous IFComp game, as they both involve a tough guy with a beautiful blonde who conspire against the woman's necromantic former partner.
Again, this game focuses for some time on the male gaze towards the woman, although there is no explicit sex or too much gore. It relies pretty heavily on the 'people can get knocked unconscious frequently without any adverse consequences).
The storyline, that of a detective having a client who comes in requesting an investigation of her own murder, works well. I didn't reach a perfect ending, but the third or fourth ending I got was good enough for me.
It's mostly CYOA with occasional parser-focused segments.
A thoroughly depressing grimdark space amnesia homebrew parser game, June 26, 2019This homebrew parser game from 2006 works a little better than others. It has easily readable source, which helps, especially when divining what verbs are allowed. It doesn't do disambiguation well, but everything else is passable.
You wake up in a space station with amnesia, discovering logs and evidence of what has come before.
This is a grimdark game, with mentions of topics like (Spoiler - click to show)frequent contemplation of suicide and enforced rape. It's pessimistic and sad.
A game that aspires greatly but does not reach its goals. Big mishmash, June 26, 2019This is a big game that is (I think) written by a couple of kids and a parent. It's scope far exceeded the team's grasp, and what's left is a bizarre and difficult game that is clearly under-implemented and nonsensical.
Items require non-sequitur interactions, the setting leaps from place to place, and even the format for score increases changes from brackets to asterisks. The walkthrough is filled with moments where the author messed up and tried something else. The only saving grace this game has is the cheerful enthusiasm behind it and the sounds, colors, and images early on.
UNDO simulator disguised as a battle against mages, June 26, 2019This game is like a mix between Kerkerkruip and Varicella without the balanced mechanics of the first or the interleaving puzzles of the latter. You are in what is essentially a battle royale with several other wizards. You have a spellbook. Killing a wizard gives you access to some of their spells. They also fight each other, so you can just wait around for a while then go loot corpses. There are some puzzles, most of which are fairly complex.
Due to the nature of the randomized combat in this game, and the unbalance of it all, it mostly devolves into an UNDO-fest. The hints even suggest this in certain scenarios. It was, though, shorter and more fun than expected. But the interactivity, polish, and replay value just weren't there for me.
A somewhat faulty pirate adventure á la Scott Adams, June 26, 2019Scott Adams wrote minimalistic games to run on small computers. They’re free, and I recommend playing them. They use two word parsers, scanty descriptions, and so on.
This game is not as good as a Scott Adams game. There are less synonyms, somewhat weird implementation, and an overall sense of frustration I didn’t experience when playing Scott’s own games. One of the most popular of all of Scott’s games was his own Pirate Adventure.
Robin Johnson and Arthur Di’Bianca both have a very successful series of games with a Scott Adams sensibility.
A short, polished adventure through a segment of Greek mythology, June 24, 2019I put off playing this game for a couple of years because I thought it was a sexual game. It mentions a few things here and there, but is quite a bit tamer than I expected, with almost all salacious material at the beginning. If Shakespeare is acceptable, this has about the same level, or Don Quijote.
Anyway, this fun adventure puts you in the role of Ariadne (THE Ariadne from mythology), engaged in a wasteful and promiscuous lifestyle, who receives a wake-up call from her aunt Circe (THE Circe). Most of the game is fairly linear, with TALK TO being the main interaction, but its well-oiled and polished. This is a great little game.
An immensely cruel but otherwise great game about overthrowing robots, June 23, 2019This is that rare game that is very cruel on the Zarfian scale but otherwise fair. Expect to restart, undo, or restore this game dozens of times. I gave up around 5 or 6 points and after decompiling, but I know at least a few people succeeded.
You play a japanese girl who wants to destroy robots, so you explore a city to undertake various actions (that must be done in a very precise order) to obtain various items, in order to stop the robots.
I'd love to see someone do a full walkthrough of this!
A steampunk/horror classic that feels slightly too short, June 22, 2019Slouching towards Bedlam is one of the most popular IF games of all time. You play in a steampunk world followed by your faithful clockwork cubical robotic assistant to help you analyze various materials and ideas.
You work in an old and decaying asylum, and you are investigating some recent occurrences.
This game is notable for two innovations; one, it plays with If conventions in amazing ways. Two, it does a wonderful job at writing some odd text (such as the robot's output, restricted to an 8x8 grid).
The game has multiple endings, with room for big moral choices (more than one). It's hard to say what's right and what's wrong in the game.
The main thrust of the story turned out to be fun, but was hard for me to grasp at first. Perhaps because of exposure to cheap sci fi, I thought that (Spoiler - click to show)the Logos was a horde of nanobots. This made understanding the game much harder.
The game feels incomplete, like other great games such as Theatre. Some of the later locations seem a bit sparse, as well. It says a lot about the game that the worst I can call it is too short. Great game.
A theft game set on the Titanic, June 22, 2019This game is set on the Titanic, and borrows a small bit from that show. There's no romance, but you play a thieving character who must hide from the law on the ship, including using an axe on metal and having a special painting.
The game is huge, but it comes with a very helpful map.
The main puzzles are fairly well clued, but there are a host of other puzzles. The fussy mechanic of opening and closing the suitcase, as well as the maze-like map, is fairly frustrating, though.
A long CYOA/parser hybrid about a torrid affair, gritty violence, and mortality, June 22, 2019This game definitely is not written for children. From the opening few paragraphs:
"I've slept with high class dames and drug-snorting whores; professional models (even a couple of top shelf centrefolds); nurses and secretaries; yet none of them, even one, came close to Stephanie Gamble in terms of sheer physical beauty."
to the scattering of heavy profanity, this game is adult-oriented, which isn't really my thing.
But the interactivity and story work well. It's about 75% a CYOA game with numbered selections, kind of like Choice of Games, with an emphasis on conversations and making plans. The rest is limited parser, with most actions being movement, looking, or talking.
The story is about a plot you have to off the old, rich husband of your girlfriend.
A sci-fi action story in Adrift with classic Adrift problems, June 22, 2019This game has you play as an artificial asexual human pursued by a manic dream pixie girl. You fight hand-to-hand, hack computers, and do other James Bond-type stuff.
However, like many Adrift games, this game requires a bizarre sequence of moves (with required commands like "reflect light beam at moon with lid")(not a real command). This is compounded by lengthy cutscenes, leaving the walkthrough with instructions like "Wait (x10)".
Overall, the general story is interesting, but relies heavily on overused tropes. I found it fun to read through with walkthrough though.
Fails at being a horrible game, June 22, 2019In the PTBAD series, which is generally an ill-conceived series of intentionally terrible games, this one manages not to be too terrible. It has generally smoothish implementation, not-too-hard main puzzle, and a poem that has crosses the line from awful to sublime.
Uses Adrift 4.0.
A slightly better sequel to the broken original game, June 22, 2019Santoonie Corp. was an interesting group in the early days of IF, and there are debates about whether the games released under their name are really there's or not. Suffice it to say, the games released under their name are poor quality.
This one is better than the other Amissville's, but still dreadful. There are TADS errors I've never even seen before for trivial actions. There is a fairly expansive map with some interesting scenes, but the scenes are built into the text description, so typing 'look' will repeat large chunks of action.
The story is nonsensical, something about hiding out in the woods and looking for weapons for your friend while being on run from the cops. Half of items are portable, the other half (often identical things to the ones you can carry) are 'too burdensome to carry'.
This is not the worst game I've ever played.
A fun clown/circus game that suffers from walkthrough-itis, June 22, 2019This game from IFComp 2005 was a pleasant surprise. You play as a retired clown trying to find his kids on a circus island.
It's simple and innocent fun, with varied locations and an honestly unique setting. The only other circus game I know well is Ballyhoo, and this is quite different from Ballyhoo.
However, it suffers a bit from 'walkthrough-itis'. It's pretty clear that the author had some awesome actions scenes and clever puzzles in mind, but the game doesn't really clue you into the required actions all that well.
I still enjoyed this game quite a bit.
An ambitious space game that needed more love and care, June 22, 2019This is a game almost all of whose problems could have been fixed with beta testing. The author did much of the work for a great game, but it's that testing and polishing that makes or breaks games.
This game has mislabeled exits, strange computation problems that make it chug to a snail's speed at times, unimplemented scenery items, guess-the-verb problems, and a 'kill people and impress women' play style that was never my thing. I was frustrated with playing, and one of the last things I saw was 'a cloud of liquid gas'.
But the core of the game is extensive worldbuilding and intricate characters. This could have been a great game. The author of this, 14 years later, could likely produce something truly marvelous. But I don't think this is it.
A very precise medical simulator, June 21, 2019This game summarizes itself pretty well with this disambiguation text:
"Which do you mean, lymph nodes generally, the inguinal lymph nodes, the supraclavicular lymph nodes or the cervical lymph nodes?"
This is a game written by two medical students for the 2005 IFComp. They wanted to show exactly what it was like being a medical student, and they succeeded (as far as I know!) The game comes with both images and sound.
It's polished and descriptive, but there's no emotion and it's too confusing to be as interactive as I'd like. I played it quite some time ago, but for some reason I never reviewed it.
Brief, unusual existential horror, June 20, 2019I played the French version of this game before. I like this game, it calls to my exact sort of tastes in games. But it may not call out to everybody. It's like Cannery Vale, which is one of my top 10 games of all time but which didn't win IFComp, or Creak, Creak, a tiny game by Chandler Groover.
In this game, you wake up in the middle of the night to strange sounds in the garden. You can explore your house, but everything seems off.
Great for fans of existential horror. Very short parser game.
A spotty Infocom game with great highlights, June 17, 2019This is an interesting game. With wordplay games, the question is, how can you make a game about wordplay that lasts long? One answer is to follow Emily Short's example and just put tons of content into a game (Counterfeit Monkey).
This game achieves its length through unfairness. Parts of this game (it's basically several mini-games put together) are wonderful: Buy the Farm was particularly good, as was the Shopping Bizarre. Those two would make a wonderful game pulled out on their own, one relying on American English sayings and the other on homonyms.
Some parts of this game don't make any sense. I didn't understand In a Manor of Speaking (which btw is also the name of a great Hulk Handsome game) at all, and looking it up, I still haven't found a good explanation at all. I believe having the Doldrums was a mistake, because it made you think everything else had a gimmick (like Gary Larson's infamous Cow Tools cartoon).
But if the game wasn't unfair, it wouldn't last very long. The only way I've seen fair wordplay games achieve length is through tons of content, like I said. Andrew Schultz does this with exhaustive code-enhanced wordspace searches. Shuffling Around is a good example of this.
I also like the Act your Part session. It was nonsensical, but I was able to get a lot of points just doing dumb stuff.
I played the version released by Zarf who was re-releasing Jason Scott's releasing of previously unreleased Infocom releases.
A short self-referential narrative describing an anomaly, June 13, 2019This game is short but satisfies all of my requirements for 5 stars:
Polish: This game has a custom format with well-designed buttons and overall CSS and layout.
Descriptiveness: There are several characters who are described in exquisite detail (or not, with good reason), and the location and item descriptions were evocative.
Emotional Impact: I could really identify with the researcher and the anomaly. The final description complemented the main narrative in an excellent way.
Interactivity: This game allows quite a few paths, but is self-deprecative. It says: (Spoiler - click to show)This may be a multiple-choice story, but there's no multiple endings. If you pick the wrong options, the story has to pretty much drag you to me so we can have this little chat. You see, fundamentally, this just isn't a good multiple choice story. That's not what it is. It was never supposed to be that. A good multiple choice story has decisions, it has character development, it's got different pathways to get to different goals and most importantly it's got replayability. There just has to be at least one ending where you die. It's a game, and there's a different way to play every time. This is not a game. These are special containment procedures. And these procedures make a very bad game, but they do a very good job of containing me.
Coincidentally, I disagree with the game's self-identification as a bad game and with its overall design philosophy. The material in the spoiler is only one way of doing things.
Replay: I enjoyed this both times I replayed it.
A highly polished game hidden in menus with wild branching, June 13, 2019This is a clever concept. You right click on a picture, and the menus are huge, with enormous branching.
Some do relatively nothing, or are just dumb jokes taking advantage of the menu structure. Others have functionality: turning off the whole system, or allowing editing.
An interesting feature is a text adventure in the 'games' section with nods to Leather Goddesses of Phobos and to Adventure. It tracks state and allows revisiting locations, but it is easy to lose your spot.
Overall, it's funny as an idea, but too tedious to explore fully, and tedious even in medium exploration.
A violent and sexual metaphor-ridden game centered on glam and Kesha, June 13, 2019This is one of Porpentine's games that highlights one fact of her games (especially her early games) more than any other work of hers: intense, destructive femininity. This is explored in other works, especially Cyberqueen and With Those we Love Alive, and, well, all of the other works, but it is the lifeblood of the game.
This game centers on being Kesha, infused with powerful glitter and mascara, driving vehicles named after genitals and destroying hater-men in a techno-cyber-surreal-sephora mashup.
It's more gruesome and sexual than I like, and Porpentine herself seems more toned down now. But the production values are really excellent. Few people, perhaps none, have managed to extract as much presentation value out of Twine's basic features.
A short twine game about a train, amnesia, and identity, June 13, 2019There is a curious sub-genre in interactive fiction about surreal games on a train. There is something about the train as both metaphor and as a constrained, linear, isolated space that makes it ideal as both a narrative setting and a game setting.
Combined, then, these make for a perfect combination when it comes to interactive fiction.
As a standalone game, this one is short and trope-reliant but well-paced and compelling. You wake up with amnesia, opposite an old woman on a train. The game doesn't last long, but choices you make matter.
An interesting short read on a lunch break.
Procedural generation, loss, and relationships, June 13, 2019This game would be a 3 star game if not for the highlighting.
Visually, it's presented beautifully, with background images, multiple textured text boxes, and UI options.
Structurally, as a standard choice game, it leaves a lot to be desired. You have a menu of people and a menu of places, and take turns picking one then the other. For each pairing, you have a binary option or two. There is a lot of text per choice.
But with the highlighting on, you can see the trick of this game: some of the game is procedurally generated. Not in the sense that the game uses predetermined text replacement based on your choices, but in the sense that there is some kind of corpus generating new sentences.
Is this useful for the game? It's cool to see your choices produce new things. But a hand-written sentence would likely be just as good or better, which is the perpetual problem of procedural generation.
Still, the highlighting gave me a sense of involvement, and the overall story was dramatic and touching.
A pro-proletariat space story with some puzzles, June 12, 2019I played this game a year ago but somehow didn't review it.
This Parser Comp game has two facets: first, it's a space game where you wander an abandoned station. Second, unlike most such games, instead of amnesia you have access to many memories, most about unionized labor.
At the time this game was released, and the first time I played it, many people (including me) thought the puzzles were a bit fussy. But on this second playthrough, I found it pretty enjoyable. It does require a kind of relative positioning command that's not typical in parser games due to its complexity, but this is good for puzzle fiends, space buddies, or those concerned for social welfare and the plight of the masses.
A polished fantasy/mythology twine game with extreme branching, June 12, 2019I saw this game a few months ago, and I was pretty impressed. It has a beautiful story to tell.
The format is large pages of text with 2 choices at the bottom. The choices split quickly, so you get very little of the game in each playthrough. However, replay is quick and enjoyable. I've seen 3 endings.
The idea is that 4 siblings are chosen every few decades to become demigods corresponding to the seasons. You can choose summer and winter, love or war, peace or sadness.
I do wish their was less extreme branching, with more of the main story in each playthrough, and that it was easier to make decisions based on a strategy, but this is a stylistic choice.
An expansive and imaginative animal-centered Quest game, June 12, 2019This was the only IFComp 2018 game I had never finished. I finally finished it today. There was no walkthrough at the time of the comp, and the one in there now doesn't work for the last area.
But I finished it today, and that last area wasn't too bad!
The reason I had so much trouble is because Quest has synonym trouble, and the author didn't implement very many synonyms. Quest also has context-sensitive commands, which is great except when it makes commands seem wrong when you're just using them out of order. So for instance, "USE MATCH ON LUMP" gives an error unless you've done everything else completely right.
Other issues are unguessable puzzles, leaps of intuition, etc.
But the characters are fun, and it's all very imaginative. I remember Steph Cherrywell made the switch from Quest to Inform and ended up winning IFComp. I think almost all the issues here are with the Quest engine, and that the author has great ideas that may possibly be expressed in a different format.
A big puzzlefest about a crazy puzzle race, June 12, 2019This game took a lot of work, and will provide great enjoyment for many people.
It's a parser game that is (as far as I can tell) bug-free and has creative puzzles, lasting longer than pretty much all the other parser games in IFComp that aren't buggy.
So why am I only giving it 3 points? The interactivity and polish felt off to me.
The game is fairly generic, especially with the standard responses. X ME, JUMP, SING (even at a concert!), DANCE etc. either give the normal response or aren't implemented at all.
And many interactions seem purposelessly fussy, almost like imitating what they think old games were like. Possessing only one object capable of creating fires, the verb LIGHT asks 'with what'? Saying LIGHT WITH [FIRE THING] doesn't fix it; you need to turn on the fire thing. But TURN ON [FIRE THING] isn't implemented. You need to LIGHT [FIRE THING] then LIGHT [THE THING YOU WANT TO BURN].
Similarly, when there's one puzzle that requires you to listen to a loud ambient thing, just LISTEN isn't good enough, you have to say what to listen to. And so on.
It seems a definite stylistic choice, and one that didn't resonate with me. If you're looking for a bug-free game with a big map, creative puzzles, and extensive gameplay, this is your game.
A great superhero game divided into many small branches, June 9, 2019This game could have been more accessible and/or popular with some design changes. It suffers strongly from “Time Cave” effect. Instead of having an overarching narrative, it’s made of a dozen or more distinct threads with very little in common. It branches wildly.
Each playthrough is, to me, a 3-star game. But the whole story is pretty cool. I discovered stuff on my 4th and 5th playthroughs that changes the whole story (although I am ever an enemy to slow-text in IF games ).
I could see this game having been made slightly more coherent, with some of the best scenes always occurring.
But this could all be down to author’s choice. Did the author want most of the game to be hidden away as a reward for the careful reader? That’s a valid design choice, limiting the number of people who enjoy the game but increasing the joy in those who do. Hanon Ondricek has many games in that style in the past, but he’s now done stuff in many styles.
Anyway, this is a pretty cool superhero story.
A complex, innovative multimedia work about NYC mediaites , June 7, 2019This hypertext work uses Undum and Raconteur to create a relatively rare system for IF (I can’t really think of any parallels to it). The premise of the game is technology allowing you to interact with memories of the past. (Bizarre corporate emotio-tech is a theme in a few Morayati games, like Laid Off at the Synesthesia Factory and Take). The mechanics of the game are selecting from a frequently-refreshed menu of questions followed by curating everyone’s responses (asking for clarification or rejecting the comment).
These mechanics are opaque, and intentionally so. You are meant to get a feel for the game through experimentation. I’m still not sure quite how it works after several playthroughs, but rejecting everything vs rejecting nothing certainly has an impact. Certain characters take on strong personalities once you begin picking them out.
The story is a sort of decadent ironic self-gazing thing, something you could imagine bored aristocrats writing about their hobbies a few weeks before a brutal revolution toppled them. Wealthy New Yorkers (here meaning ‘people who actually have somewhere to live in NYC due to their job) have a party where they trash a historical(ish?) building, are cruel and vapid to each other, and basically act like upper class jerks.
It gives a glimpse into another world. But I vaguely bounced off the interaction and setting, as I always felt like an outsider. Although that may be the whole point.
Essentially a twine version of a vampire table top RPG module, June 1, 2019This game has all the hallmarks of a D&D or Vampire: the Masquerade boxed adventure. A short backstory about why you’re seeking revenge, a quest giver, a maze-like dungeon, NPCs for battling and talking with, a vampire boss, traps, treasure and magical items.
This isn’t typical of most IFComp games, but it’s what I played around with a lot growing up, so I had a nostalgia factor while playing this.
Going back to the same parts over and over again was a bit frustrating, and it can be difficult to strategize. Death and failure are easy, while success is not.
Overall, I see this as a successful game.
A short, intense twine game about a relationship over time, June 1, 2019This game is fairly short, and can be completed in 4-6 clicks. Each page has some ‘asides’ that take you into a few paragraphs from your past, and one ‘real link’ that takes you to the next page. The shortness, combined with the absence of strong choices, are why I’m taking a point off. The styling is spare, but color transitions and positioning of various link types show signs of careful thought and polish.
Otherwise, this is an emotional short story about a school crush and a chance to meet them after many years, one complicated by gender preferences.
It’s hard to go into more detail, because there’s just not that much there.
A slight game with a heavy message about discrimination, May 27, 2019This game is short and mostly linear. Many choices that are presented, in fact all, it seems, either don't actually work (your character can't choose them) or has no effect.
Within that short time and constrained play system, though, the author manages to build up an entire world and vividly describe a wide variety of characters. I felt emotionally invested in the game.
I'm not sure that this game would be better serviced by being longer. It has a short tale to tell with a clearly defined narrative arc.
The general idea of this is bigotry, and features a world where magic blends with the era of British sailing ships and naval domination.
I'm taking off two stars, one for interactivity (I feel like the game could have at least remembered a bit of our earlier choices, like the way we handle the bigoted crewman), and one because it has little replay value. It's been over a year since I played, and I remembered the entire game when I just replayed it, finding nothing new. Perhaps this is actually a good thing, a story so vivid it's seared into your brain? But 3 stars is where I'm leaving it for now.
A self-referential game that is choice-based. Made with Vorple. Urban fantasy., May 27, 2019This game is a response to the 2017 game The Dragon Will Tell Your Future Now, a sort of troll game that promised an ending that never came, despite it's clever writing.
This current game, Re: Dragon, an unauthorized sequel, purports to tell the true story behind the earlier game. Like the first game, it dabbles with a blend of modern-day language and esoteric magical and astrological terms.
It is presented in a novel format using Vorple to create a false e-mail inbox. Other games have used other methods to do this, both before and after Re: Dragon (including Alethicorp and Human Errors). This is a particularly complex version, with several inboxes, timed messages, and mutating formats, as well as some pictures and sounds.
Overall, the one area I found a bit lacking in the game was emotional investment. It was presented with such irony, absurdity, and complex language that I felt more like an outside observer than an earnest participant.
A funny and drama-filled zombie parser game with innovative mechanics, May 27, 2019I beta-tested the French version of this game, and played the English version during IFComp and now.
This is a funny game in a very particular genre: the 'gain powers by eating' genre. Other games in this genre include portions of Spore and the Adrift game Mangiasaur.
Using Vorple, En Garde replaces the parser command line with colored buttons. These buttons are, at first, unlabeled. This represents your mental state. You begin this game as a weak, unintelligent creature, but quickly become more intelligent and powerful, and your options change accordingly.
This game is short and not too complex, puzzle- and story-wise. However, it's value is boosted by its amusing dialog between various species and people., which elevates it from a 4 star game to a 5 star game for me.
A graphical horror investigation game, May 22, 2019I grade on a 5 point scale: polish, descriptiveness, interactivity, emotional impact, and if I would play it again.
This games passes all 5 points, but it just squeaks by on a few.
Polish: The graphics aid immensely in this area. A few things could be worded more graciously, like changing some more standard responses.
Descriptiveness: This is pretty easy to award. The game is lush in every way.
Interactivity: I struggled with verbs from time to time, and some puzzle solutions were obtuse, but some interactivity was so clever I just had to laugh. (a particular amusing example is (Spoiler - click to show)finding the silver key)
Emotional impact: Some of it was silly, but I felt a definite atmosphere throughout the game, and the villa portion was tense at times.
Play again: I see myself revisiting this in the future.
So that's my 5 star rating for you. It's a fairly simple game in structure, with some tricky puzzles. Best for fans of older style games, especially Scott Adams and Magnetic Scrolls.
A story cobbled from great pieces but lacking in cohesion and pacing, May 20, 2019This story is an interesting mix. So many of the concepts it has are great: how do men and women with power like Gods of different elements find a way to defeat someone who is almost impossible to reach in their domain?
Betrayal, love, power, it's all here. A mysterious library, a maze to navigate.
But there are a few key flaws that I believe the author could improve on for the next game. If they fix these kinds of things, I think they could make truly awesome stories.
First, the pacing is off. The things that break up a story are compelling plot twists and choices. The most boring part of the game is first, and it's marked by a single choice in a sea of 'continue' style links. Incredibly momentous events are marked and gone in a moment, but a long march with stats and a maze search take up a large chunk of the game.
Second, cohesion. Are you a tender romantic or a ruthless conqueror? Both. Do you seek the favor of your partner or destroy their world? Both. Is your brother a power-hungry madman or a gentle friend willing to step aside for you? Both.
I feel like these problems could be solved simultaneously by adding significantly more choices. These choices wouldn't have to branch the game; the author has already showed the capability of writing such choices (like flavoring your brother's personality, affecting stats, or navigating). You could even have meaningless choices that have a small paragraph in response but don't affect anything else. Then you could react to crazy stuff and make those moments longer.
Explore a mid-size map over 5 decades. Well-crafted, great puzzles, May 9, 2019First Things First was nominated for an XYZZY award for Best Game, and won Best Puzzles, among others.
In this game that starts out very slowly, you quickly progress to an interesting situation similar to A Mind Forever Voyaging or Lost New York, where you can investigate a mid-size map over 50 years using a time machine. Your actions in certain time periods strongly affect the future in interesting ways.
This is definitely the best long-form time travel I have played, as I felt Lost New York (which explores New York over a century or two) and Time: All Things Come to an End (which explores many epochs in a linear fashion) had relatively unfair puzzles.
IFDB has version 3.0, but the walkthrough is for 1.1, so it didn't work in places. I am a walkthrough junkie, so it was hard for me to beat it, but I was able to guess from the walkthrough what I should try next, and eventually worked my way through it.
The game has good characters, beautiful settings, and a bit of a confused plot, which is natural given the main gameplay mechanic.
For simulation fans, it has an interesting money/bank account/investment system.
Strongly recommended for everyone. (Note: the first area seems incredibly boring, but it gets better and better. I started to like the game as soon as I made it into (Spoiler - click to show)the garage.)
A political game about censorship and dystopia, May 2, 2019I'm giving this 4.5 stars, rounding up to 5 on IFDB.
Ostrich is a multi-day Twine game set in a country similar to modern-day America.
In this story, you play the role of government censor, deciding what does and doesn't pass into the news (and later, branching out into further works).
The interactivity has a nice pattern to it: an ongoing saga in your daily commute, with choices remembered over time; your actual job which is graded and performance mentioned; and your evening rituals, which gain importance as the game progresses.
The first few times I played this game, I had the impression that it was fairly linear, but after multiple replays, I've realized that it has quite a bit of freedom. I felt like it did a good job of balancing hard choices in some bits.
There was something just a bit missing from this, though, that would would have made it a classic. I can't identify what it is.
I recommend this author's other games, as well.
An excellently polished short sci fi game with multiple endings , April 25, 2019This game by Victor Gijsbers contains many of the best elements from his former games, including an examination of player agency and strong NPCs.
You play as the commander of a mech, complete with manual and custom parser messages. Unfortunately, your visual components are damaged, so the on-scene pilot Lemmy has to do the talking for you. But Lemmy's quite the character, making life pretty difficult.
The parser is constrained to those verbs recognized by the mech, and even by the nouns which Lemmy 'tags'.
This game is shorter than I would like, but it's pretty good when my main critique is that I want more of it.
Contains some strong profanity in some paths.
A smooth puzzle game with compelling backstory built with new language, April 21, 2019This is the author's showpiece for a new language, Dialogue, that compiles to the Z-machine format.
Showpieces for new languages are a varied lot. Curses!, the showpiece for Inform, is one of the best games I've ever played: huge, puzzly, with deep connections to literature, religion, mythology and history. Ditch Day Drifter is sparser and smaller, but still pretty fun. Bronze and Floatpoint, showpieces for Inform 7, are both intensely detailed games.
This game takes a different tack. Instead of a massive adventure, it's a compact puzzle game in the snow. You play as a couple out climbing a snowy mountain, and must solve puzzles involving classic adventuring situations/items like darkness, ropes, and large pushable items.
I found the story in this compelling, as well as the puzzles. One of my favorite IFComp 2018 games.
A complex sci-fi choicescript game that ponders the nature of writing, April 21, 2019This is a complex game, which makes sense as it is part of a thesis. Unlike many IFComp games, it's less of a short story and more of a novella that should be played slowly, perhaps overall multiple days. It's not as long as a full-length Choicescript game, but it's still very hefty.
Such longterm playing is facilitated by the excellent save feature, one of many advanced design features. This game has been heavily modified from baseline Choicescript.
The main conceit of the game is that you are asked at several points to evaluate the quality of writing, and the game looks deeply into the relationship between reader and writer. The first few short stories are takes on famous writers, and some of these are just fantastic (I especially enjoyed the riff on Metamorphosis).
It also includes science fiction elements and some post-modernism.
A small series of dream vignettes , April 21, 2019This game is fairly simple, but a pleasant way to pass the time.
You are given warnings about how what you do before bed affects your dreams. Then you fall asleep.
You experience 3 dream vignettes, one with a puzzle, one with little agency, and one with a few moral choices. The order you experience these vignettes in depends on your earlier actions.
This game would be good for an interactive fiction class to analyse, because it has some delayed branching, a variety in choice structures, and is small enough to digest.
However, the game itself isn't strongly polished. I had the impression of grammar mistakes at times, and the visual presentation could be developed more.
An exceptional story that digs into London's past, April 20, 2019This Fallen London exceptional story was well-put together but didn't appeal to me as much as the others.
In this story, you explore the names of the London streets. If you've played Fallen London, you'll know that the names are all different from real London, with jokes and allusions taking place of the actual names.
This story has you become a surveyor and a recruit of a group trying to discover the 'bones of London', the true names and map. And that's pretty much it.
For fans of London itself, map enthusiasts, and Fallen London fanatics, I recommend this game.
I highly recommend Gavin Inglis's other material, and his writing in this game. It was just the concept that didn't appeal as much to me.
One of the best exceptional stories. A band of youths in Fallen London., April 20, 2019Several others had recommended this exceptional story to me. And I found it really was as good as they say.
In this game, you encounter a band of children, just as much heroes as your character is, except in their own sphere.
You take part in their adventures, seeing Fallen London through a child's eyes, and encounter a bittersweet story of growth and loss.
Highly recommended.
A pleasing monthly story involving 'astrology', April 20, 2019This was an excellent addition to the Fallen London mythology. I played it several months ago, but forgot to write the review at the time, so pardon me if there are errors.
I strongly remember the 'astrological signs' in this story. Of course Fallen London is under the ground in a giant cavern, so the existence of stars and astrological signs is a somewhat contentious subject.
The story takes you into a strange world with insects and caverns. Very fun.
A beautiful commercial game about space exploration, April 20, 2019Voyageur is a Unity-based game (I think) with amazing sound and pleasing background visuals.
It's similar to 80 Days in that it's a choice-based travel game revolving around buying items at a low price and selling them at a higher price. This mechanic fuels your ability to dive ever deeper to the center of the universe, meeting different planets that are parts of different factions along the way.
This game makes heavy use of procedural generation, sort of a text version of No Man's Sky.
With both No Man's Sky and Voyageur, I felt that maybe that procedural elements were pushed a bit higher than the scripted parts. Many of the planets eventually began blurring together.
I reached an ending that satisfied me. A mellow game, good to play at leisure.
A gorgeously illustrated Rabbit game with puzzles, April 20, 2019This game is really breaking new ground. Among Twine games, it's remarkable for both using extensive beautiful graphics, animations, etc., but for also being long and puzzle-y.
You play as a rabbit in a warren of other rabbits, but something truly odd is happening. As you explore more, you uncover an entirely new setting.
A few of the puzzles seemed fussy, and I wasn't completely emotionally invested in the story, but this is a Twine game I can strongly recommend to those new to Twine and those experienced in IF.
Complicated puzzle game involving combinatorics, April 20, 2019This game is similar to David Welbourn's classic 69105 keys. You search through piles of keys divided by adjectives, trying to find a unique key. It includes some innovations over the previous game, including multiple game modes, a different kind of randomization, and an anti-game for finding the 'worst' key.
There seems to be a bug with the second half of the game that lets you instantly win, but otherwise this is a nice to game that goes from 'banging your head' to 'oh I see'.
A brief demonstration of an innovative method for changing a story, April 20, 2019Liza Daly has come up with quite a few ways of presenting stories in the past, including complex parser games, the precursor-to-Twine game First Draft of the Revolution (in tandem with Emily Short), and the Windrift engine.
This game builds on that earlier material. It is very short, finishable in 5 minutes (unless I missed something major!).
Basically, there is a sequence of choices in the story, each of which can be revisited at any time. There is a bit of hysteresis, a term Emily Short has used before to describe how doing and undoing choices doesn't just put you back where you started, but has lingering effects.
A partially-random walk in the forest, April 20, 2019This was an interesting game. Perhaps the most interesting part was the author's afterword.
The idea is that you set off to several journeys that are procedurally generated. Along the path, you can control how surreal the messages are by staying on the path or wandering away.
Much of the conversations at the end of each journey were repetitive, which the author states is a bug. It gave an interesting effect, though, almost like a dream, a ghost conversation, or a fading memory.
Great twine mystery in an old house, April 19, 2019I really enjoyed this game in Introcomp, and the finished version is even better.
This isn't a grandiose or intense game. This game is just like an Agatha Christie story, with great attention to psychology and detail.
It manages to have a lot of material you have to plow through without feeling too much like lawnmowering. The author has a lot of context-sensitive programming with inventory-based puzzles, and that's what gives this game a good 'choice feel', if that's even a phrase.
You are at a hectic Christmas Eve dinner and Grandma's ring turns up stolen. It's your job to track down the culprit before the police have to be called.
Overall, this was my favorite Spring Thing game. Well done.
A game designed to explore academic writing concepts in game form, April 19, 2019This game was designed as part of a class in game history. It's one of the most successful games I've seen done as part of a course, since most such games are very timid in their scope. This one is decently-sized.
The author decided to feature game history and critique heavily. Something happens in the game, and then you get a quote relevant to what you just experienced.
I found that an enjoyable premise. It did suffer from implementation issues, which are the bugbear of parser games in general. For instance, there is a telephone which cannot be referred to at at all.
Overall, it's a valuable addition to the niche of 'games about games'.
A pleasing little puzzle game, April 19, 2019I helped beta test this game.
This game is pretty simple. It's a series of locations (28, I think), many of which are connecting rooms like hallways. It has one NPC. The rooms are fairly plainly described. The puzzles are contrived a bit.
But it all works. The puzzles are supposed to be contrived; you are literally exploring a 'demo game' within the game that is unfinished, and you must take advantage of errors in the code to win (like IAG Alpha).
The puzzles are fun, including a modular arithmetic/Chinese remainder theorem type puzzle.
This is a game that fills its own niche of small puzzle-fest exactly well.
A lengthy train-of-thought surrealist exercise, April 18, 2019This game is a collection of individual short story/games about musical artists in a cabin recording We Are the World.
The style is surreal and dense, between Finnegan's Wake and The Wasteland. Some are more coherent; Huey Lewis's was essentially a straight story. An example of the surreal language is "People need to stop using reptile as a pejorative. The universe is a spaceship."
On a review for Charlie the Robot, I said: "There should be a name for the genre of 'biting commentary on society that is self-aware and occasionally dips to crudity, with hints of cheerful ideals always tinged by irony, using an overload of text as literary device.' Such games include Spy Intrigue and Dr. Sourpuss Is Not A Choice-Based Game. It seems increasingly common."
It seems like that trend is continuing. This particular game has some of the least overall plot of all this genre I've seen. The different sections have little to differentiate between them, reducing the surreality to an essential sameness.
I could see this really attracting a certain personality type. I do not think this is an objectively bad game. But it didn't suit my personal tastes. A game similar to this but with a bit more interactivity that I could recommend is The Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony
A hard puzzlefest that improves upon its predecessor, April 15, 2019I beta tested this game, but didn't finish it at the time due to personal events.
This game is similar to Bullhockey 1, but it improves on it. Implementation is smoother, inventory is cut down a bit, and atmosphere is distinctly improved.
Playing through the entire game, the highlights to me were an old house containing a series of dramatic historical vignettes and a self-referential finale scene that breaks the fourth wall.
However, this game is opposed to my personal play style. I play light and breezy, skimming text and rushing through. This game is designed for careful and studious play, with dense and obscure puzzles and the need for careful notes .
Overall, each of these games is getting better.
(Note: game contains some mild BDSM imagery)
An intriguing experiment that is at times confusing, April 14, 2019This game is a sort of meta-commentary on writing and the nature of writing, technology, and maybe a bit of Sci-Fi.
It's format is essentially that of a cited and annotated series of paragraphs, each on separate pages. The presentation is slick, handling different browser sizes adeptly.
There is an extra layer to the game allowing you to access a command prompt with a few actions.
This game constantly hints at their being more, but I felt like that promise never materialized. That may be part of the point, but I feel that somehow just a couple of small tweaks here and there could have made everything gel for me.
A deconstruction of Hamlet in Ink, April 14, 2019More than any other piece of Western literature, Hamlet has been mangled up and mashed and transformed, from Hamletmachine to Lion King. But it makes sense, because it's a compelling story.
This version is a mashup between The Maltese Falcon and Hamlet. It borrows heavily from noir tropes, to the point of parody, but it also features heavy elements of surrealism.
This is a short, linear game that maintains an illusion of slightly less linearity.
It's an interesting concept. Some of the surreality was hard to distinguish from bugs at first, and this created a kind of disconnect between me and the interaction.
A complex relationship sci-fi Twine game with heavy themes , April 12, 2019I can't tell if this game is genius or just confusing. But I like it.
It's a pretty hefty Twine game at around 30K words, with much of this tied up in different relationship tracks.
You play a worker in a futuristic San Francisco that seems to be on the edge of apocalypse. You've suffered intense losses, including the recent passing of your mother, and most of the game deals with reflection on your relationship with her.
The game has excellent media usage, including a skyscraper that scrolls up and down as the player moves, and heavy usage of a beeping watch alarm.
The writing style makes heavy use of inference and allusion, making for a confusing read. It also employs non-linear narrative, so this is a pretty complex game.
A completely smooth but sparse space puzzler, April 11, 2019This game is pretty interesting. It reminds me structurally of Infocom's first sci-fi game, Starcross. Both deal with cylindrical space stations with a variety of components and pieces that must be dealt with. Both are highly polished in terms of implementation and bugs.
Those interested in parser games primarily for puzzle-based reasons or for the 'parser feel' will certainly enjoy this game, and I found enjoyment in this area.
Writing-wise, it's very sparse. Every message is custom, but the custom messages are sterile and non-descriptive. This aids in the abandoned space-station feel of the game, but I felt emotionally detached from the game. Starcross had alluring alien ecosystems and evocative descriptions of strange technology. This game doesn't have to be starcross, but I wished for something exciting or unusual in space.
tl;dr Solid small puzzle game with top-tier implementation but standoffish story.
A shortish Twine game about a bird's life throughout the season's, April 9, 2019This game has an interesting structure: part stat-based, part poetry, and part dynamic fiction.
You play as a bird who has suffered a violent attack, and must make several choices over the next year or so.
The writing is lovely and descriptive of the various seasons.
You make about one choice per season, with one text-entry choice and all others binary. The binary choices have various effects later on.
After your choice, each page is just a sentence or two that you click through to get to the next season. This is the poetic/dynamic part I referred to earlier.
The game was overall enjoyable, but the format just seemed spread thin. Being stat-based but only making 1 or 2 stat choices seemed odd, and more of a 'win by remembering what you did' sort of thing.
I'd like to see more games by this author, and will keep an eye out.
A short Twine game about identity and depression., April 8, 2019This short Spring Thing game is in the genre of text games that take a major issue confronting humanity and explore it through a player's story. In this case, it reflects depression.
You wake up in the dark, forced to rely on sense besides sight to discover more about yourself.
This game is dark, literally and metaphorically. It allows you to do anything you set your mind to.
I felt like the game's mild puzzles contributed to a sense of agency. But somehow I felt an emotional distance from the game, perhaps because of my personal feelings regarding the subject matter.
A short contemplative metaphor game based on the new Elm Narrative Engine, April 7, 2019This game is designed to showcase the Elm Narrative engine. Although it's not the first game written in the engine, it's the first I've seen.
This engine is based on the Elm programming language. From what I've seen of the engine, it features less emphasis on branching and more on context-sensitive choices (which would be useful for inventories and such).
In-game, the same link can have multiple effects depending on when you click them. Because the links can scroll out of view, there is a handy top bar listing all active links. This gives an experience somewhere between Twine and Robin Johnson's Versificator engine (which the author praises in an early dev blog).
There was one critical issue that cause me trouble. Due to the large font size, I usually had to rely on the bar, and the bar wasn't always there. I had to tap the up arrow to make it appear. This was the case in both Chrome and Firefox. I know this is just an option in the engine, as the other sample games use a constant menu bar.
Everything else about the engine was smooth and enjoyable. I could see this engine gaining wider adoption.
As for the game itself, it is a metaphorical game about the pursuit of light and darkness. It's short, contemplative, and even melodic at times. I had difficulty making an emotional connection, though, which may be related to my interface frustration.
A contemplative game about the role of words vs expressions in conversation, April 7, 2019This game joins the growing sub-genre of twine games where you express yourself with emojis (including 10pm, a recent French IFComp game, and parts of Known Unknowns).
The author speaks about being a quiet person and the game forcing you to consider the effects of that. That's an angle I really haven't seen explored before, and it was telling.
I found the game frustrating, because I couldn't guess the effects of my choices. But maybe that's the point? Intentional frustration for the player, depicting the problems quiet people unwittingly cause? If so, it's quite clever.
A short, thoughtful and polished take on dystopia, April 6, 2019This game is a take on dystopia in the well-trodden vein of Kafka and Orwell, but I think it does well, mostly due to pacing and attention to graphical detail.
This game is more of dynamic fiction than puzzle. The interactivity is there to draw your participation in the story, and it does a good job of that.
A nice mid-sized Twine demon simulator with stat tracking , April 5, 2019The author bills this as a 'small' game, but it's pretty hefty (about 20K words). Most of that is in branching paths.
The writing is witty and on-point. You are a demon in hell, and you are given the opportunity to tempt mortals. Each character is painted with distinct personalities and mannerisms, and there are numerous jokes (I enjoyed being paid in 'exposure' at one point).
You have six chances to influence mortals with various conversations. Your conversational choices impact the deals you can make. Each conversation ends in a deal of some time.
Your stated goal is to obtain a ton of power, although there are other paths in the game. This game is pretty tough, but fair. I definitely would like to play again to try out other strategies.
Overall, this is excellent. The interaction was a little bit finicky from time to time, where it seemed like a some lawnmowering was necessary, but I couldn't really tell. Fun game.
An incomplete demo of a dating game related to mental illness, April 5, 2019This game is incomplete, which is why I've given it a lower rating for now.
This is a dating simulator visual novel. This is a genre which I'm not very familiar with, but this game seems to follow many of the tropes.
You play an office worker who encounters five women, each with differente mental disorders. You have the choice to date any of them and learn more about them.
Only one of the women is implemented right now, and that one is incomplete.
The writing was fairly descriptive and the women are all very different. I was surprised by the heavy focus on physical appearance (the male gaze, or lesbian gaze, depending on how you think of your main character). The one path we see has the character eager to please us, and us eager to comment on them.
I think this is normal for dating games (as far as I know), so the main content of interest is the mental illness. It's hard to tell how exactly this will be handled in the full game, but so far it seems to be trying to raise awareness of mental illness in healthy ways. As long as it doesn't end up with the character 'curing' one of the women I think it will be okay!
A Bradbury-esque robot story about independence and free will, March 31, 2019This game involves a series of vignettes that can only be completed in one way, followed by a long open sequence of puzzles and choices with consequences.
You play as a robot managing a household for 3 humans. You learn about the humans and the world in general over time.
Nearer the end, you gain the power to significantly affect your world and the world of others.
I feel like the choice structure was a bit weak in this game, with the majority of the game (including a late puzzle sequence) solvable by lawnmowering. I think it could have benefited from more tradeoff-style choices and delayed effects.
However, the lovely worldbuilding and vivid descriptions make this a worthwhile game to play.
A solid and enjoyable Twine mystery game with a fantasy noir setting, March 13, 2019I love this game. I'm a big fan of mystery games in general, but they tend to have a common problem: how do you model the investigative process?
Some games have you collect physical evidence until you have enough to convict (the Infocom mysteries, for instance). Other games represent knowledge as individual clues that can be combined or traded (like some of my games and the excellent Erstwhile). Some games have you just guess who did it after you collect enough information (like Toby's Nose).
This game follows the latter path, and does it well. You're given quite a few cases (this is a big Twine game), and in each one, you read information about a monster causing trouble. You have a big encyclopedia listing different monsters' characteristics. Your job, as the player, is to read the encyclopedia, compare it to the monster's characteristics, and guess which monster it is, as well as its motivations.
This game wouldn't be nearly as good without its slick presentation. Beautiful intro, nice transitions and classy color use.
I beta tested this game, but it got a lot of work done after I did so. Very pleased with the outcome here.
A short game about kissing with great design obscured by the execution, March 12, 2019This is a simple game. It's a random kissing simulator. Input gender, then make some atmospheric real-time twine choices about your feelings, then kiss. Over in 5 minutes.
Reading the documentation and looking at the game structure, though, it's clear there's a bit more here. The game does some state tracking and the best endings are hard to find. Reading the source code, I find the worst endings (found by (Spoiler - click to show)Making choices that increase anxiety) highly amusing.
But finding these endings isn't even possible sometimes due to RNG, and the game doesn't do a stellar job of giving you feedback on your choices.
But perhaps this is an intentional choice? A way to model the inherent uncertainty in romantic relationships?
In any case, this is a fun game to poke around with, especially if you look under the hood. Good styling, too.
A sometimes-tedious spell-based parser game with a nice setting, March 12, 2019I had an earlier review for this game that I deleted on accident.
Charming uses a spell system similar to the Enchanter series. In the long tradition of spell-based parser games, you must use a series of more and more complicated magical spells and techniques to recover from a series of magical mishaps that occurred before play began.
The one problem I had with this game was its gating of information. After a short but repetitive opening puzzle, you are given 4 books, some with ten or fifteen or more entries. It's absolutely overwhelming.
This could have been overcome by using the system in Curses (where you have books without indices and must look up names which lead to other names) or the even better version found in Zarf's room in Cragne Manor (where there is an index that only lists pages you've already discovered).
If this info dump could be ameliorated, this is actually a lovely game with some intricate puzzles and descriptive writing. Recommended for the patient and thorough.
A quirky Twine game about self-reflection and death, March 12, 2019This is an IFComp game that had some standout moments. Overall, it's a quirky game about death. A car you receive turns out to be haunted, and dealing with the issue requires you to think about your life and the life of the ghosts.
I enjoyed one particular moment of this game a lot, when it discussed how the human fondness for randomness is associated with us trying to prepare for the unfairness and randomness of death.
I had some weird formatting issues both times I played, even with full screen, and the story as a whole was a bit uneven. But for people trying to find quality Twine games I'd give this a go.
A twisted Texture tale. Short and obscure, a sci fi story, March 12, 2019This was a controversial IFComp game. Chandler Groover, known for writing well-received games with dense, descriptive writing, released a short and cryptic game for IFComp.
After listening to the author talk, and playing it myself, I now think I know what it's all about.
The clear part is that there is a fortune telling machine. People are 'added', which summons them to the machine. There, they are either equalized or multiplied.
After finding the easter egg, I realized on my most recent playthrough:
(Spoiler - click to show)The fortune telling machine is the engine for a spaceship/planet. Each person who is 'multiplied' is erased from existence. The energy from erasing them is used to rewrite the timeline to one where the planet is in another space. Movement by not moving, just changing the timestream.
Figuring this out made me like it more, otherwise I'd give it a 3. Nice presentation and good use of the Texture format.
I still don't know what being Equalized means.
A beautiful limited parser example of minimalism and abstraction, March 6, 2019This is a fairly lengthy game (including bonus material) that uses the limited parser format. The majority of the game involves compass movement and TAKE-ing and PUT-ing.
The overarching theme of the game is that you are in a temple filled with stories, each of the stories relating to a puzzle. The puzzles are all based of a single simple mechanic, probably simpler than anything DiBianca has used before. However, it quickly becomes more complicated.
It's almost like a testament to the power of binary. TAKE/PUT, like 0 and 1, can become anything in combination, including language, numbers, etc.
The only thing keeping it from being a perfect game to me is the way that the game is so divorced from emotional investment. This is a game for philosophical and logical contemplation.
A text-heavy gamebook with an innovative polynesian setting, March 5, 2019This game has some beautiful styling and good mechanics.
You play as a Polynesian woman on a quest or rite of passage. You meet a strange group of islanders hiding secrets of their own. You have to investigate, with gamebook-style gameplay (finding inventory items, exploring with some time-progress elements).
The biggest obstruction to full enjoyment for me was the huge chunks of text, especially near the beginning. But, if you have time for the reading, and are a fan of gamebooks or Polynesian culture, this is a good read.
Has several well-done illustrations.
A long sci-fi Twine game with rich world model and puzzles, March 5, 2019This game is one of the most complex Twine games I've seen.
Rather than focusing on conversation and emotional choices as many Twine games do, this game focuses on inventory management and movement around an extensive map, similar to typical parser gameplay.
This allows for some truly clever puzzles, including a major twist that only occurs in some playthroughs.
Strongly recommended for people looking for old-school puzzles and fans of sci-fi stories about artificial intelligence.
Smash vicious vegetables in a high fantasy setting, February 24, 2019This is an interesting game; I had a ton of fun, but felt a bit deflated by my own ending (in hindsight, I should have saved!)
It's a homey game. You are on the run, but taken in by a sweet couple who run a tavern. They have odd chores for you...this game primarily consists of beating animate vegetables to death with a hammer. I found this very satisfying, and it even had an RPG-like element.
I got the ending faster than I thought I would, and I was specifically told I had picked the dullest ending, so I wish I had saved right before that or had an undo button.
Overall, it was an innovative concept and a game I enjoyed playing.
A Quest comedy about possessing nuns to rescue your mother, February 19, 2019This is a fairly hefty Quest game in Bitter Karella's characteristic style: goofy characters, classic TAKE/DROP/LOOK gameplay, vivid settings.
You play as a "level 2 succubus" from the pits of tartarus, trying to find your mother who has been kidnapped by nuns.
The twist to this game is that you can possess all of the characters, each granting you different abilities and sometimes even changing the appearance of the game itself.
Quest always has some problems that make it not quite as responsive as inform, but Bitter Karella handles it well. I strongly recommend downloading for offline play, as the servers can get tied up.
An enjoyable math-based pattern game with academic humor, February 19, 2019This game is essentially unique among interactive fiction. In a Zork-like setting, you are a math wizard (or arithmancer) taking an exam.
Your job is to use spells to create sequences of decimals coming from famous mathematical constants. The further you can get in any one sequence, the more spells you get.
You begin with basics like addition or subtraction, but soon you gain spells that modify other spells and it all becomes complex and tangled up.
In the midst of this mathematical quest, the committee viewing you gossips about academic drama, discussing department conflicts and upcoming changes. As an academic myself, it is spot on.
I work with the author and beta-tested this game, but I wouldn't feel bad giving it a lower score if it deserved one. This is a fun game, and I recommend it.
A gut-wrenching horror game with flawless execution, February 18, 2019It's rare when an IF game is presented exactly right, every portion designed perfectly well to give a uniform presentation. Liza Daly's Harmonia is sort of the standard for this type of presentation.
I think Bogeyman has achieved that level of quality. The layout, fonts, sound, and color scheme give gravitas and a haunting sense of dread to the story.
And the storyline fits the presentation, with interactions that lead you to believe that you can identify with your character, followed up with choices that pit your beliefs against themselves.
An effect, but disturbing, game. One of my go-to games when introducing IF to people.
A minimal heist game in Twine with strong characterization, February 18, 2019This is a shortish replayable twine game where you assemble a team for a heist. You choose people for different roles, such as getaway driver, then see what happens.
It seems like a very branchy game, but a big chunk of branches are eliminated early on by one choice, making it smaller than it seems. The styling is non-existent, using the standard Twine design and formatting.
The characters are memorable, though. It's pretty intense for a humor game, and I played it several times.
A hilarious comedy game with plenty of puzzles and a British setting, February 17, 2019This is a great comedy based on misunderstandings and physical humor.
You are a thief, sent to steal a priceless object from a British manor. But to do so, you must assum a variety of costumes and identities.
Along the way, you discover the secrets of the household and the neighborhood, including lies, deceit, regret, and gorillas.
There were a few sticky points in puzzles that were fussier than they needed to be, but otherwise this is a prime example of what a polished parser puzzler can look like. One of the best games of the 2010’s.
A short and emotional tale about partners in a futuristic organization, February 13, 2019This is a fairly stripped-down parser game, mostly involving linear conversations and simple tasks where you follow orders. The emotions are on-the-nose, and the descriptions are small.
But I liked the game. For my personal, somewhat cheesy style, this game was a great fit. I've played it a couple of times, and I enjoy the relationship it develops.
A fun high fantasy mystery romp, February 13, 2019This game has a lot going for it. Fun images, a strong character voice, and nice, descriptive writing.
The setting is similar to D&D, with gnolls and dragons. The main character gnoll has caveman-like speech despite his intense intelligence, kind of like the narrator in Lost Pig and exactly opposite of the birds in Birdland.
It's a mystery game, and relies on the 'notice clues then pick the correct answer at then end' method of mystery writing. This isn't my favorite method, but the game's writing suits this style really well, as the clues are all based on worldbuilding.
The greatest flaw for me was how short it is. I wish that this game had been significantly longer.
A shortish, well-polished series of vignettes related to women's choices, February 3, 2019I found this game touching. A short game (5 chapters or so, each with 5-10 choices), it moves you through different phases of life and talks about women's reproductive choices, the expectations of society, and the consequences of these actions.
The styling is well-done and understated, a good backdrop to the ongoing storyline. As a man, it gave me a lot to think about.
A brilliant choice game with a meta narrative and text input, February 3, 2019This is a well-done IFComp 2018 game.
It runs in ITCH and is primarily choice-based. The conceit is that the author wanted to develop a big, fun sci-fi fi puzzle game, but didn't succeed.
Instead, he leaves the frame of his unfinished game alone, and adds author commentary. As the game progresses, the protagonist has more and more power to affect the game itself.
The styling is excellent, with several beautiful images and switches between different interfaces. The music is lovely and appropriate.
This is a game made with love, and it shows.
A meditative twine game with some puzzles, February 3, 2019I beta tested this game.
This is a visually well-polished Twine game, with images, colors, and fonts used to enhance the presentation.
The game itself consists in a vertical tower. The player spends some time in each of the rooms, which are described in rich prose. Some rooms have puzzles, others are more poetic.
There is also an overall puzzle that ties everything together.
A parody of educational/trucking sim games set in Canada, February 3, 2019This game uses the Desmos online educational software to make a game about leaving your humdrum job to take on a trucking gig in Canada. Each city has things you can buy and things you can sell.
There are several endings you can reach, including giving up and one really interesting one that takes you all over, which I never quite completed. A guide is included on the IFDB page.
I say it's a parody because the author called it that, but the parody element isn't too strong. It mostly seems like a serviceable trucking game.
A difficult and polished short superhero game, February 3, 2019I beta tested this game. In this game, you play as a superhero who has been captured, and must escape to stop the evil villain from shooting a giant ray at Earth.
The game is arranged linearly, with 4 big set-piece puzzles. Each puzzle requires multiple steps to complete, and can be quite complicated.
I found the game very polished, although occasionally harsh (requiring death to learn what to do, for instance). Highly recommended for people into difficult puzzles in parser games.
An old-school (in a good way) compact ADRIFT game, February 2, 2019I beta-tested this game. This is the best ADRIFT game I've seen in a while. It feels like a nice little slice taken from a Zork-like universe, with lamps and stone dungeons and a troll and little people and so on. There's conversation, treasure, and a satisfying map.
A lot of time Adrift games seem to be trying to get you to do something specific but won't let you actually do it without struggling for the right command. Thankfully, that didn't happen here!
It's like a nice-sized slice of old-fashioned game, not too hard, not too easy. Worth downloading ADRIFT for.
An innovative game using the Scratch programming language and classic puzzles, February 2, 2019Unfortunately, this game seems to no longer work in the current version of Scratch.
Scratch is a programming language originally designed to help children make simple games. Jared Jackson and his daughter used (or abused) the system to make a parser game with animations and puzzles.
This game is based off of conceptual, educational-style puzzles: manipulating amounts of water, moving around mazes, etc.
The overall storyline is brief but illustrated. It has a different feel than almost all other IF games out there, and I hope that one day it can be recreated in Scratch 3 or a stable language.
A few dozen trolley dilemmas all put together, February 1, 2019This game is a custom web parser built from UnityGl. It seems to work based on searching for one or more keywords in your text, ignoring extra words.
It's built around the trolley dilemma, which is an ethics puzzle: if you know someone is about to die (due to, say, a trolley crash) and you could stop it by having other people die, what would you do?
In this game, your choice on one trolley puzzle may lead to another and another and another. You have 51 possible outcomes to search for.
It was interesting, but hard to interact with.
A combat RPG investigating a mine with math-based mechanics, February 1, 2019This is a twine RPG with an interesting mechanic: you can either do randomized attacks against a single opponent at once, with them randomly attacking back, or you can consistently do 10 damage to all enemies and block their attacks by answering math questions. Questions are hand-written, not randomized, so you can see the same ones over and over, reflecting your increasing skill. They range from "2+2=?" to "what is the first derivative of xcos(x)", so if you enjoy being quizzed on arithmetic, algebra, and calculus, this is the game for you (I enjoy that, so I liked it).
I did get stuck on level 2, after finding the altar and decoding the writings. I did skip some material on level 1, so maybe I missed a ladder? In any case, this seems like a fun RPG, though I wonder if there is a 'story behind the story', because leveling up never increases strength, it only increases exhaustion and self-loathing.
(I wrote this review during the comp. After, I investigated more of the code and found the endings, and I do believe this RPG has an overall theme related to resignation and/or stoicism, but I don't want to spoil it).
A homebrew small fantasy parser game, February 1, 2019This game is a homebrew parser game. It seems expansive at first, intimidatingly so, but it soon settles down to a fairly small, nice-sized map.
Unfortunately, the possibility space of commands is fairly high. In most modern parser games, Inform or TADS take care of common synonyms (LOOK AT vs. X vs. EXAMINE, TAKE vs. GET, etc.), and new verbs are generally hinted at in the text or provided by using items where only one word works (a shovel leads to DIG, for instance), and extensive beta-testing finds all synonyms a general player might use. This fails at times, frequently even, but it is a standard that is widespread among Inform/TADS authors.
Games written in other engines tend not to have this flexibility (with Robin Johnson's Versificator parser games being a notable exception). The standard synonyms in Inform and TADS are the results of hundreds of hours of work and playtesting, and even well-established rival engines like Quest and Adrift fail to come close to their standards. And personally written parsers tend to have even more trouble.
This is a long-winded way of saying that there are a lot of commands I wouldn't have guessed on my own without the walkthrough. Besides that, I adored this game. Crossing the chasm reminded me of The Neverending Story for some reason, finding the island reminded me of the first Zelda game. A fun slice of enjoyment.
An extensive free-form poem in Texture with styling and graphics, February 1, 2019Tohu wa Bohu is intentionally poetic, utilizing allegorical language, stream-of-consciousness, and unusual punctuation and capitalization.
It's developed in texture, with a short, skippable intro followed by a 19-part quiz, with each quiz question actually a link to another poem segment, some with images or other enhancements.
I found it well-done and beautiful. The reason for my low score is my scale. I found it:
-polished, and
-descriptive,
but somehow I felt an emotional distance that kept me from fully enjoying the piece. And, occasionally, the sheer length of the piece made the dragging and dropping tedious, leading me to be unlikely to play again.
If you're interested in poetic IF, I'd check this out.
An illustrated parser game with multiple independent tracks, February 1, 2019This French IFComp game was written using Vorple, allowing it to have a dozen illustrations.
In stark contrast to the freedom of parser or the generally linear Twine games, this game has twelve different screens you can pay attention to, each of which has its own timeline. This makes it more like Varicella or Master of the Land, which implement similar parallel timelines.
However, just as with those games, I found it difficult to make and carry out plans.
I believe there may have been an error in the scoring. Despite receiving positive feedback on many of my police reports, and playing through a half-dozen times, my score only went down from 100 out of 1000, sometimes even becoming negative. My final scores were 100, -50, 80, and so on. I checked the walkthrough after and it seemed to say I was doing a good job, so I don't know.
A faithful French Twine translation of a Cyberpunk roleplaying game, January 31, 2019This game is an odd one out in the French IF Comp. It seems to be a direct adaptation of a pre-existing Cyberpunk gamebook.
Because of this, the content size is enormous, with pages often having numerous paragraphs or in-depth conversations, with a minimal number of choices, each retaining their 'turn to page 182' text from the gamebook. The author made the choice of deleting choices which ask if you have a certain item that you don't, resulting in lots of text and few choices.
This made a stark contrast with the other Twine games, which feature more choice and less text. Both are good, but the text seemed also to have been written by a professional author, and just copied and pasted by Hoper (the pseudonym this was entered under). For some reason, I found that less appealing than 'fresh' IF. I can read a standard professional book author any day, but earnest amateur IF writing is harder to come by, and, in my personal opinion, more valuable.
Overall, I may have just been overwhelmed as a non-native speaker. I enjoyed it, but the first two pages had more text than the entirety of some of the other games in this comp, making it difficult for me as a non-native to read without getting fatigued.
An amusing take on alien-human interaction, January 31, 2019This game employs two common tropes but combines them in a fun way.
The first is communication using emojis. Like B.P. Hennessy's Known Unkown's and litrouke's 10 pm, you have an array of emojis you can pick from and combine into different emoji sentences.
The second trope is 'aliens communicate and we must decode it', like Contact, 2001, or Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind.
This particular game takes a humorous approach. I was faked out twice at the end, which I enjoyed. I used google translate, as there were many French words I was unfamiliar with.
It's a fairly short game, with 4 chapters and an epilogue, but each chapter being only a couple of choices.
I felt like the game respected my choices and made an effort to be interactive.
A classic-style murder mystery in Twine, January 30, 2019This game is a straightforward implementation of classic Golden Age-style murder mystery. Each page has several paragraphs of text. You investigate 3-4 locations, 3-4 murder weapons, and 3-4 people, then guess the murderer.
The details are generic enough that they could fit in any detective story from Holmes to Poirot. If you like murder mysteries, it's worth playing, but I wish it had more spice to it. The author has proven they can make a complete and coherent game, and I'd be interested in seeing more work from them in the future.
A longish game that wavers between genius and frustration, January 30, 2019StupidRPG is a long game, split up into several acts in multiple genres. It has a custom parser with hyperlink shortcuts, and uses quite a few tricks and techniques to spice up the visual presentation.
The biggest drawback to me is that the interface is clunky, which detracted from both my emotional investment and sense of interactivity. The game has a dungeon master that types slowly, leaving large spaces of time where you have to sit and wait for it to type out. You could leave, make a small sandwich, and come back before it finishes, sometimes. Also, the custom parser isn't up to the standards of, say, TADS or Inform 7, which caused some frustration.
The writing is amusing and the settings, especially later on, are imaginative, with puzzle mechanics involving multiple worlds. I just wish I didn't get so frustrated with the interface.
A partially illustrated futuristic sci-fi tale, January 28, 2019This is a French IFComp entry, and it worked pretty well for me.
You are a cybernetic soldier who has been massively damaged on the field of battle. You have a screen/HUD sort of thing that you can control (the theme of this year's comp is 'screens'). Clicking on different armor pieces gives you different options.
The storyline, dealing with the aftermath of war, goes in fairly standard directions for sci-fi, but I found the presentation charming and my mangled non-Francophone reading ability found the writing interesting. Slick game, and not too long, for any English speakers trying to get some mileage out of Google translate.
An incomplete puzzle Twine game from the French IF Competition, January 25, 2019This game presented a conundrum to me. As a non-native French reader, I couldn't tell if the lack of punctuation and capitalization was avant-garde or the result of less-than-perfect design processes. However, I reached a point where 2 out of 3 choices lead to death and the third said 'click anywhere to edit this node', so I believe that this is simply an incomplete game.
But the idea of it is fun. It hearkens back to more riddle-based gameplay than most narrative-focused Twine games. You're trapped, and there's a madman with a knife coming to get you. You must find six digits to unlock a door, each digit being given as a reward for a puzzle. Puzzles include logic puzzles, wordplay puzzles, etc.
I would have liked to see this finished and polished. But, in its incomplete state, I can't recommend it.
A big, illustrated, intricate, futuristic Quest game with implementation issues, January 10, 2019This game is cool. It’s illustrated and animated. It’s big. It has some real time events, great worldbuilding, and rich settings.
Unfortunately, it suffers in implementation. There are huge numbers of implemented items. Actions can be difficult to guess. I constantly found myself struggling against the parser and the system, not understanding what was wrong.
I recommend checking out the first few scenes to get a feel for this interesting game.
A short game about autonomy and robots with one big moment, January 7, 2019Zarf/Andrew Plotkin has said before that he thinks about a certain interaction he wants players to experience in a game, and then builds the game around that.
This game was built around one interaction at the end. It’s a cool interaction, but the rest of the game doesn’t do enough to build up to and support this special interaction at the level it deserves. It’s like having a small 1-tier cake with a huge crystal wedding topper that it can’t quite support.
The cards were a nice visual feature: this is set in a futuristic Vegas casino, and you can see the cards being dealt.
Overall, this shows a high level of craftsmanship, and I anticipate that a longer game by this author would be great.
A shortish, nice-looking Twine game about bisexuality, January 7, 2019Norbez has written quite a few games over the years now, including several IFComp games, and it’s clear that their style is progressing, adapting, and improving. This is the best Norbez game I’ve seen, and definitely one of the best “PSA” games I’ve seen. Just like Depression Quest for depression or Hana Feels for self-harm, Bi Lines is meant to help you consider what it’s like to be a bisexual man in an unacceptably society.
What made this piece work for me was the presentation. Nice chalk/like effects when you click on choices, smooth writing, and a supernatural setting with a reporter talking to ghosts make an excellent frame over the deeper charcterization choices and the central narrative.
This game takes place over three days, but is still fairly short. It contains some strong profanity in a scene or two. I recommend this game.
A small game with a custom parser about magical dreams, January 6, 2019Despite my low star rating,this game succeeds in (what I believe is) it’s authors’ goal. It seems like their intent was to write a complete parser game from scratch that had an interesting storyline, and they’ve done so.
This game is pure fantasy, with mysterious ailments and amulets. It’s very short. The parser lacks almost all conveniences of modern parsers, such as standard actions and abbreviations and robust keyword detection.
The game is short, but has some puzzles I personally found enjoyable, as well as some nice dream/star imagery.
For the IF player used to playing Inform games, I would not recommend this. But as someone who has tinkered around with parser programming, I know how hard this was to make, so the authors did a good job.
A short dark fantasy game about an ancient religion, December 25, 2018I beta tested this game.
Devotionalia is a shortish but replayable fantasy game that is all about atmosphere and contemplation. It is a choice-based game, but not immediately recognizable as Twine, due to the extreme customization: graphics, music, many variants of link types, and more.
The game comes with a helpful instruction page. Essentially, you are a priest of an ancient religion, the gods almost forgotten. You wish to learn from them, and thus you make your devotions.
There's not an action-driven story or a big cast of characters. It's a somber reflection on life. If you've ever seen the painting "The Monk by the Sea" by Caspar David Friedrich, this game is essentially the interactive fiction version of that painting.
A time travel pirate game in Adrift, December 21, 2018Anno 1700 is an ambitious and sprawled-out pirate game involving two timelines, multiple NPCs, and a large map.
As is often the case with Adrift games, the game works well with the walkthrough but has trouble for someone without it. Very specific actions need to be guessed, and actions that seem like they would be easy (such as communicating with your base) cause trouble.
Playing this with the walkthrough, though, was enjoyable.
Edit: Several people pointed out to me that this was written in Adrift, not Quest, and I apologize for the mistake!
A gauntlet-style illustrated game about troubleshooting magical tech, December 21, 2018This game is listed as educational, but I found it to be amusing and well-written as well.
You play as a character being asked to repair a sort of magical computer, with a crystal ball instead of a screen and an abacus and magic soup as part of the internal units.
The style seems more like old CYOA books, with most paths leading off to death. I think a 'back-up' button or more cluing could make this less frustrating. As it was, I was put off by the frequent deaths and didn't finish the game. But the writing was enjoyable, and the illustrations were very well done.
A big, sprawling twine game with crazy colors about a dog, December 19, 2018I bounced off of this game during IFComp. It has white text on a light blue background, and occasionally has combinations even harder to read (like lime green on light blue). Also, it has most of its content locked behind actions that take multiple in-day actions without promise of reward.
But now, going through slowly after the comp, and especially using the walkthrough, this is a great game. Having a real-time pegasus race in the clouds, exploring haunted houses and underground worlds, there's a lot of fun to be had.
It's all disconnected and a bit weird, but that's some of the fun of IF. I just wish there was an option to change the background color.
A word-puzzle game involving breaking a word up into syllables, December 19, 2018This game is a sequel to an earlier IFComp game, Dream Pieces.
Both games consists of rooms where you are given a few highlighted objects. These highlighted objects are words that can be broken up into their syllables and recombined.
This game centers on creating and using doors and other exits. I found it clever and interesting. The Quest engine was a little blocky and chunky (for its own reasons, not the game's) and I didn't feel emotionally invested in the game, but as a puzzle game it was effective and fun.
Psychology in a metaphorical parser game, December 19, 2018This parser game has an intriguing concept: provide psychological therapy while playing a game.
You play in a metaphorical and dreamlike world, with trolls in houses and random cookware scattered everywhere.
The therapy occurs in the gameplay: you are told relaxation techniques and other tips, asked to exercise them in-game, and generally work on laughter, dance, happiness and fixing things.
This game has a lot of implementation trouble, both with guess-the-verb and unclear instructions. This gets in the way of the relaxation experience, and makes me less likely to play again in the future.
A homebrew web parser game with minimalistic old-school dino style!, December 19, 2018This game was entered in IFComp 2018.
Escape from Dinosaur Island is a homebrew parser game that features nice coloring and styling.
The parser has most of the weaknesses of homebrew parsers in general, mostly a lack of synonyms or responses for things like 'get up' or 'push basket'. However, this is alleviated by generous in-game hinting of the correct verbs.
The plot and gameplay are Scott-Adams-esque: each room has an item or two, the plot is mostly scenery for the fun setting and puzzles, and most of the gameplay is bringing the right item to the right place.
If you like that style of gameplay (like I do), then this will be a fun little nugget of gameplay.
A masterful fantasy game with a unique interaction style, December 13, 2018Twine games often fall into two traps: branching too much (so that playthroughs are short and miss almost all content) or branching too little (so that players feel frustrated, as if their choices don't matter). Games with strong writing can make up for this (like Myriad or Polish the Glass), but it's definitely a big problem for this system.
Pseudavid sidesteps this problem neatly by using a unique form of interaction. The player is put into a physical space and allowed to navigate while multiple storylines unfold simultaneously.
The game, then, becomes about being in the right place at the right time. It gives you a real sense of a bigger world, of life and vitality.
I suggest playing this game multiple times to see the different storylines.
The one thing that I had trouble with was, even when I knew exactly what I wanted to do and had some ideas about how to do it, I had trouble carrying it out.
(Note: I helped beta test this game.)
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Adam Whybray, Adri, Andrew Plotkin, Andy Holloway, Austin Auclair, Baldur Brückner, Ben Collins-Sussman, Bill Maya, Brian Rushton, Buster Hudson, Caleb Wilson, Carl Muckenhoupt, Chandler Groover, Chris Jones, Christopher Conley, Damon L. Wakes, Daniel Ravipinto, Daniel Stelzer, David Jose, David Petrocco, David Sturgis, Drew Mochak, Edward B, Emily Short, Erica Newman, Feneric, Finn Rosenløv, Gary Butterfield, Gavin Inglis, Greg Frost, Hanon Ondricek, Harkness Munt, Harrison Gerard, Ian Holmes, Ivan Roth, Jack Welch, Jacqueline Ashwell, James Eagle, Jason Dyer, Jason Lautzenheiser, Jason Love, Jeremy Freese, Joey Jones, Joshua Porch, Justin de Vesine, Justin Melvin, Katherine Morayati, Kenneth Pedersen, Lane Puetz, Llew Mason, Lucian Smith, Marco Innocenti, Marius Müller, Mark Britton, Mark Sample, Marshal Tenner Winter, Matt Schneider, Matt Weiner, Matthew Korson, Michael Fessler, Michael Gentry, Michael Hilborn, Michael Lin, Mike Spivey, Molly Ying, Monique Padelis, Naomi Hinchen, Nate Edwards, Petter Sjölund, Q Pheevr, Rachel Spitler, Reed Lockwood, Reina Adair, Riff Conner, Roberto Colnaghi, Rowan Lipkovits, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Scott Hammack, Sean M. Shore, Shin, Wade Clarke, Zach Hodgens, Zack Johnson An enormous collaboration horror game, December 8, 2018I've played and reviewed over 1500 interactive fiction games, and there has never been anything like Cragne Manor.
This game was written by 84 authors. Some authors (including me) wrote small rooms with one minor puzzle, or, occasionally, only one.
Others wrote rooms that themselves could be entered into IFComp and do well, including complicated conversational games, (Spoiler - click to show)a miniature version of Hadean Lands, a monster breeding game, and story-focused cutscenes.
The game is a mishmash of different styles and levels of implementation. One room might be the most elaborate and smooth game you've ever seen, with varied tenses, custom parser responses, and complex state tracking; while another room might be basically a pile of dirt with nothing implemented. Puzzles range from super easy to very unfair.
For fans of big puzzle games, people who wish that longer games would be released, Infocom fans, fans of any of the people in the author list, conversational games, or IF in general, this game will provide hours of enjoyment.
As a warning, this game is overwhelming. It has 500K+ words, which is huge for parser games. As a comparison, Blue Lacuna had less than 400K, and much of that was devoted to verbose text descriptions. This game is just pure content. This game is longer than Curses!, Mulldoon Legacy, Worlds Apart, and roughly the same size as Finding Martin.
Prepare for the sinking in your stomach you will experience as you open a door to find another 6 or 7 rooms, each with their own fully-fleshed out puzzles. Prepare to keep notes for information you find in the game, tracking the many keys and doors.
The content warnings for the game are accurate. Every author has their own style, so some rooms have more of profanity or explicit content than others. I would say that maybe one or two rooms has anything sexual, and about a dozen rooms have violence or gore running from silly to horrifying.
As of writing this, there is no walkthrough, although that will likely be remedied soon. With the help of many of the authors, as I tested this game, I still took well over ten hours to beat this. Expect a long, long, long play time.
Perhaps the last thing I'd like to say about Cragne Manor is that this is almost like a little IFComp of its own. The number of games in the two is similar and the quality of the entries is similar, except that even the weakest rooms in this game have been tested and worked on as a group, and all the rooms in this game support each other, instead of fighting against each other.
Please enjoy this wonderful game.
A complex conversational game about spies and relationships , November 30, 2018Intelmission is primarily a long conversation, with an introductory segment.
You and another spy are captured together and have to talk. The game features many many topics, and makes you aware at the end of how many you explored. You can choose what to discuss, or allow the game to choose for you after a certain time.
In a way, this game reminded me of Mirror and Queen. Both are conversational games with a ton of work behind-scenes to provide many topics and allow for user flexibility. But in both games, that flexibility gets communicated to the user more as mirroring what you choose rather than gaining new information. There were few surprises, narrative twists and turns.
I did enjoy this one though, and Mirror and Queen.
A smooth Twine murder mystery with complex puzzles, November 30, 2018This was one of of my favorite games of the competition. It’s a smooth Twine game that plays well both on desktop and mobile.
You play as a ghost who died, or was murdered, during Thanksgiving. You have to simultaneously learn (as a player) about the neighborhood while gathering (as a ghost) mental clues to find out what happened.
The game is divided into two chunks: exploration and linking. Exploration has you looking through the thoughts of others to gain clues, and linking has you pick two related clues to produce a new one in a complex multi-layered system. I’ve seen mysteries use this technique (and written one), but this is the best implementation of the idea I’ve seen so far, and very satisfying. I got stuck near the end, but I feel like a puzzle game is perfect difficulty if I do well until the end and need a hint then.
Great for mystery fans, and fun for everyone.
A riff on the Stanley Parable, set in a school, November 24, 2018This game is based off of the Stanley Parable, which I've never played. This version is set in a school.
It's short, and deals with ideas of autonomy, player/author relationship, and meta narratives. I don't know if the enjoyment is higher or lower for those not familiar with the Stanley Parable.
It seems, though, like someone thought, "I like this popular game, so I'm going to adjust it to my circumstances and make a Twine version of it." The writing and structure of this game make me think that if the author tried a new game after this based on their own ideas, that it would be pretty great. I hope you write again!
A racy space comedy, November 24, 2018This reminds me in an odd way of a more optimistic and gender-swapped version of In The Friend Zone from a few comps back. In that game, you explored a world that was a giant woman.
In this, you are aboard a giant male-shaped spaceship. It is a riff on Star Trek and general science fiction tropes. In style, it reminds me of 80's college humor movie.
The level of explicitness is similar to Leather Goddesses of Phobos on Safe Mode.
It's polished, descriptive, and amusing, although I didn't personally care for the subject matter.
A campfire tale with randomly generated elements, November 24, 2018This game isn't bad in it's own category, it just happens not to be what satisfies my criteria for stars, which is why it got a low score from me.
This game uses randomization of elements taken from some sort of database (so that figurines might be of monkeys one playthrough or of dogs on another).
The player has some text input, and there are images, but overall it seems like you just get a story to read that you don't have much effect over or investment in.
The game shows a great level of skill, though.
An incomplete texture game about a surreal world, November 24, 2018In this game, you wake up in the world described in Talking Head's 'Once in a Lifetime' song. You have a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, and none of it makes sense.
This is a texture game, and has great promise. Unfortunately, it is not complete at all.
If you experiment with it, note that it has some sensuous scenes.
A complex spy game with some interaction difficulties, November 22, 2018This is a game that was hard to play during the competition, for a few reasons, and those same reasons make it much better to play now.
-It is a large Adrift game, and Adrift is an engine where a lot of commands don't work. This game gives you hints about the commands in the text, but this requires careful reading of the text.
-This game is randomized, so you can't just repeat commands from memory. The map is the same, however.
-This game is big. It has a few dozen locations, runs on a timer, and has many NPCs with many interaction options. There are little encounters too that happen frequently.
-This game is hard. Really hard. I played it 5 or 6 times before completing one of the biggest mission objectives. You have to keep track of tons of things: where stuff is located, where people are, what times things happen.
So this is definitely a game to be savored. But it is rewarding.
An illustrated book-like game set in a fantasy circus, November 21, 2018This game is by (I think) a commercial team that had a different approach to IF than most of the authors in the competition.
This game is lavishly decorated as a book, with occasional beautiful illustrations.
You play as a wolf who is friends with a young child.
It has essentially one choice per 'chapter', with the later chapters having the strongest effects. This is in contrast to most twine-style games, which encourage frequent irrelevant choices or gradual choices. This game's style is exactly what I would expect Netflix's choose your own adventure shows to be like: long segments punctuated with individual, large-effect choices.
A demo for Glyffe, an engine where you physically move through text, November 19, 2018This was a game meant to show off a particularly interesting engine, but which may not have been the best choice to show it off.
Glyffe lets you navigate (using arrow keys) around a text on screen, with interactions happening when you run over something. There are interesting Glyffe 'worlds' with red FIRE and grey WALLS and DOORS that you can physically interact with.
But this game is just a long text, where running over a paragraph makes the next pop up. The text is interesting, but the interactivity of this example wasn't sold to me.
A richly responsive game about animals occupying a human body, November 19, 2018This was one of the best and most-talked-about games form IFComp 2018.
I played through this one once during the comp and about 6 or 7 times afterwards.
This game has some of the greatest responsivity I've ever seen in a choice game. You make a choice between several different characters to inhabit 4 regions of a robot-child's body. Each area of the body has 3 choices.
Throughout the game, the character inside a given area will talk, and there are 3 variants every time this happens. In addition, there is a point where any two characters can talk to each other, which gives (I believe) around 90 combinations, some of which are merged but still very impressive. There are multiple pathways through everything.
Basically, this is a combinatorial explosion game, which are usually very short because it's impossible to make them long. This is a long game, though, so that means the author worked incredibly hard.
It also made me laugh a lot at different points, literally laughing out loud (for instance when (Spoiler - click to show)Charlie the robot is standing in the toilet flushing his feet over and over until mom comes in).
I'm giving it 4 stars just because I felt that, although my choices mattered a lot, it was hard for me to make and execute plans. I tried so many times just to get to Martin's house, even with the author's help, and I wish I could have known better how to do that. But this is an incredible achievement of a game.
A complex many-variable bilingual game about love, November 17, 2018This game was featured in IFComp 2018. It has a beautiful custom interface featuring pixel-art animations, and includes sound.
Basically, love goes wrong on a train. The sequence of events just interrupts everything.
But, you have a chance to go back and change that sequence!
This is a wonderful premise. By going back and changing the order of things, you can unlock 7 preliminary endings and then a final ending.
However, I found the choices opaque. Instead of being able to strategize, it came down to more or less random guessing. There are some hints in the text (changing options, for one thing), but even with the walkthrough, I never reached the final ending on my own. I saw what it said, though, and I thought it was beautiful.
Because I struggled with the interactivity, I didn't receive the full emotional impact of the game. Other than that, I enjoyed it.
Edit: With help from the forums, I finished this, and I loved the ending.
Where I got stuck was (Spoiler - click to show)Forgetting to confess for the 'love' ending.
A big, densely described puzzle game about a girlfriend's revenge, November 17, 2018This IFComp 2018 parser game is big and pretty tough.
I beta tested this game. You play as a person whose girlfriend has supposedly left them, trashing the house and hiding your clothes all over the town.
This is, I think, the author's first publicly released game, and a big one. It's clear while playing it that the author got better and better at programming and writing as it goes along. Thus, the first area is the sketchiest/most obtuse, while the later areas are an improvement. I recommend perhaps consulting the walkthrough until you leave the house, to get a feel for the game, then going wild.
Dynamic fiction about the perils of obsession and family secrets, November 17, 2018This was an IFComp game that I liked quite a bit more than, it seems, many of the other IFComp reviewers did.
This is almost purely dynamic fiction, a style of interactive fiction where you mostly read a linear narrative, with different special effects adding to the atmosphere and some scattered choices. "My Father's Long Long Legs" is a classic example of the genre.
This story is about a woman whose mother tended a bar and was obsessed with 'polishing the glass'. It's a story about growing up in a broken household, coming to grips with our parents' problems, and the spiral of obsession and addiction.
There's probably a metaphor here, but it's abstract enough not to be clear on what the metaphor is, which makes this game much more effective for me.
An amazing Stephen King-like twisted self-referential tale, November 17, 2018I played this game early on in the competition. It was late at night, and I was listening to sad music on my phone.
This was the perfect game. A strange tale about a writer trying to get past writer's block (self-referential art has always impressed me), taking place both in the real world and in the author's book (I love dual world games), with both text entry and choice, this game absolutely impressed me.
I have to warn that the game is extremely explicit, and I played almost entirely on the least explicit level.
The game constantly pulled out surprises, and is big enough to feel like a real, living world. Just like in the real writing process, scenes and characters are written and rewritten, in and out of the game. Decisions are reversible. There's even an inventory and an economy!
I think some people might have bounced off of this because of length, but now that the competition is over, this is one I strongly recommend. This is going on my all-time top 10 list, was my favorite IFComp game, and is definitely getting my vote for XYZZY Best Game!
A classic CYOA-style online game book about a haunted mansion, November 15, 2018This IFComp 2018 game features a professional thief protagonist who is exploring an old, haunted mansion with the intent of finding treasure.
The style is unique to the company, Intudia, with numerical choices listed in the text and buttons with numbers on them lined up below.
The game itself has an intricate backstory, with the mansion having many levels and many ghosts and villains.
There are numerous problems, however. The text is overly long at times, with scattered grammatical errors (like 'to' instead of 'too). The numbers on the bottom are often in a strange pattern with one number far to the side of the others. Instead of tracking state, it seems as if the game relies on you to remember what actions you took in the past.
Still, the story is compelling, and a fun read for fans of horror.
A murder mystery set in Old Scotland, November 15, 2018I helped to beta test this game.
This is a fairly big conversational game set in medieval Scotland. The player must converse with over a dozen characters to figure out who is planning a murder.
The ambitious game design makes this feel epic, and it's exciting to get tangled up in the web of deceit. However, the large number of characters and the many topics makes for a combinatorial explosion, and it becomes easy to get lost in a forest of information.
The author has an Introcomp game that is also set in medieval times that is worth checking out.
A gorgeously illustrated medieval-looking cybertext game about an abbess, November 15, 2018This game is lavish, with a medieval-looking font and scattered illustrations and capitals.
Presented like a book, interactivity is done by either turning the page or by selecting between binary choices.
There are quite a few paths in this game that you can take, and I found it overall impressive. My 3 stars is because I didn't feel an emotional involvement in the game, being put more at a distance by the elaborate presentation. I also didn't feel an inclination to play again, due to the energy required in poring through the text.
A time capsule from the 80's. A sprawling, difficult fantasy game., November 9, 2018This game was created over a period of 30 years, using a variety of design systems.
You play a natural philosopher in medieval times, nicknamed Phil. There are a ton of puzzles and a magic system.
However, this game could use some thorough beta testing by six or more people familiar with modern IF conventions. Directions are omitted from room descriptions, puzzles are undervalued, and there's an inventory limit which doesn't really seem to do much in-game.
For people who enjoy struggling with the parser in old school games (I'm in that group, and intend to play this one again!)
Part 1 of an AI sci-fi story, November 9, 2018This is a short, incomplete science fiction story.
This game has excellent worldbuilding, you can really get a feeling for the kind of place that you're in. It's a high-tech sci-fi scenario.
However, it feels more like a good first effort than anything else. Formatting is kind of off, with no spaces between paragraphs. The clinical tone isn't quite nailed, with first names being used for researchers (like Dr. Sarah and so on).
I believe a further game by this author, with practice and polish, will turn out great.
Great for wordplay fans, November 9, 2018I read a review once saying that Counterfeit Monkey had killed off the wordplay genre because you couldn't get any better than that.
I think that's silly; that's like saying that Jimi Hendrix killed the guitar solo or Betty Crocker killed the recipe. When there's something good out there, you want more of it, and this game delivers.
Many of Schultz's games involve puzzles too hard to compute on your own (Ugly Oafs come to mind). The best games, like Threediopolis or Shuffling Around, give you just enough freedom and hints that you can figure it out on your own.
This game is palindrome-based. The palindromes are mostly spread into the background, although there are a bunch of puzzle solutions that require a puzzle-based answer. The dedicated wordplay fan will love this game, and casual fans will as well.
A big, fairly serious horror game by bitterkarella, November 9, 2018bitterkarella is known for making horror-themed games in Quest, both serious and humorous.
This game has more styling than most, with hand-chosen fonts and neon colors.
The storyline seems well thought-out, and the setting is evocative. It all feels like an intense and overwhelming dream, the kind you wake from gasping for air. It starts out light-hearted but gets more intense.
This game has the usual problems Quest does, which I think are inevitable given the platform. Of all bitterkarella's games, this is the one I'd most like to see polished up in Inform or TADS 3.
A horror game set in an abandoned school, November 6, 2018I was impressed and a bit frustrated by this game.
The bad: the text is a bit hard to read. I had to bulk up the page size a bunch before being able to see the fancy-font white on black text. Also, possibly due to the font, I felt weirdly discombobulated while playing and had trouble focusing.
The good: this is a genuinely engaging tale about a girl and her friend meeting up with three guys to explore a haunted school. The true horror is in the relationships here; I had several honestly surprising and unsettling experiences with people in the game that wasn't based on supernatural horror at all.
I actually feel like I love this game, but I wish it were easier to read and didn't have that sort of vague procedurally generated feel (it's not actually procedurally generated, but it has multiple paths, so some of the text is vague to suit several scenarios). I want to play this again.
A short branching teenage camp horror game, November 6, 2018This game is in the Intudia system, which was also used for Addicott Manor in IFComp.
This game is quite short, as is appropriate for the Ectocomp competition. It's also a widely branching game. You are a counselor on a bus trip to a camp. You have about 2-5 choices on any branch.
The story is about murder, supernatural violence, etc. and relies on several stereotypes and tropes of teenage slasher films.
A Chinese literature-inspired short Halloween story, November 5, 2018This fairly short Twine story has us playing as a magistrate's assistant, reviewing three different accounts of ghosts by three different characters.
The characters are inspired by the Chinese novel Di Gong An.
I found the setting interesting and the writing well-done. The only real choice was the order of the stories, but there was a bit of a puzzle at the end which I was pleased with.
A novella-length game about a crew of teenagers and a haunted town, November 5, 2018This game combines dating game-type choices with complex static storytelling to form a rich interactive game.
You go to a Halloween party, and a lot of people are there. A supernatural event puts the whole town in danger, and you have a group of 8 people you can interact with, including multiple romantic partners.
Most of the choices relate to how you treat people. It doesn't track perfectly, though...I picked constantly to have favorable interactions with one character (Zachary) and twice with another (Ione) and received romantic possibilities only with Ione.
Very impressive. The title and cover art led me to believe it would be a short and under-implemented parser game. Instead, it was a rich and polished novella.
The font was a light grey that was a bit difficult to read, as a warning to the visually impaired.
A long exploratory Twine game about a Frankenstein scenario, November 4, 2018In this game, you play a patched-up person made up of different people's parts.
It comes in three acts, two of which are exploratory, and the third of which is mostly a coda.
In the first act, you explore the house of yourself and your master, spending several days or weeks in-game exploring, thinking, learning, and solving some puzzles.
In the second act, you have the chance to interact more with the real world.
The styling was nice here, with Harmonia-like spacing and margins. Options are greyed out to indicate places you should explore more.
This really worked well on a lot of levels. I found the exploration tedious at times, but I don't think that there's an easy fix, and the game is good as-is. My ending was touching.
A promising first entry in the Ectocomp competition, November 4, 2018This is the second Ectocomp game I've played by howtophil, and I have to say that it's not as good as his other, and I actually think that's a compliment.
This current game was, as far as I know, the author's first completed work. I remember testing it in the forums. It implements several clever ideas/puzzles, one puzzle in each of four rooms.
However, it sort of attempts too much at once, not leaving enough time and space for careful implementation.
The author's second game in this competition, Wake Up, was written in less time but with more skill. It had a narrow focus, excellent implementation, and a great overall structure. It's clear the author is learning by leaps and bounds.
So I can't strongly recommend this game, but I can recommend Wake Up, and I believe the next games to come from this author will continue to increase in quality.
Frankly amazing story about trying to give a powerpoint presentation, November 4, 2018Sometimes Twine games just click for me, and sometimes they don't.
Two ways they can fail is to either encourage/require you to just click everything, or to have trivial choices that clearly don't effect the story.
This gave really gave me the feeling of strategy. Even if it was an illusion, I felt like I could play a specific kind of character and have it matter.
The game contains some highly unusual events, part of which gets explained near the end of the game. I don't think everyone will love this game, but I know many others who also like it. For me, this is the kind of Twine writing that very few people get right: Hennessay, Dalmady, Corfman, Lutz and Porpentine, a few others. Welch can write with the best!
A short horror romp, like a music video, November 4, 2018Playing this game felt like being in the video for Thriller or some other sort of famous creepy song.
It's largely linear, with a series of obstacles and strong hints on what to do (except at one point where I completely failed multiple times in a row at what turned out to be the last two puzzles of the game).
Some of the content of the game wasn't really up my alley (you follow a girl out of a bar because she's so attractive), but it was coherent, and everything meshed well with the opening.
The third in a voodoo-based parser series, November 4, 2018In this Inform game, you are a private investigator who is haunted by strange phenomena. It has a large cast of characters and expansive geometry.
However, due to its nature as a fairly quickly written game (for Ectocomp), it suffers from a lack of implementation that makes it difficult to play without the walkthrough. I took my time, examining things, in the opening scene, and missed out on all the triggers that would have led me to discover more.
Best experienced with a walkthrough.
This game gave me rabies and leprosy, November 3, 2018In this Ectocomp Grand Guignol game, you play as a masked reveler in a sort of grim fantasy realm.
This is a substantial game, bigger than most IFComp Twine games (though I think this is a proprietary system, not Twine). There are at least 13 locations, an inventory system and economy, various sicknesses you can acquire.
It seems like an Italian horror version of Carneval, with decadent displays by comedians, dancing, buffets, etc.
I found a satisfying ending after exploring about half the map, and felt content. Styling was rich and gorgeous. I think this is even better than Devotionalia, the author's IFComp game.
An entertaining short Twine story based on a classic kids' cartoon, November 3, 2018This is a feel-good game, which, as the author pointed out online, is very different from their last game, Bogeyman:
"my entry for ifcomp, which is genre-neutral: "extremely disturbing", "relentlessly horrible"
my entry for ectocomp, which is specifically halloween-themed: light-hearted family-friendly HIJINKS"
This game is based on a classic kids' cartoon, and it holds up well. You have a big, lawnmowery exploration phase looking for supplies before setting up a home alone-like defense.
The game feels slight and smallish, but polished; this makes it perfect for a casual competition like Ectocomp.
A Texture Halloween game with some great moments, November 3, 2018This game is a shortish Texture game with a Halloween theme. You are brought before a macabre group and forced to perform a ritual.
The Texture programming was more complex than I'm used to, which was a nice change. It felt like a real puzzle. At first, I thought it was similar to Moon Goon, with an altar containing 'assorted items', but the ending couldn't have been more different.
I loved the overall plot design in this game. Given its fun-to-length ratio, you should just go try it.
A humorous and horrifying collection of short Halloween games, November 3, 2018This game is framed as a collection of friends sharing tales. After an intimidating wall of opening text, you begin playing the mini-games in random order.
You can, at any time, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom to skip a tale, which opens up a small segment of the game.
The stories were fun, and in a wide range. One was essentially a one-note joke; one was a deeply disturbing exploration in three parts that was frankly horrifying; another was like a fairy tale; and the fourth is a fun riff on metaphorical games.
I found this game truly enjoyable. Its one defect for me was the difficulty in finding the right actions/verbs on a regular basis. However, that may be part of the charm. But when I saw a pattern on the wallpaper and couldn't X PATTERN, or couldn't get a response for cutting it with one of two items present in the game, I got frustrated. SHOUT could work more often, TALK TO isn't implemented. But I don't know if it's worth it going back to spruce this game up, since the fun's already there.
A debut for a part of Spirit AI's new character engine, November 2, 2018First, it's fun that Spirit AI is putting out a Halloween game.
This is a unity game, and it's big: 140+ mb. It has graphics, courtesy of Tea Powered Games, and text, courtesy of Emily Short.
The basic framework is a nice wallpaper-y background with a visual novel-style character you're speaking with.
You have three forms of interaction:
-selecting a topic (I found 3 topics in my playthroughs). Different topics allow different conversation options.
-selecting emotions (up to 6 or 8 or so, each an on/off button). These are independent of each other, so I could, for instance, choose to be curious, open, angry, sad and hungry. These alter the conversational options in a procedural way, sometimes unlocking more.
-the conversational options themselves. Some, with an exclamation mark, have a greater effect on the game.
You play a ghost who is haunting an old house. At first, you have great difficulty in speaking, but that is gradually relieved (unless you mess up like I did on my first play-through.)
This game has many endings and quite a few topics.
Overall, I was impressed by the flexibility of the engine. I could see this being integrated with 3d Unity games, with physical location or costumes being a fourth way of influencing topics or replacing one of the methods above.
The procedural text had pros and cons.
At its least enjoyable: clicking a radio button on and off rapidly would cycle through the options, changing words like 'abject' to 'inconsolable', for instance, exposing the guts of the game.
At its best: when used as intended, the proceduralness lets the game respond to your intentions in a pleasing way that would be horrible to write as an author.
So you only really see it when lawnmowering or experimenting. But in this game, I found it easy to get lost, as I frequently had trouble guessing what the effect of my actions would be. So I ended up seeing a lot of the 'guts'.
As a demo of the system, it worked very well. As a story, I found it interesting and worth playing several times. I'm glad this was in the competition, and I hope a lot of people sign up to try out the engine (I know I'm interested, if I can find the time!)
An interesting speed-IF that uses audio exclusively, November 2, 2018It was great to see something as complex as an audio game entered.
The controls are simple: 1 to say yes, 2 to say no. It uses Unity. I wished there were a pause button, but that would matter more in a longer piece.
The game is made using voice changers. The main 'scary' voice is highly distorted, but I was able to hear it most of the time. Your character's voice is like a chipmunk.
The story is that you've been kidnapped after signing a waiver, and you have to answer questions from a questionnaire. My game ended after two questions.
A messy game about a messy witch, October 31, 2018B Minus Seven writes games that are more surrealist poetry than anything else, and this is no different.
It's unabashed in its content, using profanity, brashness, confusion and vulnerability. It's also very short. You pick from three things in a cross between a recipe book and a shopping list, each one with 1-3 more options before returning.
It didn't really gel together for me, but for fans of B Minus Seven it is a great addition to the oeuvre.
A twisted slug-based horror story about modern information sources, October 31, 2018This is a political game by what I presume is a non-native English speaker who is very experienced in their own language, as there are numerous typos together with a very creative story.
The game also contains a great deal of offensive material, but it's difficult to tell who it's aimed at; I could see it being equally offensive to everyone, but curiously inoffensive at the same time.
The central storyline is that slugs have changed the world into a hyper-connected group of individuals that subsist on trashy news stories, including stories about Soros and Clinton.
Playing this game was certainly an experience.
A quest game written for EctoComp with multiple paths and riddles, October 31, 2018This is a Quest hyperlink game written for Ectocomp. It was written in less than 4 hours.
You play as a vampire masquerading as a newspaper delivery girl, visiting different areas in the city.
The game had nice styling and art, and I appreciated the apparent depth. But there were some translation issues that made the puzzly parts of the game hard for me to understand, and several typos.
Tricky location-based puzzle, October 31, 2018This Ectocomp Petite Mort is a tricky little pentagram puzzle.
It took me a while to understand what I needed to do. The game had a fairly entertaining framing story which (especially the latter portion) elevated the game in my opinion. Even though I didn't necessarily agree with its message, I respected it.
The main puzzle consists in placing objects on a pentagram (with both inner and outer pentagons). I thought for half of the game that I could only walk on pentagram lines themselves. Certain objects repel each other, and the game encourages experimentation.
A political slice of life game, October 31, 2018This is a speed-IF game, written in just 4 hours, but it has some pretty good heft; I've seen some IFComp games with less material, and it has nice styling.
It presents a scenario in which you've run out of biscuits, and the effects of Brexit have made it difficult to get enough food.
There are multiple paths, most of which have no choices (which makes sense for a Speed-IF), and the game encourages replay. Probably the best use I've seen of Twine in a Speed IF for creating the most material in the shortest amount of time. A nice game to add to Benson's growing portfolio.
A surreal blood world, caught in a moment of time, October 31, 2018This is a neat little puzzle/story written up in just a few hours.
You are in one of Caleb Wilson's bizarre worlds, a world of blood and ectoplasm and strange gods.
You are provided with a multitude of items and left to sort it out for yourself. Every object has a use, and in the end there are 7 ways to finish the game.
The best part of this game is the immersive worldbuilding.
A short nightmare speed-IF based on a real experience, October 31, 2018First, a note about my ratings. This game is very short and is necessarily unpolished (as a game written in just 4 hours). So I took off one star for that.
But I found it had emotional effectiveness, I would play it again, the interactivity worked for me, and the writing was descriptive.
You are having a terrible nightmare and feel paralzyed. There is only a small amount of time to help yourself.
It took me a couple of play-throughs to get through it, but I was impressed at the level of craftmanship in an Ectocomp game. Well done.
A short, rocking Hawaiian game, September 25, 2018This game drew my attention when I discovered that the 'provided map' is just google maps centered on the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian islands.
This is not my favorite Veeder game, but it was enjoyable, both when I played on my own and then later at an IF meetup.
The game as-played seems to have two phases: an exploration phase, and an action phase. I found it necessary to google some locations in the game at different points, and google provided information that helped in some puzzles.
The game offers several methods of interaction, including one that may be time-limited.
If you like this game, I recommend Crocodracula. If you hate this game, I recommend An Evening At Ransom Woodingdean House. If you haven't played this game yet, I recommend Taco Fiction and this game.
A sort of unofficial sequel to Spellbreaker. Big, puzzly, and difficult, September 25, 2018This game is the result of an immense amount of work, and was, for a few years, frequently recommended on rec.games.int-fiction.
I'm giving it such a low score due to my rubric. The overall game design is mixed, with the most time spent in the least interesting areas, extreme amounts of waiting being required, and so on. The game feels fairly unpolished, and could have used more tester feedback. It's the kind of game that could use a group of people working together over time, sharing hints on the forums, more than one person solving it, which is probably why it was once so popular, especially since it was released before 1998 and the explosion in high-quality story-focused games with original storylines.
This game copies the format of Spellbreaker, with spells that you gnusto into a spellbook and cast, and which frequently fail. You spend a lot of the game wandering around a monastery, as well as investigating other parts of the Great Underground Empire.
If there is someone who is a fan of Infocom games, feels like current games are too easy, and loves picking over a difficult game during a period of weeks or months, keeping careful notes and a map, then this would be a 5 star game for them.
For everyone else, I wouldn't recommend this game in general.
A bizarre, long, unfair but fun parody wordplay game, September 24, 2018I do everything I can to complete games before I review them. I read walkthroughs, I look up old message boards, and, at last resort, I decompile to get the text.
This game is one of those rare ones (such as Hard Puzzle 2) where decompiling is worthless. In this case, the text of the game is literally split into two interleaving fragments, so that no whole words remain.
You have a huge anagram machine which makes anagrammed words out of anything you put in it. The results can be used, eaten, modified, entered, etc.
There are a lot of rough edges in the implementation, which is part of the overall effect. I don't know of anyone whose solved it. I got very far this time, but I forget how to do all the puzzles I had solved when I tried this last year. I'd love to see a team of people on a forum solve this one.
The premier fate-locked story of Fallen London, September 24, 2018I had played Fallen London for over a year before I purchased Flint. It is the most expensive story of Fallen London, one of the older ones, and most likely the longest.
Flint is split into two portions. The first ended faster than I thought it would. It mostly consisted of preparing for a trip. However, despite the fast-ish ending (which was still long; the first half felt as long as some exceptional stories), many interesting things happened. The game plunges into deep lore that explains so much of the game (including the prison), nets you cool items/people, and has some exciting action sequences.
The second sequence was longer, and had several lucrative opportunities, and ended in some highly unusual and unique interactions that I found poignant and touching, and which feels like one of the most important events possible in the life of a character.
The story ends with both strong lore rewards and strong in-game monetarial awards.
A moral lesson, experiment, or thoughtpiece as an Inform game, September 19, 2018I found this game to be touching. It's an online-only Inform game that asks you to make a certain moral choice.
It has a unique sort of interactivity that is only available in an online game. Due to the specific response I got, I'm not sure if this kind of interactivity is still operational.
It is short, and deals with the nature of story vs. game (among other things).
An intriguing short story about a missing woman in Japan, September 19, 2018I played this game because it has been one of the most-rated games this year. It's a short-to-mid-length Twine game set in Japan with three endings.
I gave this game/story 5 stars based on my criteria:
-Polish. The writing is smooth, the images add to the story, and the structure seems thought-out.
-Interactivity. I wanted to pursue the main thread of the story but feel like I had some investment. This game is fairly linear and branches in some "do you want to win or not win?" kind of ways. But it worked for me.
-Descriptive writing. This story is vivid and very descriptive.
-Emotional impact. I found the story effective from two angles: one about a man showing concern for a fellow human, and another angle where the protagonist is a deeply concerning example of a man believing that he has the privilege to become obsessed with and interfere with a woman's life.
-I would play this again.
A real-time messaging game with an involved story and some rough patches, September 8, 2018I purchased Project Hyrax a month or two ago.
The design and formatting are well done. It's a text-based game where you receive messages from a time traveller.
The writing seems like it is not from a native speaker, with numerous typos and grammatical errors. Also, many of the choices are clearly irrelevant to what happens after, adding nothing to the gameplay, and only two choices are available at a time.
However, the timed messages and the length of the game drew it out to over a month as I tried to finish it to write a review. It eventually grew on me, and I found myself having a good time.
I would have given it 4 stars for that reason, but it froze on me after many, many choices, and I couldn't get it unfrozen.
A sprawling absurd Twine game with a tangled and deep backstory, August 21, 2018Escape from the Crazy Place is a sprawling, labyrinthine Twine game with significantly more content than games such as Birdland. It's absurdist, surreal, dreamlike, and ridiculous.
It's history is almost more absurd (parts of this may be inaccurate; play the TADS version to see more). It began as a physical handwritten CYOA book in school over 30 years ago, passed around by students and added to over time. That copy was lost, rewritten from memory.
It became an online html game before anyone was doing much CYOA html, then it became TADS in 2006. Now, years later, it's been redone in Twine.
It has dozens of authors. It has parts that are clever and exciting.
But it also has parts that are less exciting. One reason passing around a physical CYOA book in school is thrilling is because you can see the heft and size of it and think, "oh man, this puppy is huge!". Flipping through can give you an idea of its contents.
Escape from the Crazy Place is online, though, so you don't really know what you're getting. And the first passages are the oldest, by those with the least experience, referencing 80's and adolescents. The first about also loops around itself somewhat, making it even harder to get a grip on the size of the game.
I kept pushing through (playing with my 6 year old son) and we found a lot of really great content. That experience made me think that this is a good game to play collaboratively, just as it was written.
An entertaining fusion of Lovecraftian horror with the roaring twenties, July 19, 2018I received a review copy of this game, and played through a couple of games.
This is a single- or multi-player board game that goes through 6 rounds. In each of the six rounds, you are trying to increase your 7 stats. These stats allow you to pass challenges. In the end, you see if your stats will qualify you for a 'role', determining if you win or not. The roles have 2 hidden stat requirements which you must guess from their descriptions.
I've played many commercial IF games in the last couple of years, and I would put this one in the top tier in terms of polish. The music, graphics, animations, and overall presentation are professional and engaging.
Writing-wise, I was strongly reminded of Fallen London in its more humorous sidequests. You are playing as a cultist each time. A good amount of text was repeated on two playthroughs, more repetition than is typical for a pure text game, but less repetition than I'm used to in a board game. It allows for mods (several of which are already developed), which increases the replay value.
The game was charming and funny. I found myself excited by the game map with its bouncy art of classic locations like an old town hall, an asylum, a speakeasy, etc.
The interaction was a little fiddly. It took me two playthroughs and two readings of the tutorial to fully understand what was going on, and I'm not really convinced of the 'elder sign' mechanic. The game doesn't tell you how to pass certain tests, including the test to see if you win, but you can spend elder signs to see what tests include. Replay also helps you know what tests require.
However, I enjoyed both of my playthroughs. Because I hadn't paid for the game, I considered what price I'd pay for the game. I thought, "Is this $20 range like Sunless Skies? Because that would be pretty steep." When I saw it was $4.99, I thought, "That's more than fair for the price you're paying."
So if you're a fan of Lovecraftian references, gothic humor, Ruby Gloom-style art, or complex board games like Arkham Asylum, this is a good game for you.
A dreamlike dark fantasy in service to the empress, June 10, 2018This game is one of Porpentine's best games, by her own admission and the acclaim of others.
It has music and takes the unusual tack of having you draw symbols on your skin as the game progresses. I chose not to do so, but many who have played have done so, and you can search for some of their images.
The game casts you as an artificer for a massive, insectoid alien queen. Isolation and body change are themes, as you wander a city and castle and spend time on yourselves.
The game has music and interesting styling. The story includes friendship and love and bizarre, alien history.
A twiny jam 300 word branching futurepunk story, May 23, 2018This is Pacian's only Twine game I know. Entered in the popular Twiny Jam competition for twine games of 300 words or less, this has a Time Cave type structure. You can see all endings by lawnmowering, but it might be more fun just to explore 4 or 5.
The story is grim and gritty. You are part of a jetbike gang, and the cops are coming. All of the branches are short, and they all paint out a dystopian world of grime and flame and bad relationships. It is a vivid world.
A help-desk for wearable emotion-manipulators. Fiction through bureaucracy., May 22, 2018This is a complex Twine-and-Javascript based game that reproduces the help-desk environment from IT. You are given a bunch of tickets or help requests to address. You can dismiss them, respond to them, rank their severity, etc.
But instead of normal IT, you're troubleshooting a device that creates impulses in others.
As you progress, your performance is evaluated, and others might respond to you. The story slowly splays out.
It's an odd story, too. Like Morayati's other works regarding technological dystopias (Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory, Take), the game explores uncomfortable parts of the human condition.
The game takes real-life issues (like the below-minimum-wage oppression of gig jobs like Mechanical Turk, having to buy cheap knock-offs of products that can harm you, workplace harassment, etc.) which people have gradually become numb too and puts them in a startling new light by applying them to new situations.
If you liked this work, I strongly recommend the two other games I mentioned earlier.
A silly short game involving replacing lineart with clipart, May 11, 2018This was from the Mystery House Taken Over competition, where IF authors were tasked with revamping the old, famous adventure game Mystery House.
As far as I can tell, this game only allows directional commands, and all that happens in each room is that a piece of original, poor quality line art is replaced with a piece of badly cropped clip art as a joke. I found it amusing, but the game is so small and light as to be hardly there.
If anyone finds additional content, let me know and I'll revise my review.
A clever puzzle game with lots of character and some bugs in the ointment, May 8, 2018I've enjoyed the full Guttersnipe sequence of games; they generally feature well-thought out puzzles involving an urchin doing ridiculous things and eating junk.
This game puts a spin on things by placing your long-standing help system and narrative device Percy the Rat in confinement.
It features stereotypical Italians as the antagonists, with names like Tony Macaroni. It would be somewhat uncomfortable, except that it's less of a parody of Italians themselves and more of a parody of gangster movies's and novels' parodies of Italians.
There were several bugs in the version that I played, but it made the game more interesting, as I had to type exactly the right command, and it became just another puzzle. But polish and interactivity correspond to two of my stars, which is why I'm giving 3/5.
Edit:
Since my original review, the game has been revised to fix many bugs, so I'm increasing my score to 4/5.
An illustrated multi-stage game about controlling information to Trump, May 8, 2018This is a Twine game that features a number of people surrounding Trump, especially John Kelly, Stephen Miller, and Jared Kushner.
The game makes use of multimedia, with links to real-life articles, various illustrations, scrolling text aimations, and sounds.
The plot is fairly simple: you play as an intern thrust into the role of providing positive information for trump. Different factions try to tell you what to pass on, but you must choose between them.
The game has a few bugs listed below that should be easily fixed. Also, I felt like something was off with the links. I found myself frequently scrolling up and down to read the text after clicking a link, and had some trouble when coming back from aside-text (as everything became reset on the original page when I returned).
I was glad I played, as it was amusing. On a personal note not factored into my rating, I don't agree with its demonization of Stephen Miller as the evil behind the throne. Many people have been posited as the true evil behind the throne for some time in the Trump administration, and I think that shifts responsibility away from the President.
One bug report for the author:
(Spoiler - click to show)On the page near the end referencing constitutional crisis and WWIII:
The (link-reveal:) command should be assigned to a variable or attached to a hook
Also, the very last page seemed to have an error, as it showed a 'fire mueller' tweet as a graphic, while having a written text that said:
(Tweet text: "After hearing the words of my celestial grandchild, I have decided to rescind my order to fire Robert Mueller and will be resigning from the Presidency. I hope that once I am gone, we can begin to heal.)
A fairly polished joke game by Santoonie Corporation, May 2, 2018Santoonie Corporation was a group that sprang up in the early 2000's promising a very advanced game called Amissville that never materialized in completed form. They went on to release a series of games, including Delvyn and Zero, and, finally, Lawn of Love.
Each of these games has an ambitious opening scenario that is mildly under-implemented and contains some sort of offensive or bizarre standard responses before eventually petering out in a section that cannot be finished.
This game is no exception. This game has an opening picture, a preface, an introduction, and a prelude. It features an opening scenario with conversation and detailed rooms, but with basic features missing (like when moving in an unavailable direction, where no text is printed. Apparently a sound was supposed to ping).
The story involves you meeting a pair of interesting young women, neighbors, one of whom plays a game with you. The game peters out shortly after.
If you find this interesting, try Delvyn, Zero, and the TADS Amissville.
A homebrew parser game that leans on classic tropes, May 2, 2018This is a parser game written in C++. I played it on my own at first, but after I found it had trouble responding to several commands (and crashed after a few unexpected commands) I resorted to the walkthrough.
This game leans heavily on old text adventure cliches, especially making homages to Curses! and, perhaps, Scott Adams games.
Several scenes from Curses! are exactly reproduced, such as the delicately balanced key and the spade joke.
The worldbuilding was fairly well done, but I can't recommend this one due to the difficulties of the parser.
An ambitious and sprawling collection of games, April 29, 2018This is unique among IF; the closest thing to it I've seen is the current Spring Thing game Life in This Northern Town.
This is an anthology of five games: one inform game and four heavily modified Twine games.
I'll discuss each game in a minute. First, an overview: the folder from itch.io contains six images, one of each of the main protagonists together with a cover photo. The art is very well-done.
The general idea is that five heroes banded together, and then something occurred to them in the long run. The games focus on the beginning and the aftermath, skipping the traditional climax. It's contemplative.
Each game is named after a main character. Looking at the photos before playing is advised.
Alemayehu is the Inform game, and perhaps this should not be the game to start with when you're playing through. It is a constrained parser game, with a few actions primarily relating to other characters. It is a one-room game.that last a couple dozen actions or so.
Apollinariya is a textual labyrinth in Twine. The screen is split in two, with a table of contents on the left and text on the right. Your goal, if there can be said to be one, is to fill out the table of contents on the left, after which you can read the story as a whole. Links are unusual, as clicking on them reveals arrows going left or right, occasionally crossed out. To me, this was the weakest Twine game, as I ended up lawnmowering every link to get the last bits of story. But I enjoyed the final story.
Arzan is a heavily styled letter with a number of binary choices. in tone and styling it is reminiscent of First Draft of the Revolution. While the story is fairly linear, it offers some significant choices in terms of tone and emotion.
Cevahir was perhaps my favorite Twine subgame. Based on a taciturn character, it is minimalistic in writing but uses evocative visual imagery.
The final Twine game, Renatum An Amurum, uses retro styling, similar to text boxes in SNES RPG's. Similar to the Texture writing system, hovering over links provides additional context, but links are still clicked instead of dragged. This game requires replays to get the full story.
On the negative side, I found the new names and the obscure writing hard to get into at first, and I was surprised that the Twine and Inform games had been bundled up into applications.
I felt like I knew the characters by the end, which is a good sign.
A short mini-game about Jack and the Beanstalk using ZIL, April 28, 2018This game was written as a learning sample of the ZIL language. It was written over just a few days.
As such, it is small and lean. But Welch has managed to put a few clever puzzles in.
I was unable to solve this without a walkthrough the first time I tried it. After the walkthrough, which is very detailed, I felt like the game required a number of fairly mean actions, but with suitable rewards.
I find this game most interesting as an example of the ZILF language. I wonder how many of the standard responses were hand-coded, and how many part of the language.
A cruel puzzle of a maze and an unusual one, too, April 28, 2018This game is highly unusual. It is a text adventure maze implemented on an emulator of an old type of computer.
The setup is fairly simple: a maze that reveals its shape to you once you fail to complete it, and which regenerates randomly each time. A single item, of questionable utility, is found in the maze each time.
The solution to the maze uses a trick I have never seen before in interactive fiction, and which is very cruel.
A well-polished Tarot simulator, April 28, 2018This game allows you to experience three different randomly generated tarot readings, complete with illustrations.
This is a polished game, and it incorporates information from a survey done about people's impressions of the cards. So it's almost like having a reading randomly selected from several dozen other people's readings.
It was impressed, but I saw it as an intellectual exercise without gut feeling.
An illustrated surreal Twine game with earnest writing, April 28, 2018This game starts you in a dark room with several voices talking to you. There are eight doors, some locked, and others not. Your goal is to escape.
The different voices seem to represent parts of your psyche, and the short game is a game of self-discovery. It is illustrated with hand-made colored pencil drawings.
The writing is littered with typos, and the storyline is somewhat confusing. It was descriptive, though, and good at evoking emotion.
A poetic exploration of four women's deaths and the cause thereof, April 28, 2018This is a fairly brief game written in free verse. It seems to draw on the writings of four famous women who died, mostly in controversial situations (including deaths that resonated in the trans and African-American communities).
The writing was interesting, but the free verse format made it hard for me to make an emotional connection to the writing. It was interesting looking up the four women in the story.
A brief slice of life in an anime-inspired techno future, April 28, 2018This Twine game uses appropriate styling and occasional graphics to tell a slice-of-life story in a world where cybernetic enhancements are common.
You have encounters with two different friends whose lives are different than most people's, and explore some unusual technology.
It feels like a brief vignette of a larger world, either a fan fiction, a taste of the author's own universe, or an introduction to a longer game.
A mid-sized Twine puzzler with color-coordinated puzzles, April 28, 2018In this game, you have jumped down a hole into a central hub-like room with multiple color coordinated rooms branching off.
Puzzles follow a sort of game-logic, where mysterious machines and illogical creatures and locations abound.
Parts of it seem forced and/or rough. The machine that merges birds with items is fun to tinker with but some of the results seem hard to guess.
The writing takes a major downturn during the whale segment, where it begins insulting the player and taking a negative and small view of life. This is isolated, and weird.
Overall, I can say with Dwight from the Office: "A lot of the evidence seemed to be based on puns."
A short, text-heavy twine game about a detective taking a case, April 27, 2018This is a short Twine game that leans heavily on standard detective tropes. You, a hard bitten male detective, have a female client come in with an extensive backstory that you explore through various links. A lot is made of her appearance, but more in a deductive way than a seductive way.
The woman's story is about suspected adultery. The story uses standard Twine styling and has a heavy amount of text per choice, making it more like a story with distinct branch points and less like a mechanics-driven game or visual art piece.
Overall, I would have preferred some more deviations from the noir formula or some more compelling mechanics, but what's here is done well.
A lengthy TADS sci-fi novella with sketchy implementation, April 25, 2018This is one of the longest and most plot-intensive games entered into IFComp.
The story is a sort of self-insert fantasy. A college student who is bullied and shy is courted by beautiful women and powerful men due to his latent universe-changing powers. It unfolds over several days, over a week.
Unfortunately, there are two flaws in the implementation and design. First, the author has decided to implement in great detail the most tedious parts of the game. Ordering food takes several steps, repeated daily. Campus contains many non-essential locations, which seem possibly to be based on the author's actual campus. Most of the game consists of opening your backpack, selecting the right book, putting it in your backpack, closing it, marching across campus, sitting in class, waiting, going to the cafeteria, ordering food, swiping your id, sitting, going to your dorm, swiping your id, and entering your room. This is repeated at least five or six times in the game.
The second flaw is that only this path is implemented, and only with the exact walkthrough commands. Attempting to order food without the walkthrough is extremely difficult.
Overall, I was glad I played.
A systematic monster creation system speed-IF game, April 22, 2018This game is pretty fun. You have a body on a table, with several items you can attach to them. Every single combination of attachments yields a different monster, which causes a different amount of mayhem. The game officially ends after several monsters you create do a certain amount of mayhem.
An interesting experiment with human-guided AI interaction, April 21, 2018This is an interesting game. It's a conversation between ELIZA and some human-mediated input that is taken from a collection of computer-generated speech.
The conversations at first are pure nonsense, but later evolve into partial nonsense, with recurring themes of frustration, curiosity, and romance.
There are sexual references in one portion. The overall feel is one of experimental poetry, very appropriate for the Spring Thing competition.
A big, polished sequel to a big, polished game, April 21, 2018This sequel to the 15-year-earlier Risorgimento Represso is a fairly large glulx game that uses advanced features such as graphical windows.
In classic parser game style, you are an eccentric wizard's apprentice in a blended fantasy/modern setting where you push the boundaries of the law to get what you want.
I enjoyed the variety of puzzles, such as timing puzzles and transportation puzzles.
This game reminds me a lot in style and quality to Bob Bates' game Thaumistry. Both games were charming, and reached a level of quality that is quite difficult to reach, but failed to grip my imagination. In both games, I felt like some solutions were unnecessarily restricted.
I believe this game is most likely to win Spring Thing (this review was written before the competition ended).
An ambitious amnesia horror RPG with some rough edges, April 21, 2018This game was not what I expected. With warnings about graphic violence and explicit language, the title 'American Angst', and the logo of an American flag-colored smily face, I expected something like a mix between 'The Purge' and 'Saw' and anti-Donald Trump revenge horror.
I got something else instead, and was pleasantly surprised. This game is an amnesia-based horror game that tells the story passively through set pieces, until the end when all is revealed.
It uses extensive styling, with special 'emphasis' boxes, an 8-bit looking battle interface, and special designs for links and devices. Profanity occurs about once or twice a screen, but my chrome extension blocked it easily.
The game saves automatically, and takes you back to checkpoints if you die.
I found the story compelling, and was surprised by the ending(s).
The game has rough patches, though. The credits don't list a single tester, and it shows. There are several mis-spellings (such as the word 'matrace' for mattress) and small grammatical errors (like 'the flashlight doubles for a nighstick' instead of 'doubles as').
Similarly, there are many game elements which should improve interactivity but end up not doing much. There is a panic stat which doesn't seem to do much besides letting you choose between having a panic attack or not. The battles are more random than strategy based. And choices aren't informed, some literally being 'left or right?' with no other information, making it feel like you don't have control.
Having had this game tested would have caught some of these issues. As it is, though, this is a well-done game and one of the best Twine games of 2017.
A visual novel with combat elements set underwater, April 18, 2018This was a first for me: a visual novel with RPG elements. I know visual novels are a big field, but I've generally played text-only games.
The art seemed high-quality, but characters would switch positions on the screen at odd times, which was kind of distracting. It was hard for me to distinguish the two male protagonists, who changed expression sometimes when they were talking and sometimes when others were talking.
The overall storyline was interesting, and seemed like part of a larger and well-developed world.
The RPG combat was fun, I don't see that a lot. I was allowed to go into negative MP with the main character, making winning easy.
Overall, I found some of the graphical elements unpolished, but the story very descriptive. The interactivity worked for me, and the combat and some of the decisions made me feel anxious for the characters. Overall, I feel satisfied with my playthrough and don't plan on revisiting the game. So I'm assigning it a score of 3/5.
Love and pain in an endless world, April 18, 2018I love reading creepy stories and sci-fi stories, and one subgenre of both of those that I like is the time loop story. While such stories can be played just as a puzzler (get this sequence right to fix the machine, like Fingertips:Fingertips), I especially appreciate the ones that focus on human thought and feeling.
This game is well-written and focuses on character and depth. It is, as far as I can tell, completely linear (or completely cyclical, I guess I could say). It's like an endless roundabout with occasional exits that lead to the same roundabout. But it does have an overall narrative arc.
It contains some dark themes, and isn't really appropriate for children, I would say. I found it meaningful and well-done.
This uses slow text, which I usually dislike but found appropriate here (and not too slow). It also used music which I didn't listen to.
A 'get the band back together' game in Quest, April 13, 2018This is a complex Quest game with a life-like map and NPCs that are responsive and numerous.
For my personal taste, the NPCs were too lifelike, with your main companion having a foul mouth, using profanity as a form of verbal seasoning rather than a means of emotional signalling. It made me uncomfortable the whole game. For some players, though, this is a selling point.
The game itself is fun; you try to convince all the members of your band to get back together. Each one is vividly defined, and you're asked to perform various fetch quests, intuition-based puzzles, and logic or experimentation puzzles to get to your goal.
Quest has its usual limitations, but this game was better programmed than many quest games. Great for puzzle fans and fans of real-life slice of life games that don't mind strong profanity.
An intricate conversation about family, history, relationship, and love, April 11, 2018I beta tested this game. This is an ambitious conversational game with a parser that recognizes sentences in addition to keywords.
This increases the complexity of possible inputs to a great extent; just typing in topics isn't enough, you have to add extra words.
I beta tested this 2 or 3 times, but I never beat it until after it was released. When I beat it, I was shocked and surprised at what I hadn't seen before.
This is a well-written and interesting game, but I found the complexity of the possible inputs overwhelming.
A pleasant mid-length minimalist puzzle game that is kid-friendly, April 11, 2018This is a game in the vein of DiBianca's other games, with an emphasis on a minimal verb set and getching puzzles.
You have to help sixteen animals in a gridlike town. Each asks for various things, and you have to help them. Some give hints, and others just add flavor.
I beta tested this game, and I enjoyed it then and now. Highly recommended for a pure puzzle experience.
A massive game of intense difficulty, April 11, 2018This game is the third by Mike Gerwat, after Hill 160 and Escape from Terra.
This is in the top tier of long parser games if played without a walkthrough. You play a version of the author, a former piano tuner who was born blind and is now deaf and tuned pianos for famous bands. You now go back through time to college and other places.
The gameplay length is increased by the difficulty. Some important room descriptions are only printed once. If you didn't see it the first time, you'll never see it again. Seemingly minor actions lead to game over's hundreds of moves later. Searching the code, there are 542 instances of the phrase "GAME OVER!", ranging from leaving the taps on when exiting the shower to using shoddy condoms.
The walkthrough is not completely accurate, either, leading to more random deaths. Random deaths cannot be undone, meaning that you must save constantly.
The game is split into four sections, the first and last of which have alternate paths. I was unable to complete the first section with either path, but I read through much of the game in the decompiled text strings.
I'm giving it three stars because it is descriptive, it is reasonably polished, and it seems to communicate the emotional feeling that the author was going for when adding in all of the pitfalls.
A short game using an rpg-maker that diagnoses your mental illness, April 11, 2018This interactive fiction game uses a unique engine: an RPG-maker.
There are no RPG elements, just dialog boxes. You have somewhere between 2-4 choices, and the game gives you a diagnosis of a mental illness.
There are some spelling mistakes, and the game is pretty short. But it's creative and uses images in an interesting way.
A meandering, symbolic tale in poetry, April 11, 2018Adam Brendenberg has written several interesting poetic games in the past, including War of the Willows (a fighting game in poem form) and Fallen Leaves (a procedural poem generator).
This game has a sort of puzzling aspect. You wander a physical space, including what seems to be a labyrinth with mysterious controls. It's all written in Twine. The topics of the poetry include the game itself, a meditation on video games in general, and Donald Trump in a boat.
A clever parser take on memory and time with some unfinished corners, April 11, 2018This game reminds me of last year's spring thing game Niney, where you gathered up 'roles' and distributed them to other characters.
This game isn't similar in form or content, but it's similar in creativity. Your motions affect time, and there are hidden stats affecting what you are able to do.
My main interest in playing this game was piecing together the backstory, which was fun.
There were some unifinished corners here and there; many of the standard responses (like X ME) are left with their standard forms. But I enjoyed this.
A sort of confessional or mirror or personality test in fantasy form, April 10, 2018This game has you read through 5 sort of interviews in Twine. Each one has a background character from a fantasy (or science-fi or both) tale explain to you how they feel about life while you react.
Each ends with a choice, which you must explain via text entry.
Reading all 5 stories unlocks a sixth story.
I liked the interactivity of it, the text entry and so on. But because the game seems designed to be a mirror for the reader, a lot of the text was bloodless and generic, designed to apply to as many situations at possible.
It covers some fairly controversial topics, including a dedication to a notorious American criminal.
A They Might Be Giants Nanobots tribute game with disappearing words, April 10, 2018This game is part of the They Might Be Giants Nanobots tribute album. This 'album' consists of Twine games inspired by the songs and their lyrics, and is a sequel to the Apollo 18 Tribute Album of parser games in 2012.
I passed over Nouns at first, as it's fairly minimal. I was learning Twine at the time and downloading games to look at the code, and Nouns had a tiny, tiny 'game map'. Then I realized it was all javascript.
The game consists of one passage, almost all of whose words are links. Clicking on each link transforms the game.
I thought it was random at first, but on subsequent playthroughs, I realized there was a specific pattern involved. I liked it.
I only took off one star because I didn't engage with the game on an emotional level. Otherwise, the game is polished, descriptive, with good interactivity and a nice overall experience.
An engaging sci-fi tale using a parser-choice hybrid, April 9, 2018I enjoyed this game, which took me a few hours to complete (and one big part I missed out on because I didn't notice a certain room exit).
This game uses the same hybrid system as in Detectiveland and Draculaland, where you choose a noun to hold and various options become available.
The breadth of the puzzles is impressive, and the humor is great. A few times I was frustrated by not knowing what to do, but when I realized what was needed, I felt like the puzzles were fair.
The endings were nice, I think. It's good to have satisfying endings for a game.
Another Tangerine House Undum game with two views, April 9, 2018The Marino family has released several Mrs. Wobbles games over the years. This one is fairly long, and features two different protagonists.
All of these games feature a heavily costumized and illustrated Undum interface, like Twine but with a single, unbroken page of scroll. Text appears and disappears, stats are tracked, and there are several images.
This game seemed to have more depth than the other Tangerine House games; it offers two paths through the game, and a complicated inventory and even an economy.
A sprawling multi-platform tale about crime and love in North Dakota, April 8, 2018This is a very large game/story, comprising 3 Twine stories, 1 inklewriter story, 1 Instagram album, and three wordpress blog entries.
Reading quickly, even skimming from time to time, it took around 3 hours to finish.
The story is compelling: an unemployed woman gets a business opportunity from her brother that's too good to be true.
It's gritty and dark. It's full of profanity, which I filtered on my computer. It's also completely believable.
I'm giving it 4 stars because the fifth star is for "would I play it again?" and while it was very compelling, I felt mildly traumatized by the time I was done.
A crisp and smooth small illustrated Windrift game, April 8, 2018This is the first game to use Liza Daly's windrift system besides her own.
I found the writing in this game to be sharp and evocative; I loved it, and might nominate this for best writing of 2018 when that time comes around.
It's very short, and the interactivity is quite limited, but the visuals are placed very well, and the styling and writing come together in a really pleasing way.
A gripping short creepy story about identity , April 8, 2018I found this short horror story compelling. You are someone, somewhere, intentionally vague, and you have a knack for finding faces on things.
The game is more than just that, of course, but I found it compelling, especially with the multimedia.
I don't want to say too much about it, because experiencing it all is the point. I wasn't satisfied with the conclusions of the piece though, even after experimentation. But that's something that's due to personal taste.
This has nothing to do with my rating or even something I think the author should do, but I wish the game had included a gallery of found faces. But I can satisfy that interest by my own searches. I like this game.
A short and difficult eastern monastery game, April 7, 2018I'm a fan of Anssi Raisanen's games, and this one in particular was interesting, but it lacked a few key features that other games from this author have.
It had one particularly clever puzzle involving an extra image included with the game, one maddening guess-the-verb puzzle, and one short and sweet puzzle. Overall, it was shorter than most Raisanen games, and with somewhat less good implementation.
But if you're playing through the author's whole collection, I wouldn't skip out.
A short, lonely Quest game in a futuristic setting, April 6, 2018This is an odd little game with some major implementation problems.
You start out in a room with a tree and a mysterious force. Exiting this room proved too difficult for many IFComp reviewers in 2006. Evidently, it requires an action that is explicity denied by the GUI. This seems to be an oversight, and not a puzzle.
The rest of the game involves exploring a series of generic rooms. There is a minimal walkthrough, but it seems to leave out several interesting portions of the game. I was intrigued, but unable to discover more than a few hidden set pieces.
A bizarre game with great depth and replay value and tricky UI, April 6, 2018This was one of the few IFComp 2015 games that I never reviewed. On my old laptop, it wouldn't even run; every page of text would be immediately erased.
It works on my new laptop, though. And what an unusual game it is.
It runs in a command-prompt type window, and uses single-letter commands with occasional typing of names and numbers.
It is a surreal game, with huge standing waves surrounding a 25-location town and people getting murdered left and right, each murder announced by red lightning.
A hallucinogenic bunny hops around guiding you.
I've never come close to finding the murderer, but I've discovered many of the game's secrets over my 4 playthroughs. The best involved a tightly-timed sequence at a bar leading to a length CYOA sequence.
This is a game with several flaws, such as the fact that you can't scroll back through text due to it disappearing, and it's incredibly easy to hit a button and miss a whole page of text. There is no save command.
But these flaws enhance it; it makes you approach the game more cautiously. This game is a masterpiece in a way. But it requires length play.
A just-off-reality alternate timeline game where Napoleon survived, April 4, 2018Disclaimer: I write for Choice of Games and received this copy for free.
This game is set in an alternate reality where Robert Fulton had more freedom to work with steam and Napoleon survived long enough for succession to be a question. The game is meticulously researched to be as close to baseline reality as possible.
You play the personal bodyguard and childhood friend of Alexandre Walewski, the illegitimate but favored heir of Napoleon. You deal with court intrigue and assassination attempts as you mold the future of France.
I didn't like the beginning of this game, so much that I set it aside for months. I just didn't find it compelling.
But one of the biggest strengths that Choice of Games has is the length of their games. Once I played a few more chapters, I had spent so much time with these characters that I became emotionally invested. I was very satisfied with my outcomes.
I also enjoyed the chance you had to make major changes in the outcomes of different chapters, and to take charge.
I don't give 5 stars to all choice of games games; this one was, in my mind, special.
A 5-Episode virtual reality mecha game in ADRIFT, April 4, 2018ADRIFT usually has the weakest of the popular parsers (Inform, TADS, Quest, etc.), and this game is no exception.
The concept is interesting: you play as a human playing a virtual reality video game after the main game has ended. There are several layers of reality, similar to Wreck-it-Ralph. You play in a single layer, though.
The video game is about giant mechas fighting aliens. The after-the-game playthrough that occupies most of Mishmash is a stealth game using a 'ghost cap'.
I enjoyed the opening scenario, but the game quickly devolved into walkthrough-only territory.
A puzzle game with intentional and unintentional insights to game industry, April 3, 2018This game is a puzzle game with three difficulties (corresponding to more or less turns) and gender options.
You have to cram through a packed day of tasks to get a game produced.
I worked in the game industry in the early 2000's, and all of this was very familiar. The caffeine-fueled late nights testing bugs, the feuds, the wheeling and dealing, and the shiny, beautiful golden master CD. I was on the outside of it, but it was intense.
This game is really tricky, and not all solutions are coded for, even fairly reasonable ones.
This game also offers unintentional glimpses into game culture, which also ring true in an unpleasant way. The main puzzle involving a woman executive has her being embarrassed to ask you to open a box that she's struggling with. All women are assumed to have long hair, etc. The penknife you have is a Mexican penknife, about which the game says the following:
"* What's up with the "Mexican army knife"?
Again, no politics, I just needed something that could cut twine but still be flimsy enough to break off after one use. Given the comparatively small size and budget of the Mexican army, it seemed like an easy gag. Plus I got to put in a funny line about a hazy trip to Tijuana."
All of these things that I mentioned were fairly innocuous in the game culture when this is written, but don't hold up to modern scrutiny.
A compelling twine game with two worlds, one Porpentine-esque, April 2, 2018This is a surprisingly good Twine game from Spring Thing a few years back. I say surprisingly, because I never hear anyone talk about it.
It uses graphics and background colors to distinguish between two different worlds: one, a porpentine-like world with beings of slime and technology, and the other the human world, where a father is struggling with mental illness.
It has puzzles; at one point, there is a long sequence involving the food chain. I found bits of this fiddly, but interesting enough that I was happy when it was done.
The overall storyline was great, and that's what I like best about games. So I recommend this one.
A bland but complex fantasy game , April 1, 2018This game hits up almost all of the classic overused parser game tropes: you are a wizard's apprentice in a fantasy town on a quest to get scrolls of spells by completing complicated fetch quests. The parser is another 'let's insult the PC' parser, and the game has hunger and sleep timers.
This style of game was popular for a time in the 90's (with Unnkulia and Westfront PC), but otherwise has continued to be produced since then on a regular basis.
Why do people still make it (even in 2018, years after this game)? Because it can still be fun, and sometimes overused tropes are overused because they're so good.
But in this case, I mostly felt frustrated. I stopped playing the first time I tried it a year or two ago because it was so frustrating getting killed over and over again in the windmill. This time, I completed the game (by (Spoiler - click to show)Taking several breaks to return the broom early).
I finally completed it now. If you're just hankering for some unforgiving old-school games, try this out. But I prefer some other more recent old-school games, like A Beauty Cold and Austere, or Speculative Fiction, or Scroll Thief, all of which had clever innovations.
An amusing game with a unique PC, April 1, 2018This game was influential on my own writing. In this game, you play as a disembodied eyeball which must solve various puzzles on a desk and on a fireplace mantel.
It's creative and its fun. However, I found the interactivity frustrating, and so I never completely engaged with the writing and the concept.
A short doing-homework simulation, March 31, 2018This is an odd game. The author coded up a little puzzle where you find answer to homework questions and then type them in, together with one or two little fetch quests.
They then spent a great deal of time polishing that game and adding extra frills. But the core game is brief, and the means of completing it are clunky.
This is certainly a unique game.
A slick commercial game by a former Infocom author, March 31, 2018This game was funded by kickstarter, like Hadean Lands before it. It casts you as a novice magic user who is trying to save magic folk from discovery.
The magic system is a bit unusual; it seems to rely mostly on moon-logic. In fact, a lot of the game does. There's really no connection between things; it seems like the puzzles are mostly solvable by trying everything everywhere.
Many players enjoy this style of careful play, and the game has very positive steam reviews and ratings on here, and people I've talked to liked it quite a bit.
But I like puzzle games where you can plan ahead more, like Hadean Lands. I felt like Thaumistry kept saying 'I'll notice that you tried a reasonable solution, but it's not the one I want. Just wait and be patient, kid.' I ended up stopping playing halfway and through, and left it that way for months.
So it's not my style. But it is incredibly high-quality in terms of polish. It was beta tested over and over, and looks good.
An Adrift robot murder mystery, March 30, 2018This was a charming game, and in a genre I haven't seen too much of: a murder mystery set completely in a world of robots. Bad Machine and Suspended both give off the same vibe of this game, that of a purely mechanical society, but this game achieves a remarkable contrast between the impassiveness of the robots and the emotion of the investigation.
It suffers from ADRIFT's standard problems, but to a much smaller degree than usual. I did have some trouble guessing the later actions, but overall I found myself pleased by this game. I've been lucky enough to find a string of good games in a row this week.
A short murder mystery game with a mid-level of polish, March 30, 2018This game was entered in IFComp 2004. It has two PCs, one featured in the prologue, and one who is a main character detective.
The opening scene was clever, but I soon find myself frustrated by small bugs and a lack of implementation. Without proper feedback, it was hard to know if I was on the right track or not.
The game has several puzzles which are fairly hard to guess on your own, and which seemed somewhat unfair to me.
Overall, it was interesting, and had a nice cat character.
A kid's story with 10 different color coded islands, March 30, 2018This game is really interesting. By the author of Little Blue Men and Anchorhead, it is intended for children and comes with a great set of supplementary materials.
There is a sort of tedious opening with a ton of hand-holding before it opens up to a wide world. I enjoyed the islands, especially the junk and dark islands.
I felt like the author was holding back a bit on some descriptions that could have been made biting and/or sad. But the sparseness was fun.
One of the last islands seemed like a big buildup to an anticlimax.
Overall, I have to say I enjoyed it, because I couldn't put it down, and couldn't wait all the next day to play more. So that's a good sign!
One thing that can seemingly lock you out of victory:
(Spoiler - click to show)The icefruit seed doesn't respawn correctly.
So I suggest that, to be safe, you save (Spoiler - click to show)before using it.
You'll know you did it right if (Spoiler - click to show)Something dramatic happens.
A difficult and sprawling dark fantasy/comedy circus game, March 28, 2018I played this Guttersnipe game after I played the IFComp 2017 one.
This is a big Quest game. You play as a ragamuffin urchin who is trying to be the number one urchin of all time. The game uses a variety of humorous dialects to show character, including yours.
You enter a dark circus, and have to discover its secrets. This is a big game with a big map, with 1-2 puzzles per room. Generally, an item found in one room will solve one puzzle somewhere else.
I liked this game, and would have given it 4 stars, but I found it a bit difficult to complete, and I abandoned it partway through. If it had a complete walkthrough, I would probably give it 4 stars.
This author has a number of other games that are big and well-received, including Night House and the other Guttersnipe game.
Edit: I finished playing, and the parts I hadn't been able to reach were actually great! I wish this were ported to Inform or TADS.
A wonderful one-room puzzle box with tons of items and layers of clues, March 27, 2018This is a great one-room puzzle game in the same vein as The Wand or Lord Bellwater's Secret.
You are placed in a room and tasked with finding a certain word. This is quite a difficult task. The room is split up into 9 different sub-locations, each with puzzles, usually several puzzles. There are experimentation puzzles, intuition puzzles, red herrings, crossword-style puzzles, math puzzles, etc.
I was able to solve it without hints, but I think I played it once 8 years ago, and it gave me a hint on a particularly tricky problem.
About half of my playtime was just going to each of the 9 sections of the room and examining everything. The other half was putting the clues together.
An unplished made game about visiting exotic locations, March 21, 2018This game purports to be the eleventh in a long series, which is a clever gimmick. The game has several clever parts.
However, it has a lot of little bugs that add up to a good deal. It's self-aware about it (the game's most accurate line is "Oh boy, you sure hope these generic messages don't mean this puzzle is bugged!").
Overall, it was interesting, but I wasn't able to complete one of the three core puzzles, the one belonging to the error message above. I did read the ending after decompiling, though.
A polished and complex short cooking-based game, March 21, 2018I beta tested this game.
This is a unique concept for a text adventure. You are pitted in a Chopped-style cooking challenge against three other chefs. Your goal is to cook a certain recipe in twenty minutes.
Unfortunately, your competitors have their own ideas, and you have some trouble on your own.
This reminded me of Varicella, both in the numerous autonomous actions of others, and in the time constraint. It also left me feeling like there was more for me to discover that I hadn't figured out.
A short humorous horse relationship game, March 18, 2018This game is billed as just a demo for doing relationships in twine, which affected my perception of it (in the sense that I assumed it wasn’t a fully fleshed game), but it manages to have a lot of heart and some neat tricks.
It is based on a riding school with three different ponies/horses, who you interact with in a couple of branching choices. Each one has its own likes and dislikes, which affect the ending.
It succeeded in its goal of making twine seem more like choicescript, and made me laugh a few times. If it was going to be fleshed all of the way out, I wish it were longer and had better cluing as to the effects of the relationship choices and more endings. But as it is I like it.
A media-heavy short terror story about sleep paralysis, March 17, 2018This story uses media in unusually good ways. It has audio, graphics, animation and text effects.
The game is creepy on two levels. On the first level, it has overtly 'horror'-type text, almost over-the-top. On the second level, it serves to illustrate what something experiencing sleep paralysis could encounter, and I found that much more disturbing.
The story had a narrative twist that I found lessened my enjoyment of it as a game, but heightened my appreciation of it as a piece of art or a means of communicating thoughts. Because I think the artist intended it more as a story or art, I've considered it as such and given it 5 stars
Uses slow text, but in an appropriate way. I usually hate slow text, but it makes sense here. The whole piece is well-considered and designed as a whole.
A tricky take on the classic logic problem, March 8, 2018I expected this game to just be a straightforward implementation of the classic logic puzzles (involving getting a fox, a duck, and some grain across a river. Other versions have a wolf, a goat, and some cabbage, and so on).
However, the author assumes that everyone already knows this puzzle. Instead, each step of the classic solution is hampered by a different difficulty.
I felt that most of the solutions were of the moon logic variety, or like late Sierra point and click games. Also, the implementation was at times spotty with the rope, which is a notoriously difficult thing to code.
An old, short IFComp game about science fiction, amnesia, and families, March 8, 2018This is a fairly short science fiction game with 5 or 6 puzzles.
As the other reviewer noted, it was under implemented, with several locations having no description at all. There were other things that were strangely over implemented, such as a certain action in the first room having more than a dozen responses.
The idea was clever, overall, but the game has a real penchant for attacking the character with strong profanity and insulting many things that you do. It has a narrative purpose, but it seems like the sort of thing a young author thinks is intense and meaningful before they begin to get more experience.
I would have given 2 stars, but the puzzle bits were satisfying, so I gave it 3.
An amusing and odd fantasy game involving a series of trolley problems, February 26, 2018This game is set in a fantastical alternate world with animate skeletons and talking pigs.
Supernatural trolleys and trolley lines connect different parts of the world together, and you are a harpooner on one such trolley.
Your task is to be confronted with several situations where the good of one is pitted against the good of many and you have to make a choice. This is the classical trolley problem, and also, in this game, a literal trolley problem as you decide who to run over.
There is also a side mystery uncovered by Club Floyd but which I was not aware of.
A branching horror story in a cave with a challenging puzzle, February 26, 2018This was an interesting game.
You find yourself in a cave in a branching sort of exploration/conversation.
On my first play through, I ended it fairly quickly, and I wasn't too impressed. It seemed like a faintly cheesy sort of Halloween story.
But on my second play through, I encountered much more text, and the game became much more developed, with compelling issues and questions together with a nice puzzle.
Overall, I recommend it for fans of horror.
A smooth, short sci-fi/AI game with fancy text effects, February 5, 2018This game, similar to Leinonen's earlier Ex Nihilo, is a short text-effects-heavy game about a powerful entity questioning its own existence.
This time, though, the game is linked to all of Wikipedia, and debates the worth of existence of an advanced system. Overall, though, like Ex Nihilo, this game feels like a demo for advanced graphics in a text setting. This isn't bad, but the game is very short.
Definitely worth checking out!
A chain of disconnected, silly events, February 5, 2018This game is a sequence of surreal puzzles. You've woken up in a world where Half-Life 3 has been confirmed, and this is a clear indicator that reality has been warped.
The setting is goofy and charming, but this quick game doesn't have the author's usual polish and guidance. Puzzles, including the very first puzzle, rely on some very unusual logic, making the game more difficult in somewhat unfair ways.
The character descriptions were good, though.
A fantasy one-move game about combat with an ancient vampire, February 3, 2018This game was part of the New Year's minicomp. I was pleased to see that it's a puzzly one-move game, and that the formatting was done well.
The setting is fairly standard fantasy, but it helps establish the setting quickly. You are a sort of paladin facing a 'Red Queen' vampire.
I'm very much into D&D inspired games, and one-move games. But some very basic things were not implemented, like 'pray' (when you're a paladin and the game mentions your orisons). But enough was implemented to be fun.
A try-die-repeat game with oddball knowledge-based puzzles, January 26, 2018The original Lurking Horror was one of my favorite Infocom games, so I was interested in seeing Veeder's take on it.
This game is closer to Captain Verdeterre's Plunder than to any of Ryan's other games. Like Verdeterre, this game has a tight timer that sends you to your death, and you must play over and over to beat it.
This game exploits that structure for the story in amusing ways, though. You pick up in G.U.E. Tech (from Lurking Horror, itself inspired by M.I.T.), stuck in a time loop caused by the awakening of an Elder God. You are very aware of your previous iterations.
Progress is similar to Hadean Lands, in that you progress by gaining knowledge that your later iterations use. But instead of being tracked in-game, the knowledge is stored in password-like spells. The spell names include mangled versions of the author's name and a scrambled name of a D&D slime demon.
I enjoyed this game quite a bit; the solutions were generally very reasonable, and there was a nice 'power boost' or two near the middle of the game, with the end requiring you to tie everything together. I got impatient with one puzzle in the middle, when I had half a dozen unused spells and the same number of unsolved rooms and I couldn't figure out which ones went together. I decompiled to get past that stage, and didn't have any trouble after that.
A polished, short modernist tale about a storm, January 20, 2018This game is firmly in the modernist tradition of the early 1900s, similar to works by Kafka or T.S. Eliot.
The tags on this game include 'existentialist' and 'absurd', and that's a good description.
The game is dream-like; you are in a lushly detailed house where nothing really matters, and the story drives you forward. It's like a Ryan Veeder game without the Ferris Bueller attitude.
Overall, I found it effective, especially because I forgot the french IF commands and had to look them up (on the french play-IF card http://ifiction.free.fr/fichiers/play-if-card_fr.pdf), so at first I was just typing room names. This gives you a description of the room, but doesn't take you there, and doesn't give you the same description as actually being there. This made the game very odd.
Overall, I liked it.
An innovative drag-drop game with a cyclic structure, January 20, 2018This game seems like an advance upon the simple structure of Texture. In both game systems, you drag keywords onto other words. But in this game, you find the keywords, drag them into an inventory, and can pull them out whenever you like. A four-item inventory limit causes pressure in the game.
I like the system. The story is generic hack-and-slash, but I like generic hack-and-slash, so it wasn't bad. It was deeply implemented for all reasonable responses, though.
With a larger inventory, this could support a long and complicated game. The interactivity in this particular game though wasn't quite what I enjoy; it was mostly a try-repeat-again game, and it was frustrating losing at the end due to choices I made at the very beginning.
An intriguing horror mystery with humor, January 20, 2018I beta tested this game, so it's hard to be objective about it. I think I would give it a 4.5/5, so I rounded up.
Faute De Servo combines several game ideas that I love, including waking up in a lab-like environment with no clue what's going on (like Babel) and gaining powers by devouring random things (like the under-played Mangiasaur).
Much of the game consists of figuring out the action system, as well as the backstory of your location. I found this somewhat confusing (which is why I gave 4.5/5) but the presentation is so slick that it makes up for it.
There's also a good deal of humorous banter in the game, which I enjoyed. It is derivved from a cast of characters with distinct personalities and varying levels of intelligence.
This is definitely worth playing, both for the overall game concept and for the nifty implementation.
More combat innovation from Corax. A long battle game, January 17, 2018After seeing several gritty fantasy choice RPGs this last IFComp that were just okay, it's great to see a complicated and balanced combat system where you have to make real choices.
In this game, you take the role of Hansel and Gretel, in a more modern setting, as they track down and kill sorceresses one at a time. Over several chapters, you have to solve difficult puzzles in an exploration segment (which also unlocks 'fragments' or powers you can activate in later chapters), followed by one or more combat segments.
Combat has a relative positioning system where enemies are different steps in front or behind you. You can turn around, advance, use weapons of different ranges and effectiveness, make use of cover, focus and dodge, etc.
It's of similar complexity to Kerkerkruip. It's written using Vorple, so that helps the complexity, but it prohibits saving. The author has found a clever way past this using a password system, which transported me to the 90's and my time playing Willow and Punch-Out! on the NES.
It was very long; the challenge of the puzzles, complex combat, and playing in a non-native language made me take 2 hours for the first 5 chapters, and I don't have time to finish it right now, but a look through the walkthrough shows that it has a complex plot. This is a high-quality game.
A fairly long fantasy CYOA game in Inform 6 with vivid characters, January 15, 2018This French game is in a CYOA format. It’s an adventure story, almost novella length, set on a fantasy world. It has a tone that is lighter and appropriate for young adult and middle school readers. In fact, it reminded me of Norbez’s IFComp game If You Squint it Looks Like Christmas in its tone, genre, length, and choice structure (as a point of reference for ifcomp players).
I liked the story overall, even sharing parts of it with my wife. It’s a heartwarming and cheerful story, with vivid characters and moments of excitement.
The choice structure wasn’t what I’m used to; many of the choices were “do something awesome or leave”. I never tried leaving, because I wanted to see what would happen. Eventually, I become somewhat paranoid that the leaving choices were important, so it gave more weight to my decisions.
I would give it 4 stars if it had a save system. I couldn’t find one, and this is very lengthy.
A short, meditative Twine game about a dual-culture paramedic , January 13, 2018This Twine game is intentionally short and linear, but it's not quite as linear as it advertises; basically, you are unwinding after a long day, and you get to pick what order to unwind in.
You seem to be a volunteer for a hospital, as well as a student. Actions like taking off your boots or untying your hair trigger memories from earlier in the day.
I found it fascinating as a glimpse into another, medical world, as well as portraying a character who seems to be a minority in their current situation.
A current issue repainted in a fantasy world in Twine, January 13, 2018This game was inspired by the debates in America surrounding the law passed in North Carolina restricting transgender individuals from using bathrooms besides those of their biological gender.
This game isn't really an allegory, as exactly the same things are happening in this world as in ours. Rather, it reframes the discussion using fantasy techniques to give events a greater emotional impact.
I played through one branch to the end, and rewound a bit to get three different endings. The Twine styling and coding was beautiful, with links represented by +'s for links that furthered the study and *'s used for asides.
It took less than 25 minutes for me. The interactivity was interesting, because it spells out the consequences of your choices in an in-game way.
Fans of DeNiro's other works or of topical commentary will appreciate this game.
A post-apocalyptic take on current American politics, January 12, 2018This is an ePub game with hyperlinks. It consists of a series of articles with footnotes and cross references.
The idea is that a viral outbreak has caused the collapse of America, combined with Trump’s actions. As you dig deeper, though you find a greater truth.
It’s coever, but the chosen format is slow paced and sometimes dull in the name of realism, like when it had a largely standard ten page blank medical form. Many critical moments are hidden in transcripts emulating Reddit and 4chan, and the author took painstaking care to recreate the racism, homophobia and misogyny of these forums. This didn’t really suit me.
This was a creative format, and represents a great deal of work. The writing is detailed and feels authentic.
An educational esperanto adventure in 5 chapters of Twine, January 12, 2018This game is, it seems, written in Esperanto. I thought it was Portuguese at first, but the game itself corrected me.
You are Alice, and, I believe, you are headed to an Esperanto-speaking conference, where you meet someone who tells you about Esperanto. I learned that Esperanto has between 100,000 and 1,000,000 speakers. Given that the number of Twine fans is probably somewhere in that range, too, and the intersection is fairly low, I don't think many people will be able to complete this game.
I only got through the first third of the first chapter. Looking through the code, it seems like there is a compelling fantasy element in the middle.
This is an intriguing game, and a great amount of work.
An amusing little medieval/goofy farce, December 17, 2017I have to give a caveat about my score first; I think this game is really around a 5 out of 10 on the IFComp scale; it's short, silly, self-conscious. But, it satisfies all of my 5 star criteria:
1. Polished: I didn't encounter any errors, and the writing was consistent, and even the plain twine styling seemed to fit the story.
2. Descriptive: The game has a nice voice and inventive language (I chuckled at the word turdburglar, especially because I misread it at first).
3. Interactivity: The game presented me with exactly the kind of options I wanted at several points in the game. It was actually very effective at presenting options that made me go 'Yes! This is exactly what I want to do'.
4. Emotion. I smiled a lot.
5. Would I play it again? Yes, I'm interested in exploring the mechanics.
So this is technically a 5, but on the 'how much will the average IF player like it' scale, I'd give it a 2-3.
An intriguing slice of life game with troubled implementation, December 5, 2017This game has a great premise: you are a trolley driver on a monotonous route who has a plan which is only slowly revealed to the player.
This has all sorts of potential, and the game throws in some interesting characters and narrative twists.
But it has two main issues: one is a lack of synonyms and other implementation errors; and the other is a lack of in-game guidance.
Other than that, I found it a pleasant game, with a surprising ending.
A creepy but buggy tale about a state park , December 3, 2017This quest game has refreshingly original storybuilding. It includes a big pamphlet you can read which does a good job of displaying a 'descent into madness', although I think it could have done better if it left a bit more mystery in the last few pages.
The game has a layout (story-wise) similar to Karella's earlier Night House. You are alone in a building, and something is outside, and you have to figure out what it wants.
I was unable to complete this during Ectocomp. Afterwards, some people commented on intfiction with the solution.
Overall, this was a positive experience once I knew what to do.
A massive game with a modern setting, battling monsters and humor, December 3, 2017Cryptozookeeper is an XYZZY Award winner, and is one of the biggest games out there in terms of content, especially in terms of NPC content.
You play as a character who is sucked into a world where you can blend together DNA and create new monsters, who then fight each other in a pokemon-like system.
The system takes center stage story-wise, but not mechanically. The game is structured in a series of 'episodes', each of which results in new DNA for your devices.
The game has a ton of characters, many of whom constantly follow you around and talk and joke.
The implementation is selective; some parts are extremely detailed, while many synonyms and scenery descriptions are omitted.
This game is truly monumental. It also has a great deal of profanity and suggestive language.
Play as a living dungeon in this short looping game, December 3, 2017I swear this game was different the first time I played it. In any case, what it is now is a living dungeon Twine game; you are a living dungeon, and adventurers come in in a cycle. You choose from a menu of 3 randomly generated options until either the adventurer dies, or succeeds.
I thought it was clever, and the graphic was helpful. But I felt like it could be further developed.
An early example of the limited-parser genre, December 3, 2017Arthur DiBianca has made several popular limited parser games, including Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, Inside the Facility and The Wand.
Excelsior was their first attempt, and its player respons/reviews influenced the later games.
Excelsior restricts all action verbs to movement and 'USE'. Your goal is to reach the top of a tall tower.
I thought I had played through this whole game before, but I played through with the walkthrough, and I was surprised at how much there was. I think this game does not measure up to DiBianca's later games, as there is a great deal of "something changes somewhere that you can't see" devices here, that makes the game very complicated.
An incredibly hard puzzle twine game with complicated inventory and riddles, November 20, 2017Some people really enjoy difficult puzzle games, like Fish! or Praser 5 or System's Twilight.
This is the first time I've seen such a game done well in Twine. It is very hard; it has been given a 'nasty' forgiveness rating by the author, and that is completely appropriate.
There are frequent deaths and ways to lock yourself out of victory, but there is a multi-save feature which helps.
The first part of the game is an escape the room puzzle. I thought it itself was one of the hardest twine puzzle I had seen, and I thought it was the whole game, and a longish one at that. Once I escaped, I realized the main game was much, much, much bigger. In fact, the next area was huge, and I thought that was the whole game, and then it opened up into the real game! And there's an epilogue about as long as the first complex.
I couldn't finish, even looking at the source code. This is unfair, difficult, and crazy, so if you're in the mood for something like that, you've found it.
An Escher-esque maze of smells and riddles and puzzles, November 17, 2017This is a mid-length IFComp game from 2006. It's a surreal afterlife/coma type game where you've been in a car crash and must travel through your mind to escape back to reality, hopefully with your wife.
It has a maze of rooms, inaccessible at first due to the fact that doors and archways are placed on ceilings and high walls, willy-nilly. You eventually learn to control the maze.
Much of the game revolves around smells. There is a Nim game and also a difficult cryptographic puzzle. I found it under-clued and somewhat unfair.
A revenge murder story like Taken, November 17, 2017This game is mid-length; it has you play as an assassin infiltrating a house to avenge their daughter's death.
I have to wonder if this is a troll game. It is over-the-top, and includes a random adult scene (in metaphor form), and involves toilets and superglue as weapons of death.
There were several bugs and the writing wasn't especially polished.
A fairly good ghost story in Adrift with some bugs, November 17, 2017This story is actually pretty fun, given how little this is done in IF.
It's a traditional ghost/creepy story with an old abandoned house to search through.
It has numerous bugs, and a huge number of 'guess the verb' problems, but I was glad I played it and enjoyed it overall. I used the walkthrough.
A mishmash of DnD tropes with Christianity and roman history, November 17, 2017This has to be a troll game; Panks admitted before that some of his IFComp games are troll games (such as Ninja II). But if not...
You play as a weakened mythological god, except that that never gets mentioned after the first screen. You can find and kill Jesus. Most of the game is fighting DnD characters. There is a village with a tavern, like most Panks games.
It was interesting, but not his best offering.
An ambitious puzzly club game with implementation issues, November 17, 2017This game attempts quite a bit. You are trying to get into a mysterious club. The game is full of puzzles and many, many red herrings.
There was obviously a lot of thought and effort put in, but it could have used more testing. Fun with a walkthrough.
A thoughtful game with use of graphic backgrounds/animations, November 17, 2017I beta tested this game.
This is a unity/Ink game which takes place over several weeks in an apartment as the main character deals with life and with dreams.
Most of the choices are about how you interact with others and your view on life. The story is very malleable; your choices have strong effects on the outcome.
It turns out that the story is based on (and is an implementation of)(Spoiler - click to show)a personality test. Finding this out tied the whole game together for me. But I felt disconnected during the game, and I wish I had more idea of where my choices would take me.
An exercise in futility, in Twine format, November 17, 2017In 2006, Theo Koutz entered an IFComp game called Sisyphus, where you roll a stone up a hill and it rolls down again. It was a troll game that was smooth and polished.
This is essentially the same game, but with shiny new polish. You have to open some doors, but you can't. Replaying this, though, I found that I actually enjoyed the writing, perhaps more than any other game in the comp.
So this was pretty fun, despite the author's intentions.
Awesome transformation witch game, November 17, 2017I beta tested this game.
This game has a utilitarian interface, but don't let that fool you: this is a seriously great game.
Your magical witch house is broken, and you need to fix it. You have an inventory (even though it's web based), and you have the power to alter the elements of various inventory elements.
It has a cheerful backstory. Different items you carry interact with each other.
The various interactions are fiddly sometimes, and perhaps even unfair; but somehow everything gelled for me in a great way. Not everyone may feel the same.
A sci-fi culture clash game in journal form, November 17, 2017This game is one that I changed my opinion of over time. When I first played it, I skimmed it quickly, and I sort of dismissed it. I liked the sentence-shortening puzzles, but the text was confusing.
After reading several good reviews over the course of the competition, I'll admit, I revised my opinion due to popular opinion. In this case, I went through, and re-examined the writing, and I realized that it was a good depiction of a character that I disliked, rather than dislikable writing about a bland character as I had initially assumed.
For me, this places the game in the same category as Savoir-Faire, which had a similar roguish protagonist.
This is a high quality game; I'm giving it 3 stars only because I didn't connect on an emotional level. I feel like others will enjoy it even more than I did.
A cheerful fantasy game with dark undertones, November 17, 2017This game strongly reminds me of Owlor's pony-based games, even though the game never says that the protagonists are ponies (or humans, for that matter).
Your sister has sent a curse at you, and you have to cancel it out somehow. This is a navigation-based Twine game, and you have an inventory of sorts (you can pick different birds to follow you, and so on).
This game was pretty enjoyable; I would give it 4 stars, but it has some glaring errors, like Twine 'if' errors that post big messages on pages that occur in every playthrough. If those were fixed up, I'd bump up the score.
A fun little color-based mathematical puzzle, November 17, 2017This is one of my favorite Andrew Schultz games. It has you in a world where pseudoscience is real and real science is pseudoscience.
You play on a giant colored cube, and have to manipulate some transponders using a mood ring.
There's a second puzzle later that I did have trouble with, but overall, I liked the concept, and the game.
A game about conspiracy and aliens, November 17, 2017This game is centered around a spy drama, like the Bond movies. It is translated, with several errors.
The main characters is a chauvinist, who 'negs' women and is over macho. That really turned me off.
It does have a clever plot, involving a conspiracy (led by you) to manipulate the world.
A massive Twine game with a tangled web of themes, November 17, 2017There should be a name for the genre of 'biting commentary on society that is self-aware and occasionally dips to crudity, with hints of cheerful ideals always tinged by irony, using an overload of text as literary device.' Such games include Spy Intrigue and Dr. Sourpuss Is Not A Choice-Based Game. It seems increasingly common.
Charlie the Robot is gorgeous visually, and is innovative in its sheer variety of input methods and looks. There are 5 chapters accessible at any time, like Birdland.
The themes include surface themes of humans vs. robots, a lower layer of the mindlessness of modern office life, a lower layer of individualism, and so on.
But it was just too much filler for me to enjoy. The packing on and on and on of text is a literary device that doesn't work for me. I appreciate the themes in the game, and its cleverness, but the overall feel is just overwhelming.
A fun big RPG with nice styling but some bugs, November 17, 2017This RPG in Quest is just gorgeous. I loved the font and coloring.
You can choose a class, then do a preliminary quest, then a bigger quest, then maybe another one, then the final quest.
It held up better than just about any of the web RPGs in this comp. I couldn't finish it because it was really, really long.
I'd give it more stars, but there were some typos and some minor bugs. If they were fixed up, it would be great.
A three-act fantasy game with a big cast of characters, November 17, 2017I beta tested this game.
This game casts you as a translator of ancient languages in a fantasy world. It's split up into three acts: a tense moment on a boat, a fight in a town, and a climactic finale in an archaelogical dig.
The overall story, the characters, etc. are all well-drawn. But the game is so big that more needs to be filled-in; more responses to synonyms and commands, more conversational topics, more alternate puzzle solutions.
A trip through time at a magical library, November 17, 2017This game has you play as a father and daughter travelling to a real-life library (in Harvard, I think?)
You meet a goofy pair of twins that are mysterious and magical. And you discover a special moss that allows you to visit other times.
I felt like the game could have done more with the premise. But what's there is fun; I felt like I learned something interesting.
A game about censorship, November 17, 2017You play a government censor in this game. You are given a series of incriminating documents which you have to censor; clicking on various sentences blacks them out.
You are graded on how you do. This doesn't matter quite as much as you'd think, but it does affect the final ending.
I loved the feel of this game, the feel of manipulating documents and being in control. I do wish it had been longer or the the censoring had been more closely integrated with the story.
A short quest game in a magical house, November 17, 2017This short Quest game has you go into a mysterious house. In that house, you have to solve a few short puzzles and meet a stranger.
This game felt insubstantial to me; I wished for more: more puzzles, more backstory, more descriptions, more conversation.
This feels like the seed of a bigger and better game. I could see a 2.0 version of this game being very enjoyable.
A large mathematical journey of a puzzlefest, November 17, 2017I beta tested this game several times, and work with the author.
This is one of the best big games released in recent years. It's a mathematical puzzlefest, and it's huge; I'm a math professor, and I used the walkthrough, and it still took me 4 hours.
You travel through the history of mathematics, or more over a mind-map of theoretical concepts: the number line, arithmetic, algebra, all the way up to fractals.
The game is completable by non-math majors, according to several reviewers.
This is an old-school game; puzzles are unabashedly complex, each room is its own set-piece, NPCs don't engage in deep puzzle trees. I liked it, and I especially like that people are still making 'big games'.
A funny short TADS game where you seek out a dozen or so endings, November 17, 2017I beta tested this game.
This is a TADS game where you are on a spaceship, and anything you do (for long enough) results in a different wacky ending.
The author keeps you from meeting too many error messages; if you try to do something usually not allowed (like going down when you shouldn't) it justs adapts the game (like having you burrow through the metal). It even includes a battle-ship type game.
It made me laugh, it is pretty descriptive, but it's not polished in some sense that I have trouble grabbing hold of; and I felt confused without the hints.
Basically a children's novella with some interactivity, November 17, 2017I could see myself picking this book up and reading it in the library. You play as an orphan who gets sucked into another world by a mysterious stranger.
This other world is an Oz-like fantasy world that is creatively engineered. A long story plays out.
There's not much interactivity to speak of, though there are options scattered throughout. But I liked this; it reminded me of 'pulpy' kids books that I read when I was a teenager, like Deltora quest.
One of the best puzzly web games out there. Surreal Alice., November 17, 2017I beta tested this game.
This is an intense puzzle game, and it has some small graphics, background sounds/music, and timed responses.
This is a tricky, tricky puzzle game. You have to redeem yourself after destroying your father's pocket watch. The game sends you on a journey with several axes: time, space, size, etc.
I like it quite a bit, even writing down a walkthrough for it.
I only give it 4 stars because timed text delays drive me crazy. But not everyone may feel that way.
A cute little Twine tale of kids on an island, November 17, 2017This is a cute little game. You play as two kids who are searching for their pet named Sicomore.
You pick the order to visit three locations, then finish off the last location. So there's not much interactivity.
What makes it charming is that it seems like it was designed around a series of characters drawn and named by children, which I liked. The illustrations are provided in the game.
An odd mix of underimplementation and clever ideas, November 17, 2017This was a strange game. It has some great ideas: extricate yourself from a pile of rubble (which reminds me of an old comp game where you start in a pile of dead bodies and have to crawl out). You then explore a small underground complex with a Lovecraftian vibe.
But the game has a lot of implementation problems, leading to numerous judges missing out on big chunks of the game.
I didn't have too much trouble getting out of the pile, like some judges did, but I didn't even so the cabinets or the slicing machine.
Worth trying. I wish it were expanded.
A dancing-based historical game in a magnificent setting, November 17, 2017Ojuel is a master of setting, and this is a great game. You play as an former dancer in 1958 in a communist Carribean country. You have to extricate something from a house party, but you don't know what it is.
The game has great storytelling, using flashbacks and conversation to good effect. I see it getting nominated for several XYZZYs.
There were several implementation difficulties, though, because it was sometimes hard to know what verbs to use. A post-comp release that implemented every command response contained in judges' reviews would not take much time, and would add the finishing touches to this already great game.
A fancy symbol-sliding game, November 17, 2017This game has you speak completely in symbols.
You are bird, a child living with a single male named Ty. Ty has problems, and so do you.
You communicate with Ty completely in symbols. What this means in-game is never explained.
This story didn't grab me, but the presentation was slick, and it's a game worth replaying. Sometimes technical stuff is enough to impress me on its own; however, the author has a great knack for characterization as well.
A complicated hard sci-fi game with money system, November 16, 2017This game kind of threw me off at first; I used the walkthrough, which seemed super unmotivated, and some large pieces of occasionally-awkward text made me not like it as much.
But then lglasser said she loved it on her twitch stream, as did an Italian IFComp judge, so I gave it another shot, walkthrough-free.
This time around, I liked it. All reasonable commands seemed to be accepted. The game allowed a great deal of flexible exploration and a money system that worked. Exploration was all that was needed to trigger the story, and the hint system was just strong enough to get me through and just vague enough to make it a challenge.
It seemed oddly fixated an alien mating systems, but it was more National Geographic than anything else.
A limited parser castle comedy involving mistaken identities, November 16, 2017This is a very funny, long limited parser game about being a pig. A hero follows you, and believes you to be able to smell a polymorphing wizard. Anything you sniff, he smashes.
The first part of the game plays out in the tradition established by Arthur DiBianca, where a few key verbs are used in unusual ways to accomplish your goals. Later on, the game branches out, allowing you to switch between certain 'tools' to accomplish various goals.
This game is unusual among limited parser games in that it has quite a few large text dumps, often spanning more than a screen on a laptop computer with maximized window. The writing is good, the story is strong, but it can be a bit much, especially on a second playthrough.
This game also touches on several social issues (not least the annoying habit of young men singing Wonderwall).
A powerful Twine game about dementia, November 16, 2017I beta tested this game.
Stephen Granade has written a wonderful game here about an old man coping with dementia.
It makes magnificent use of unreliable narrator to depict the disorientation that dementia causes.
It is a fairly long Twine game, but autosaves, and has a nice feature that tells you how long the game has been playing.
Highly recommended.
An expansive time travel quest game, November 16, 2017This game is by Luke Jones, who also wrote the interesting Bony King of Nowhere for Spring Thing in 2017.
This game is a treasure hunt puzzle fest type game, but it's kind of spare and with some hard-to-guess puzzles. The puzzles mostly revolve around finding the item or items that will induce NPCs to do things for you.
The game has a large cast of characters, many of which have multiple versions of themselves over 3 time periods. It has also has many rooms over the same time period. But much of it is under implemented. A porter is present in each time period, but has very little description or conversation in any, except for one short paragraph once. However, the author was explicitly inspired by Robin Johnson's minimalist games, so it is likely intentional.
The game has good bones, though, with a pleasant run through campus history and future. If the author switched to Inform 7, like Steph Cherrywell did, and budgeted more time for beta testing and polishing, they could build on the success they already have.
An intense minimalist puzzlefest with magical color combinatorics, November 16, 2017This is one of the large puzzle fest games out there in recent years.
You play an adventurer entering a strange castle where all actions are performed by a wand: you set the wand to a color combination, then you go on.
It has a fun feel similar to Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, by the same author. Slowly, more and more combinations are revealed to you, often allowing you to go back and do things that you've been wanting to do for a while, but were unable to do.
HIghly recommended.
A literal walk in the park, with some teenager-ish issues and few goals, November 16, 2017This game is pretty aimless; you are on a bus that runs into something on the street, then you go around the park.
I think this part of what 'slice is life' is defined to be; there are no real goals. You can buy soda, talk to an old man, take Tylenol (which has very different effects than the Tylenol I'm used to. Unless it's Tylenol pm; maybe that makes more sense).
I found two different endings.
A treasure-finding RPG, November 16, 2017This game is a fairly traditional RPG, where you find better and better weapons/armor and equip them, and gain gold. It's framed as a VR story in a casino to better explain why items disappear in a puff of smoke and why all treasures get converted to their cash values.
I found the game enjoyable, and fairly long, although I bug kept me from going from the novice half to the expert half. I would recommend it for fans of RPGs.
A modern fable about a witch and her child, November 16, 2017This story is fairly linear, more like dynamic fiction than puzzle-based or branching cybertext.
In this game, you read the story of an old witch who, out of loneliness, creates a girl out of turnips.
This game has Megan Stevens' most imaginative writing of her IFComp games, and presents an interesting analogy between the witch/turnip girl and parents/millenials. It's short, and worth reading.
A polished and well-designed story framed as a simulation, November 16, 2017I beta tested this IFComp 2017 game.
This is a Twine game framed as a situation (specifically of feeding sea-monkeys), which the actual story is fitted into.
I found the colors and presentation very nice, and the game overall very polished. I did find it frustrating how long it took to reach the final ending, but that was mostly due to time crunch around IFComp. If you have time to play, this is a relaxing and enjoyable experience.
Contains infrequent strong profanity.
A blend of creepy pasta, wikipedia, and detective work, November 16, 2017This well-done game presents a murder mystery/creepypasta through a series of faux Wikipedia pages.
By clicking on link after link, you slowly come to realize the scope and depth of a deep plot. Unlike a normal murder mystery, this one has creepy pasta vibes, similar to SCP or the Russian Sleep Experiment, except more grounded in reality.
I found it interesting and compelling, although I felt it was a bit pulpy, and occasionally became tedious finding the links. It's the kind of game I wish I would have thought of.
A tight puzzle fest in a color coded escape-room game, November 16, 2017This game has you going to a live escape room in a mall or building somewhere.
Inside are a series of color-coded rooms with a variety of puzzles. They include a variety using slightly-less-standard-but-still standard verbs like 'search' or 'look under', etc.
I enjoyed this game. It didn't really inspire any emotion in me, but as a small puzzle snack, it does what it is intended to do.
I feel like this is an improvement over the author's previous game, Questor's Quest, and I'd like to see more from this author.
A haunting Finnish tale of a young witch, November 16, 2017This game is chock full of atmosphere, with compelling story and writing. Many 2017 IFComp judges found it compelling, and I predict it will receive at least one and probably several XYZZY nominations.
You play as a young witch in a Finnish village whose mistress has died. A dream has haunted everyone in town: a fighting force of strangers is coming in boats.
The game is fairly short, but well-done. There were a few guess-the verb spots, though. Overall, I recommend it.
An imaginative graphical game with few choicepoints, November 16, 2017This game plays out like a branching graphical novel. It has quite a few beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and images.
You are a space traveler who has left the earth with her young daughter. You are separated, and must travel to five different planets, seeking your daughter.
Choices are few, but you get some major ones. For me, the biggest attraction is the interesting characters and depicted societies in each world.
A great mid-sized Twine space exploration/trading game, November 16, 2017I beta-tested this game, and I deeply enjoyed it.
It's a twine game with some really nice use of color and a cool title screen.
You venture from world to world, doing some grinding of resources, and buying different equipment.
Other parts of the game include more room-to-room travel and taking and using items. There are story interludes, and so on.
It was a little shorter than I hoped for, but I'm still giving it 5 stars.
A live-action parser survival crafting game, November 16, 2017I beta tested this game.
This is an interesting concept: a Java game (just like minecraft!) which is a parser game with a real-time timer.
You find resources, and craft materials with them.
As it is, the game is difficult; however, a Wiki is provided that is especially helpful.
However, the difficulty was tuned just a bit too hard for me, and that made it hard for me to get sucked in.
A buggy but intense psychological symbolism game, November 16, 2017This game reminds me of Pilgrimage by Victor Ojuel. Both are symbolic games with female protagonists based on the 4 humors: sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious, and melancholic.
Beyond that, though, they diverge significantly. Temperamentum has a 'real world' and 4 different worlds themed on the idea of hot/cold, wet/dry associated to the 4 humors.
The game is heavy, about loss. I enjoyed it, but parts of it are almost impossible without the walkthrough, and the walkthrough itself is unreliable in parts (for instance, west and east are switched at one point, and in another, it uses the word 'woman' when only 'her' works).
A short branching Twine game about routine and its interruptions, November 16, 2017This is a short Twine game entered into IFComp 2017.
It branches in a non-trivial, interesting way. You are lying in bed after an evening with some man and you realize you need to wash your hands. But it's dark, and you don't really want to.
This is a character whose life is centered around routines, and around keeping secrets. I found it interesting, but not compelling.
A longish Twine game about anorexia with a few bugs, November 16, 2017This game is purposely modeled after Depression Quest. Instead of Depression, it models Anorexia, and was constructed as part of an academic sort of study.
This game is fairly long; if you load it up in Twinery, it has a huge amount of nodes and more than 5 endings.
However, the game often felt detached to me, and I ran into several broken pages that I had to back out of.
A standard fantasy RPG gamebook, in PDF form, November 16, 2017This game is written in PDF form, and you read along yourself, jumping to different pages.
I can't help but compare this game to Trapped in Time, another PDF gamebook entered into IFComp in a previous year. In that game, you had a tight series of events that were played over and over, and it allowed 'parser-like' actions where you would add 10 or 20 to an entry's number to do things like examining or using a card.
This game, however, relies more on randomized combat, and the largest parts of the game are two mazes.
It has some interesting storyline near the end, but I feel like it could have been tested out more by some experienced beta testers to help find out what works and what doesn't.
A rhythm-game interactive fiction in the magical realism genre, November 16, 2017This game has you tapping the space bar in rhythm to simulate swimming. As you continue to swim, the game's story progresses. If you stop swimming, you get an alternate version of the story. By progressing between swimming and not swimming, you finish the story.
It's a magical realism story centered on one moment in time, as you swim from one beach to another. I found it effective, but the interactivity wasn't quite what I liked.
A bizarre text which prints out one character at a time, November 16, 2017This game uses the obscure Floo text system. It has a 2-hour timer (that resets once it finishes). As you push any key, characters show up one at a time, revealing some text that seems procedurally generated, but not by the Floo engine; it seems like it was pre-generated and put into the floo interpreter, ready to be revealed one character at a time.
A history-based game about exploring an underground WWII factory, November 16, 2017This game has you exploring a fairly minimalist underground factory. Each room has one thing in it (except for a complicated office with several things), and most things are undescribed.
There are 3 or 4 puzzles, which are pretty good, but could use significantly more synonyms programmed in.
I liked it in general, but found it frustrating. The release notes were good.
A well-done parser hybrid mystery with graphics, November 16, 2017This game has you explore a reservation-based casino to try and uncover the truth behind a murder.
It implements a blackjack game, and uses graphics and a hand-made parser hybrid engine.
The primary portion of the game is investigating a few suspects by interviewing them, examining their items, and talking to those who have seen them.
However, I never felt strongly emotionally invested in the game. I did feel interested while playing, though.
A short, polished game with angels and a Christmasy feel, November 16, 2017This game is about a relationship between you (the angel Gabriel) and Demeter, a human man.
It’s a 2-room game, and the main object is to find objects of various colors to complete a rainbow. The game cheats a little by hiding colors in meta ways, but I found the color hint reasonably fair, well implemented, and fun.
A mid-length cybertext game about orcs, rage, and peace, November 16, 2017I beta tested this game.
In this game, you play as an orc monk who has sworn off violence. However, your monastery has been attacked, and you are the sole survivor.
The game tracks several stats, including rage and health, and you have the chance to visit three different locations on your way to the grand finale. There are several endings.
I enjoyed this game, but I wished it were longer. I felt like there wasn't enough material to grab into a story with as much background information as this one. What was there, was good though.
A hyperlinked essay on Christianity and the LGBTQ community, November 16, 2017This is a lengthy essay in 4 or 5 parts about what it means to be Christian and LGBTQ.
The author describes their coming to grips with being a non binary person.
I found it interesting, and it was polished and descriptive. But I felt like it didn't benefit from its interactivity.
An interactive short poem in the form of a list, November 16, 2017This is a twine game where every letter is hyperlinked to other passages. Each passage is a single sentence fragment describing a thing.
It's short, and charming. I enjoyed it; it doesn't have much substance to it, but it doesn't need to. It didn't provoke any strong emotions in me.
The individual letter idea was clever, and elevates my opinion of the game.
An over-the-top super villain game with multiple protagonists, November 16, 2017I enjoyed this 2017 IFComp game. You play as a consultant for super villains who answers their questions for money. The parser becomes a phone line, of which you have 2, and your commands are commands to the villains themselves.
Each villain has unique powers. The writing for the radioactive man grated on me a bit, but overall I found it clever. This game had the most traditional gameplay of the top games of the competition, with no limited parser commands.
I recommend it, and hope that everyone reading this will take the time to try it.
A clever premise involving source code, with mixed execution, November 16, 2017This game has you open up the source in the infirm compiler, so that you can see the source and the compiled game simultaneously. The source becomes a short story, with comments, and is a companion piece to the game.
It’s a clever idea, and I enjoyed the melodramatic story the game had. But the constraints needed to make th source code readable made the game overly simplistic and under implemented.
The meek shall inherit...something, November 16, 2017This is a fairly long and polished Twine game with multiple branches, more or less in the Gauntlet style under Ashwell's classification system.
The game is centered around meekness. You are a milquetoast character on a train dealing with family issues and personal anxiety.
If you choose to, you can be sent on a small adventure, where you learn more about the possibilities in yourself.
The writing was engaging, but I felt like my choices didn't really matter (outside of Do you want to continue or Not), and I feel like they didn't drive the text forward. The concept was creative, though.
A gauntlet of kitty death in a witches story, November 16, 2017This short Twine game has you acting as a witch's assistant for fetching a magical flower.
Every choice that you make leads you either to instant death or further along the path.
The witch who owns you refers to other cats; could this be other lives, or do you play multiple protagonists? A careful reading can reveal more.
The writing was well done, but I would have preferred a different kind of interactivity.
A big Twine RPG with different classes and randomized combat, November 16, 2017I enjoyed this game from IFComp 2017. You choose from one of three character classes, and you can take a variety of characters with you, including a sonomancer (something like that) who integrates music with magic.
There is a power creep issue that several judges noticed, where pretty much anyone who makes it to the endgame can one-shot the boss, but besides that, the core concepts worked well for me. I feel like it needs more polish; combat has several blank lines requiring you to scroll, for instance.
I was glad I played this one, because I'm a fan of D&D and this reminded me of trying out someone's home-brew campaign. Your mileage may vary.
A home-brew parser horror game with graphic sexual violence, November 16, 2017This game was entered into the 2017 IFComp. It is plagued by bugs and translation errors, and it uses a home-brew parser that is missing some of the capability of a standard parser.
The story has you searching the house to make sure your friends and family are all right after a ghost haunts the house. It has several graphic depictions of sexual violence in a crude sort of way.
A graphics-and-image heavy game with few choices about murder, November 16, 2017This game was one of three translations of Qiaobooks games entered into IFComp 2017. I helped organize people to test this game.
It has a really interesting technical concept: text is typed out on timed intervals with changing backgrounds and timed sound effects/music.
However, some of the execution falls down; the translation, even after a few revisions, is off, as is the typesetting (apostrophes especially have problems). The graphics render the text difficult to read.
More troubling for me is the storyline of this game, which features a fairly sexist protagonist.
I enjoyed the other two Qiaobook games entered in the competition more, although this one was the longest.
A short space horror thriller in Twine, November 16, 2017This short Twine game uses specialized styling to give a retro sci-fi fi feel, and the story fits that vibe as well. You are visiting a base on the moon which has been terrorized by space animals. It borrows heavily from the feel of the Alien movies.
However, it is fairly short, and the writing has a few problems that could be remediated by some more careful revision and beta testing. Overall, though, the basic storyline was interesting.
A tech-savvy game about the end of a young girl's life, November 16, 2017This game is about a girl named Mikayla, whose phone you find. The game consists of digging though all the apps in the phone to see what her life was like.
I enjoyed the photos (of random things like dogs and writing) and the poetry. There were text notes and voice memos that were, I think, too long for me. They seemed to be there mainly to provide a feeling of reality and background; however, in a storytelling environment, being 'true to life' often makes things too unwieldly. I feel that the purpose of stories is to condense and crystallize reality, and those two parts of the game could have used significant condensing and crystallization.
Overall, it left a good impression on me, especially the ending (which I found by poring through the code).
A shortish Lovecraftian horror game set on an airplane, November 16, 2017I beta tested this game.
This is a short parser game in the Lovecraftian tradition. It takes place mostly on an airplane.
The game is interesting both story-wise and mechanically. Story-wise, it features a protagonist that isn't just a standard anglo-saxon. Mechanically, it features 3-dimensional movement in multiple environments. 3d movement is something I worked on in my game Ether, and I think this game handled it well.
However, the interactivity was iffy, as it was difficult to know what commands would work.
My favorite of the 3 Chinese if comp 2017 games. A puppet horror story, November 16, 2017I beta tested this game.
This is a story that only branches twice, but does so in an effective way. You are the wife of a puppet master who performs across the country, but you have to make a difficult choice when he turns to dark means to support his work.
It's fairly short, and it uses type-writer effect text on light backgrounds with music/sound effects.
A fun compact RPG game written in ADRIFT, with music, November 16, 2017I helped beta test this game.
This game meets my niche interests well. It is a combat random combat RPG in a fantasy setting, where it's mostly puzzle-based; most monsters are extremely difficult to defeat until you solve another puzzle, than become generally easy. It allows for some variability, though, as you can sequence break or die in an easy fight due to randomness.
I thought this was fun. A couple of times I felt thwarted by not knowing what to do, though.
A short but branchy self-aware Twine game in a fantasy setting, November 16, 2017This is a short Twine game where there are many branches (around 60 endings), but each play through is very short.
There is no distinctive CSS styling, but the game is written in a consistent voice.
I downloaded the file and opened it up in Twinery to see the code, and I think I know what happened with the development of this game. It seems to be a classic case of "What's fun for the author isn't what's fun for the player."
The Twine code is lovingly organized and garnished, with little extras here and there, either private jokes or Easter eggs for code-readers. The code branches all over, and has little Easter egg chunks like a map of the author's house, a little section on self-harm, asides, the chance to fight the narrator, etc.
The problem with this structure is that the player never sees it. As is common in this author-centered style, the cool content is hidden in branches the player is unlikely to take. The most normal branches are the shortest and the most straightforward. An author tends to think, 'Ah-ha! The player will try the first few branches, realize that something is off, and try the elaborate branches!'
But what tends to happen is, the player thinks, 'I've seen a lot of short, under implemented fantasy twine games. I've played through twice, and that's what this seems like, so I'm out of here', never seeing what lies beneath.
Another issue is that, because each play through is so short, most of the work is on content the player will never see. Cat Manning had the same issue with Crossroads in the 2015 IFComp, and later worked to retool her style with Invasion, which had longer playthroughs.
So, this is a lovingly-crafted, well-written game, but if you want to see all of it, you need to put in a lot of work.
A three-act Twine game with inventory management and maps, November 16, 2017This game is a mid-length Twine game (30,000 words in 214 passages).
It's about a rough, one-eyed monster hunter named Jacobi. He's carrying out various tasks for the king in return for help for his loved one.
The game has you face three challenges, each with a map and combat. They become darker as you progress, with the title referring to thematic darkness.
I actually liked this game's interactivity (moving, fighting, buying and selling), but there were several typos, and I was turned off by the 'grizzled unhappy war hero make dark choices' theme. I like those themes in general, but only lightened by a great deal of heart. This game has some (with Elias and Cassandra), but for my personal tastes, I would have liked more balance. This is definitely a personal thing, and others may wish it even darker.
'Skyrim in text'; a demo of a combat engine in an rpg game, November 16, 2017I beta tested this game.
This is an ambitious concept debuted here in a demo game. It is an rpg game with procedurally generated text and spinning wheels indicating combat.
I liked the system quite a bit; the styling was good, and the graphics nice. I felt a bit dissociated from the story; like real RPGs, the story was in service to the puzzles.
There is hidden material here; despite beta testing and playing again later, I didn't find the sword or defeat the giant monster. Worth checking it out to see the system.
A short one-room game about a mad scientist, November 16, 2017This is a very short little game where you are trying to get your crazy future-telling device to work.
It's a one-room game, but very little is implemented. I had to decompile the game to figure out how to get the device to work. I had further difficulties with basic commands like going in doors.
The idea isn't bad, but it could be better developed.
A game about language and its intrinsic meaning, November 16, 2017This game is centered around a language or collection of languages that the protagonist is trying to study.
The central mechanic is that you are presented with 3-syllable words that you can alter.
The discussion centers on the idea that language influences our thoughts and actions, and vice-versa.
I liked this game, but it didn't draw me in emotionally.
An intentionally bad game with a few short pathways, November 16, 2017This game is a worthy sequel to Toiletworld, by Chet Rocketfrak (presumably the same as Chad Rocketman).
This game centers around Bilbert/Bolbert, who has something wrong with them. You can talk to Bilbert, or enter Bilbert.
There's not much more than that. I found it amusing, but the author is clearly aiming for a 1-star rating, and who am I to refuse?
An excellent and well-illustrated academic time travel game, November 16, 2017This is probably the slickest of all the games entered this year.
This is a short mystery tale set in a women's college in (I think) the northeast. You are replacing a professor who has mysteriously disappeared.
The main narrative is about time-hoppers (which feels more like a temporal Gulliver's Travels than H.G. Wells), but there is a sub-narrative about the place of adjunct/temporary/visiting faculty and the various roles of women in academia.
The game beautifully divides between 'asides'-links and 'moving forward'-links by having the first show up as notes in the margin and the latter extending the text.
It's well-illustrated and well-written. One of the best web games available.
A compelling fantasy tale with a few minor issues, November 16, 2017I enjoyed the story in this game quite a bit, more than just about any other game in the competition.
You play as a magical crow who is fleeing a destructive sentient firestorm. You have to hop from town to town, trying to warn everyone while fighting a bad reputation.
I enjoyed the characters and setting; it was generic fantasy, but not swords and sorcery generic fantasy, more of Diana Wynn Jones or fairy tales.
There were some noticeable typos, though, which detracted from the experience.
A dialect-heavy dark comedy Quest game with symmetric map, November 16, 2017I really enjoyed this game. I had a few technical difficulties wrangling with Quest.
You play as a cockney-speaking orphan who has penned up in a penitentiary-orphanage. Your goal is to go from Public Enemy Number 2 to Number 1.
The map is large, but pleasingly symmetrical. You solve a puzzle in each room until the game is over.
Some of the puzzles were fairly nonsensical, and I had difficulty with them, but overall, I was impressed.
A clever Infocom homage marred by implementation difficulties, November 16, 2017This game was fun and clever; I think a large chunk of judges found the concept fun and original.
You are a lurking grue, and you have to devour an adventurer.
Because it is completely dark, you have rely on your other senses.
I had difficulty getting helpful responses from going in different directions, and with the final verb.
Overall, if the feedback from comp judges is implemented, this would be a game that continues to get played for a long time.
A squirrel game with some tricky puzzles, November 16, 2017I enjoyed the puzzles of Goodbye Cruel Squirrel with a walkthrough. I enjoyed the writing in general, but not the mean-spiritedness.
You play as a squirrel raiding another tribe. You have to progress through a series of locations, each with its own puzzle.
I got stuck early on and used a walkthrough the whole time.
A hidden-object like game involving visions of the future, November 16, 2017This is a game with a brilliant premise; you are some sort of alien being charged with protecting a young girl.
You have visions of the future, showing you that seven enemies will come and attack her.
You can do various things to improve her chances of survival, with each thing you do providing you with a new vision.
This was very successful in general, but I found it fiddly in two areas. First, some things weren't implemented; for instance, the first thing you learn about Kayla is that she has pulled-back hair and a simple dress. But if you try to examine either one, there is an error.
Second, the game essentially becomes a hidden-object puzzle. You have to scour descriptions for nouns, examine each noun, and hope that you find the right thing. Some solutions that seem like they should work, don't; like finding alternate things for burning/clogging, etc.
But I still enjoyed this game a lot. It has a nice map.
A short murder mystery translated from Chinese, November 16, 2017I helped to beta test this game, which is one of the three Qiaobook translation entries.
In this game, you play as a young man who wakes up in bed with a dead body.
You have to play through a few times to identify the killer.
The game is developed with background images and sound.
I like the general 'find the killer' concept, but I found it difficult to wait for the typewritten text.
A humorous collection of vignettes based on fake news, November 16, 2017I beta tested this game, and I found it very funny.
Mike Sousa has written many past IF games, and the polish of this game is testament to his experience.
This game is tied together by various real-life newspaper headlines. You are having a pretty crazy day, and you hop from sequence to sequence trying to deal with mistaken identities and rogue celebrities.
There isn't a lot of direct interactivity in the traditional sense, but there's a lot of room to play around in each scene, with plenty of coded actions.
A short poem or series of short poems in a dense, obscure style, November 16, 2017This is a shortish Twine game entered into the 2017 IFComp.
It consists of free verse, sometimes with poetic styling, and sometimes in a more conversational tone.
There is some profanity, in a sort of navel-gazing self-aware way. In general, I liked the poetry, though, and found it enjoyable even on a second or third read.
An enormous scifi game with severe implementation problems, November 16, 2017Escape from Terra is huge, with 3 or 4 or 5 acts, each act as large and complicated as an IFComp game.
You can pick from two different characters, including one who is deaf. You have to use weapons to battle your way to a safe space, before being take to outer space.
In outer space, you have to interact romantically with aliens, change bodies, use strange plants, etc. with many NPCs and companions.
It's also impossibly buggy. The walkthrough frequently doesn't work, and anything off the walkthrough doesn't work at all.
A grotesque limited parser game about consumption, November 16, 2017I beta tested this game, and it was my personal choice for winner of IFComp 2017.
It is a grotesque game; you are a child granted a bottomless pit by a magical character in a fairy tale. You are imprisoned in a dungeon where countless other children have met gruesome deaths.
The game revolves completely around eating, with eating the only real action. Like DiBianca's Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, where USE was the only verb, the puzzles in this game revolves around timing and sequence.
I found this game satisfying, and have played it 6 or 7 times.
The most Ryan Veeder game yet. A short mystery., November 7, 2017It's hard to conceive of a game that is more Ryan Veeder-y than this one. This is most likely due to the support from his Patreon, which was started (according to its home page) because he wanted more reasons to include complex irrelevant subsystems in this game.
And this game has them. There's not that much you have to do in this game, but a lot you can do. Random mini quests and red herrings abound. I spent around 2 hours on this game, but the main pathway can be finished in 20 minutes or less.
There are two characters to pick from, but the choice is inconsequential...sort of. And sort of not. I felt rewarded for playing through with both.
I read a paper on humor theory once that talked about the 'incongruity-resolution' theory, which is that we laugh when we experience something out of the ordinary, that doesn't make sense, and then have it resolved suddenly. This game is built on nothing but incongruity-resolution. Everything in the game is a mix of useless and semi-useful.
I liked this a lot more than the Roscovian Palladium, or any other of the short random games that he makes every few months. A nice game to play if you just want to burn time and fiddle around with stuff.
A brief, terror-filled moment in time, November 6, 2017This game reminded of another game, which I couldn't remember for a while, but now I recall is the author's 2016 game, Light Into Darkness. I liked that game, but this one is better.
It's a brief moment in time. The game definitely plays around with the typical speed of a parser game, where major events can occur in one command.
I hit on a good ending perhaps by chance, early on, and replayed to stretch it out as long as possible. If I hadn't guessed the command, I might not have liked it as much, but it was good.
A very original short gruesome story in an alt-historical universe, November 6, 2017This was a strange game. When I started it, I thought, 'Oh, so this is writing which might be something really good, or just fluff'. As I played through, it all sort of fell together, and I liked it.
It's bizarre; a sort of mix between 80's neon punk and Jack the Ripper's London. Plus some of ancient Rome thrown in.
I had a bit of trouble at first figuring out what to do, but I grasped it in the end. I think this was my favorite of La Petite Morte, and perhaps of the whole Ectocomp competition.
A lighthearted ghost story with you as the ghost, November 6, 2017This is a short Ectocomp game that branches strongly.
You play a recently deceased woman who has the chance to go back and haunt one of three different people: her daughter, her old flame, and her enemy.
The game is sort of a gauntlet, because many of the choices are wrong, but you don't always have to restart completely.
I found it charming, with some interesting mini-twists, but overall I had to replay a lot of different sections to see it all.
A short, thoughtful horror game about dreams, November 6, 2017This is one of those short games that is more like enacting a ritual than solving a puzzle. You find yourself inside a dream, with an unusual purpose.
Like another game which I enjoyed in this comp, your character is more nuanced than the typical interactive fiction protagonist.
It's a speed-IF, so it's fairly short, but it's well-polished. There weren't many surprises due to the foreshadowing, but the imagery was vivid.
A short spooky tale about going to sleep, November 6, 2017In this game, you play someone who's been reading too many scary stories alone in a house, and you're too scared to go upstairs.
This is a great, relatable setup. Things are sparsely implemented, as is to be expected in a speed-IF, but I found no bugs and it had a fun verb choice.
The ending felt abrupt, which was disappointing, but I understand that not much is possible with speed-IF. This had the most relatable PC, for me, of any game I've played this year.
A mysterious short horror story about a little, little...girl?, November 5, 2017This game is confusing; I played it through 3 times. But it's polished, with descriptive writing, had a haunting emotion, and I've already replayed it a few times. So I'm giving 4 stars.
Most of Groover's purposely opaque work is an allusion to some known fairy tale, which provides a framework for understanding the piece. His original stories tend to provide more in the way of explanations.
This piece is a hidden-object fetch quest, with a sort of standing-up-to-bullies theme that reminded me of Andrew Schultz's frequent theme of 'everyone told you you were worthless and now you'll show them'.
I enjoyed the meta-puzzle of trying to piece it all together. It never gelled for me, but that's okay; having some things left unresolved improves the atmosphere.
A short, linear RPG-inspired horror game, November 5, 2017This is a fairly clever game with no real choices, and quite long for an Ectocomp game in terms of text.
The idea is that you are part of an RPG party (feels more like MMORPG than pen-and-paper RPG), and everyone dies, but you linger on.
It dwells a lot on your existence as a ghost, and some parts of it were unique, even for fantasy-based ghost stories.
So, it's mostly a short story, but paced well by links, and its a good short story.
A very clever game engine with an unpolished horror game, November 5, 2017This game engine is creative; it's like Detectiveland, in that you click on nouns and then verbs. It's multiplayer, and even allows different players to simultaneously play in different languages, with chat.
I wasn't as impressed with the game. It has a certain sort of forward crassness, reminiscent of Trump's 'locker room talk'. The story revolves around your deceased wife and your new girlfriend.
Due to the 3 hour time constraint, this game has some problems with grammar and typos.
Overall, I like the engine, but would prefer to see a different sort of game to show off the engine.
A short, intense horror game for Ectocomp, November 5, 2017This game had me on the edge, and toyed around with my emotions. I was kept in strong suspense, thinking 'This is either going to get 1 star or a high score'.
This was a translation, and it was translated well; it felt idiomatic to me. The writing in general was good.
Very short.
A fun little wordplay game about constraints, November 5, 2017This is the second Schultz game I played this Ectocomp, and I like it quite a bit!
There are four rooms, and you have to do something special in each one. The language is constrained, in a way reminiscent of Ad Verbum.
This was implemented impressively well for an Ectocomp game. There were a few verbs I thought should work, like (Spoiler - click to show)attack, amass, and insist, but this could be fixed later. A nice little snack.
An obtuse, short word puzzle , November 5, 2017I generally like Andrew Schultz's wordplay games, but this one seems ill-conceived.
It has a concept that is very restrictive, and everything in the game is built up according to this scheme.
You are asked to find a friend and set a clock to a certain time. The issue is, there is no hinting as to the correct solution, yet the game only admits one solution. I thought of other solutions, afterwards; why not allow (Spoiler - click to show)5:04 as LIV? or 10:49 as MIL? I know there are time constraints, but the cluing is off here. On the other hand, Schultz's IFComp 2017 game is one of his most accessible, so I encourage you to try that one out.
A sci-fi twine game with many endings about a powerful AI, November 4, 2017This was a short Ectocomp game written in 3 hours or less.
In that time, the author provided nice background music and good text styling.
The game is fairly linear; all of your choices affect only the next paragraph, until the end, when your choices open up a few different ending options.
I wish I knew more about my choices so I could feel better immersed as the character. The storytelling was good; I could definitely see myself enjoying a longer game from this author, and I enjoyed this one.
Nothing is scarier than reality. Short Ink game, November 4, 2017This game was, in its way, the creepiest of the Grand Guignol games.
The actual horror elements are played down; you have 12 hours to work on your animation project. At each hour, you can work, explore (until you use up the storylets) or relax.
Creepy stuff can happen, but soon daylight comes, and all the supernatural elements seem not frightening at all. But as you go to your final exam, you begin to realize how horrifying real life can be (at least I felt that way).
A worthy successor to Lime Ergot with a bit of fiddliness, November 4, 2017This game is ingenious, as creative as Lime Ergot was, with a touch reminiscent of Midnight. Swordfight.
You play as a washed-up seaman who has escaped a wreck and ended up on a plantation.
The navigation system is deeply unusual.
I had one big of trouble, with the game's only locked door. I had tried the correct action in different rooms, and discovered it didn't work, so I didn't try it in the right room. I ended up decompiling to find the answer (as the game has some speed-IF bits, like no hint system, so I didn't trust it completely), but I could have figured it out with more experimentation. I felt like it drew me out of the story, though. Otherwise, this is a wonderful game.
A Twine story about vague hauntings and ghosts and war, November 4, 2017This game was entered for Ectocomp 2017.
Like the author's other entry, this game is written using big blocks of text. Unlike the other entry, this one had more typos and grammatical errors, and seems to have been checked a little less.
The story revolves around fellow soldiers Abe and Shep, a psychiatrist, and Mary Shepard, a young woman who seems to have passed away. I had trouble following the timeline and who the narrative character was.
The highlight of the game was the scattered bits of poetry, which I think worked out well.
A mid-length horror game with stats and challenges, November 4, 2017This game is actually quite extensive for an ectocomp game.
Written with Ink (I think), it has you travelling up a river that is completely infested with monsters of various kinds, mostly zombie-like creatures and ghosts. You are in a sort of alternate Victorian era, with enormous factories and electrical equipment and such.
The game heavily advertises its stats-based nature, with money, fuel, tea, and health being tracked. It took me around 30 minutes, and I played to a non-satisfactory ending. Recommended if you're looking for a more stats-based approach to Ectocomp.
A Russian-influenced transgender ghost tale, November 4, 2017Grozny has some of the best writing in this ectocomp so far, with 'dripping with the waters of SHEOL' standing as a good description of the text itself.
This is an intrinsically transgender story; every detail of the game is about being transgender, living with a transgender partner, and reassuring each other about being transgender.
It's also a strong tale about disability, both mental and physical. Your character has left their alt-history 1800's house in shambles, with clothes and dishes all over, most likely due to depression. You have to take numerous pills, you have intrusive thoughts, your joints ache (I somehow imagine a combination of arthritis and fibromyalgia), and you are walking a narrow tightrope with regards to your faith.
The entire game (which does have a ghost story, but only in service to the overall themes) feels like a house of cards which has been delicately set up but is constantly on the verge of collapse.
A fun little creepy web-based game at a school with some text effects, November 4, 2017This is a shortish Ectocomp game with nice styling and some interesting text-hover effects.
You play as a schoolgirl who makes a bizarre discovery with her friends. The game branches quite a bit, with each branch fairly short.
I'd go into more detail, but the interest of the game lies entirely in the oddness of it all.
I found one small issue; the 'cockroach' link led to a page which was just a blank line; this was my first playthrough, and I had to restart. I ended up playing through 3 times.
A semi-graphical horror game in space, November 4, 2017I actually had a rather frustrating experience with this game. In this year's IFComp, there were three games submitted that were download-only, had the text slowly spool out without an option to advance, and had white text on a light background photo. They were heavily criticized for these three things.
That's why it's surprising to see an experience IF author (with access to this information) make a download-only game with slowly-spooled out white text on a light background photo/animation. I had to increase the font size significantly to see the game. I also had to look away for something on the last screen, and the text faded away before I was sure what it said.
Despite that, I enjoyed the game. It has strong parallels to one of my favorite short stories, The Judge's House, as well as System Shock (which I've only experience filtered through Cyberqueen).
The game manages to develop a great deal of backstory without slowing down the game too much. The ending is strongly foreshadowed, but this only helps to build tension.
The non-linear presentation combined with image changes gave the game some more interactivity as it requires you to puzzle out how it all fits together.
A graphical pony-based horror game about creepypasta, November 3, 2017This is the second elevator-game based Ectocomp game I've played this year. Both are effective in their own way, but while Going Down derived it's effectiveness from understatement, The Elevator Game is much more in-your-face.
Like Owlor's other games, this game is loosely based on My Little Pony (in the sense that the characters are ponies with a similar art style), but otherwise the mythology and other world building details are different.
The game is fully illustrated, with some of Owlor's best work here, particularly in a sequence when you watch the elevator game taking place through a security camera and 'pausing' the camera reveals hidden objects.
I think that, for what Owlor is going for, this is a real success. But I found the horror to be a bit too over-the-top to be really effective; I'd like more moments where things were left to my imagination.
A short example of dynamic fiction with a haunting feel, November 3, 2017The author is going for something very different here, something out of the norm. As they state on the Ectocomp page, this game is a short story with no choices.
It's a vaguely mysterious game, with hints of influences from Asia (parts of it reminded me of China, India, and Israel). The blending of different cultures was the most important part to me.
The formatting was very hard to read, though. Pararaphs weren't spaced out, and the text was presented in large blocks. The dialogue could do with some pruning; it had a lot of the quick back-and-forth nothings that real dialogue has, but which do little to improve narrative writing without careful implementation, which was lacking here.
I liked the ending. On a technical note which is not due to the author (I think), I couldn't scroll down, and had to zoom out to read the text.
A tangled web of memory's in a possibly alt-earth, November 3, 2017This is a purposely obscure short Twine game. It makes extensive use of color shifts and effects.
The story centers on a young (?) couple who have been forced into hiding while people like them are hunted down.
The first part was a lot like the diary of Anne Frank, so much that I thought that would be the final twist.
But it devolves into a dissociative mess near the end, in a pleasing way. The hard thing was that I didn't really know what sort of effects my choices would have, but that's unavoidable with the chosen subject matter.
A creepy elevator game with great graphics and sound, November 3, 2017This is a game that should be enjoyed at a slow pace, even though it's not too long. The slow-burn is the point, and it's good! I also recommend sound.
A friend of yours wants to play the 'elevator game', a creepypasta-esque game where you have to go to different floors in different orders, and you are supposed to end up in an alternate universe.
The elevator is mimicked here with muzak, elevator bings, and gentle use of graphics. I liked it! But it's hard to rush through.
Same as all the other Panks games, October 27, 2017I had just played Fetter's Grim and Westfall (or Westport or whatever it is), as well as a few other Panks games.
This game has all the usual suspects: a village, a tavern, a cathedral on the west side of town with a nook to the north, jokes about the author being drunk or not being drunk, a hellhound that is in the first dark forest area south of town, etc. exactly what's in all the other games.
It doesn't understand 'X' or 'TAKE' even though other Panks games in the same year do. It's just bizarre.
A slightly more dressed up version of Panks' games, September 30, 2017This game has all the usual Panks trappings:
inn - check
Jesus as a combatable NPC - check
hellhound - check
automated randomized combat - check
This game adds some of the Japanese atmosphere of the Ninja games to the mix. But overall, it's more of the same.
A multiple-futures/presents Twine game involving mental illness, September 28, 2017Saving John is a Twine 1 game with the standard CSS and formatting. In it, you find yourself in a dangerous situation and have the opportunity to construct a backstory for what happened.
The backstories involves jealousy, betrayal, love, profanity, and so on. The game is fairly short, but can be replayed several times.
The writing was descriptive, and the interactivity worked, but the story just didn't click with me, and It didn't feel all the way polished.
A short, surreal horror game in Inklewriter, September 28, 2017This game placed low in IFComp 2016. It is in Inklewriter, a beautiful story-focused engine that is now being discontinued.
Snake's Game has several variants depending on the play through, but most seem to deal with a world where time and space can be warped at will, taking you to hell and a variety of other places.
It's fairly short, and the writing felt unpolished, but the other had a lot of heart, making this game more emotionally powerful than most low-ranking games, to me.
A parody of Sleeping Beauty and IF, September 28, 2017This game casts you as The Packrat, and adventurer who is trying to fight their urges to take anything and everything they can get a hold of.
This is played up for laughs early on, but not so much later.
This game centers around 'guess the author's thoughts'-type puzzles, and as such is very difficult to finish unaided.
A ton of work went into this, but it could have used more polishing.
An augmented story book with graphics, animation and sound, September 28, 2017This is a small chapter book with a story about a cat.
It is well-written, with no typos that I saw. It incorporates animations that respond to screen touches and (I think) accelerometers. It also includes sound.
This type of augmented story is not something that has traditionally been entered into the IFComp, although I could see a day when things become more common. For me, though, I found it uncomplying emotionally, and the interactivity that was available was not exciting.
A heavily illustrated, trashy jerk-type story, September 28, 2017This is the most-illustrated IFComp game I've played, and one of the least appealing. Your girlfriend broke up with you, and you have to manipulate a dozen or so women into sharing their phone numbers.
The game is deeply misogynistic, and the art is in a style somewhere between simpsons and family guy in style and content.
A short dialogue-based game with incredible graphics, September 28, 2017This game was entered in IFComp 2016, but disappeared shortly thereafter.
However, lglasser recorded multiple playthroughs, which completely shows the gameplay, as it is a disjoint collection of sequences/videos triggered by clicking on labelled items on a screen.
The game is graphics-heavy, with pure white silhouettes against hand-drawn backgrounds. It also comes with music.
After hearing good things about the game, I was surprised how angsty and profanity-laden the game was. There is a whole genre out there of shocking confessions, which isn't my style, but this story is well done in that genre.
A porpentine-esque surreal bio-cyber Twine game, September 28, 2017This game is strongly (by the author's admission) influenced by porpentine.
It mimics Porpentine's uses of multi-colored links and cycling back to one location, and background music, as well as visceral/gooey scenes and identity horror.
However, it lacks a great deal of porpentine's pacing. Frequently, new text is delayed for several seconds before appearing. There are no consistent 'rules' for how scenes proceed; many threads are introduced that are not resolved.
I found that the game was stronger the longer it went.
A reality tv show parody with some guess-the-verb problems, September 28, 2017In this game, you use a remote control to interact with various tv shows. These include a game show, a survivor-like show, and one I'll leave unmentioned for surprises.
The concept is fun, but the execution combines under-implementation, heavy-handedness, and lampshaded 4th wall breaking that is never resolved as to why it should occur.
A one-room, essentially puzzleless horror game, September 28, 2017This game was coded in 2.5 days by a first time author with one beta tester. It requires what is generally an annoying way of interacting with a game. By all standards, it should be a fairly horrible game.
But it placed 19th out of 35, and wasn't really that bad. I like fairly campy, psychological horror, and this game provides it. It had great descriptions, and spookily changing descriptions.
This is a very short game. I liked it, in the end.
A short, fun werewolf romp that could use some more cluing, September 28, 2017This game casts you as a werewolf agent for a large group of werewolves. You have to travel to a snow-covered Chinese village to investigate its destruction.
The story and setting are actually pretty good, and I liked this game. Where it falls down is in presenting information to the player; nowhere, even in the extensive menu system, are you told how to transform between human and wolf. Conversation topics have to be guessed to proceed with little in-game explanation.
Fun mid-length game to take for a spin. Nice use of different senses in descriptions.
A big school treasure hunt in TADS, September 28, 2017This game is big, and full of little easter eggs. It's one of those games that is created with love and creative, but seemingly based on things in the author's life and somewhat underclued.
Typical puzzles in this game include finding keys and operating semi-complicated machinery.
A hell-based vampire story with powers and some gore, September 28, 2017This game casts you as the vampire Martin Voigt, travelling through a hellish landscape to retrieve three talismans of power and find the three priestesses who can help him.
The setting is imaginative and well-defined. Generally, each room contains a challenge, which at first can be solved with a basic power, and later requires you to fetch items from the other parts of the (small) map.
It was a bit gorey and not for young children. Some of the interactivity was off, in the sense that actions were underclued. But the overall level of polish was high.
A mid-length sci-fi game with multiple viewpoints and a vintage Sci-fi feel, September 28, 2017This game feels just like all of the 60's scifi stories I read growing up, in a good way.
You play as a young child on a lonely outpost in the sea during a war between Earth and Mars. Alone for the day, you get to use your imagination around the island, until events take a sudden turn.
The multiple viewpoints reminded me favorably of Rover's Day Out and Delphina's House.
There were a few parts where the interactivity just didn't do it for me, which is why I deducted one star.
Very, very big game about a robotic conspiracy at a factory, September 28, 2017This game has numerous issues, and is best played with a walkthrough.
With a walkthrough, it can be pretty fun. It does include steps like waiting 19 times in a row, with each Z producing a text dump.
The reason it can be fun is that its story, which has early hints about employees not being all the way there and oddly intelligent robotic devices, is compelling in the large scale.
Worth trying if you like to skim read and don't mind walkthroughs.
A 'bureaucracy in hell' IFComp game, September 28, 2017This game casts you as a demon in the bureaucracy of hell. You decide to make a break for it and get out.
This game has several NPCs, most of whom respond to just a few topics/activities. It has well-coded puzzles involving searching and manipulation.
But much of it just feels underclued, especially the second half of the game. This makes it somewhat difficult to finish.
A mid-sized fantasy game about foreign the perfect weapon, September 28, 2017This game has you sent on a quest to collect parts to make a magic item, escape from a jail cell, search a dungeon, and has both a classic logic puzzle and a collection of riddles.
I didn't really like it at first, and played through with the walkthrough the whole way. Along the way, though, I began to like it more. The descriptions can be fun and interesting, though unpolished. The story has some fairly large plotholes, but I feel like the game was close to being complete, fun, and bug free, if the author had had more time.
A game about playing inside of classic arcade games, September 28, 2017This game by a good author (see 'Delusions') reminds me a bit of Gris et Jaune by Jason Devlin, another talented author. Both games have very strong openings that hint at a great game full of polish.
However, both were not completely finished/polished in time for the competitions they were entered in. This game, in particular, falls flat in the most exciting part: the actual game simulation. You play as Mario, and you have to jump with timed Glulx effects, but it just doesn't work out, and later levels are, I believe, unfinished.
A heartfelt but choppy gangster game, September 28, 2017This game seems to almost certainly have been written by a talented but inexperienced teenager who had a great idea for a game but fell down in the execution.
This is a mobster story, with gunfights, methlabs, explosions, burning buildings, etc. But everything is disjointed; creative scenes are established, but not connected to each other. No one seemed to notice horrible deaths or accidents that had occurred minutes earlier, and massive plotholes come and go without comment.
It was an entertaining read, though, with the walkthrough.
A sprawling city game with some bugs and complicated simulations, September 28, 2017This game has you waking up in a club, needing to go around solving a number of unclued and unmotivated puzzles, some of which are unfinishable due to bugs.
It implements a number of complicated things, including a car with ignition, an apartment intercom, a hose that needs to be taken/dropped and turned off/on, a sink to wash dishes in. Unfortunately, all the least interesting things are the things that are implemented in the most detail.
A large, sparse game about time travel in Viking times, September 28, 2017This is a Zorkian game that has you travelling to Viking times to search for various items in order to join a society of time travellers.
The score is lower than the work going into the game deserves; but according to my system, it is fairly unpolished, the rooms aren't descriptive, it didn't inspire any strong emotions, and the interactivity was frustrating.
But in general, this is an inoffensive game, wandering around a large landscape looking for treasures. Includes a light puzzle.
A classic-style adventure game in basic with a simple parser, September 28, 2017This game is similar to Panks' epic Westfront game. It's a very simple basic adventure with a large map. The majority of the code is room descriptions and names of things. The rest of the code seems to be lock-and-key type things.
I found it somewhat frustrating with the insta-deaths and lack of normal verb shortcuts. However, it was generally non-offensive, and actually a fun atmosphere. It was disqualified from IFComp for incorporating Smurfs.
One of Porpentine's earliest twine experiments, September 17, 2017This game was created in 2012, and uploaded recently by someone besides Porpentine. It was created at least as early as March of that year, since it's mentioned in an AdventureCow forum.
It is the shortest of the early experiments (which include Myriad and a few others). However, it contains a lot of Porpentine's signature style, including body transformation and horror, protagonists which evoke multiple emotions simultaneously, and surrealism.
This is not the kind of game I imagine Porpentine would release today, but it's interesting as a historical insight.
Reworkings of several old arcade games into IF, tied by a plot, September 15, 2017This game, similar to Sylenius Mysterium, has you entering an arcade at night and playing a variety of arcade games in IF form.
Some of the games work out really well (I like the way that Pong was presented). Others are just bizarre (what game corresponds to the politics scene?).
Overall, fun with a walkthrough.
An origami-based 'fetch items for wizard' game, September 15, 2017This game is part of the incomprehensibly large subset of 'a wizard asks you to collect items' games.
It's also part of the 'parser likes to insult your character' genre.
It also begins with 'my lame apartment', including waking up with a hangover in just your underwear, which is also a surprisingly large genre.
However, it also lets you make about 15 different objects with origami, which is pretty cool.
A turn-based version of the arcade game Asteroids, September 15, 2017This game is a variant of the arcade game Asteroids. It has a backstory, and then has you flying through a two-dimensional grid, letting you change your direction and fire at will.
I liked it, but it was too fussy. I think I encountered a bug, too; going off the edge of the grid said I was getting sent back, but the truth was that it didn't send me back.
An entertaining concept.
An intense alien war game, September 15, 2017I thought this IFArcade game was by Cadre, but i guess I was wrong. This is an intense alien war drama, copying numerous movies/books in that style (Aliens, Catch 22, Starship Troopers, etc.) It has violence and profanity.
It's based on the arcade game Centipede. You land in a swamp with several marines, and you are in a field of poisonous mushrooms with ticks, scorpions, and centipedes attacking you.
It's incredibly difficult to win.
A super short text story telling the background of Donkey Kong, September 15, 2017This game casts you as the main enemy in the original Donkey Kong game.
It paints you as a primeval sort of building, unfairly pitted against the mustachioed plumber
It has some fun non-standard responses, but overall, it's over quickly. I mostly like its unity of style.
A tasteless reworking of the classic arcade game, September 15, 2017I was surprised by this game, because I played it in the downloaded Arcade pack, and didn't have a chance to see the tags or genre.
It's essentially just a tasteless reworking of the original game Dig Dug, written by someone with the mind of a 12 year old male who has heard about women but never actually spoken with one.
An amusing text reworking of the classic arcade game, September 15, 2017The original arcade game night driver had you barreling down a road, swerving left and right down an endless field of white pegs.
This game has a text version, where you can speed, brake, and turn each turn. The conceit, though, is that you're a dad, late at night, and your wife and kids are having an endless conversation with you as you drive. The game eventually ends in a strange way.
A mid length sci fi game with complicated wiring puzzle, September 15, 2017This game has you wake up with amnesia in a space wreck.
Eventually, your world opens up a bit more, and you get to explore an alien world.
It's a fairly interesting game setup, but the story doesn't have much 'bite'. Concepts are introduced but then never explored.
It has a pretty complicated electrical wiring puzzle that requires experimentation at the end.
A short game about a random NPC in an unlabeled arcade game, September 15, 2017This game has you wandering around in a certain unlabeled arcade game (when it was first released in the IF arcade pack, it was even titled Unlabeled).
It's just a joke game; once you realize what's going on, it's over really quickly. But it's fun while it lasts.
A short goofy game reworking the classic game Galaxian, September 15, 2017This game from the IF arcade pack is a reworking of the classic arcade game Galaxian.
It portrays what it would really be like for the main character in Galaxian. Considering that there are also two space invader clones in the IF arcade pack, this game actually was pretty well put together.
It's super short.
A short text game mimicking space invaders, September 15, 2017This game was in the IF arcade pack.
Unlike most other games in the IF arcade pack, this is pretty much just a straight-up implementation of space invaders in text. The invaders go left, and right, and so on, and you shoot. I feel like the 2 other invader-like ports had a better implementation.
An intriguing Space Invader text reworking with some loose ends, September 15, 2017This TADS game is part of the IF arcade pack, and is probably the most creative of the 3 reworkings of space-invader type games.
You are in a line of bunkers, and you can dodge left and right, in and out of them as you shoot the invaders.
There are intriguing hints of a storyline, but they seem to go nowhere.
An amusing reworking of the classic arcade game Joust, September 15, 2017This game was part of the IF arcade pack, most of whose games were sci-fi related. Just like the way the original game was unusual for taking a fantasy-based viewpoint, this game is unusual in the IF arcade pack for the same reason.
Wizards, trolls, pterodactyls; though this game is short, the setting is fun and inventive.
A text game spoofing the original Lode Runner, September 15, 2017This is essentially a joke game in the IF arcade pack spoofing Lode Runner.
It shows the logical result of assuming everything in the game is real, including the more unreasonable parts of the original game.
It's short, but I found it amusing.
A violent and disturbing image of what Pac-Man really is, September 15, 2017There is a famous alternate version of the pac-man story where pac-man is an astronaut who is having hallucinations about the ghosts of his compatriots, and the dots are pills.
This game is not the same, but it's fairly similar, and has some profanity and violence. Was this game the origin of that pac-man story, or is it parallel development, or do they have a common source?
In any case, an interesting game from a famous author who has disavowed all of their speed-IFs.
Pinball in text, September 15, 2017This game is in the IF arcade pack. It has you as a pinball, with very little control over your actions and destiny.
It has a strong narrative with a metaphor between the ball and the human soul.
As a game, I found Enlightened Master to be a better working of a text pinball game.
A tedious implementation of Pong with strange words, September 15, 2017This game is fairly tedious, but it's well done, and has some great writing. It paints you as the pong paddle, but with a very unusual view on the world itself. It also has some nice text styling.
But getting even 2 points takes just forever. I can't imagine playing to 15 points.
Aftermath of a famous arcade game, September 15, 2017This game shows you what it would be like if the classic arcade game Tapper was real.
You have to clean up and leave. It's not much, but it has a fun Wreck-it-Ralph behind the scenes feel. It has a more traditional IF style than the other IF arcade games, and is at least complete.
An occasionally list rated story of a father and son and expectations, September 15, 2017This game is about a father who is macho and masculine, and a son who has taken a different path and identity from their father.
You take turns playing as father, son, or, eventually, unicorn. The meaning of the unicorn is enigmatic to me, perhaps representing social pressure, but you'll have to play to see what you think.
There is some strong profanity, vague reference to sexual acts, and occasional violence.
A nice miniature twine game with a good twist, September 15, 2017This game mimics the parser format, with green-on-black text and parser-like writing.
It was part of the 300-word-limit Twiny Jam.
The twist makes this a worthwhile game. Most of the gameplay (in fact, all of it) consists of choosing from a large list the one item that will solve the current obstacle.
One of the better all-rhyming games; short Ectocomp story, September 15, 2017Most games written in rhyme have terrible poetry. This one was pretty fun; its poetry is utilitarian but entertaining.
However, it can be pretty hard to guess some of the commands.
This is an Ectocomp speed-IF game about a witch defending herself from angry villagers and searching for a lost friend.
A fairly buggy Ectocomp adrift game about an evil chicken, September 15, 2017I've heard rumors of the 3d in this game, but I have yet to find it. I haven't found anyone who's actually finished it. I was able to get to the end by the use of Adrift's Debugger.
It's a fairly amusing game, after a long text dump. You need to kill an evil chicken, but it's hard to find the right tool.
Great small game for Ectocomp about brain-changing parasites, September 15, 2017This game has a great plot for a 3-hour ectocomp game.
You are one of the few remaining members of society after parasites from space have attacked everyone. At a SETI outpost, you try to survive with a friend.
The implementation was buggy, as could be expected from a Speed-IF game, but the writing and story were excellent; would make a good TV episode.
A 'hunt the wumpus'-type game in Twine, September 15, 2017I actually played this game backwards on accident. There is a major event you're supposed to encounter early on in one of the first rooms, but that ended up being the last room I entered.
Most of this game is navigating a house while a mysterious being also does so. You have to avoid, destroy, and escape.
Over all, it was well done, but I never really got into it. The room descriptions were fairly amusing.
Creepy little ectocomp story, September 15, 2017This is a disturbingly creepy ectocomp story from one of the authors of One Eye Open. I knew pretty much exactly where it was going after a few turns, but that's the beauty: the dread of what's coming, not knowing how it's going to come.
Contains a high level of violence.
A sprawling RPG with color use, September 15, 2017This game is so different from Panks's other games. Panks's IFComp games were short and trivial, or mocking.
This game is really, really big, and reasonably well polished.
You can play a lot of mini games, visit tons of locations, order NPCs, etc.
The problem is that it was developed for a long time by one person with only a little input from others, meaning that several of the mechanics are just spotty.
A simulationist speed-IF based on Metamorphoses and Not With Hands, September 15, 2017This is a short speed-IF game designed to show off a simulationist library involving the code of both Metamorphoses and peacock.z5 (known as Not With Hands). Emily Short said that her purpose in writing it was to use (quoting):
-- the same materials classes as Metamorphoses, plus some extras;
-- multiple kinds of blades to be used for cutting, efficacious on
different materials;
-- examples of diminution of size, division into pieces, and the
opening of containers based on said cutting;
-- routines for burning objects, taking into account their material
and contents;
-- smoke and carbon smearing (removable);(end quote)
Agatha Christie meets Dracula, September 15, 2017This game is similar to both Murder on the Orient Express and Dracula.
You awake from your coffin on a train to discover that a passenger has had their blood drained--and not by you.
This game has many of the usual speed-IF problems (undercluing and underimplementation), but it is in the top 10% of all speed-IF, and quite enjoyable.
A compelling sci fi horror game with good worldbuilding, September 15, 2017This is a speed-IF game from Ectocomp. Written in 3 hours, it has a nicely built up world with its own ecology.
The game is short, and learning about it is the main attraction, so I won't say more about the plot. I had some trouble with some of the interactions, though, but I enjoyed the writing.
A buggy adrift speed-IF about a creepy house, September 15, 2017This game was entered in Ectocomp 2011.
It is a speed-IF, so it has many of speed-IF's usual problems. in this case, I was unable to finish the game due to not knowing where to place an object. I also had difficulty finding things and guessing verbs.
A pretty funny 'horror' story about...the Death Shack!, September 15, 2017This game uses some of the more cinematic qualities of Adrift.
It's a speed-IF, so it was written in just 3 hours. But it has really fun animations and text effects. The death shack becomes a recurring character that destroys all in its path. I especially laughed at the hotel scene.
A completely broken Adrift horror game, September 15, 2017This game can't do anything past the first move. It was written for Ectocomp, but it seems not to have been tested at all.
In general, it seems like it would be a creepy game where you play a stalker, possibly having a humorous turn later.
A great speed-IF adrift game about Halloween origins, September 15, 2017This game is a sort of shaggy dog story that tells the origin of a certain Halloween tradition.
It's presented in a tragic way rather than a comedic way. You are a juggler in a medieval court where laughter is forbidden, and whose father was banished or killed because of that rule. It's worth trying out.
A murder mystery set at an airplane field, September 15, 2017This game was an IFComp game. It has you as a detective investigating murder at an airplane field.
You collect clues by searching scenery and by talking to people. It has a lot of elements of a good detective story, but it's really easy to get stuck and throw off the timing. There's also some goofy oddball elements that don't really fit in.
A commentary about choices, based on They Might Be Giants, September 15, 2017This is an ultrashort game, written for the nanobots They Might Be Giants tribute album.
The major idea of it is that (Spoiler - click to show)there is a single sentence
where every word is a link; each word that you click takes you to the same sentence, about decisions. It seems like a commentary/joke on the nature of choices.
A clever Twine maze based on a They Might Be Giants song, September 15, 2017This is a sort of word maze based on the lyrics of the nanobots album song Lost My Mind.
Every word leads to other words, going around in a cycle. There is a secret to solving the maze, but it's fairly complicated to finish it even if you know the secret; but if you keep trying, it should work out. I thought it was fun.
A fun epidemic game where you are the epidemic, September 15, 2017This is one of the short Twine games for the nanobots They Might Be Giants tribute album.
You play as a slowly evolving hive mind created in MIT by accident. You have several choices as to how the hive mind will evolve and adapt.
It made me smile, and I found it fun.
The original, and one of the best depending on your likes, September 4, 2017Adventure was the very first text adventure of all time. It inspired the genre and its name.
The point of the game is to gather a variety of treasures and bring them back to a small building. The game is pretty accurately based on the Mammoth Caves, which explains the mazes and the fact that exits and entrances sometimes don't match up exactly (i.e. going west and then east may not leave you where you started).
For me, the most enjoyable way to play this game was to keep it at a slow pace, going back to it time and again while playing other games. I kept a numbered list of every room with all of its exits to other rooms. This made the game much easier. After several weeks, I got to a point where I couldn't get any further for several days. I finally looked up a walkthrough for the last three or four puzzles.
Once you get all the treasures, there is an endgame that is surprisingly good; it seems more like a modern deconstruction of the game than the very first game of all.
I played the 350 point version, and I found the game incredibly enjoyable. I admit that I used the wicker cage bug (as mentioned in another review), where you can carry everything in the wicker cage. To get full points, you must remove the items from the cage outside of the building before placing them in there.
Every Interactive Fiction player should play this game because so many other games reference it heavily.
An eery slice of life Twine game with 5 endings and a non-trivial length, August 28, 2017This game surprised me by its quality. I can't vouch for the writing quality; as Spanish is not my native language, anything written in it sounds nice to me. But the concepts were really beautiful.
You play as a young person on a bus home, when things take an unexpected turn. The situation you find yourself in is at once relatable and deeply uncomfortable.
The game made good use of text effects, switching colors of the background and text, using different font sizes, etc.
There was some overarching Thing which I didn't get because of my poor Spanish, something about (Spoiler - click to show)graduation and getting covered in floor and eggs?
It seemed fairly linear to me, but a second replay had about 40% new text, so I was impressed. I would have rated this game somewhere in the 7-9 range in IFComp. Well done. My only wish is that there was some more consistency in how mid-game links were handled, as it was hard to know what clicking on different texts would do. On the other hand, given the general feel of confusion the game evokes, it may have been an intentional design choice.
Strength through length; a compelling and long Victorian pastiche, August 25, 2017I played a Study in Steampunk after I had spent several months rereading the original Sherlock Holmes stories. I had discovered that Sherlock was very different from modern versions: no "elementary, dear Watson", a lot of strength and physical activity, minimal pipe use, etc.
So when I started this game as John Watson and my friend said 'the game's afoot', I rolled my eyes. I couldn't get into the storyline about dueling empires with mechs and soul-draining powers.
But I tried again two more times, and on the third time, it stuck. I think the first chapter just wasn't as strong as the later ones; the game began offering really intriguing role-playing choices, and ended up setting up several compelling life-and-death situations that were effective.
The decisions were effective, I believe, because the game is just so long. It has a lot of minor faults I would usually take off points for (like obvious choices between being good/being evil or by-the-numbers genre scenes), but the author clearly has a deep understanding of long-form game design that just makes it fun.
I enjoyed it more once I realized that it wasn't really a Sherlock Holmes knock-off; it was really the author's own vision, with some Sherlock-related elements. The author cites Dracula and Jack the Ripper as inspirations, too, and these are almost stronger; supernatural life-draining is one of the main game topics. It also suggests Jekyll and Hyde as an influence, but I saw nothing of this in my playthrough.
This game is effective because of how long it is, and is definitely worth its price.
A creepy short game experimenting with text output, August 17, 2017This game (whose cover art was nominated for an XYZZY award for best supplemental materials) uses randomization to change the description of the area you are in (a one-room game), and every turn it clears the screen before printing the description.
I found it a bit confusing, and I had to look up the club floyd transcript to finish it, but it was a fun experiment.
An intentionally poor surreal game, August 17, 2017This game, according to the author, was intended to come in exactly second to last place, which required (he said) surreal puzzles, misspellings, and a barely interactive NPC.
This may be tongue in cheek, but they have truly created a terrible game here. It is bad on many levels, including dumb implementation errors, undercluing, and misspellings. The author has truly succeeded at their goal.
An interesting puzzle game marred by implementation issues, August 15, 2017This game has you trying out various products in a puzzly environment. It has a snarky parser that jokes about a corporate environment, uses text pauses extensively, and has you assemble a complicated system.
It's actually pretty interesting, but the implementation has increasingly greater issues, making the latter half impossible to complete.
A goofy game about an evil cow... or is it?, August 15, 2017This is an ADRIFT game from 2008, and like most ADRIFT games (especially from that time), it has quite a few bugs.
It's not terrible; it has some fun moments as you wander around a bizarre, goofy landscape. But eventually, the bugs pile up and it gets too hard to play.
A slick, moody hyperlink game with sound and graphics on a train, August 15, 2017This is a SubQ magazine game that has a pleasing atmosphere. It has graphics and background noise.
You are on a train with your significant other. It's going through a long tunnel. There are a few other people on the train. It's a moody and introspective piece.
I could go into more detail, but playing the game does not take much longer than reading this review, so why not just try it?
A classic game with some difficulty due to randomization, August 15, 2017This is one of the best selling IF games ever. It has graphics and runs on Spectrum emulators (like Fuse).
It has graphics, and is intended to cover the same material as the book The Hobbit. It does so with a great deal of NPC independence, which ends up (to me) being somewhat frustrating. Back in the early days of text adventures, many of the companies (especially outside of Infocom) hadn't really thought about player guidance, and so games devolved into 'guess the verb' on every occasion.
Still, this game has a good deal of charm, and I've had fun exploring it.
A small game about a student and about mourning, August 15, 2017This is a game of the same sort of Wrenlaw, but smaller and less well implemented. You try to examine a variety of objects in your college dorm to unlock memories about a former love
It is not polished, but I enjoyed playing it, and it didn't overstay its welcome. If you like On Optimism or A Moment of Hope, you'd like this.
A unique game based on a Lord Dunsany story, August 15, 2017This game is perhaps best left undescribed, as its core mechanic is so unusual. It helps to type ABOUT or (I think) COMMANDS.
The story is based off an old Dunsany Story, just like Nepstad's The Journey of the King. But this game is much more constrained than that one.
I would have rated the game higher if I hadn't been stuck so many times, trying to search for the correct commands to advance the game.
Better than it could have been, August 12, 2017This is just a demo game, but I found it amusing in a sort of way. It is clearly just set up to show off features of glulx.
There are images (including in-line) and sounds, both background and controllable. Hearing what I assume is Plotkin's voice going 'whoosh whoosh' at increasingly loud levels is enjoyable, as is switching around background colors around a photograph of his face.
I'd love to see someone remake it with backstory and more interactivity, but keeping everything that's already in it.
Best experienced downloaded.
A very well-developed RPG with shops, battles, and a huge tower, August 6, 2017This is a big game. You have a long, opening sequence (very long!) that is entirely linear, then you begin the actual game, which is one of the best RPGs I've seen in text (Kerkerkruip is the other, and they're roughly equal in quality).
You are on a sort of elevator-like platform, and you ascend from level to level. To ascend requires 3 keys; each level has 8 doors with a variety of challenges. These challenges include trap-filled pathways, combat, mini-games of cards/fantasy chess, and occasionally some bizarre extra paths.
Everything is hyperlinks, making combat much more enjoyable than usual. Magic is simple. There is a complex money system, and most levels let you pick between seeing an armorer or an apothecary.
More than anything, it reminded me of Final Fantasy VII and Conan the Barbarian. The enemies start out as zombies and humanoid fungus, but you eventually find Guards of the Tower, Captains of the Tower, and Swordsmen of the Tower, much like Shinra Tower in FFVII.
I got to the 7th stage, but was unable to defeat the end guardian.
The story and writing is exactly the sort of thing TSR was putting out in the 90's. You're in a sort of dreamworld that is stable, and are hired out as an assassin, with the king as your target. The monsters are generally right out of a D&D handbook. There seems to be some mild racy parts, but my French vocabulary doesn't include that sort of thing, so it's easy to self-censor.
A minimalist moral tale of bullying told with the wrong engine, August 1, 2017This game is a short, linear story in a windows executable file where you mostly just click 'next' over and over again, with one or two choices you can make.
It's about a young boy who is being sent to juvenile detention after killing someone. It is very short.
It is in an RPG engine with hit points and so on. The author has the hit points represent ages.
A puzzly game in poetry, August 1, 2017This game does two interesting things: everything is in poetry, and you are in a place where space and time are warped.
This is fun, but the game is really very difficult; it's hard to have any idea at all what to do. Much of what you do is based on paradoxes.
I enjoyed this game with the walkthrough, but I don't know how it would be without it.
A large Adrift game where you stop various supervillains, August 1, 2017This game has the same sort of superhero tone as the Frenetic Five games. You are a superhero that isn't really that super.
The game had a fun tone, with some fairly silly humor. It's long though, and somewhat buggy. David Whyld's games tend to be fairly similar, so if you like one, you'll like them all-and vice versa.
A shortish fatasy game about giving people what they want, August 1, 2017This game is a short fantasy game set in a castle. I thought it was building up to something bigger, but most of the game is just wandering around equipping yourself.
There were many missing synonyms, and the game implied a robust conversation system that just wasn't there.
It had one fairly funny NPC in the armorer, though.
A crazy drug-and-violence story set in Australia, August 1, 2017This shortish TADS game has you framed for murder at a biker bar in Australia.
It uses garish colors and the writing is choppy and strewn with profanities.
It's an on-the-rails mystery that has a good base story but implementation issues.
A typical Santoonie game about a goblin, August 1, 2017Santoonie was a fake game company that would make really obnoxious games, occasionally for IFComp.
This is one such game. Like the others, it gives just enough of a level of implementation and thought that you think it might actually work and be fun, and then it slaps you with an unfinished game. It's like the Charlie Brown and Lucy football routine, over and over.
Has a sidekick with strong profanity.
A short, violent game with odd responses, August 1, 2017This short game has you escaping from a prison cell.
The walkthrough encourages you to do some very odd things.
The game is short, mostly about things like finding keys and opening doors.
I think it could have been better without the strange responses.
A dark/light themed game with earnest and bizarre writing, August 1, 2017This game has you enter a series of parallel worlds where darkness is everywhere, and you must attack it with the light.
It seems intentionally to parody things at several points, with gophers as the bad guys and a random plant called Gorarry that is the key to the universe.
I don't see anyone beating this without the walkthrough, but with the walkthrough it has some fun narrative points about player/parser relations.
A homebrew parser game about fixing a broken spaceship, August 1, 2017This game has you waking up in a closet after some drastic event. You need to save yourself and the ship.
This is a homebrew parser, which is fine, but it is also a homebrew parser that tries to implement the trickier parts of parser like conversation, which is not as fine. Simple shortcuts like 'l' and 'i' don't work, either.
It's not too bad, in general, but the parser causes too many problems to ignore.
A big, mostly empty game about investigating fraud, August 1, 2017This game has you wandering around a large map until you reach a manor, where you have to complete several puzzles to convict a rich man of fraud.
Most of the locations are empty, and when they are not empty, they often have strange disambiguation problems. The one NPC is very odd, to say the least.
This game needed a lot more polish.
A short graphical tech demo, August 1, 2017This is a short demo of a system not unlike Comazombie's MCA adventures or Robin Johnson's systems; however, this one is fairly incomplete.
You play Sigmund, from the Ring cycle of stories, and it's all filled with numerous graphics. Before the game really begins, though, it's all over.
A TADS horror game in a maze-like swamp, August 1, 2017This is a gory game set in a swamp. It's mostly empty rooms with little scenery (with exactly one or two of those in the whole map being something you need to search or look under). It's punctuated with instant-death combat unless you find items in the right order.
It has an interesting concept, but the execution needed a lot more work and a lot less mazes.
A buggy small game about six different lives, August 1, 2017This game is a sort of metaphysical ladder.
You have different choices to do the right or wrong thing. Doing the right thing reincarnates you as something 'greater', and the wrong thing makes you lower.
The game is so buggy, though, that it is very hard to go 'down'.
A short surreal game on a train with bugs, August 1, 2017This is a rather buggy surreal game set on a train.
It's hard to say much about it, because I get stuck on the second platform; whenever a train comes in, and I try to get on, the game says 'The train isn't here, idiot.', which is hardly encouraging.
In fact, the game in general is fairly insulting to the player (try typing YES repeatedely). I've decompiled it, but can't find much.
A fun game making and breaking words, August 1, 2017I played the most recent version of this game.
It's a fun wordplay game in Quest, where you click on different items to take and break them.
Breaking an item splits it up into different letters. You combine the letters to make new words.
It's fairly short, but I enjoyed it. There was some slowdown on textadventures.co.uk
A fascinating journey through the London underground and memory, August 1, 2017This game reminds me for some reason of Michael Ende's Momo.
In any case, this is a quest hyperlink game that has you travelling on trains. You are on a subway line, you can wait or get off at each station, then travel on a new line in a new directions.
There are a dozen or more lines, with quite a few stations.
As you play, very good text effects begin to show up. A metastory appears.
There is unnecessary strong profanity; however, on Chrome, profanity filters filter it out.
A DnD-influenced short game about fantasy racism, August 1, 2017This game is a bit shaky but has a great storyline about fantasy racism. The main character is dark-skinned, female, and can see in the dark, and everyone hates them.
This game was startling in its originality. It was also fairly buggy, with big typos that were missed.
It contains some combat and puzzles, with the interactivity at times just too underimplemented.
Contains some strong profanity.
A complicated but polished Baseball game, August 1, 2017Baseball is the theme of this, Andrew Schultz's first IFComp game.
Unlike his later games, there is no wordplay here, and no abstract narrative about excelling at being smart.
Instead, there is a deeply implemented and simulated baseball game. There are all sorts of timers going on, and wardrobe changes, and so on.
It's so complicated that it's all a bit overwhelming.
An extensive ADRIFT game set in Camelot, August 1, 2017This game has you going to Camelot to help Guinevere.
The plot is a bit and thin, and the ADRIFT parser is as weak as ever.
But the game is fairly detailed, and a lot of thought has gone into it.
The main weird thing is that wearing a ring is important to the story, but it always slips off your finger. Also, Hagrid makes an appearance in the game, talking about Dumbledore.
A surreal game on a train about a foster child, August 1, 2017I liked this game, though it was cut short and was buggy near the very end.
You play as a foster child sent to another world, where they look for their brother Ben.
You explore a wild fantasy world, primarily inhabited by robots.
The game uses interesting cinematic techniques like intruding italics text from the real world.
I liked it, but it stops right in the middle.
A small fantasy ship with three tasks, August 1, 2017This game has you explore a small ship full of fantasy creatures like faeries and goblins.
It has one oddly inappropriate part, but nothing else really in that nature.
By visiting the Faerie queen, you receive a variety of tasks, about 3 or 4 in total. Each is a simple fetch-type quest or single action.
The game ends fairly quickly.
A supershort zombie horror game set in a creepy hotel, August 1, 2017This is the third comazombie game I've played; the first was a tiny demo with little plot. The second was mostly in German.
This one is a complete, though tiny, game. You are in a room in a hotel with some pretty good colors and styling. It's a multiple choice game using a simplified version of comazombie's previous systems.
It throws in some needless profanity at one point which doesn't really fit, most likely due to the speaker having English as a second language.
A game with large geography about loss and memory, August 1, 2017This is one of those games where you wander about, having recollections come to you (like Wrenlaw).
The game has a sprawling geography; outside of the first area, each movement can take you through different climates.
It is short, a bit buggy, and kind of quickly put together, but I enjoyed it. It has MIDI music that I did not hear.
A fun little spoof on adventure games with intriguing puzzles, August 1, 2017This game is very good, similar to Ad Verbum, although I found it underclued and a bit frustrating.
There are three rooms with three challenges (after a brief intro). In the first room,... well, it might be more fun to play through.
Suffice it to say, it's almost like a test for adventurers based on standard IF tropes such as room descriptions, object names, and so on.
There was a sequel in 2017 with similar puzzles, which were also good.
A complex adrift game allowing choice of abilities set in medieval times, August 1, 2017This is a large Adrift game, in which, after an extended prologue, you are cursed into a form of your choosing: rat, fox, or snake.
As an animal, it is your job to be restored to your original form and find your lost love, Princess Tevona.
Overall, this was done pretty well, but the Adrift parser was pretty frustrating (I used Adrift Runner 4.0).
A campus exploration game about fire, fog, and a convict, August 1, 2017This is a really big game, with some really big bugs.
I played this game for the first time a few weeks ago, and I never realized there was a fire in my room or that the door was supposed to be blocked. Instead, I wandered around the rest of the building for a while.
Following the walkthrough, this game does have some fun elements. The huge maze is not one of those fun elements, though.
Interesting when used with the walkthrough.
A wordplay game set in Greek darkness, August 1, 2017This game has you descend on a train to the depths of Erebus, where you have to find your way around in total darkness.
This game is centered on wordplay, involving letters (similar in a vague way to Threediopolis).
I don't want to spoil the main mechanic, but I also found it very hard to figure out the main mechanic. Lack of cluing seems to be one of the biggest issues here.
A buggy game about changing your name after a hangover, August 1, 2017This game combines an unfortunately too common theme in IF (waking up in an apartment after drinking and/or romantic affairs) with another too common theme (office bureaucracy) and another (wacky weirdness), but somehow without fully committing to any of them.
The ADRIFT parser is really poor here. "Two dollar bill" is recognized, but not 'two' or 'bill' or so on.
There was a bug partway through that kept the walkthrough from working for me.
A game about discovering an invisibility potion, August 1, 2017This game has you find the secret of invisibility.
The base concept is really good; you have to remove clothes and not carry stuff to avoid being caught. You can find bandages, etc.
Unfortunately, the game is a bit too fiddly to work with. It's difficult to know what to do, due to undercluing.
A short zork-esque game with key-like combat, August 1, 2017This game has you exploring a small area with a Zorkian feel (a living room, a cave, transportation items, gemstones, etc.)
The puzzles are a bit underclued. Several of the puzzles involve a monster running at you. You have to be holding the correct weapon and use it to defeat the creature.
A silly power rangers spoof with giant opening maze, August 1, 2017This game is split into two parts. The second part is pretty cool; you are a power-ranger sort of person who gets a robot and can form a Zord type of thing.
The first part, however, is incredibly dull, having you trudge through swamps requiring 15 or 20 movement commands in a single direction (like n.n.n.n.n.n.n....)
If the first half were shorter, this would be pretty fun.
An interesting multiple choice system, mostly in German, August 1, 2017This game is written in its own multiple choice system, which allows you to check inventory at any time.
This game is almost entirely in German. I like German games, so it's not so bad, but in my version of windows, the umlauts display poorly, making the German not as easy to read.
Overall, the game is not as well developed as the system is.
A short demo game of a multiple choice system, August 1, 2017I found this system to actually be fairly impressive; you have multiple choice menus, but can check your inventory when you want to.
Unfortunately, this version is just a small demo, with little of the real action you might get in a full game.
Trap Cave, released the next year, had a larger game in the same system.
A postapocalyptic game with open world after linear intro, August 1, 2017This game has an intro involving you escaping from and surviving a terrible disaster, separating you from your friends.
It then opens up to an open world where you have to gather money, clothing and weapons to survive the apocalypse.
One of the better Adrift games.
A big, ambitious but buggy game about a magic house, August 1, 2017Like all other John Evans games, this is a really big game that promises some cool stuff (being able to cast all sorts of spells and having a portable house), but is not able to deliver on its promises.
The walkthrough is interesting, though, and worth checking out.
A homebrew RPG game with crafting system , August 1, 2017This game has an interesting setup where you wake up, with amnesia, in a forest, wearing a tunic with a skull embroidered on it.
You have to fight your way past beetles to get upgrades to fight more beetles to leave a tutorial area which ends the game.
The problem with the combat system here is that small steps take a lot of effort. Typing takes much more effort than clicks; either typing needs to be reduced to superfast shortcuts, or each command typed needs to have significant effect. This game strugles to find that balance.
An old homebrew parser game about infiltrating a party, August 1, 2017This is an old game that was released in IFComp purporting to be from 1981, complete with an old manual.
It was, rather, a new (for 2000) homebrew parser game about being a spy. I found the parser difficult to wrangle with and the story hard to piece together.
A short, purposely dumb game involving urination, August 1, 2017This game has a homebrew parser that doesn't recognize most commands. In this short game, you have to work very hard to keep from urinating yourself.
It has several bugs and overall just doesn't make much sense, except for the anti-Barney rhetoric.
A survey game with a hook about childhood, August 1, 2017This game starts out with you answering several survey questions about music and its role in your life.
Then it has a major shift, and ends up employing some interesting narrative techniques and text styling tricks to make some unusual points.
I like the trick, but I found it hard to pick choices that reflected the persona I wanted to put off.
A short spy thriller set in an office, August 1, 2017This game, which I believe is the author's first published game, has you disguising yourself as a repairman to enter an office and steal some data.
The author went through several cycles of writing and revising this work, improving the puzzles considerably over the original. The result is a smooth, short work.
As Jesus, fight and convert disciples, August 1, 2017In this game, you play as Jesus. You wander around a map, converting disciples, and occasionally fighting centurions.
Part of the game is purposely blasphemous, which I didn't like. But somehow the game is more sincere than Jarod's Journey or The Bible Retold.
I kept being killed by the centurion, and didn't finish.
Ninja, plus a dragon, August 1, 2017This game is just Ninja I with an extra dragon added.
I don't see how this could possibly not be satire of some sort, especially as Panks released much longer and more detailed games.
It did somehow make me like Ninja I a bit more though...
An early web CYOA game about an alien invasion, August 1, 2017This was a good twinelike game before Twine was popular.
You go to the bathroom in a bar, and everyone is gone when you come out.
This game is mostly pure branching, but has a clever puzzle or two, several images, and some sounds.
It was a bit hard to install and get running, but it's very interesting, especially if you're in to IF history.
Play as a lone janitor in a science facility, August 1, 2017This TADS game has you play as a janitor in a lab where all the scientists are gone for the day. It's up to you to stop the terrorists.
The setting is pretty bland for a lab, and the room descriptions are minimal, but I didn't find any bugs.
There is an independent NPC and an animal that are fairly fun.
A strange game from the fake Santoonie Corp, August 1, 2017This game has you play an autistic elf in the US called Delvyn, who eats pancakes and adventures into a spooky house.
I found this game fairly entertaining though buggy at first, but then I got stuck in the second pit, and reading on RGIF made me uncertain whether the game was even finishable, as Santoonie are notable trolls.
A fun Alan game in Raisanen's classic puzzly style, August 1, 2017Anssi Raisanen has written several Alan games over the years with a certain sort of puzzly style, and I've grown to enjoy them.
This game has you escaping from a wine cellar in a castle, finding and helping a wizard, and rescuing a king.
Anssi's games have a very consistent style, so if you like one, you'll like them all. The Chasing is another good one.
As president, travel over the whole world, August 1, 2017In this game, you play as the president of the united states, and every room is a country of the world.
It was quite entertaining to see that I could travel to Mexico to the south and Canada to the north.
The writing and implementation was a bit spotty, though, and it was hard to guess what to do next.
A short, buggy game about riding a go kart to a fantasy land, August 1, 2017This is an AGT game, a sort of parser used before TADS and Inform.
AGT games can be very good; however, this one has many issues, including grammar and spelling. Random text prints at the beginning of every verb, often instead of error messages.
I followed the walkthrough, but eventually found myself unable to complete it.
A greek mythology/modern life game, August 1, 2017This was an entertaining game from IFcomp 2002.
You explore your house, looking for your notes. As you find notes, you have a sort of flashback or dream of a greek mythological figure.
I enjoyed these vignettes more than the house filled with greek mythology-named cats.
The game was a bit underclued, though, and it was hard to get invested.
A massive adrift game with text dumps and pop culture references, August 1, 2017This was David Whyld's first IFcomp game.
This game is just really, really big, with tons of conversations and features.
It's just too big; page after page of text dumps make it difficult to pay attention to what you're trying to do.
It involves a fantasy land where everyone references american pop culture and you learn DnD spells.
A mishmash of 20 different scenes, August 1, 2017This game contains a wide variety of scenes that are not related to each other very much, except by a small thread at the end. It includes things as diverse as Dr Who and fantasy as well as American history.
Only the main thread of the game; anything else was not implemented (for instance, you can't PRAY at Mecca).
It was interesting, but ultimately incoherent.
Moving and confusing, detailed and short. A memory game, July 22, 2017This is my final review for the Official Ryan Vedder Weekend Review Contest with guaranteed prize, giving me a score of 8 (due to having reviewed the other games earlier). Due to lack of publicity, the contest has been extended until Monday night at midnight Moscow time. Just post your Veeder reviews on ifdb (the Veedercomp games also count). 2nd and 3rd place winners get something too.
This game confused me at first; I didn't Get the mechanic that advances the game until my second playthrough.
You are in a park, looking for a geocache. There is a satisfying trash minigame.
I found it touching; if it is a parody, they say that parodies of extremism are indistinguishable from extremism, so the extreme schmalziness is something I enjoyed.
I love this game, but it was too hard to figure out how to progress (it's probably my fault for not reading the text after a major hint in my first playthrough, but oh well).
A game about a tiny rat in a big world, with creepy museum things, July 22, 2017This review is part of the Official Ryan Veeder Weekend Review Exposium with Guaranteed Prize.
For some reason, when I saw this game, I didn't want to play it. Then many people reviewed it, and I still didn't want to play it. It seemed like it would be confusing with a lot of red herrings.
Then I tried it, and stopped, because I am overwhelmed by red herrings and use walkthroughs on every game.
Then I had to write a review for this exposium, and I played it. The writing is great. Unplugging the router was a joy in itself, despite its lack of gameplay effect. The juxtaposition of the wooden caterpillar with the other objects in its room frightened me (I think I thought it was on the bed?).
The combat was satisfying once I worked it out, and conversation was surprisingly good.
This is a good game, but it stressed me out due to my gaming style.
A short game with a twist and good source code, July 22, 2017This review is for the Official Ryan Veeder Weekend Review Salon with Guaranteed Prize.
This Ryan Veeder game had me very confused, and then pleased, then more confused; then I read the source code, nodded, and understood.
You play a doctor trying to help a sick patient named Pauline. You are in a small hospital that is very... unusual, to say the least, in its geography.
The lack of cluing got to me, though, and the strong branching made each playthrough less memorable.
But the twist was pleasant.
A Robin and Orchid spinoff as a tutorial, July 22, 2017This review is part of the Official Ryan Veeder Weekend Review Communal Effort with Guaranteed Prize.
This is a spin-off of Robin and Orchid. You are investigating a haunted house, and fall down a hole.
The best part of the game is the demonstration of the three main methods of conversation.
The least best part of the game is the hinting. While it is generally good, there were times where the hints just kind of kicked out at important moments. The inexperienced adventurer that I was playing as got frustrated at not, for instance, knowing how to get through the door.
I enjoyed the ending considerably, though.
A short game with well-implemented NPCs and a layered story., July 22, 2017This review is for The Official Ryan Veeder Weekend Review Tournament with Guaranteed Prize.
This game is a prequel to The Statue Got Me High, but you don't need to have played the latter game.
It contains classic elements of the Veeder mythos, such as red herrings, consumable food, actions that seem simple but maybe take a little longer to type than the other anticipated but you never know, and NPCs whose tone of voice is in direct contrast to the content of their conversations.
This game makes a 5 on my scale, but only barely. According to my criteria, it is polished (no bugs here), descriptive (why not?), has an emotional investment (I hated Edward), the interactivity is okay (I had to decompile it once, but I wanted to decompile it, so that's something), and I would play it again.
But it just scraped by in each category, so it might not be as good as a 4 star game that did great in one category.
A briefly earnest parody of an earnest scary story about a bunny, July 22, 2017This review is part of the Official Ryan Veeder Weekend Review Competition with Guaranteed Prize.
In this game, entered in the Haunted House Jam, you play (in 3rd person) a (winsome) character named something with an SH that I forgot.
There is a small map, and a puzzle involving a stick (which was listed as a rope in the inventory) that failed to draw me in.
However, the quality of the writing was par, and the experience with the dark figure and the other experience with the empty bedroom were vaguely similar to experiences I've had. I would play it again.
A fairly well written faintly recalled memory of a fable by Poe, July 22, 2017This review is part of the Official Ryan Veeder Weekend Review Challenge with Guaranteed Prize.
In this game, our intrepid author programs an entire game without a single (actually, with A single) glance at the source material.
The source material was, from the recollection, somewhat disturbing, but the retelling is much more disturbing if approached in the right vein. Have you ever faintly recalled a movie, or story, or dream from your youth that deeply disturbed you? I have half-recollected versions of both It and Castle in the Sky that are much more haunting than the original.
That's what this game is; it condenses all of the most disturbing parts of the game. What's disturbing is not the game, but what it reveals about the human mind, about Veeder's mind, about the things that his brain decided to store up for the future.
Has substantially more French than the original, July 22, 2017This review is part of the Official Ryan Veeder Weekend Review Contest with Guaranteed Prize.
While I was alarmed by the 'vitesse alarmante' of the 'eau' entering my ship, I was able to escape towards 'la poupe'.
While the addition of extra French improved the game considerably, it had no effect on pre-existing French. I would have preferred seeing Capitaine Earthworm or some other variation thereof.
An animated comic about commas, July 16, 2017This is a pretty fun comic to watch, but has very little interactivity. It worked for me in-browser.
It's essentially an animated comic about a comma who really doesn't like you. In each scene, you can mostly wait until the next scene, but you can also try a few basically well-cued actions. There is a scene or two, though, with really badly cued actions.
A charming and pleasant search for 7 lost horses, July 16, 2017Räisänen definitely has their own style of puzzle, in this and other games.
In this game, you are a nobleman who has lost seven horses, and who has been asked to find them, as well as delivering invitations.
The puzzle design rests on light puzzles mostly focusing on examining, waiting, and movement, similar to Arthur DiBianca's later games.
A fun implementation of a creepy lovecraftian punk rock parody, July 16, 2017This game is all about punk rock; you are at the HeBGB, based on the actual birthplace of punk the CBGB.
The game is underclued in many ways, but with the walkthrough, it was fun.
You have to learn about an old punk band, become a punk, and find a mystic lost chord. The map is pretty simple, but the puzzles can be pretty hard.
An extraordinarily complex group of active NPCs in a groucho marx scene, July 16, 2017You are a director filming the Marx brothers, and you have to herd all of them together before you can film them.
There are tons of independent NPCs, all doing all sorts of things, running from each other, fighting each other, etc.
As a technical piece, it's brilliant; as a game, it's less than enjoyable. Even playing with the walkthrough is hard; I recommend dowloading the zip containing the source and transcript, reading the transcripts, and just playing around with the actual game.
An entertaining but deeply frustrating game, July 16, 2017This game is named appropriately, for two reasons.
First, it's about a series of unfortunate events. After a bright opening, the game quickly devolves into tragedy after tragedy. The writing is funny and fresh, and the situations made me laugh.
Second, though, the biggest section of the game is incredibly frustrating, with inventory limits, hunger puzzle, liquid measuring problems, etc.
I recommend playing through the first part, then using a walkthrough or the club floyd transcript.
A clever, short campfire or surreal tale using Twine, July 16, 2017This game makes excellent use of different text and background colors and fonts to provide an intriguing and creepy atmosphere.
You play as a groundskeeper for the queen who has been dismissed. You take a short tour through a fantastic and frightening landscape. The background darkens as the game progresses.
Overall, a great short gane.
A fun little creepy adventure driving a car down a highway, July 16, 2017This game was short and sketchy, as is usual for ectocomp games.
You drive down a dark and spooky road at night, and various cinematic effects happen. There's some implied backstory and multiple endings.
But it's short enough that the time you spend wondering whether to play it would be better spent just playing it.
A short Voodoo religion-based game for Ectocomp, July 16, 2017This game was entered in Ectocomp 2013. It has a short sequence based on the Voodoo religion, and includes a fairly clever puzzle.
Because it was a speed-IF, it has a bunch of rough edges. Also, the game has quite a bit of profanity. But the concept is much better developed than most ectocomp games.
A chilling game that becomes an intriguing puzzle, July 16, 2017This game was quite creepy and icky at first, until I realized my true purpose.
This game is a play-and-replay game that was brilliantly coded in 3 hours or less, and provides more gameplay than most Ectocomop speed IF. Recommended. I can't say much more without spoiling it.
A visual novel existential Speed-IF about death, July 16, 2017This is a very short game but with some nice graphics and interesting concept. You are dead, and you are on the internet. You talk to some old friends and check out some old haunts.
It's an Ectocomp game, so it's fairly short, and it takes a lot of files to get running. It has very few branching points.
A fun, tiny game where you customize your body, July 16, 2017In this game, you are a monster with a varying number of body parts that you can modify by taking different things out of buckets and baskets nearby, including tails, skins, eyes, and 'extra'.
Its short and fun, written quickly for Ectocomp. It doesn't have an ending or graphics, but it's whimsical and fun.
A haunting short story about a man, a woman, and a cat, July 16, 2017This is a SpeedIf made for Ectocomp. You play an old man who has experienced a loss, and who finds a dead cat on his lawn.
You have to clean up the cat, by finding various items about your house. As you do, a mysterious backstory is slowly unveiled.
While the final story didn't completely gel for me, I found this game fun and fascinating.
A short thriller about being Jack in Halloween, July 16, 2017This game has you starting as a confused Jack during Halloween, and quickly escalates from there.
The story is quite original for IF, though it resembles the plot of several non-IF media sources.
This is an ectocomp game, so it is short and buggy, but the concept is neat.
A bizarre short sequence with minimalist parser about Doom, July 16, 2017This is a violent and profanity-filled short little game with some graphics effects that has a bit of a parser in it (you can type 5 or 7 different commands) made for Ectocomp.
It seems like it was intricate to program in the 3 hours, but suffered from the lack of time.
A game that randomly assigns you candy, July 16, 2017This is a twine game with two buttons: one that randomly gives you a type of candy, and one that counts the candy you've gotten.
I don't know if there's anything hidden here. This is a speed IF, so its likely the author was just experimenting with Twine, in which case this is a neat little piece of programming.
A little combat simulator running around a house grabbing poetry, July 16, 2017In this game, you run around a 3x3 house filled with independent hostile NPCs who chase you. You need to evade or shoot them and find four treasures hidden in the house.
The randomized combat can be hard, but if you expect it coming in, it can be a lot of fun. I found 2 poems and ran, and I was satisfied with my ending.
A short horror game with an unusual narrative viewpoint, July 16, 2017This is an ectocomp game about a confined, frightening story with an unusual viewpoint suggested by the title of the story.
The game does a very good job at splitting up the parser-viewpoint and the player-viewpoint. It's also fairly grim. I enjoyed this game, but as a speed-IF, it had some spotty implementation.
An intricate correct-sequence tiny horror puzzle, July 16, 2017This was a fun but frustrating little puzzle. You are a parasite in a human and you want to get out.
There are 7 steps to getting out, but you have to do them in exactly the correct order. Timing is essential. The game allows you to take several incorrect paths at first, so you can't just go through the options systematically, you have to read the failure text and respond.
I liked it.
An interesting social commentary entered into Ectocomp, July 16, 2017This game is about gentrification rather than zombification. A social commentary twine game designed to show the plight of those affected by gentrification.
This game had no ending that I could find, but upon restarting the game you can find access to more information about gentrification.
A wacky game about dying on Halloween, July 16, 2017This is a speed IF entered into Ectocomp. In this game, you are aware of your death, and you try to avoid it. It branches wildly, with a bunch of silly deaths.
Some of the branches are advertised as unfinished, but its all part of the fun. I liked it as a small snack.
A short, underimplemented but funny horror game, July 16, 2017In this short ectocomp game, you have to buy a newspaper and go into a diner, where events soon unfold in a dangerous way.
I had a lot of trouble figuring out what to do, so I had to textdump the game, but once I found the ending, I thought it was humorous. It definitely could use some more synonyms, though.
A Halloween movement game that was less than I thought, July 16, 2017In this game, you are on a 3x3 grid with 4 bad guys and 4 good guys.
I thought the point of the game was to use the elements listed on the rooms to have a sort of rock/paper/scissors battle where you throw bad guys at each other and so on.
Instead, you just move everyone around so that everyone is in the generally correct area. Its fun, but it could have been more. This was an ectocomp game, so what's been done is pretty good.
A short, creepy google simulator for halloween, July 16, 2017In this game, you have a 'brand new' google engine that's spooky: Boogle.
You find out that boogle is more than you expected, in a fairly funny and gruesome sort of way. The surprises are the best part, so I won't describe it much more. Good fun-to-time ratio.
A short hospital horror game, July 16, 2017This was a speed-IF for ectocomp, which generally means guess-the-verb issues and underimplementation.
That happens here, but not as much as I thought it would be. I didn't read the initial text, and that made the game harder for me, but once that was fixed, I was able to beat the game without a problem.
I found the horror effective. You are a late-night janitor mopping.
A wildly branching silly ectocomp game, July 16, 2017This game has you wandering around a spooky halloween town and branches a lot, like a time-cave structure.
It starts with a parody of adventure games (a room full of boring furniture), but gets better afterwards.
A fun game from a fish perspective, July 16, 2017There is a surprisingly large amount of interactive fiction where you play as a fish. This is one of them.
This game does a great job of showing how horrifying ice fishing is to the fish involved. There were some odd interactions, and the game was short, but it's a speed-IF ectocomp game, so I can't complain.
A frustrating and hard graphical adventure about dreams, July 16, 2017This is a point and click adventure. I couldn't get past an ogre, and from reading reviews, I don't know anyone (except maybe one person) who actually beat it; there's an ogre that's hard to get past.
You wander around a girl's boarding school at night before discovering an unsavory conspiracy involving scientific experiments on dreams.
An overly ambitious, under-implemented fantasy fest, July 16, 2017This game had just too big of a scope and not enough polish to work out. It is a sprawling fantasy game, with a village and a town and a tower and an underground dungeon and an island and so on and so on. It has a homebrew parser. Contrast this with The Land Beyond The Picket Fence from the same year; its homebrew parser is much more polished, the map is tiny (7 or 9 or so locations), and its slick and smooth. Both games probably had roughly similar amounts of work put into them, but Eldor is just spread too thin.
However, Stuart Allen released The Unholy Grail the next year, which is a fantastic game, so I strongly recommend it.
A small game about escaping your wife, July 16, 2017You're King Arthur, and can't leave because Guinevere won't let you.
This is a short game, yet still frustrating. The many actions you have to do are hard to conceive of before doing them.
The author said on rec.arts.int-fiction that they wrote this game in 3 days, and it shows. It's not horrible, because the scope was small enough to allow for some polish, but it doesn't sparkle.
An insanely hard puzzle game that is huge, July 16, 2017This MSDOS game, which I played in DOSBOX, is a collection of extraordinarily hard puzzles. You enter an intersection of hallways, with each direction in the hallway having a door with a puzzle. Past those puzzles are harder puzzles. Past those puzzles are...way too many puzzles.
This is one of the very largest adventure games, and even the easiest puzzles are way too hard for most people. If you are an adventure puzzle fanatic, you can try this game. Expect many, many, many random deaths. I'm giving it 3 stars for being polished, descriptive, and good at instilling an emotion: annoyance.
A buggy futuristic game, July 16, 2017This game is extraordinarily hard to run. I ended up poking around in the code and reading past reviews to get an idea of this game.
You are in a future with a robot that is a copy of Floyd from Planetfall. You are investigating an office complex.
A huge part of the code is taken up by a long, involved fight, describing how you or your opponent kick each other's trash.
A mid-length exploration game with some tricky puzzles, July 16, 2017This game has you exploring a mid-sized map with a music building, a post office, and a Hardee's knockoff.
The game is well-coded and funny at many times, but many of the puzzles are of the absurd variety that only makes sense in retrospect. Puzzles include 'look behind the one scenery item in the one room that has something', 'try something that has no chance of working in real life', and 'make sure you're carrying a completely random item that will save your life'.
I wasn't a fun of the puzzles, but a large segment of people are. If you like methodically working through a game, drawing a map, and checking every item, you will probably really like this game quite a bit.
A tiny but tricky humorous parody of Indiana Jones+Zork, July 16, 2017This is a fairly entertaining parody of Indiana Jones that has some implementation problems. You are at the end of a long adventurer, and already have thousands of points, but you just need to get the jewel and go.
This game borrows some text from and parodies Francesco Bova's The Jewel of Knowledge, and credits that author.
I liked it, but it was annoying trying to figure out the correct syntax and logic of the three main puzzles.
A medieval jailbreak game, July 16, 2017This game starts with a long cinematic-type sequence where you are thrown in jail for dressing like a boy.
It's notable for changing location descriptions. However, everyone I've seen that beat it used the walkthrough. It contains several unintuitive puzzles, and is one of those games best experienced via walkthru, in my opinion.
A bug-ridden but fun 3rd person supervillain game, July 16, 2017You are a third-person observer in a ship as Captain Chaos, a relatively benign supervillain, is crashing to the earth.
The writing is good, and funny, but the game is super buggy, with events firing at the wrong time, repeating actions sending your score up over and over, and a whole slew of bad interfaced design problems and missing synonyms.
It's a shame, because the writing is so fun.
A vampire hunting game with some bugginess, July 16, 2017This is a big grid of a city which you stalk as a vampire.
The game is winnable but the author ran out of time, making many of the locations underimplemented. I was able to complete the game, but only by asking the doorman about various things in the magazine.
It has some violence and sensuality, but both written so blandly as to have little effect.
A great game plagued with many bugs, about Indian folklore, July 16, 2017This large game tells a wonderful native american tale. Set in a large village, and in the world of the dead, you have to hunt food for a village while the warriors prepare for the arrival of a deadly giant.
Big and ambitious, this game was massively buggy during the competition and placed in the bottom 10. It was updated later, fixing many but not all problems. I recommend playing with the walkthrough to see the great story.
A touching memory of WWI soldiers with very difficult interface, July 16, 2017This is a very touching game, whose ending gave me shivers.
You play a variety of characters, many of whom are (I believe) Canadians sent to fight in WWI.
The game jumps from character to character and situation to situation in an interesting way, likely influenced by the previous year's Photopia.
However, the interaction is given by choosing an action from a drop down menu of 3 to 4, and then guessing the exact words the game wants you to type. This is essentially impossible without the walkthrough.
An experiment where you are the computer, typing in descriptions, July 16, 2017This is a completely freeform game. The computer gives you commands, which you respond to. It asks for items in the room, and then will try to TAKE or BREAK them, etc., as well as asking for exits and having you move around.
It was a lot of fun, but only for a short time.
A large, sprawling fantasy castle with big bugs, July 16, 2017I was excited to finally play the first John Evans game, as he had become a legend in my mind from his other games.
John Evans is known for entering massive, extremely bold games into the comp that are just not finished. Games where you create the world, or where you can do anything you want, that kind of thing.
Castle Amnos is actually relatively tame and finished compared to the later games. There is a castle with five floors, reachable by an elevator whose buttons seem to work randomly. I was able to learn a variety of spells. It seems the game is mostly unfinishable, but the textdump showed me the ending.
Overall, it was fairly fun.
An adrift game exploring a deserted island, July 16, 2017In this game, you are marooned on a small island, and you have to get off.
Like most adrift games, the parser is poor and has disambiguation trouble.
The game has a lot of under-described locations. And there is really no hint on what you are supposed to be doing. Also the walkthrough says to take tires, but the game says they are too heavy.
Overall, this seems like a really ambitious game with moving NPCs and fire simulation, but it was probably too big to polish up in time for the comp.
A mid-length ADRIFT game exploring a small town, July 16, 2017You've crashed your car in a small town, and you have to find your way out.
This game plays on a 3x3 city grid that is minimally described (more areas open up later).
Everything is minimally described. 'There is a swimming pool here. It sparkles' and stuff like that. I had a game-stopping bug early on in Gargoyle, but it looks like others found many bugs as well. Scenery is undersdescribed, and the ADRIFT parser makes playing harder than it should.
A fun but under-implemented AGT cyberpunk spy game, July 16, 2017In this AGT game (a parser that I find better than ADRIFT but not as good as Inform or TADS), you have to navigate an enemy stronghold using different cubes of software and slabs and pills.
It's not very polished at all, and the parser has some troubles, and the story has gaping plotholes (it's super easy to walk into enemy barracks and take things from soldiers). But it has a charm to it, and the story seems really deeply thought out; the author says they invented the world in their youth.
An incomplete cinematic Lovecraftian horror game, July 16, 2017This game is a well-written and programmed Lovecraftian horror game set in the time of slavery and wooden sailing ships.
You wake up, bound and gagged in a fascinating sequence, before landing on a mysterious island.
This game does a good job of being disorienting and horror-filling. It is grotesquely violent at some points, and has some non-consensual and non-explicit advances by one character.
A difficult but cinematic terrorist game, July 16, 2017In this game, whose opening reminded me a bit of Infocom's Border Zone, you play a man who is in a train bathroom when terrorists take over.
The game has you do exciting things like climbing on trains and so on, but the puzzles are pretty nasty, almost impossible without hints. Even with hints, I found it fairly difficult, as a cumbersome inventory system led me to drop some things I later discovered I needed.
Overall, an interesting story, and worth playing for puzzle fiends.
A multilinear game about the ocean, July 16, 2017This game has you wandering around a beach, just exploring and experimenting with life.
This game has around 40 endings, some after a very short time, and some after a very long time. It has some fairly complex NPCs.
As a beach game, there are several references to babes and illicit activities under boardwalks, and some fairly non-explicit scenes involving such. There's also a touching scene with a toddler.
A big empty spaceship game where you have to repair broken things, July 16, 2017This is a Star Trek-esque game. After a brief opening sequence with some guess-the-verb stuff, you are woken from cryosleep and have to repair a station.
The station has hallways A through J that are all identical, and minimally described, as well as a variety of other rooms. There are some fun things here, but I found a lot of it frustrating. The centerpiece of the game is a series of several EVA expeditions that realistically model 3d movement without friction. I found this to be tedious.
A big, difficult game about buying beer while underage, July 16, 2017This is a big game with a lot of personality. I haven't heard of anyone who's actually finished it, though.
You play an overweight, nerdy character who wants to be popular with the head cheerleader. You are going to try to get underage beer. It has a Jim Munroe sort of feel.
This game is full of NPCs and things to do and strange subplots, but its somehow hard to achieve anything besides wandering around. This is a game that would strongly benefit from a walkthrough. As it is, the hints are good, but each hint leads to other hints you should do first and the first steps are never really mentioned.
A long fantasy time travel game in an uncles' hotel/museum, July 16, 2017This game seems strongly influenced by the previous year's massive Mulldoon Legacy. You are investigating your uncle's museum/hotel, and you discover a crackling energy portal leading to ancient times.
The game has some tricky puzzles, and the published version is in fact not completable. However, the source code provided does compile correctly.
I found the game to be fun but to have way too many 'guess the author's brain'-type puzzles.
A murder mystery wrapped up in a long faery-poem driven gala, July 16, 2017This is an interesting game, with many elements reminiscent of Infocom's Suspect, but much simpler.
You are attending a Faerie masque that a neighbor has thrown; in this masque, everyone has a costume and a role to say.
About half of the game consists of listening to the gala instructions (basically a big cosplay or LARP, all in rhyme), and solving easy riddles. Then it gets harder, and weird.
I liked it, though. It has some layers of mystery that are never unveiled, and which you are left to deduce for yourself, which I was unable to do.
A short arabic-themed puzzle game about catching a thief, July 16, 2017This is a sort of cross between Zork and arabian nights. You have on the one hand sultan's guards with scimitars and bazaars, and on the other hand you have soda vending machines and currency based on King Mycroft.
I found a few game-killing bugs in Gargoyle (when asking the merchant about a few things), but it might just be my interpreter.
I liked the puzzles, though they were hard to guess at times. A lot of people liked the original way of getting past the dog.
A ridiculous small game based on a webcomic, July 16, 2017This is a wacky/goofy game with humor typical of the early 2000's (think Strongbad-era).
You are a penguin and have to do a variety of bizarre things. The game is a one-room-at-a-time game. You can experiment, but reading the hints is probably the best way to go.
A game about finding a safety deposit box with nonsensical puzzles, July 16, 2017In this game, you have to pass four or fives puzzles to open a safety deposit box.
These puzzles are based in reality, but have little basis in reality. Just taking a ticket from the machine involves deciphering a complex sequence of button presses.
These puzzles are exceedingly illogical. But the game is otherwise competently written and bugless.
A gruesome medieval game about memorializing the dead, July 16, 2017This game starts with several puzzles involving climbing out from a pile of corpses.
After that, you need to memorialize the dead.
This is certainly an unusual game. It could have been far better if the various puzzles had been better clued, and synonyms for verbs and nouns implemented.
An excellent, short surreal game by the author of deadline enchanter, July 16, 2017Deadline Enchanter was one of my first games I ever played, and still one of my favorites and a strong influence.
This game came before deadline enchanter, but shares its same feeling of utter bizzareness.
You are the ruler(s?) of a kingdom that has been ravaged by a ghost. There is wearable honey/history, and all sorts of other interesting things. I love this little game. It plays on gargoyle.
A jumbled IFComp game that was a late Walkthrough Comp entry, July 16, 2017WalkthroughComp was done by Emily Short, where she wrote out a telegram of a bizarre walkthrough for a nonexistent game, and then you were to write that game.
This game is one of the biggest responses to that; however, it's too big. The game is full of text dumps, and the environment (inside a VR machine) just veers wildly from genre to genre and location to location.
It must have taken a lot of effort, but it needed more coherence, I think.
An old adrift game with spooky music but bad implementation, July 16, 2017This is a game with a big map but only 2 or 3 puzzles. You explore a creepy house (with some timed text effects at the beginning, creepy music/sound effects, and a popup image in the middle that's not supposed to be scary).
I ran this on Adrift 3.9. Like all adrift games, it has major problems. This game also has big text dumps.
An Adrift game dreaming about Will Crowther and Adventure, July 16, 2017In this game, a female college friend gives you (a male) a disk of Advent 550 to help you over the blues.
You end up playing the game, and falling asleep with your friend on the couch. You have a trippy dream involving will crowther.
The Adrift parser isn't that great (I used 3.90), but the game pulled some clever tricks for the game-within-a-game. I actually enjoyed this, but I had to put it in the Adrift Generator to find all the necessary tasks.
A purposely irritating short game with a bunch of tiny tests, July 16, 2017This game uses the Adrift parser, which is inherently problematic.
It is a sequence of small rooms with really unclear puzzles, including a sound puzzle. The puzzles are really irritating.
However, this game did not come last in the competition. It's possible that hardcore puzzle fans may enjoy this game.
The first IFComp Quest game; short and buggy quest for love, July 16, 2017This game is the first Quest game ever entered into IFComp.
You wandering in the first to give a flower to a girl. Then more stuff happens. It is really a teenagerish game (male, specifically), from the plotline to the poor spelling and bugginess.
At least the author was bold by going out on a limb, entering the first Quest game ever.
A competent TADS game about finding your past in an old town, July 16, 2017I like the atmosphere in this game. You're in a town on the Gulf Coast, exploring a town and an old wharf.
The game isn't large, so it doesn't take too long to finish. But it could be much better-clued. Without clues, this game is like playing monopoly for the first time without instructions.
There was one action required at the end that I found unusually gruesome, but somewhat logical in hindsight.
An interesting cruise ship that devolves into a find-crystal-beat-wizard game, July 16, 2017This game had a really promising opening. You board a cruise ship, and you are unguided; you wander into a gift shop, and can buy many things, there is a 4-day schedule, meals are offered throughout the day, etc.
And then BAM, it becomes a completely unoriginal text adventure where you have to solve unmotivated puzzles to find crystals to defeat a wizard. Why? It was so promising...
A competently programmed but hard 'hard sci fi' game, July 16, 2017This game has you visiting a lost world where the builders, an ancient people of great power, had disappeared, and where your supervisor has disappeared.
It has a fairly small map, allowing you to explore much of it in 30 minutes or so, but it has a tricky maze and a propensity for hiding things in scenery objects.
Overall, I found it a mostly interesting story, reminiscent of a Star Trek movie.
A fascinating but ultimately too obscure game based on colours, July 16, 2017This game actually reminded me of the new game Niney (in 2017), where you 'become' different things for this people.
This game has you perform a task for 26 different people (not related to the alphabet). However, knowing what you need to do is really, really hard, involving a cryptographic puzzle.
Then the game involves color shifting and sorting, with a cool ending.
The code shows a character named Polly, but I didn't find them.
A buggy take on the crusades and a parody of Jesus' death, July 16, 2017This game puts you in the place of a general during the crusades.
You have to break into a city and talk to the king. There's a lot of guess-the-verb happening here.
Then you end up telling the story of Christ's death, with some parody elements. You have to reconstruct it into a more 'exciting' story to convert the king.
A somewhat buggy and underclued fantasy adventure that grew on me, July 16, 2017This game has a lot of bad signs; typos/grammar errors, the plot is literally 'destroy the evil sorcerer', random text dumps happen.
But it actually seems pretty original later on; there are several NPCs, a house with an unusual layout, an island to wander around, and an unexpected story.
I had to read the accompanying transcript, but I liked this in the end.
A medieval conversation-based romance adventure, July 16, 2017This is an action-heavy game set in medieval times, a sort of romance.
You play a young woman whose leg is damaged at a young age, before being forced to reside with a cruel lord. In several cinematic or conversational scenes, you decide your future, dealing with brigands and romance.
The biggest problem here, and it's a problem with many of Fischer's other well-put-together games, is in the cluing. It's hard to know exactly what you're meant to do. The game could use a great deal of more direction.
An intriguing game based on amnesia, waiting in a very long line, July 16, 2017This is a somewhat kafka-esque game which is translated from spanish. It was later retranslated as 'dead reckoning' (which can be found at the Olvida Mortal page, not the other game also titled Dead Reckoning
You wake from a sort of fugue in a very, very long line. You can't remember why you're there.
The game was essentially fair, and had great atmosphere, but it had one really, really bad 'guess the sentence' puzzle involving the SAY TO WOMAN "something something" type command.
Has some brief strong profanity.
A wacky factory with death timers and randomization, July 16, 2017This was one of the hardest games for me to try to finish. You are in a factory with room names like "218 IMO" and "PUR PLE", with characters like "TIND-R-FUT" and "YES-R-KNO".
There is a timer that kills you randomly, over and over (you are a band of six robots, so you have six lives). The solution to the game is randomized, but there are also many irrelevant puzzles.
A game based on a play about a MUD, July 16, 2017In this game, you are in a MUD (like a text version of World of Warcraft). You have to join a beginner quest and complete it.
The game has several entertaining characters. It contains an in-game hint system that makes sense.
I found some bugs related to attempting to do things twice (like after dying).
The game seems to hint at some risque business, but there's nothing really like that (at least not explicitly).
A fun surreal game with some tricky puzzles, July 16, 2017This game has you wandering an enormous mansion, exploring room after room, with hidden passages and a strange woman in the library.
I enjoyed it, but only because I used hints. The game has the sort of thing where you have 20 similar rooms and one of them has a scenery item that can be used.
The author is a little too smarmy; if you type nothing, you get "Let me explain something here; you're playing a text adventure...no text, no adventure, get it?". That kind of 'oh silly player' attitude is prevalent. It has a lot of poetry and some physical simulation (freezing and melting in an optional puzzle, flushing toilet, etc.)
An illustrated TADS game reminiscent of The Little Prince, July 16, 2017This game has you exploring a little abandoned islet. It really reminds me of the little prince with its illustrations, especially a sheep, a snake, a desert, etc.
It has a music-based puzzle (without sound) that was nice. It was all very light, though, and had you take some actions that are rather unguessable. The pictures were pleasant, though.
An entertaining but tricky poem with some interactivity, July 16, 2017This game is a poem about a rich lord and the devil fighting. It uses colors and illustrations.
You get a big chunk of verses, and then most actions give you a sentence or two of prose, but the correct action advances the verses.
It was frankly enjoyable, the poem about the english lord and the devil brawling.
A graphics-heavy, big game with a huge swamp, July 16, 2017This is a big, old-school game with tons of pictures. Expect quicksand, killer mosquitoes, a big maze, a light puzzle, a hunger puzzle, searching many random objects, etc.
I played with the walkthrough, but this would be a big, big game without it.
Story was pretty good, but navigating the swamp was tedious. The puzzles weren't too bad. Randomly has a troll.
An old-school game with changing colors about collecting treasures, July 16, 2017This game is kind of a mish-mash of things, with a seedy individual like the thief in Zork, and a plot about collecting treasures.
I knew I was in trouble when I found myself in Maze Room 1. It was even worse when I discovered that the walkthrough didn't help here due to the maze being randomized.
There were some fun action sequences later on, but the game was too underclued to be easily completable.
A somewhat difficult sci-fi space thriller for Windows, July 16, 2017This is a long and well-polished game, but it has a number of difficult features, like items you have to take at the right time or you'll be closed off forever, a maze, etc.
It felt somewhat tedious to play through. It had a teenage girl that loves swearing; in fact, it's one of her main characteristics.
Interesting, but ultimately not one I'd replay.
A minimalist game made with a primitive parser. Locks and keys, July 16, 2017This game is just a light puzzle plus a series of locks and keys. The keys are bizarre; a weapon, a jar, they can all be keys.
This just seems quickly programmed in an old an bad language. I wonder if the author wrote it years before and spruced it up for the comp. It does have some nice Ascii art, and some fun ideas, but it needs a lot of work.
A short, enjoyable medieval German game, July 16, 2017This game has three main puzzles, and is a cinematic game with nice background descriptions.
I struggled a bit with the game, as I didn't speak german. But it is very short, and the medieval background was really fun.
I've provided a small walkthrough:
(Spoiler - click to show)To get over the wall, jump then pull yourself.
For the forest, stick sticks in the ground.
For the man, alternate fighting and talking, with a lot of talking.
A homebrew RPG with random battles and death and losses turned to max, July 16, 2017When I saw this had the same opening as You Were Doomed From the Start, my heart sank.
This is a two-part ms-dos game, but I know of noone who has passed the first few rooms, as every step has you fight a monster called Double J, an in-joke about one of the author's friends, I believe.
By examining the code in Notepad++, I could read a lot of the text; there's a giant shape to the map, and a bomb of some sorts. Apparently there is a cheat, and a new game++. But noone's ever reached it.
A homebrew game with graphics and music but difficult design, July 16, 2017This is one of several different executable games entered into the 2001 IFComp where you wander around a very large area and engage in random RPG combat.
I only played a few minutes of the game. The music and images were interesting, but I just had a hard time getting into the interaction; also, I could see from the walkthrough that this is a very very long game.
A scott-adam's esque spy thriller, July 16, 2017In this game, you are in a facility that is wired to blow. Most rooms are empty, except for some with one item. Like Scott Adams, it has a two-word parser.
It was fairly fun, but it could have had a greater depth of implementation, and there was some 'guess the verb' stuff going on later. It also had an annoying maze.
Fun for those looking for a quick snack.
A fairly competent adrift game about murder, July 16, 2017In this game, you play someone exploring a house during a party, trying to find paperwork on a lien on your house.
There is a death. You want to learn more about it.
The game has some odd touches (some strong profanity from a goth, for intance), especially the fact that you go through every area of the house in front of the unhappy occupants and they don't stop you.
Otherwise, though, this is one of the best Adrift implementations I've seen.
A compelling mostly linear sci fi story about god and vengeance, July 16, 2017In this game, you play a scientist who has been part of discovering suspended animation.
In the game, you discover the true implications of suspended animation, and what it meas for you, for God, and so on.
The game has some sensuality and participatory violence, which are both portrayed in a negative light.
The game is short, and has large text dumps.
An early Quest superhero game, July 16, 2017The early Quest engine had a number of issues, mainly that you had to define each action separately, and it didn't do synonyms well. So much of this game is 'guess the verb'. I downloaded an old version of quest to play it, as gargoyle was having some problems.
You play a woman who becomes a superhero after a mysterious hilt comes into her life. The game goes from scene to scene. I couldn't finish one scene due to a bug (I think I had the wrong interpreter yet again), but opening the quest file in Notepad++ revealed the ending, as the game is completely linear.
A well-written short story about a chance meeting in the future, July 16, 2017This was the first TADS 3 game entered into IFComp.
You are someone in the future who meets a woman at night, knowing she would be there.
You then have a flashback to how you got to that point.
I had trouble guessing one of the very first commands (pointed out in David Welbourn's walkthrough).
It's a fun game, but learning more about it is what makes it enjoyable.
A complex and obtuse game about combinatorics and counting, July 16, 2017In this game, you are trying to catch a cult leader.
You have a number of colored objects, and you have puzzles of the 'explore the complex mechanisms' type.
I found it incredibly obtuse, but some others rated it highly. If you like puzzles like the goat and the fox or towers of hanoi (neither of which appears in this game), you may like this game.
A dumb but funny game about prison, July 16, 2017In this game, you commit a series of unwitting (or sometimes witting) crimes, ending in worse and worse prison-related situations.
The story-telling uses really effective techniques, but the writing and puzzles aren't up to the challenge. By techniques, I mean cuts between scenes, timed events, actions with delayed effects, etc.
Explore a big office with some magical segments to get coffee, July 16, 2017This game is one of those frequent IFComp middle games that are big, fairly well polished, but without the snazzy setting or good cluing that would make it wonderful.
You explore an office with several cubicles, each presenting its own challenge (dealing with an npc, helping a tech repair guy, etc.)
Overall, though, you're unlikely to finish without a walkthrough.
A long star-trek/Dr. who Esque space survival game, July 16, 2017This game has you wandering around a space ship with slowly evolving goals. You begin as a tourist and end up as much more.
The game was competently programmed, but dry. I found it difficult to be invested in the game.
One of the biggest sticking points is a maze with randomized directions (so every turn the game spins you around). There is an item that helps, but it's a bit tedious, especially since there are 4 locations leading off of it that you need to get to.
A darkly atmospheric game that does interesting narrative tricks, July 16, 2017This game casts you as an unusual 'we', with unusual descriptions of rooms and a bizarre atmosphere.
I am surprised this game is not discussed more; however, like most little-discussed games, this is likely due to the lack of cluing.
The game is reminiscent of some ancient dark ritual, of Beowulf or Peer Gynt.
A short, mostly bland but well-clued space game, July 16, 2017This game has you teleporting to a moon base to investigate a disappearance and stop a monster.
It has an instant death puzzle, but thankfully no mazes or light source puzzles. The game is well-clued, and its fairly easy to know what to do at all times (except right near the end).
The game has numerous spelling and grammar errors, but otherwise could be dressed up to be a fun game.
A sort of cute house game with magic and fun red herrings, July 16, 2017This game has a good mix of red herrings and regular puzzle items.
You are wandering around a house, looking for your auntie. Magic intervenes.
This game has a fairly large map, but because it's organized so well, it feels compact.
A couple of the puzzle solutions surprised me, and I feel they could have been clued better.
A game about dinosaurs that I suspect was purposely bad, July 16, 2017This game placed near the bottom of the 2002 comp, and it's not hard to see why.
The game opens with an error message; typing 'walkthru' says 'insert walkthru here'. it says it was written for a 7 year old later, which could make sense, but it seems like the authors knew it wasn't anywhere near done, and gave up.
It has a huge, mazelike map with empty rooms all over. You are given goals, but the winning walkthru ignores all of those goals.
A truly bizarre game.
A game about being a complete jerk, July 16, 2017This game is just terrible. In it, you are a misognyistic, sadistic, horrible man, whose goal is to make everyone's life worse.
The game jumps from genre to genre, and in my version, was unfinishable due to a bug near the end, but I wasn't interested in finishing it anyway.
New version has game-killing bug; a dating sim with sci-fi, July 12, 2017This game has a large, expansive world where you wander around and meet various women while a large story plays in the background about people with psycho-kinetic powers being chased by a shady organization.
There are 8 girls that you meet, and you can build up romance with any of them. If you build a romance high enough, you get a special ending.
I was unable to complete the game, as you have to select options a, b, c, or d to travel to different places, and this version of the game in Gargoyle understands 'c' as 'close', rendering me unable to select this option.
As for the sexism, here's the description of the first female lead. I'll let you decide what to think:
"The girl is clothed in a silky blue dress. Long vibrant hair cascades over her shoulders and
down her back. Her countenance seems to reflect all feminine virtue, inclusive of kindness,
empathy, and consciousness of time and place. Her deportment is modest, and there is
propriety in the way she patiently sits waiting for someone, a gallant knight to ride up and
sweep her off her feet perhaps. Certainly that cannot be the case, nor do you look anything like
a knight, but since when was there ever harm in entertaining a fanciful thought?"
Edit: After downloading Adrift 4.0, and replaying, the game was much better, with graphics and sound and no game-closing bugs.
A fantasy/fairy game with two worlds and implementation problems, July 10, 2017This game has you house-sitting for your friend, but problems begin to show up.
It's bold and innovative: there's a responsive cat NPC, there is a system where you read and study books to memorize them, a slick TV hint delivery system, and so on, but it seems like it never got that last month or weeks of polishing that would have pulled it all together. Like Happy Ever After from this comp, this game seems influenced to a degree by Mulldoon Legacy, with a mysterious friend who has left, leaving their house open with a portal in it to a more rustic world.
An html-TADS Christian game that is perhaps a subtle parody, July 10, 2017This game purports to be an exploration of the Christian faith. You are the son of the centurion who stood on Golgotha, and you are sent on a quest to explore various cities.
In each city, you explore different areas, and see NPCs, but you don't have to do anything.
As you leave each city, you are given a choice of three directions to go in corresponding to 3 beliefs. You have to choose the correct belief to progress.
The game seems to me to be a subtle parody. The graphics are at times ridiculous (the meditating shopkeeper); the character is very excited at how clean the angel is; your character ends up suffering quite a bit, but is grateful that thieves left him his shoes; it all seems a sort of fun-poking 'from the inside' the way that Jacek Pudlo troll RAIF 'from the inside' (where you pretend to be a fan of what you hate, and then say things that other fans are embarrassed by).
A game involving getting high over and over again, July 10, 2017In this TADS game, you spend much of the time smoking marijuana and passing it around, before later taking peyote.
The author's note claims the game isn't about getting enlightened for drugs, but it's hard to know what it is about if not that. It definitely seems like a good anti-drug advertisement, given that following the drugs leads you to being a dirty, unwashed bum that children run away from.
Scattered strong profanity, extensive drug use.
A keyword-driven short philosophical game based on Minos' labyrinth, July 10, 2017This game displays some bold text at the top, and then you pick out keywords from that to type in, which then changes the text.
This is essentially a short twine game years before twine was developed. It has short but intriguing thoughts on the nature of IF games.
A juvenile riff on the already juvenile Unnkulia games, July 10, 2017The Unnkulia games filled the gap between the end of Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls and the beginning of Inform. They were juvenile, focused on 'bro' type humor, misogyny, and underclued puzzles.
This game manages to ampmlify all of that. It suffers from several problems, including an overly large scope. Every location has several paragraphs of text, frequently a whole page. The puzzles use moon-logic where it's very hard to know what will happen next.
A game about being transformed into a dog, July 10, 2017In this game, you are a 9 yr old turned into a dog.
Much of the game revolves around acquiring coupons for a dog salon, to transform yourself. It uses graphics extensively.
The game would generally be fun, with a tight map and interesting puzzles, but it has so many puzzles requiring waiting for a long time, and it has a lot of underground bad feelings for women, non-white american peoples, and the aged. It also has a direct attack on a former IF author which is essentially vicious.
A tiny C++ game meant more as a programming demo, July 10, 2017This game has you pick a text speed, then color.
It has a parser that understands 10 verbs, most of them like save, quit, etc. It uses 'pickup' and 'use' along with directions.
There are 8 rooms in a grid missing its center. Each room has a key. One room has 8 keyholes.
The author claims this was intended as a simple demo.
In the school of the future, enter VR to print paper, July 7, 2017This game has you as a student of the future in a little pod who has to print a paper. This is one of 6 virtual reality games in IFComp 1997, probably as a response to Delusions from IFComp 1996.
This game also reminds me a lot of The Legend Lives, which has a very similar opening setup.
I actually liked this game; it was overwhelming, getting started, but I liked the well-thought out means of transferring information between the physical and virtual realms.
A surreal, horror-futuristic game with some thriller scenes, July 5, 2017I have to make one big admission up front: I played Kaged with a walkthrough almost straight through. I had heard some of the puzzles were unfair, and the story seemed great, and so I just read it as a short story.
This worked surprisingly well. It makes for a great short story. You are a bureaucrat in a complicated futuristic society where everything is tightly regulated and disturbing. You are asked to help stop a menace in this world.
The game deals with the nature of reality and with mind-bending. A pretty crazy game.
Edit: The original version of this game, played on HTML Tads, has great music and graphics. Really worth playing.
A game about an introvert interested in an extrovert, July 5, 2017This game is about a typical introverted boy with a long ponytail and an interest in computers and fantasy-type things who matches in an online dating program with a vivacious and popular girl.
This just kills (metaphorically) the boy, who can't handle the intense polar opposites of excitement and nervousness.
The game was well-written and pretty well-programmed, and it produces some real emotion with its intense, up-close-and-ugly examination of the young adult brain.
An interesting marine biologist spy thriller, July 5, 2017This game uses the relatively unknown JACL engine, but it plays pretty well.
This game is a sleeper hit; I hadn't heard of it, but it's well-put-together. You are on a floating scientific base on a small island that has experienced a recent die-off of fish, and a loss of all juvenile population. You are brought in from the outside to what is essentially a military situation.
The game has espionage, science, etc. Some of the puzzles are unfair a bit, but the game responds well to things you attempt to do, and contains a number of action scenes.
A big haunted house with bugs that was withdrawn from IFComp, July 5, 2017This game was withdrawn from IFComp 1997 due to bugginess. It is big and enjoyable, but there is a hunger timer that I believe cannot be stopped.
It was large and ambitious but not beta-tested at all, which explains the problems. Marnie Parker later went on to write the graphics-intensive Carma, about punctuation coming to life.
The ghost house here is impressive, and looking at the decompiled text, it had a deep backstory going back hundreds of years.
Plotwise, it seems to deliberately be copying Hollywood Hijinks plus maybe something else (Casper?).
A big game with underclued puzzles and moderate humor, July 5, 2017This game is part of a peculiar brand of IFComp games that are very large, moderately well-implemented, and deeply underclued. Someone said that such game suffer from Erden-itis, from "Travels in the land of Erden', an exemplar of this class of games. Other such games include Town Dragon, The Sueno, Varkana, and a host of others.
You have a big city here, a castle, and a very large endgame. Most of the puzzles involve things that would never occur for you to do on your own.
(Sort of like if you meet a random person in a game. Are you supposed to attack them? Say 'hi'? Ask them about themself? It turns out you are supposed to 'INSULT PERSON'. Why? It makes sense out of the world, but why would it make sense in the world?)
A large and underclued game about rescuing a princess, July 5, 2017There is a dragon in town, and it's your job to rescue the mayor's daughter from them.
This game has more of an open-world feel, with many challenges that can be completed in any order, and a slowly unveiling realization of what's going on.
The problem, though, is that only a small slice of that open world has been implemented, making it very easy to do the wrong thing due to lack of guidance. It also has a really, really big maze that can be hard.
Interesting concept, and fun to play with a walkthrough.
A surrealist game about your inner self, July 5, 2017This is a shortish, underclued but interesting surreal game where you explore the inner workings of your own mind. It reminds me of Blue Chairs, but shorter and less humorous.
This game is has elements similar to Mikko's last game. Both games were written in a couple of weeks. It contains some juvenile bot non-explicit references to nudity.
I found it difficult to know what to do next, but the walkthrough was helpful. It has a very clever puzzle involving mutating words that accounts for many false attempts.
An intriguing science fiction apocalyptic game with guess-the-verb problems, July 5, 2017This is a really creative and original game, with a nuclear apocalypse and a sort of dual-world situation.
Despite its many plot innovations, the implementation itself is sub-par, making it difficult to play without the hints (which are split up into 5 sub-files, and seem intimidating, but which are fairly simple).
Definitely a good play (with hints) for fans of apocalyptic things.
An archaeology/fantasy game, July 5, 2017This game seems somehow unfinished; you are called in as an expert to an old abbey to investigate some pottery. You travel around the house and grounds, gathering various items, and then are thrown into a different kind of story.
The game then ends soon thereafter.
There are some implementation errors. Overall, its fun with a walkthrough if you are a fan of archaeology games.
An implementation of Planetfall's sample transcript, July 5, 2017This game is a straightforward implementation of Planetfall's sample transcript. A few things are different, since the Inform and Infocom parsers have different responses.
The original transcript ends in a premature death. This game does not; however, the new ending sequence is barely there, a matter of a few moves.
It's well-done, but very small. The smallness is even smaller when the game informs you that portions are blocked off because its not finished by the author.
A very hard-to-use homebrew parser with a bland game, July 5, 2017This game uses a home-written parser for a story about travelling to work.
Hardly anything is implemented, like X or compass directions or inventory or disambiguation. You travel to work, passing several obstacles in the way.
The writing is really unusual, and I kind of like it and kind of don't. It's really, really overblown, something like "You stand here with your beautiful, gentle wife, basking in the happy glow of home life in your kitchen.."
The game's biggest merit is that must have been hard to program.
A crude, offensive, homebrewn parser game, July 5, 2017This game manages to be offensive on almost every level without being actually obscene. If you want to play a game based on massive diarrhea, being rude to your mother, offensive racial stereotypes (including Injun Jim and Italian and Mexican characters who add 'o' after every word), sexism, entering giant bodily orifices, senseless murder, and random drug use, this is the game for you.
The parser itself does an okay job of recognizing commands, but it has some actually brilliant innovations, like little popup windows that tell you what's going on elsewhere, and a great implementation of hangman. But why its put in as an implementation of an childish and offensive BIG game whose favorite puzzle form is the obscure riddle is beyond me.
A great little nugget of a homebrew parser. Small fantasy land, July 5, 2017This is how homebrew parsers should be; and it makes sense, coming just 3 years after Inform was created and making new parsers was less intimidating.
This is a compact fantasy world, with only 7 or so locations. It has a gnome, a toadstool garden, and a mad scientist. It has good cluing, and fun, open mechanics including potions/chemicals you can try on things (nothing complicated).
The only thing I found difficult was that one important room exit was only mentioned once, in one event, with no way to read that text again once it scrolled back. So its important to read everything carefully.
A buggy fantasy ms-dos game with a magician, July 5, 2017I downloaded this game and got it to run with the batch file. However, it was buggy; I couldn't figure out how to throw the soup on the fire, one of the earliest commands. The soup kept being an object ON the fire. And examining the hat at the very beginning was supposed to send out a dove, but that never happened.
It seems like a complicated game, but it is just intractable.
A short but straightforward old alan game about getting to IFComp, July 5, 2017This is a fun little Alan game (requiring an older interpreter from ifarchive.org) about running to get to playing ifcomp games on time.
The game is well-hinted; I only had one guess-the-verb problem. You basically just hail a taxi and drive over to your friend's house.
The game is on a timer, but its so short that once you figure it out, its super easy to redo. It also has a clever ending.
A boredom simulator with some necromantic flavor , July 1, 2017This game consists almost entirely of a long, very repetitive sequence on board a spaceship where you choose from among the same 3 options for dozens of turns. The first turn has more variety.
So it's boring, but it's trying to be boring, and its polished and descriptive at its boring task, which is why I've given it 3 stars.
A short, buggy, and gross game, July 1, 2017Opening this game in the adrift 5 development tool, you can see it has 4 commands to win it, one of which is a strong profanity.
Virtually nothing is implemented, and the story is disjointed and bizarre.
But, as Billy Mays said, this is not the worst game I have ever played.
A short twine zombie game with graphics, July 1, 2017This is a zombie game with a fairly gruesome ending.
You play as someone caught in a zombie invasion. The game has a fairly clever gimmick of having your choices all be zombie-language, making the links a sort of maze to get out from. But overall, its short and underimplemented, which makes sense for a speed-IF.
A sorceror's apprentice makes a decision, July 1, 2017In this game, you play a sorceror's apprentice who works with potions and plants.
Something is off, though, and you're forced to make some important decisions. The game has some good dramatic timing that I think could really be emulated.
A short, dramatic game with some underimplementation, July 1, 2017This game has an original story, good writing and a nice sense of drama. You play a mom having a terrible dream, and the next day the events of the day are eerily similar.
This game is good, but it could have benefited from more plot development and better implementation. Because the author only had 3 hours, though, it's good in its sphere.
A glimpse into a creepy alternate world, July 1, 2017This is a short game about a creepy alternate world where there is a very different form of punishment for tasks.
I found the writing to be good/descriptive, and the setting was original and creative.
However, the ending, though cool, needed just a bit more of a hint or more setup. It felt abrupt.
A pseudo-historical witch story, July 1, 2017This was a speed-IF game for Ectocomp 2016 that is framed as a series of vignettes from historical documents about a witch.
I found the old-style writing charming; searching for one of the main characters (Ezola Midnight) has no hits besides this game, so I assume that this wasn't copied directly from source texts, and that some sort of fusion was going on.
Short, and interesting.
An interesting story that needs some more polish, July 1, 2017Marco Innocenti has come up with a good story here that reminds me of Walking Dead in good ways.
There is some sort of incident that prompts a destructive release of a virus, and you are being interrogated as to your role in its release.
This would be a 4 or 5 star game in Italian, but the 3 hour time limit made the translation more choppy, breaking up the flow of the story and distancing the reader from the game. I would actually like to play this in Italian.
A darkly atmospheric game choosing between doors and the room inside, July 1, 2017This game is like a DnD or serious Munchkin game: door, challenge, reward. You select some attributes about yourself (like luck, strength, etc.).
Then you are shown two doors, and you have to pick one. Behind each door is a text scene with some sort of dnd-like encounter, like a feast of food you can eat or not, or a chest that is obviously trapped.
The font, colors, and atmosphere were very good, and the writing was good.
I had to download the entire ifcomp 2016 file to get all the files for this game.
A breathy, heartfelt longish twine game about inner demons, July 1, 2017This game reminds me a lot of creepypasta: intense writing with something of a neglect of proper writing techniques (such as grammar and some other things that careful testing could fix). However, it has an intensity of emotion that makes it more enjoyable than a polished, bloodless game.
You play someone who has a dark secret inside of them, which affects them throughout their life. Eventually, you must journey to your own psyche to confront this secret.
It's fairly long, with choices that felt mostly meaningful. It features combat. It has some profanity and violent sequences.
An early hugo game about survival after a catastrophe, July 1, 2017This is a short, loosely timed game about waking up after some sort of accident and then trying to help yourself and others before time runs out.
The writing is interesting, and the game feels fairly polished. However, it really suffers from 'guess what the author is thinking' syndrome. Some of the actions are completely unmotivated. However, playing around on my own was fairly fun.
An intriguing little game that devolves into juvenilia, July 1, 2017This game starts out pretty cool, and basically consists of a linear series of challenges in a surreal prison environment.
I would give it 3 or 4 stars, but it just gets dumb, involving marijuana quests and another interaction involving a statue that could only be conceived by a teenage boy.
A long fantasy quest with many keys, July 1, 2017This is a standard epic fantasy quest exploring a temple, just like a DnD module.
You find a variety of keys and hidden passages, and different pieces of things that look like they go together, and magical clothing.
It's just not clued well, and its tedious. Keys are used multiple times, without much sense to it, so you end up trying every key on every door.
It's pretty long, and could be fun for fantasy fans.
A fairly long romp exploring a mad scientist's house, July 1, 2017This game has a long prologue as a young woman who dumped her boyfriend. After the prologue, you play the boyfriend.
The boyfriend's game is nonlinear and interesting, as you explore a mad scientist's house. It suffers too much from 'flail about until something interesting happens' syndrome, though. Its hard to know exactly what they want you to do.
But the writing is good and there are several interesting and well-written NPCs.
Not obscene, but a campus exploration game, July 1, 2017This is a mid-length game that has you trying to find, then deliver, a letter to Dr. Aardvarkbarf.
The game has a fairly large campus. Puzzles mostly focus on examining items, and physical things such as PUSH and PULL.
The game is clever, but the map is large and many things aren't clued to well. Nothing about it really stuck out.
A game about eating breakfast by collecting items, July 1, 2017This is a shortish game mostly involving complicated puzzles (like the lights puzzle where pushing off one light turns on all those around it, or counting to 255 in quaternary).
Some of the puzzles are gross or a bit mean-spirited, and it could all use some more cluing. Beyond that, it's pretty competently programmed.
Mostly interesting for fans of convoluted puzzles.
An intense, surreal game about becoming purified, July 1, 2017This is a short surreal game that swerves from scene to scene with intense emotion. You confront hell, satyrs and nymphs, and so on. There's extreme pain, and you can see your collection of spells by typing Spells.
Some of it is fairly juvenile, though, especially the parts with nymphs/satyrs and the general breathless feel.
A short fun game about gathering inspiration for IFComp, July 1, 2017This is a relatively short game. You play a programmer in an apartment who is trying to get IFComp inspiration.
As you continually attempt to write your game, you begin to get trippy dreams...or are they dreams?
The game is over relatively quickly, but its enjoyable while it lasts. Has a couple of puzzles.
A really fine tiny micro Twiny Jam game that's an RPG, July 1, 2017This is an entry in a minimalistic twine jam. It makes the smallest RPG possible. There is a village with an inn and one location to fight monsters, with maybe 2 or 3 kinds of monsters. You collect XP and gold to get to the boss, who is extremely strong.
I really enjoyed this, it encapsulates the essence of an RPG in a fun way.
Andy Phillip's best game; a massive city spy thriller, July 1, 2017This game took me about 2500 moves to complete this game using the hints; this is an extremely long game, among the very longest I have ever played.
You are in a 40-story city, with about 20 of the stories implemented. Each story that's implemented has 3-4 puzzles.
The game is a spy thriller, with you as the spy. As usual for Andy Phillips games, there is a lot of action, a lot of 'guess what he's thinking', and some male gaze, although it is toned down from his other games.
This is an epic, sprawling game; I have no idea how this fit in the z-machine. It also has a very well executed plot twist that was almost as good as Spider and Web's.
This game took me about a month of playing 30-60 minutes a day. I could have played 20 IFComp games in the time it took me to beat this.
Mid-length fantasy; a mute swordsman rescues villagers, July 1, 2017I love Snyder's games. TotTS is an excellent linear mid-length game with not-too-hard puzzles that has a fantasy feel not found in many places, kind of like the story The Fool of The World or the beginning of Princess Mononoke.
You play a swordsman who travels the land searching for a village under oppression, righting wrongs along the way. You use several items in rather creative ways, and puzzles have multiple solutions.
I found the ending unusual, and extremely satisfying. It made a few points in the game much more understandable, and tied everything together very well. I wanted to go through and play again with my new understanding.
Strongly recommended.
A clever exploration of the creative process, July 1, 2017In this game, you create a story by choosing from menus. This game has a time cave structure, where every chance branches widely into more choices.
This usually is not effective, but the branches are short, the game meant to be replayed often, and you have a general idea of what effect your choices will have.
Options include choosing a setting for your short story, choosing characters, choosing motivations or objects, and so on.
A funny purposely bad game with a 'blob language' you have to deciphter, July 1, 2017This was a short ectocomp that was intended to bad, to help A. Snyder's game not be last (A. Snyder is Mike Snyder's kid). Neither game ended up being last.
This game has a lot of fake blob language with a grammar and everything. It's silly and purposely bad, and short, but it was fun learning blob grammar and exploring endings.
A short ectocomp game about a grim wedding, July 1, 2017This game has a great atmosphere. Its for ectocomp, so its really short, but it has well-clued actions for you to get ready for a wedding in a poor village.
Every item has a message attached to it, and the story has a nice buildup given how short it is. Great fun-to-time ration.
A short ectocomp game about a creepy mirror, July 1, 2017This is a short twine game about a creepy mirror. It's jumbled and not polished at all, but it had a sort of breathy earnestness that makes the game more fun, like certain creepy pastas.
There is a creepy mirror in your house, and something can be seen inside. What is it? Is it real?
A hyperlink simulation of a creepy search engine, July 1, 2017In this short ectocomp game, you are using a creepy search engine that understands your true intentions, which true intentions get darker and darker over time.
This was fun, but on replay it was easier to see the forcing that occurred. Still, its well done for an ectocomp game.
A fun graphical mini-puzzle with a twist, July 1, 2017This was Andrew Schultz's 2016 Ectocomp game. The author has made a mini-game, kind of reminiscent of one of the hat puzzle games (maybe Playing Games?) with a sort of maze you need to trace out, through 5 different levels.
The fifth level is different than the other levels. It needs a special command to finish it. The more times you replay it, the more hints that you get as to what the command is.
A humorous shortish twine-like game with an impala, July 1, 2017This game has you playing Vlad the Impala, whose identity has been stolen by the vampire Vlad the Impaler.
It is hyperlink-based, and has you going around collecting inventory items of a sort to turn on a device to destroy the Impaler. It has some plot twists.
The humor was actually pretty good, but there was some 'guess the link' issues with underclued puzzles. But with this and Dr. Sourpuss, the author has made some good games, and I hope they make more.
A short creepy story infused with East Asian culture, July 1, 2017This game describes a creepy summoning ritual that you are attempting to carry out as explore the remnants of a funeral for your grandfather that combines East Asian and Christian funeral traditions.
I found the cultural portions good, and the creature being summoned was creepy, but the game ended too abruptly I thought, and I wasn't all the way drawn in. But these are small problems for a SpeedIF entry.
A great multimedia creepy twine-like experience about consumerism, July 1, 2017This game utilizes a nice animation of candles that changes throughout the game.
You play a sort of medium who contacts the ghosts (or memories) of a family in a house that is slowly sinking.
The writing is good, and deals with a good deal of capitalistic consumerism, but at heart this is a good creepy story. It didn't draw me in emotionally, but otherwise was enjoyable.
A fun, short speedIF about finding your head, July 1, 2017In this game, you have to ride everywhere looking for your head.
It had good descriptions, and was humorous. It was voted as having some of the best cover art, because its cover is also its map.
Its so short that I can't say much without spoiling the game, but it's a fun way to spend 10 minutes.
A german-language archaeology thriller, July 1, 2017This was the only IFComp game to never be rated at all. It's a german language game in an unusual file format.
It's quite large, and involves exploring ruins to find relics of ancient gods.
The engine could be better, and the game has some tedious puzzles (like opening 30 similar-colored baskets to find which basket an item randomly appears in).
A dark combat/exploration game with spotty implementation, July 1, 2017This is a creative horror game, focused on ghoulish/crypt horror and exploring some tombs/labs.
The game is creative, with various NPCs that are active. But the implementation is no good, with even the walkthrough's commands being unrecognized at times.
Still, it is interesting for fans of non-Lovecraftian horror.
An illegal code entered into IFComp as a text file, July 1, 2017This game had the code to crack some sort of copyright protection (maybe on DVDs?)
It was entered in IFComp to make some sort of message. It's not even intended to be IF.
A 'goofy and silly' entry about waking up without amnesia on an island, July 1, 2017This game is purposely wacky and silly. This would be fun, but it has numerous implementation errors, and a game-ending bug that prevents you from leaving a room as a scene fires over and over.
The author knew the game wasn't that well put together, so they threw in some funny stuff. The spirit guide that follows you everywhere is bizarre. The author has a lot of imagination; this game could be a lot of fun with more work.
A short humor game about making a stink bomb to save your house, July 1, 2017In this game, you play Adoo, a college student come home who discovers it's going to be sold. So you decide to set up a stink bomb based on half-remembered ingredients your dad mentioned in a dungeons and dragons-esque tale.
This game has great ideas but is lacking in concept. It has many guess-the-verb problems, typos, and scenes mis-firing. But the writing is humorous and friendly.
A Level 9 reworking of Adventure with an expanded endgame, July 1, 2017This game is a reworking of Adventure, and was released commercially by Level 9.
It's generally similar to Adventure, with the dragon puzzle made easier, but it has a much bigger endgame where you have to save hundreds of elves (but your actions save about a hundred at a time).
It has graphics that add a lot to the game, even though they are nowhere near as good as Magnetic Scrolls.
Gargoyle plays level 9 games, so if you want to try this out, it may be a fun way to play the original Adventure game.
A short horror based on My Little Pony, July 1, 2017This was an Ectocomp 2016 speed game. This is set in a MLP-type world, similar to Owlor's other games.
You are a hardened and vicious magic-using pony out for revenge. You need to go an a quest to find the ingredients for your potion.
This was relatively straightforward, and fun, with good cluing, until I got stuck on one ingredient for a long time due to misunderstanding a description.
It is unpolished and didn't draw me in, but that is due to it being a speed-IF.
An illustrated Twine game about bullying, July 1, 2017This is a shortish alt-game about bullying and abusive relationships. It is illustrated with various hand-drawn illustrations.
You play as a character who is in a sort of abusive relationship, and who doesn't fit in. You have to deal with this relationship and how it affects the rest of your life. It can get intense, with some strong profanity.
It gave me a good sense of the emotion involved in the game, but it felt like it could use more polish.
An interactive years-long diary about children and cruel interactions, July 1, 2017In this game, you are reading through diary entries of a young child going through several years of school. It's a twine-type game, and it has a large scope, going through several years at a fast space.
You have several friends you interact with, with mechanics keeping track of the relationships, but I found this fairly opaque; I wished I had more feedback on my choices. One nice feature was that choices you were not able to make due to past choices were crossed out, showing you 'what could have been'.
The game treats very serious subjects, including sexual assault. The biggest drawback to me was having trouble seeing how my choices relate to the pages you reach.
A interconnected web of short, apocalyptic stories, July 1, 2017This game was really talked about a lot in the 2016 IFComp. It is unusual; it consists of many (< 500) short stories about apocalypses, many of them grim or with body horror, but with good writing. The player was invited to add to the total number of apocalypses.
I found a lot of the apocalypses very enjoyable. The format was hard for me to navigate, though; I couldn't find new stories at the pace that I wanted to. They are linked by keywords, sometimes, and sometimes not (i.e. there are dead-end links).
I enjoyed it.
A very long psych ward alt-game with Choice-of-Games style relationships, July 1, 2017This game reminds me in length and quality of a hosted Choice of Games commercial game. It has similar amounts of text per choice, and has 9 different relationships you can work on.
The main difference between this and choice of games is that there are frequently just 2 choices, while CoG tends to have 3 or more choices.
However, the author did a good job at making the game interesting by not making it clear which, if any, option is the 'right' option. I think this game provided a very clear picture of what a psych ward might be like. I chose to ally with a friend with borderline personality disorder.
A longish hyperlink horror game with replay value, June 28, 2017Well, I guess marketing works. After seeing months of promotional materials for Strayed, I decided to try it while it was on sale out of curiosity.
This is a longish hyperlink game. Although the ads seemed to show graphics for the pc version, the android version was, as advertised, pure text.
The game has a strong central horror narrative, with several detours allowed on the way, with many of the choices being flavor choices.
Just before this game, I had played Abyss, which is a similar game (twinelike without stats, on the play store). This game has better writing, less typos, and is more mature than Abyss, but is of comparable size. Those differences, though, make the difference for me between a free game (Abyss) and a commercial game (Strayed).
On replaying Strayed, I found quite a few new areas I had not previously explored, and the grand finale was different in a way that ties into the nature of the horror.
However, I did not find the horror gripping. It reminded me the most of some creepy pasta stories, where some reactions of the participants don't reflect reality (an example not from the game: "You see an airplane that morphs into a fluttering leaf. You shrug it off.")
I guess I was hoping more for emotional investment (like Hana Feels) or persistent consequences of actions (like Choice of Games), both of which the authors had written for. But $1-$2 is an appropriate amount for this game.
Edit: I added another star when I found out the underlined text showed you what your choices had affected; I really like this in a game.
Effective mind-bending Twine game about two friends with many endings, June 27, 2017I was a big fan of My Father's Long Long Legs, so when I saw this game by the same author, I was intrigued. However, I found the name off-putting, thinking it would be a video game fan work or something similar.
It' s not; it's much more like Shade with conversations and in Twine (which would be an effective format for Shade, in my opinion). You are at a sleepover with a friend, who has a mysterious uncle that works for Nintendo. As the night progresses, strange incongruities arise.
Michael Lutz is an excellent storyteller. The author's notes at the end of the game are fascinating, and include a discussion of how the game accidentally relates to GamerGate, the controversy surrounding a group of mostly male gamers who attacked female journalists over trumped-up charges.
This game is among the very best Twine games, and in the end, is uplifting.
Played in tame mode; a silly puzzlefest with great writing , June 25, 2017So, my experience in playing Phobos is atypical; I played in tame mode, and I just used a walkthrough, because I wasn't very interested in the game.
But the writing turned out to be quite good. The mishaps of my companion and the finale were some of the best things I've read in a while. This game ends up reading a lot like the meretzky-adams game Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Also similar to that game is the transportation syste, where you travel between disconnected worlds.
Even in tame mode, some dirty stuff sneaks through, but it is on the level of the movie Space Balls (e.g. a suggestive spaceship, a man or woman getting almost undressed against their will, etc.)
Using the walkthrough, the game seemed pretty hard. The copy protection in this game is achieved by having a horrible maze with horrible monsters, where you have to use two of the feeling to get through.
The game has the infamous t-removing machine, inspiration of future games such as Earl Grey and Counterfeit Monkey.
Overall, I'm not sure if I'll play it again. But I think meretzky does some of his best writing here (perhaps he was enthusiastic about the subject matter).
An early, linear game about using e-mail, June 24, 2017This 1997 IFComp game shows to me how Twine didn't ruin parser games and IFComp; if this game had been entered in the 2010's, it would certainly have been a short twine game. I feel like authors are writing the same games, just on more appropriate platforms.
You spend most of the time typing well-clued commands and pressing enter a lot, and it's short. Its clear the author just wanted to write something short and fun. You play as a digital avatar near the digital highway, opening your digital mailbox for the first time.
A short survival game about a blind woman in a basement, June 11, 2017You are a blind woman kidnapped by a sort of serial killer. The writing is pulp-y.
The big idea here is that you FEEL, SMELL, and LISTEN instead of LOOKING.
This concept is actually implemented pretty well, but the puzzles themselves are mostly of the search-everything and perform-uncued-action variety, which makes the game less exciting.
A massive spy thriller-type game with intricate, unfair puzzles, June 11, 2017Most of Andy Phillips games have the same bones with different overlays. In all of the games, you play a protagonist with some sort of special features (in this one, you're an intelligent accountant), a femme fatale, and cinematic scenes with really hard combinatorial puzzles.
The special features of this one are the setting (most of it in an abandoned boarding school), and the gruesomeness of it. It was a bit over the top, even compared to his other games.
If you haven't tried any of the other games, I really liked Heist and Time.
A short haunting from ectocomp, June 11, 2017IN this game, you're trapped in a mirrored box as part of a Halloween stunt, carrying only a candle and some matches.
I couldn't get the game to do much, but it really had atmosphere. Just the act of lighting the matches, and the candle, and having the descriptions of your reflection described, were subtly creepy.
A short spoof of the troll game toiletworld, June 11, 2017This game spoofs Toiletworld, so you should probably make sure to play that first.
This game just has 3 under-implemented locations with some neat tricks involving Magician's Choice and movement of scenery, but otherwise it's pretty typical for a speed-IF ectocomp game. Not bad, though. This author has a longer, fun game called How to Win at Rock, Paper, Scissors.
A clever inversion of normal gameplay; a short halloween game, June 11, 2017This game is a clever inversion of usual goals. Playing normally as Dr. bonesaw, this is a short game; you get your vengeance.
The true gameplay, however, is more fun:
(Spoiler - click to show)You find the true ending by sabotaging yourself. It takes a few turns, but it's really pleasing to stop the unstoppable vengeance of Dr.
Bonesaw.
A purposely obnoxious short puzzle about tons of pieces, June 11, 2017Hard Puzzle is obnoxious on purpose. You need to assemble a stool, but everything goes wrong, and you start to find more and more parts.
The author intentionally makes the game underimplemented, with guess-the-verb, standard response, etc. going on. It claims to be a speed-IF that isn't too hard, but it is hard.
I decompiled it to figure it out. I'm giving it 4 stars because it's good at what it sets out to do.
An entertaining but frustrating animal shuttling game, June 11, 2017This game is the sequel to Hard Puzzle, and like the first, it has some purposely underimplemented parts, and lies about its difficulty and even about your goals (or does it?)
I haven't finished it yet, but I've read all the text from decompiling, and I know the last command(s), just not the middle.
In any case, the game has a large number of critters with independent AI and some emergent behavior. It's fun to play around with.
A diabolical finale to the hard puzzle trilogy, June 11, 2017This game take the purposeful obfuscation of the last 2 games and ramps it up even higher. There are numerous independent NPCs, every turn has an ongoing story, the stool and parts from the first two games shows up, etc.
Decompiling again got me the ending, which was a fitting ending for this trilogy of games.
The writing may be interesting to even those who haven't played the first two games.
A very short QBasic game with some typos, June 11, 2017After playing another of DBT's games, I looked forward to this one, because it sounded cool.
However, it just has 9 rooms, all lined up one after another, with no items to find whatsoever. You just take the exits one at a time, and at the end, you see one character, whom you can't interact with, and there's exactly one thing you can type to end the game.
Looking at the code, there's really nothing there. It's 281 lines, more than half of which is standard code for every DBT game (the text header takes up about a fourth of the code). The doll itself is referred to as the 'cusred doll'.
I'm disappointed, because this game sounded cool, and the other DBT game I played wasn't that bad.
A long, very British illustrated game about magical charms, June 11, 2017This is the third Magnetic scrolls game. It was meant to be based on magical spells, like Enchanter, but you have to do a LOT of work before you get any spells.
The game lets you get through deathly obstacles, but you will lose a bit of luck if you do, which blocks you out of the endgame. So if it says you lose a little bit of luck, go back to an earlier save!
Overall, a super british game, with all of the spells based on British slang for 'thing' (like wossname and so on).
Very frustrating, very unfair, but interesting and with good graphics.
A fun in-joke interactive fiction game, June 5, 2017This is a meta game. You have an enemy who has stolen some basic IF verbs, and who later poses a series of challenges based on different IF conventions.
The writing is light and smooth, though pretty absurd at times. The ALAN interpreter provided by the game seemed to be very effective.
Overall, good for fans of silly games or games about IF itself.
A game about family and war, with several flashbacks, June 5, 2017Blink is an odd game with good concepts; you play and old man talking to his grandson about war, havi g several flashbacks to your past. There is brief strong language.
The game has several good points, with a pretty good conversation system, some nice uses of different viewpoints on the same locations, etc.
But the locations don't seem fleshed out, synonyms aren't all the way there, it's short, and it just seems unfinished in a way.
A complex and fun simulation of finding a colony planet, June 5, 2017This is a web-based game tracking several stats. You play as the AI in a seedship set to deliver colonists to a planet.
You visit many planets, hoping to find ones that are breathable, have water, are friendly, etc.
All sorts of events happen on your trip, but the game is mostly linear with mostly binary choices. There are some (fun) exceptions.
Overall, an enjoyable small game with great depth.
A multiple-path spy game, June 5, 2017In this game, you put on one of three different disguises at the beginning of the game, and then go through a James Bond-esque adventure where you act against a shady organization.
The game is spottily implemented and has some pretty big typos (like 'I want you to kill me' instead of 'I want you to kill him'). Overall, it's a fun concept that could use more polish.
A great way to fit a lot of game in a small space, June 5, 2017This was, I believe, the first commercial text adventure. Certainly the first successful one; although Adventure and Dungeon were much more descriptive, this game fit on everyone's systems.
Gargoyle can play this game if you change .dat files to .saga. Scott Adams' website has an interpreter for these games as of 2017.
This game is ultra-minimalistic, with room descriptions often empty or as short as possible. The parser takes only two words at a time; only the first three letters of each word are read.
The game is actually quite fun, especially if you're willing to spend a long time playing around with it. It achieves the 'long time'-ness by having several situations that lock you out of victory without you realizing it, and by requiring a lot of combinations of items.
Before I played it, I thought it was an Adventure rip off, but they are very, very dissimilar. It's like the way that Antz and A Bug's Life are similar, or Monster's Inc and Shrek. They are vaguely similar, but not really.
A fun minimalistic pirate adventure, June 5, 2017This is Scott Adam's second game, and fits into just a few kB of data; it's really miraculous how well it works, and I liked it better than Adventureland.
This game forces you to conjure up your own explanations of things; a hidden passage, a bloody book, black mamba snakes, etc. are described only once. There is no desire for mimesis, just for game.
Having played these games has given me much more respect for Scott Adams' work.
A very good, old game based on Chinese mythology, June 5, 2017This game came out the same year as Curses!, back before Inform was a thing. It's one of the very few games on ifdb written in adsys, and doesn't support undo.
You start the game near a fountain hub with paths leading in every direction. There are six dragons that you interact with to gain six coins.
Many of the puzzles are unfair in a sense, and the game feels like it could be polished more. But it's long and complex, and has a really likable fire iguana helper. The hints file on IFDB is annoying, but I was able to finish the game using it, after about 447 moves.
A Paul Panks memorial, June 5, 2017This game is a tribute to Paul Allen Panks, deceased, famous for submitting numerous games to the IFComp which were generally not well received.
I never played a Panks game myself, but I've read a lot about them. This game includes an actual museum to Panks that is quite detailed.
The main game seems to reference Panks' 2 Ninja games, and also the fact that much of his work was unfinished.
A color-coded secret mission about defusing a bomb, June 5, 2017This Scott Adams game is not as good as the first two, but still good.
You have to race through a small nuclear complex to find a saboteur, and to discover two different keys, some color-coded passwords, and a lot of pictures of yourself.
There are a few puzzles that are really hard; with no hints and no internet back in the day, this would have taken forever to solve. Overalll, though it was an enjoyable experience.
Is this the first example of color-coded keys in a lab? It's certainly an early example.
A strange, magical voodoo journey in minimalistic style, June 5, 2017Having played through the first 3 Scott Adams games, I didn't like this one as much. What's the point of everything? Why do you do what you do with the Ju-Ju bag? What's with the statue?
In the other games, I feel like my imagination could fill in a lot of the details. In this one, I just couldn't piece it together.
The atmosphere was good, though, and the non-Ju-Ju puzzles were clever. I still recommend it.
A star-trek inspired mini game by Scott Adams, June 5, 2017In this game, you have a phaser (initially set to stun) and you are on an alien planet, so the parallels with star trek are obvious.
The game has you work out an ingenious method of transportation, and then visit a number of alien locales, gathering strange and alien objects.
I found the initial part of this game absolutely fascinating, but by the end the transportation method became a bit annoying.
A large and powerful game in an old, rusty parser system, June 5, 2017This game is famous as a cooperation between 7 authors at a time when e-mail was new and difficult to use.
The real story of the game isn't even actually apparent until almost the end. The middle parts have quite a variety, from Robin Hood to an urban setting to McCarthyism to vampires.
The game took me over 1200 moves to finish. There are 1001 points you can obtain.
The AGT parser is old and bad. I'd rather even have a Scott Adams parser, because those games have a true simplicity; but in this game KNOCK DOOR and KNOCK ON DOOR give different responses, with only one working; TIE ROPE and TIE ROPE TO TREE give different responses, one working and one giving you a generic message. And so on... I only discovered later that you can type LIST EXITS, which would have been very useful.
The ending has a moral choice that many have described as seeming ambiguous, but with only one leading to a successful ending.
One of the best games available pre-Curses!
A haunting old novella made into a TADS game, June 5, 2017This game is adapted from an old novella, so it has a bunch of textdumps; however, I really enjoy the writing of the novella, so I didn't mind.
There were some pretty hard puzzles, some that were good, and some that were 'guess the verb'.
Worthwhile to play if you like Dunsany/Chambers/Lovecraft's writing.
A cool and funny old-school Scott Adams adventure in a funhouse, June 5, 2017In this game, like other Scott Adams games, you have a minimal 2-word parser, with spare rooms with a few objects.
Also like the other games, every inch of the game is used for something good. This game is also really, really funny. An opening joke made me laugh out loud.
This has been one of my favorite scott adam adventures so far.
A minimalistic atmospheric marvel about Dracula, June 5, 2017Scott Adams created many games in a short time, but the Count is one of the most famous.
I played this game only recently, after experiencing more modern games, but I love its charm and open exploration. I feel like in the 70's, when it came out, and people only had a few games, it's unfairness and picky parser would actually be a bonus, adding many hours to gameplay as you try to figure out something to type.
But even for more modern players looking for a quick fix, it's enjoyable. The ultra-minimalism works really well, here, as you are captured and wake up the next day with little explanation beyond your own dark imagination.
A real keeper. Beating it on your own could take quite a while, though.
A frustratingly unfair Egyptian scott adams game, June 5, 2017This game is a pure treasure hunt, with 13 different treasures to find and gather in a central location; this is in contrast to Secret Mission, The Count, and Mystery Fun House, which appeared before this game.
This game is really unfair; you have to repeat actions, destroy important-seeming things, etc.
However, it matches the genre well; pyramids are supposed to be filled with unfair death traps.
Overall, though, this is still a good game.
An overly-complicated oldschool western game, June 5, 2017This is one of Scott Adams' later games, which are filled with unintuitive verbs and actions. If someone liked the earlier games, this would be an 'advanced' version of the earlier games.
I liked the atmosphere in this game, though. The spooky ghosts, the unusual voices, it all combined for a fun creepy feeling.
This game has a notable chemistry puzzle.
A zombie school RPG on an APPLE II emulator, June 5, 2017This is a game where you battle zombies one at a time. The violence level is similar to The Walking Dead.
There is an RPG element which can be difficult, but this is balanced by the fact that you can use careful planning to give yourself higher chances of success. This basically turns battles into gating puzzles where you have a random chance of occasionally getting into a much further place than you usually would.
The emulator was much less of a pain than I imagined; I just downloaded the folder and clicked once and there I was.
Fans of One Eye Open will like this setting and story, and vice versa.
A juvenile and large early text adventure with graphics, June 5, 2017This game can be summarized pretty easily by a couple of early facts:
-you are wearing a shirt with a marijuana leaf;
-if you go to the southern edge of the world, there is a sign saying that this is the 'boundary of the adventure';
-one of the first people you meet won't stop laughing at how dumb you look.
I didn't really enjoy this game; it's about the size of Zork, with some pictures. It's pretty hard, and the parser claims to be advanced, but actually has major problems.
I don't really recommend this game at all.
A big, illustrated classic game with devious puzzles and a good map, June 5, 2017I did not like the first Magnetic Scrolls game, The Pawn, at all. It was juvenile, and the puzzles were unfair.
Guild of Thieves is much better; it's still unfair at times, but not so much, and the juvenilia have been cut back.
You play a thief who has to steal a large number of treasures from a castle and its environs. It's a very Zork-like setting. The map felt large at first, but eventually it was easy to picture it all.
There are treasures absolutely everywhere. It's easy to find several treasures, but I doubt anyone's found all of them on their own. Magnetic Scrolls aren't know for their fairness, anyway, but you can get a lot of enjoyment out of this game right from the getgo.
A wartime game with constrained gameplay, June 5, 2017I played this game on HugoJS, the online Hugo interpreter.
This is a meaningful and interesting game. You are in a war, which I interpreted as Vietnam or Korea, but could be many wars.
You suddenly find your options severely curtailed by an unexpected event. And you have to watch, helpless, as events around you unfold. You eventually can influence things, but this isn't necessarily a plus.
I loved the emotion and feeling in this game. The only drawback was the interaction; I frequently had no clue what to do.
A fun little exploration/puzzle game made by a company, June 5, 2017This is a little old-school game where you have to search and poke and prod a sort of club house. There are little secret passageways and hidden messages and so on.
It's not very polished, and it didn't really draw me in; as just another game released in a year, it doesn't stand out. But for patrons of the company, I imagine it would be a real treat to have something tailor-made for your group.
A bear-pun-filled exploration of parental relationships and friendship, June 5, 2017This is a highly styled twine game that switches back and forth between two narratives about a bear, one set in the present where the bear is roaming a lab, and the other in the past where the bear confronts his father.
The game is full of bear puns (which are great) and occasional strong profanity (which I did not enjoy; I used a web-based profanity filter, though, so it wasn't bad.)
The story was funny (with one rather gruesome bit covered in other reviews). The deep backstory, though, was not compelling to me, as I didn't feel it was universal. It's a sort of classic Millenial story about fighting for the right to do nothing.
Super hard death trap Scott Adams game, June 5, 2017This game was designed to be super hard and last long. It does that by having random events that have a chance of killing you, including a 20-turn-or-so-long event where every turn you have a chance of dying and it won't let you save.
Besides that, it's actually pretty cool, with a deeper plot and a castaway-type setup. At the end, you're given a password to use in Savage Island Part 2.
Great intro to an incomplete game, June 5, 2017I enjoyed this short superhero game. You play as someone who is interested in becoming a superhero.
You have special glasses that let you see the world differently. There's some random combat, and some clever puzzles, and then the game just ends.
It'll probably never be finished now, but it's still interesting to play. Check it out!
A textfire demo pack game about surfers, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This game wasn't particularly inspiring. It's just a few turns in an interesting setting, but it cuts off before any action can occur. Due to its truly incomplete nature, it's not as good as the other textfire games.
A great teaser for an impossible-to-write sim game, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This is one of the cruelest jokes in the pack, a demo that promises a massive game with intense conversations, a controllable maze, and an army simulation with graphics.
This is great for its intended purpose.
A textfire demo game about colors, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This game showed extensive use of color, and came just a few months before Photopia.
You travel from colorful area to colorful area. Each area has a way to change the color, but it can be hard to figure out each color change.
A really pretty game.
A joke demo about the classic novel, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This game (one of the many from which Adam Cadre scrubbed his name) is based on Flowers for Algernon. It has extensive styling of the standard parser errors, written in the voice of someone with bad spelling and grammar.
A lot of work went into this joke game, and it's an interesting concept.
A short joke game about being in a coma, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This is one of the shorter games. You are in a coma, and then it ends. It hints at being able to do more after (or maybe before?) the part shown in the demo.
A humorous depiction of a deplorable event in US history, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This is a joke game, like the others. In this game, you recreate the actual events of the 1998 Winter Olympics where the US men's hockey team trashed their hotel room.
It made me laugh. Very short.
A textfire game about being inanimate, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This is one of the weaker textfire games. There is a machine that turns you into an inanimate object (including one inappropriate one, an option that I never ran into).
In this 'demo', you only get to be grain. You can't do anything. This was done much better by the game Constraints.
A short joke game about jack and the beanstalk, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
In this demo, you plant the magic beans, but the game ends right around there. There was a surprise twist that I thought was pretty good.
A weaker textfire game, but with some fun surprises.
A violent joke game about finding new ways to attack someone, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
In this game, there are 100 clones of Marjorie Hopkirk, and you have to kill them one at a time, each in a different way. The 'demo' stops after 5 turns.
This is the most violent of the textfire games, but is well put together.
A charming/haunting short story about a boy and a girl, June 5, 2017Chris Klimas is the inventor of Twine, and in many of his old games you can see leanings towards the future design of Twine.
This is a textfire game. The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This is the most complete and, in my opinion, the best game in the pack. A grandma is making you clean, and you don't want to. You have a dreamlike encounter with a young girl. It almost has a fairy-tale type setting, but in real life.
It uses an interesting menu-based system. Very cool.
A joke textfire game about the game Operation!, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This is a purposefully ridiculously demo of a parser version of the game Operate!, except its set in real life with an intense audience clamoring for you to remove more and more of a person's organs.
It's a short game.
A one-joke game about being a heart., June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
In this game, you are a heart. You can pump, or wait. I died when I played, but at least one other person lived.
It was actually really reasonably put together. I liked this game! But it really is a joke demo, which is why I didn't rate it higher.
A joke game about frustrating driving, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
This textfire game actually called out to me. There was a game in the 2016 ectocomp that also dealed with this subject: driving in a car in stressful circumstances.
This game is a joke demo, so it stops after the most interesting part. But there is a long bit of simulation with driving around that really does a good job of depicting how frustrating bad traffic is.
An entertaining one-verb joke demo game, June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
In this joke demo, you can only use the verb TAKE and nothing else (well, until you meet your wife). This is similar to Morayati's game TAKE, but in this game, it's more of a wordplay game; you try to use as many idioms as you can involving the word TAKE.
An entertaining chess simulation from the textfire 12 pack., June 5, 2017The Textfire Demo 12-pack was released on April Fool's in 1998, claiming to be demos of an upcoming commercial studio called Textfire.
In this game, you play a pawn in a chess game. The game shows you the chess board. The storyline is actually pretty entertaining; it's fun being a pawn. This was a joke demo; it actually would be great to do a chess game where you saw inside all the character's heads, their thought process, etc.
A textdump-heavy but awesome short don't-escape-the-room game, June 5, 2017This is an opposite game, where you defy conventions. In this game, you are in a room and don't want to get out; you do everything you can to barricade the room so that a vampire can't get in.
There's a huge textdump at the beginning, which is written pretty well.
The puzzles are great, but could be hinted at better. It didn't last long, but it was great while it did.
A super-hard Scott Adams adventure in space, June 5, 2017In this game, you play the second half of the first Savage Island. The first Savage Island was really hard, but this one is much harder.
It's hard to survive past the first two moves, as you must discover how to survive a vacuum. Beyond that, it just keeps getting harder, as you experience things that have to be searched on several levels, unusual verbs and unusual ways to use objects, and more vacuum-based time limits.
Overall, though, it has a much more coherent story than some other Scott Adams games.
A very short game in BASIC with random death and bad parser, June 5, 2017In this game, you play a ninja who has to retrieve a golden idol.
It's super short, with only 3 or 4 activities you need to execute.
I'm giving it 2 stars because the writing is descriptive, and because the small writing that was there did give a nice atmosphere.
But otherwise, this is tiny, with poor planning decisions and an obnoxious parser (it commits that horrible offense of understanding a command, telling you it's wrong, and telling you what command you should type instead).
A goofy/funny but buggy scifi adventure, June 5, 2017This game is a short sci-fi adventure with some pretty funny writing.
Two aliens kidnap you, and you are scheduled to be eaten, but something outrageous happens to your body, giving you unusual powers.
The game is good, especially a multi-functional ray gun, but it just needs to be implemented better. There need to be more synonyms, and perhaps a better treatment of darkness.
A linear twine game about bizarre worlds, written for friends, June 5, 2017This is a mid-length twine game written for a bunch of friends with some in-jokes. That type of game is usually very boring and/or poorly written.
But this game is actually very good; the writing is extremely creative. There are about 7 people whose lives you can influence with yes/no answers, presumably drawn from the author's friends. The true ending is poignant.
A great portrait of friendship.
An escape-the-death game with huge text and spotty implementation, June 5, 2017This is a big game in a small map. You are avoiding death, but it's coming at you in every way.
ADRIFT parser just aren't as good as Inform or TADS, but it's difficult to say why without just playing. It's about the same level of responsiveness as Quest.
This game has really, really big textdumps. And it can be difficult to know what to do at times. There is a walkthrough, but noone has been able to find the secret command to unlock it and post it online.
A short game that is wildly branching, June 5, 2017This is a rinse-and-repeat type Twine game, where you have exactly 7 clicks to try and save the world.
After seven attempts, you die. However, the game remembers your past, and you can carry information from session to session, such as passwords.
I found the game enjoyable but not gripping.
A 'blind' collaborative game spoofing spy thrillers, June 5, 2017This is a really neat idea: each of 12 or so authors codes a bit of game based off of the previous author, and leaves hints for the next author. Noone can see or influence anyone except the author directly before and after.
So the game is long and takes some wild turns. It was really enjoyable, except the people near the end decided to throw in some profanity and other weird stuff.
Overall, a really neat idea. It's really choppy, and I had to use textdumps to solve it (the worst is a door that says its locked, but which you can walk right through).
A thoughtful and well-implemented poetry exercise, June 5, 2017This game is based off of the japanese idea of Renga, which was itself the inspiration for Haiku.
In this game, you type keywords to form a poem. The game is quite adaptive, allowing you type all sorts of things.
This same adaptiveness makes it difficult to know how much in control you are. Typing Z over and over again will give you just fine poetry, but you can also directly influence it. This reminds me the most of Mirror and Queen.
A logic puzzle with an active, procedurally generated NPC, June 5, 2017This game was designed, I believe, to introduce a new audience to IF. It has an intriguing logic puzzle where you research a procedurally generated alien to see what properties it has, look up its homeworld, and send it home.
However, the game is strangely aggravating for an 'outreach' game. Even with all the hints, I had few ideas on what I could do to coerce the alien into the pod except in the easiest of cases.
The biggest problem here is that the game doesn't suggest many courses of action with the alien, but implements many courses of action. This means that I floundered around, exploring the edges of a possibly great game, without ever seeing its core.
A thought-provoking speed IF about a prison, June 5, 2017This game was based on a pretty funny quote as described in the readme in the zip file.
This is a conversation based game in 2 rooms, where you talk to an old man about a strange prison with a strange gate.
This had great storybuilding, a strong setting and a vagueness about morality and about your choices.
A heavily location-based long Twine with excellent styling, May 23, 2017It took me 209 choices to complete this game on my third playthrough.
This game took third in IfComp 2016, but as of this writing, it has the highest rating and number of ratings on IFDB.
In this game, you arrive at and explore a mysterious old motel with a supernatural flair. The game uses two main types of links: mostly-static location-based links for movement, and then conversation/emotion links for small scenes that play out as you move.
The two kinds of links are very consistent, making for some great gameplay. The styling is also good, with some nice animations and fonts and colors.
A hilarious gumshoe detective game in a hybrid parser interface, May 16, 2017I beta tested this game.
Detectiveland is a great game in a unique interface created by Robin Johnson.
The interface is a refinement of the one used in Draculaland. You have a parser-like interface, but instead of typing in commands, you have a menu of visible things and people and an inventory; you click on an object or person, and a menu of verbs comes up. One object at a time can be 'held', and this affects the menus of other nouns.
This is one of the biggest IFComp winners ever, with a minimal walkthrough taking 250 or more moves. It is split into 4 cases, 3 of which can be solved simultaneously.
You play a detective resolving problems in a square grid town. The game has graphics of speakers, and has really good humorous writing.
The game is written Scott Adams style, so many of the locations have very spare writing. This, according to the other, allowed him to spend more time on conversations and scripted events.
**Edit**
I actually hadn't played any Scott Adams games before this one; now I have played three, and this game is a straight send-up of those games, down to the split window and empty room descriptions. It's a perfect homage.
A crying-it-out simulator after a breakup in college, May 12, 2017In this game, you are absolutely devastated by a relationship. The writing is breathy and emotional. Overall, it reminded me a lot of Twilight, and not really in a bad way; Twilight has a way of keeping you reading.
However, it feels incomplete; the game shifts scenes abruptly at the end and ends just as abruptly, though there is some significant branching earlier. I've loaded the game in Twinery to check, and there is only the one, odd ending.
A cute game with creative implementation about 2 bunnies, May 12, 2017This is a cute little puzzle game. You play a bunny, and the narrator is your sibling.
There is a cool graphical map, unusual for a glulx game. You have to clean your house before going to market, and collect food, etc. It reminds me of a Peter Rabbit book.
The puzzles were clever, but could be clued better. A lot of the 'corners' of the game feel empty, with conversations especially feeling like they should be more developed or be clearly limited.
A series of miniature short stories about fate, May 12, 2017This was a fun little game. You choose left or right over and over again. Each branch takes you to a microstory about fate; some of which I really enjoyed.
If you play long enough, stuff changes slightly. Overall, though, this was a fun microgame, and worth checking out.
A very polished and graphically well-developed short story about displacement, May 12, 2017This is a very well put-together game which deals with a young boy named Ishmael whose family has been impoverished and displaced, and deals with their journey towards insurgency.
The graphics and interface are impeccable. This is really, really well done. It also includes an animated story and some sound effects that I didn't hear because I didn't have headphones and didn't turn on my speakers (not his fault).
A short goofy twine game about a fantasy world, May 12, 2017In this twine game, you are transported to another world where you make friends with bizarre creatures.
It's the type of game that's fun and silly and everything works out. It's also pretty short.
The first link available in the game takes you to a youtube video of some music. It was interesting.
An apparent microtwine adventure that is bigger than it seems, May 12, 2017This seems like a super small game (like TwinyJam or something) but is in fact quite large; the author claims it has "~29000 words in 723 nodes". It is strongly branching, but also pretty fun; it also has nice background changes, especially in the ocean scenes.
It's a fun game for a diversion. Recommended.
An intriguing game based on becoming different roles, May 12, 2017You play a character on a train who assumes different personas or identities over a period of several days. You eXamine different people, and discover new identities, then BE them for different people.
It's a philosophical sort of game. I found it to be a bit lawnmowery (you spend a lot of time just trying each persona on each passenger), but I found it enjoyable. The 'seducing' personas I didn't really like.
The ending was interesting, but like many others, I found it confusing.
A short Ink allegory of the political situation, May 12, 2017This game was shorter than I though it'd be. You select one person out of 9 on a raft, and you have several turns to choose who to talk to and what to do with rations. I don't believe the choice of character influences much.
This seems to be a weighty political allegory, but I found it difficult to see exactly what the messages were meant to be. There were parts against Nike factories, and parts for supporting refugees, but it seemed like there was much more that I was supposed to see that I just couldn't parse.
Overall, it was entertaining.
A branching and goofy game as a fly, May 12, 2017This game is a humorous story about a fly that notices a human up to no good.
It is surprisingly complex, and I found myself chuckling several times. It really seems to capture the essence of being a fly.
There was at least one link that didn't work (when I tried to SPLASH in the wine bottle), but otherwise it seemed really smooth.
There is some mild profanity.
View 5 different rooms with a camera, May 12, 2017This is a shortish but heavily replayable game.
You are at a Halloween party in a haunted house. It's your job to watch 5 monitors to look for spooky activity.
There's a death, and the explanation for that death depends on which monitors you were watching.
I found the writing good, the sounds polished, and so on, but the core mechanic just wasn't clicking with me. Sometimes you were supposed to be looking, sometimes listening, sometimes talking; I felt like I would have preferred more segregation between the various activities you can engage in.
An RPG type game where you can switch between all characters, May 12, 2017This is an ambitious but incomplete game. The idea is that you have standard RPG stats, and by switching characters, you can get their stats.
The writing has seen a lot of effort by the author, but the interaction is a bit wobbly. I wanted to be the cat lady and find her cat as her, but I couldn't finish her quest as her. No one could recognize that I was her, either.
Interesting concept, but needs more work.
Great opening to a big simulation game, May 12, 2017This game has the same design philosophy as the authors' last games, but with a very different set of mechanics.
The opening sequence is thrilling, with a strong buildup to... something extremely odd.
This game discourses at great length about advanced mathematics and philosophy while you are engaging in something utterly trivial, but it manages to blend the two together.
It was a trippy and surreal experience. I played until the game said I had no more to learn, but I didn't get a high score. If you get lost, shoot the magnet.
An intriguing fantasy twinelike game in free form verse, May 12, 2017This is the first chapter of a longer game. It is written in free form verses, but they are quite easy to read as normal paragraphs, and the broken up style is quite nice.
The game has a sort of pagan witch style of magic, with archetypes like the crone, the elder, the maiden, and the mother, a shadow world, etc.
The game focuses a lot on mating and dating, but not in any explicit form; the society just has a more free form culture, a lot like the fictional society in Friends where there are few consequences.
Overall, well eone, especially in setting-building.
More backwards phrases, this time with some unusual puzzles, May 12, 2017This game is in the spirit of the Problems Compound and Slicker City. It's a surreal adventure about self reflection and mean people, where everything is written using common phrases turned backwards (which reminds me, Andrew should write a game where every puzzle solution is a palindrome).
The puzzles were more interesting this time around, though I had the hardest time getting initial clues on how to solve them. I enjoyed the postponed mechanic, for instance.
These three games are all of one cloth. If you liked the others, you'll like this one.
A polished but disappointing game about philosophy, May 12, 2017This game is quite a bit like the old Unnkulia games: snarky or rude to the player at times, obsessed with unfair puzzles, filled with little 'male gaze' comments about women, arrogance about religion and philosophy, and full of 'goofy humor'. I didn't really like it.
It is big and mostly polished, but the puzzles are pretty opaque, more of a 'look how clever I the author am' than 'look how clever you the player are'.
You spend much of the game travelling back and forth through time and your own mind.
An excellent experimental opera about space and visions, May 12, 2017I am a fan of opera, including experimental opera, so this was a really enjoyable game. You play as a woman in space investigating a planet and dealing with a recurring sequence of visions.
I found the game quite beautiful, especially Chapter 1: Sunflowers. I would listen to other interactive operas in the future.
There are only 2 or 3 chapters right now, so total listening time is about a half hour or so.
A rich conversational experience with good styling, May 11, 2017This game has a beautiful backdrop of a mirror, and has unusual fonts and styling.
It is a parser conversational game. You type topics (about 1000 are recognized) and thus explore a a conversational thread.
The writing is good, but the biggest issue is the lack of control. I felt like I was just getting random snippets, even though there were threads. The vagueness of the writing contributed to this fact.
As a technical work, though, this is extraordinarily impressive.
A mid-length choicescript game about controlling superheroes, May 10, 2017This is a fairly long ifcomp choicescript game (about 5 chapters, though more are planned) about a world where superheroes have to be contained, like X-Men or the Incredibles.
This game seems to hit up all of the classic stereotypes of its genre, so I found it easy to just skim the text, the details all blurring together. The writing didn't pop out, and the text seemed to just do the job without excitement.
I was pleased by the interactivity, however; I tried to play as a rude brute, to see if the game could handle different styles of play, and the game really seemed to handle my input well. I would play it again; I feel like it has good bones, but it could use a few rewrites to get it to pop.
A legnthy twine game with inventory and puzzles about evil and shoes, May 10, 2017This is a pretty long twine game with some dark humor, all about a conspiracy and a new shoe.
This game is well-coded, and includes difficult twine constructs and handles it well. The text seems mostly error-free.
The game handles puzzles much better than most Twine games. The annoyance of lawnmowering links was offset by the creativity of the puzzle design.
The writing wasn't especially polished, and the story was hard to follow in places. It has a single and unnecessary strong profanity near the start.
A shortish game based on items with a certain kind of wordplay, May 10, 2017This game is a sequel to The Problems Compound. It is not one of my favorite Andrew Schultz games. Schultz has made some brilliant games, like Threediopolis and Shuffling Around, that are based on wordplay and puzzles, where the player has to use wordplay tricks to come up with commands.
This game and its predecessor have some small elements like that, but are mostly big set-pieces there to show off silly word reversals. These word reversals, while clever, are difficult to understand at times, and lead to a disjointed game world. This game was polished, but shorter than Problems Compound.
A short, minimally branching twine game about dreams and violent events, May 10, 2017In this game, you choose one of three options, then click through a few links in a row.
The game uses the standard twine style without customization, although each of the branches ends in a picture.
The stories are about bizarre and violent dreams. One of the branches had an explicit sexual encounter, at which point I stopped playing.
A my-little-pony inspired game about a dangerous island and a hidden saint, May 10, 2017I helped to beta-test this my little pony inspired game.
This game is accompanied by many hand-drawn illustrations of various bizarre creatures and locations. You walk around an island, exploring with your pony companion, and try to discover a patron saint of diplomacy to help your quest.
The illustrations add a lot to the game, and the writing is inventive and descriptive.
The game was fun, but didn't draw me in with an emotional connection. It is fairly long, but ends seemingly mid-story.
A short-to-mid length goofy twine game about adventure, May 10, 2017This is an entry in the 'I'm so wacky!' class of games. The text is a garish yellow, and the plot is disjointed and wild. It lasts for a respectable number of turns, and has some basic puzzles.
The author is completely committed to their writing, though, and they did a good job conveying the emotion that they wanted. This game is not really a bad little 'snack' if you're just looking for something quick and mildly amusing during a lunch break.
A quick Twine game about magical metals and Queen Victoria , May 10, 2017This author has written several very good games in the past, but I feel that this one doesn't live up to their reputation.
You pick to be one of several magic using Australians in the 1800s during a heist. The game is very similar in style to choicescript, and overall feels like an opening chapter from a choicescript game.
I think overall, this game and another game from this comp (the Eight Characters game) spent a great deal of time on front loaded back story, which involves a lot of reading that does not translate into gameplay. This isn't bad in itself, but the rest of both of these games focus on quick-action gameplay, so it conflicts with the earlier play style.
A mythology-dense twine work with labrythine structure, May 10, 2017This game consists of 7 chapters in a scifi setting with heavy Greek mythology references.
This game is very dense with invented words and phrases. It reminds me of To Burn in Memory from 2015; both games have text that makes subconscious sense but whose meaning is hard to grasp.
I think the issue is that none of the setting or mythology matters; the game might as well be about someone getting dressed for the morning. This is because you never need to use your knowledge about the setting to progress. Almost all links return to the previous page, and there are no opportunities for 'missed chances'. If the game made you make some tough, clearly marked irreversible choices, with delayed consequences, or used the knowledge it dispenses it dispenses.
A space game on a small map with heavy background, May 10, 2017In this game, you play as a character waking out of a deep sleep before interacting with an alien species.
This game relies a lot on heavy front-loading of information, most of which is not actually necessary for the game, because it generally teaches commands and the most common commands are listed in the Quest interpreter as drop-down boxes.
After the front-loading, there are a few actions you need to take that are more fast-paced.
The storyline is interesting, but I feel like the different parts of the game could have been incorporated more smoothly, perhaps with the manuals spread out more. However, the game is implemented well, and doesn't seem to have any bugs as far as I can see.
Recommended for fans of hard sci-fi looking for a short parser game.
A wildly branching Twine pastiche of all of Poems works, May 10, 2017This game seems like the author took everyone one of Poe's stories, drew a picture of the ending of it, summarized it in a humorous way, and then built a branching tree of decisions where each branch ends at a different picture/parody.
This was pretty entertaining, but it's tedious to look for more than a half dozen endings. Best for fans of Poe, pastiche, or old fashioned CYOA books.
A very long sci-fi/psychological Twine with music and some text effects, May 10, 2017I was a beta-tester for this game. This is one of the longest Twine games available. It's about a character who is trapped, and is having flashbacks to how they got there.
It's a sci fi Gane, with much of it aboard a Star Trek-Esqye vessel (although a small one). It deals with the characters relationship with the crew members.
There is an overall framing story as well involving recorded memory. As part of the framing story, the early text is purposely stilted and formal.
A sketchily implemented steam punk story set in a city, May 10, 2017This game has a big setting, with around 132 rooms, most of which are empty hotel rooms you don't need to visit.
There is a steampunk hotel with automated bellhop and clockwork mechanisms that you glimpse briefly, before a future setting in a regular house. As many have stated, this is pretty skimpily implemented. Playing it with the walkthrough reminds me a lot of Deadline Enchanter, but in that game, the sketchiness was intentional, and a walkthrough was included.
If you're into steampunk, play this with a walkthrough.
A strongly branching scifi story about a powerful device, May 10, 2017This is a very branching game, with, I assume, 10 endings (I've seen 4 or 5).
It has extensive styling of the words and background, which was a little grating but much better than the standard style.
This was a mostly branching game, meaning that most choices end up sending you on different paths. However, a lot of the paths are just quick bad endings, so there is one main correct path.
The story and writing were okay, I would say above average for unedited Internet stories. There was some profanity, but not a lot.
Overall, it could be a fun short sci fi game for a lunch break.
A short game about getting a theatre production to work., May 10, 2017This game is actually exactly what a great short game looks like about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way through the writing process. There is a good storyline with side bits, the main walkthrough is implemented, there aren't that many bugs, but it isn't really all the way there: there are some descriptions that were written quickly and need revising, many objects are unimplemented, conversations need more topics, and all of the thousand little responses for standard actions and wrong attempts need to be added.
This game is mostly about fixing the curtain so the stage can go up. It does a good job of characterizing the different individuals involved.
A mid length branching zombie game, May 10, 2017I beta tested this game. A single playthrough of this game takes you through a series of battles and explorations in a luxury apartment building after a zombie apocalypse.
The game is not too long, and there are some difficulties with the translation. However, on more playthroughs, it has more features: more branches, randomization, multiple languages.
A series of hyperlinked letters about teenagers and friendship , May 10, 2017I'll admit, I was disappointed, because I thought this game actually had a series of secret coded messages that you had to decrypt, from hints in the text.
But this is actually a bunch die of letters from a girl to the player that talk about life and difficulties. The styling is great, and the game is polished and descriptive. There was some strong profanity.
Really polished, but relatively short and hard to piece together.
Randomly generated abstract poetry, May 10, 2017I am a fan of poetry, but not generally of procedurally generated poetry, except for the Mary Jane of Tomorrow. This program generates random, disjointed ghazal-form poems based on some input.
I think more could have been, for instance with rhyming procedurally or otherwise using the stricter forms of Ghazal.
A moving kinetic game about death, May 10, 2017This game shows, like Stone Harbor, the power of a great story mixed with good physical and visual interaction. Both games are strongly linear, with fewer interactions, but with a great effect.
Ash tells the story of the death of the authors mom, a lingering death in the hospital. There are some interesting choices in the story with subtle effects later, but it's mostly linear. The beauty comes from the tight writing, the smooth visual effects, the appropriate font, and the way that the choices seem to reflect thought and intent more than actual decisions. You are choosing how to feel, not what to do. This worked well for me.
I finished both times with goosebumps all over my arm. This game is on the opposite end of the also great Cactus Blue Motel in terms of world model and interactivity, but both are great. Neither game resembles the super-branching wild stories that the lower-placing entries have. I love this game.
A zombie game leaning on video game tropes and history, May 10, 2017This game has an entertaining premise: zombies have attacked Vigamus, the video game museum, and you have to use video game powers to save the museum.
But it falls flat with missing synonyms, sexist humor, and an overly zany plot. Others have definitely enjoyed it (it has some great ratings on textadventures.co.uk) but it didn't suit me personally.
A mid-length twine game with sci-fi labs, graphics, text effects, world model, May 10, 2017This is actually a pretty good game, but just a bit odd. You are a squid.... sometimes, in a development that reminds me of the old game Delusions, although I'm sure the resemblance is a coincidence.
The game has a nice world model, with different locations and the ability to take and use objects. There are some fun graphics and cool timers and text effects.
It's a bit odd that you have to undo at times to move around the game, and there was an occasional typo (I saw the word maintenance room with two brackets after it), but overall it was a fun game.
A short surreal work set in an alternate universe, May 10, 2017I beta tested this game.
This game is a short surreal story where you wander about an office place that is somewhat fantastical, and is both familiar and not.
It's hard to know what actions will have what effects, but that too is part of the story.
The best part of this game is the unusual culture of it, different from the male-powered white American setting assumed for so many games.
A Texture game with pure binary branching, May 10, 2017I've played this game 3 times since IFComp, each time trying several endings.
It uses Texture, which is a mobile-friendly app which seems like it could work well with screen readers.
Each page, though, is just two choices, which split into 2 choices, about 8 times. Or 6, actually.
The writing is good, but pure branching just isn't my style. I did enjoy it more on my 3rd playthrough, though.
A goofy evil genius game with graphics, May 10, 2017In this game, you play an evil genius taking over the world. It's a Twine game with some hand drawn graphics, an invebtiry, and non-trivial branching.
It's a goofy humor game. The author did a good job with descriptive language and polishing up the links and graphics, and the interactivity is definitely non-trivial, but overall it didn't gel for me.
A linear, thrilling parser game about a futuristic cowboy , May 10, 2017In this game, you face a series of combat challenges, one after another.
Each challenge is in one location, and you use a variety of methods to attack your opponents.
Before Superluminal Vagrant Twin, this was probably Pacian's best known game. It has some violent and suggestive elements. It features a romance and several friendships, often with the people you are battling. The setting is rich and evocative.
A shortish twine piece about depression, May 10, 2017This is an entry by Megan Stevens, who has been doing her own thing in IFCOMP for several years. She doesn't focus as much on styling or complex link structures. Instead, her games focus on serious life events and a sort of grey evocative feel.
This game is about depression. It's short, but I found parts of it effective, especially the scene displayed in the cover art.
This game has a single, pretty much unnecessary strong profanity. It also references depression, obviously. If you like this game, you should try her other work.
Spore in choicescript, with hats, May 10, 2017This is a choicescript game with several short chapters and 2 longer chapters that involve cycling through similar events.
You start out as a small being in primordial ooze, then grow into a creature, then a tribe, a city, and a spacefarer.
The game is well polished and has a consistent tone that's not bad. Some of the cycling of similar options seemed a bit tedious at the end.
Overall, I would put it in the top half of the competition.
A shortish twine game about an alternate future , May 10, 2017In this game, you are the daughter of the famous founder of the n/a movement, which somehow focuses on those with subtle powers, whether supernatural or based on refined psychology, I couldn't tell.
This game has many endings, based on how you react to 1-4 visitors that come to your office. The game has large blocks of text either a few, but varied options at the end.
I found the game not very exciting, but I liked how differently you could actually on different playthroughs.
An alternative-world chill-out western , May 10, 2017This mid-length TADS game has a strong writing style and uses various colors. It has unique, alien world-building and an interesting map.
It also has puzzles that can be hard to guess. Using the walkthrough is fun, though, to get the whole story. There is one strong profanity, for no real reason, but it won't happen if you follow the walthrough.
I really enjoyed the setting and backstory here, it really is unique.
A great spooky game with an infuriating interface, May 10, 2017This game is a long, well-written, and exciting creepy game set in a house.
You are a young child at night, whose family seems to be missing. You explore the house, gathering various objects, and discovering more about the truth of your family's disappearance.
I created a textadventures.co.uk account, but the game interface was still infuriatingly bad. If I typed in a command too fast, the game would freeze, making me need to restore a save. You can only have one save at once.
Also, I followed the walkthrough, but I couldn't get the main opponent to spawn in the game. I still have never finished the game, even though I've started over 8 times.
**Edit** I finally got the game to finish; I realized that the walkthrough didn't say what I thought it did, and there's nothing you need to 'spawn'. This does, though, make the big puzzle unmotivated.
A fun implementation of a forum thread exploration game, May 10, 2017This game was written by an established board game maker and writer. Caroline Berg had a forum thread (located at https://videogamegeek.com/thread/1117906/you-are-standing-cave/page/6) where she was narrating an adventure game to the board members.
This game is the implementation of that forum thread. It was written in 2 weeks, after 1 week spent learning Inform.
The current implementation was not beta-tested, so it could really use some fixing up, but the core of it is good. It could do with a walkthrough.
A gender-swapped static story implemented in Twine, May 10, 2017(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)There's not much to say about this game; it's just an old short story/novella, with all the genders swapped, and implemented in big linear chunks in Twine.
Why not just read the original book? Not much to see here.
An overbusy and complex glulx card game with multimedia features, May 10, 2017This game is primarily notable for its extensive use of multimedia with glulx, more than any other previous glulx game.
It's a card game where you take turns playing cards that affect a world. The writing and images are detailed and compelling.
However, I felt that there was just too much going on in this game. The game window has a ton of doodads and images, and the effects were very complicated. I will admit I was in a hurry, though.
Overall, fun as an idle game, and interesting as a tech demo.
A polished mid-length fantasy twine game in a fantasy setting, May 10, 2017This game has some good graphics, excellent styling and a convenient user interface with saves and achievements. This is a great setup for a Twine game, especially one like this with more 'game'-y features.
The story was a good read, too. You are cast out of a village and left 'to the wolves', but you make a new life for yourself. Your interactions with the villagers and yourself are up to you.
The mechanics were a little opaque, and the endings didn't quite click for me, but overall, Highly recommended.
A troll game, written in z-code, May 10, 2017Z-machine games are less and less frequent each year, because Inform defaults to glulx. This comp still had several z-machine games though, but I'm not sure why.
Anyway, that means that the author of this game has probably had Inform for a while. Given that that's the case, this is a pretty disappointing troll game. There are only a couple of rooms, few items, etc.
A well-polished nugget based on paper, rock, scissors, May 10, 2017This game is a good example of how you can take just any idea and polish it up into something fun.
The idea (playing paper rocks scissors with crazy consequences) is interesting, but so many other comp parser games had interesting ideas and just failed. There were parser games where no exits were listed, games where only one synonym out of 20 were implemented, games where the writing was incomprehensible, games with big text dumps.
This game, however, hit up all of the important points for basic player enjoyment: adaptive in-game hints, synonyms implemented, standard responses changed, consistent puzzles, etc.
My personal favorite bit was:
">eat phone
You take a big bite out of your cell phone and chew thoroughly.
Okay, you don't actually do that, because that would be dumb."
The writing was a bit sparse, and the story was minimal, but this game still was fun and placed high. Why? Because those pieces of basic player enjoyment are the most important part of a parser game, I believe.
A very detailed game by 2 experienced authors, May 10, 2017Pogoman GO! was written by the winners of the 2009 IfComp and the JayIsGames Casual Gameplay competition (one where heavyweights like zarf and Stephen Granade entered).
From any other authors, this would be an impressive game, but I ended up disappointed. This game is intricate, well over 100,000 words of code. It has dozens of locations, an intricate minigame with many characters and a combat system, and a well-thought out plotline. Tons of little fun response are added, and so on and so on.
So what's not to like? First, it's a parody of a flash-in-the-pan social event that was already outdated when the comp started. It's an in-joke that's not 'in'.
Second, it parodied the most annoying parts of the original: crashes, grinding, pop-up achievements, etc.
Third, the 'good part' that comes after the parody part is itself somehow dissatisfying, as if the beta testers didn't get to it themselves. There are good puzzles and interesting locations, but the cluing is off.
The cluing and storyline both suffer from the zaniness of the game; it introduces humorous elements, but fails to integrate them into the internal logic of the game. The solution may be funny, but why is that the solution out of all solutions that should work?
This is a lot of complaining, when the truth is that this is mechanically one of the best games of the last few years, and most people should have a good time with it.
A super-short goofy game with a lot of side things implemented, May 10, 2017This game is pretty short, with 4 minor scenes. It reminds me a lot of last year's The King and the Crown, where there was a lot of easter eggs and goofy content.
It can be hard to figure out what to do, and a lot of the game is sketchy, with extra line breaks or misunderstood synonyms.
It has a certain type of humor that some people like. If you liked this, you'd probably like Pogoman Go!.
It has a deeper meaning in some branches, again like the King and the Crown.
A slick and smooth mid-sized game about judging a science fair, May 10, 2017This game is Hanon Ondricek at his best. There's a million moving pieces: a book-selling minigame, events on a timer, mobile NPCs, in-depth conversational trees, easter eggs, crowds, a million little easter eggs, non-standard parser responses. It's a great game.
It's fairly short, but I think it was designed that way intentionally to allow all players to reach an ending. You just wander around, looking at everything, talking to the kids and parents, selling books, and then you pick a winner.
Highly recommended.
A great exploration of how far you can go with a limited parser. In a lab., May 10, 2017This game reminds me somehow of the old electronic devices you could get around the time of the NES that would play just one game, like Snake or other games. There were little, limited buttons, but they really did a lot with them.
This is the text version of that; you can just move N, E, S, W and Z. But this huge game exploits all of that. It can be finished in 2 hours with the walkthrough, but if you want to do it on your own, you need to do some exhaustive searching. Some of the truly unfair puzzles seem to be solvable if you just keep searching everything over and over again.
If you like this game, you should like DiBianca's other games. This was the number one game in the author's vote.
A visually rich Texture game about feeding grim animals, May 10, 2017In this game, you play as a zookeeper for a queen.
This is a texture game, which is good for mobile and desktop. You grab a few nouns at the bottom, and drag them above; in this story, they nouns are mainly keys and food.
Your job is to feed the animals. This game is about exploration of the universe; your choices matter, making replay enjoyable.
The game is visually well-developed as well.
Highly recommended.
A largely linear but powerful story about a psychic-turned-detective, May 10, 2017This was my favorite game of the comp, on the strength of its writing and its use of kinetic links.
In this game, you play a fake psychic who discovers their true powers after being roped into a murder investigation.
The gameplay resolves around big chunks of text with little choices that change some flavor text. I usually don't like this style, but the concept of a psychic\detective trying to prove himself is great for this style; it makes you hunt the text for clues, trying to figure out what angle to approach a person, to guess what item to use next. It reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, with a strong attention to gathering clues from clothing, appearance, and clues.
The styling is gorgeous, the machinery runs smooth, the graphics are good. Does this mean Parser is dead? No, it just means that there's twice as many games to enjoy.
A very limited parser game with great depth of implementation, May 10, 2017Morayati is known for writing polished, inventive games. This game proved to be popular and a big talking point for the comp.
It's a gladiatorial game, where instead of fighting, you write 'hot takes' about your fight. An embedded monitor records how well the audience responds.
The game has a darker metaphorical meaning, and draws a lot of its intensity from that.
A game that, perhaps, everyone should play. There's a lot to talk about here.
A complex and well-clued twine game about killing vampires, May 10, 2017This game is by the author of Open Sorcery, one of the best Twine games.
In this game, you play a side character in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-type world. You need to kill a vampire!
The game is heavily location-and-inventory based, similar to the other high-rated IFComp 2016 games Cactus Blue Motel and the Shoe Dept.
There are a lot of clever tricks, like testing you on how well you know classic texts, useful items hid among unuseful items.
The cluing is excellent; any one ending will give you hints on the other 15, and options that you should have thought of but didn't are greyed out.
It does have an unnecessarily large amount of profanity, though.
A great story concept that could use some tightening, May 10, 2017Riot is a game that I thought I wouldn't like but which improved as I played it.
It's a longish twine game about a police officer who runs into a sticky situation in a Riot. It uses some basic styling.
The pages are pretty long with binary choices whose effects only carry over to the next page. This isn't necessarily bad; Ash had the same choice structure.
But a lot of the text seemed extraneous. I found myself skimming the text and focusing on the choices. The choices got more compelling as I continued to play, and I enjoyed switching characters later on.
I think that cutting out a lot of the text per page to focus on the raw story could have really helped this piece. I would definitely play another game by this author.
Excellent parser/choice hybrid about Inuits and magic, September 15, 2016In this game, you play as a young Inuit native (I believe; it never says, but you live on the ice and eat seal meat). You can summon beings from the Stars by placing runes on the ground that describe them, two runes at a time.
This game uses a parser/choice hybrid, by having a variety of nouns at the bottom which, as you click them, provide verbs to act on them with, usually two or three verbs at a time.
This system took me a bit to get used to at first, but I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. The runes become an alphabet of sorts that, like the alphabet in Ingold's adaptation of Sorcery!, allows for a great deal of variety and difficulty in a parser hybrid.
The story was slow to start for me, but grew on me. I strongly recommend this game. It took me about 40 minutes to play.
A fun short, creepy game about running out of light, September 10, 2016In this game, you are trapped inside a small shop with a grue (a creature from the Zork series). Just any connection with Zork makes a game more silly, but that's not a drawback here.
You have to move through the darkness with limited resources. As you do, you find different sources of light and other surprises. You're just trying to survive.
I had to replay a couple of times to get it right. It has some nice ambient sounds and good use of images and backgrounds.
I really liked it, and recommend it.
Life and death and life through binary choices, September 3, 2016Caveat: I was given a review copy of this game, but ended up playing the free public intro instead.
This game incorporates various multimedia effects including sounds, music, some animation and even apple watch interactivity, but I played it on android with the sound turned off.
So I'm just reviewing the graphics and story, and it's a good one. This is my favorite Fwlicity Banks game yet, perhaps because I just finished mistborn and I enjoyed the metal-themed magic vibe and the wilderness survival aspects.
In the free intro to the game, which by itself is quite long, you play as the unwilling holder of a special talent: "eating" souls. What that entails and its implications for you are slowly unraveled.
Your main nemesis at first is a ghastly creatute, a red eyed albino bear. The confrontations with the bear were exciting, and you get a lot of mileage out of the game before the pay/ad wall.
The visual styling is gorgeous. The choices were all binary, and the story 'felt' like the choices didn't matter at first, but I soon found that options that seemed unimportant led to dramatic results; the author must have spent a great deal of time working on the different threads to allow this level of choice.
As a final note, I've given this game 5 stars based on my judging criteria. I've reviewed several of Banks' games by her request, but I haven't been afraid to give less stars when appropriate. This game is polished, descriptive, gave me a real thrill of emotion, and made me want to play more, which are 4 of my 5 criteria. I didn't like the binary choices at first, but it fell into a rhythm that ended up working for me, which is my 5th star.
A compelling science fiction mystery with spotty implementation, August 24, 2016This game is sort of like Babel without beta testing. You play a psychic detective walking through a destroyed lab, and you have to relive a man's memories to determine what happened.
The memories are really interesting, and the general story is very good. However, as others have noted, you eventually reach a place where the implementation is completely spotty and the walkthrough is your only help.
Recommended, with a walkthrough, for fans of intense science fiction.
A puzzlefest mashup of several shakespeare plays, August 23, 2016This game is written in Robin Johnson's own engine, one of the best home-brew parsers available. It is a Scott Adams-style puzzlefest, with smaller room descriptions, lots of places to explore, and 0-1 items in each location.
Some of the puzzles are quite hard; this game is for fans of old-school design.
The game mashes up several Shakespeare plays, primarily Hamlet, but also Othello, Macbeth, Richard III, the Henry IV/Falstaff plays, Romeo and Juliet, and so on
Overall, this is one of the best theatre-based games available, and one of the best old-school games.
A small, cute game with dinosaurs. A bit frustrating, August 23, 2016This game was entered in Pet Jam. You are on an island where most things are made of felt, including a wide variety of randomly generated dinosaurs.
There's not a lot to do; most of the items consists of 'flavor' items that allow you to have fun, rather than pursuing an overarching goal.
I was on mobile, and it was frustrating dealing with the long dinosaur names (which can be rewritten) and with the red herrings.
A well done location-based Twine game with few events and no end, August 23, 2016This game is a luscious set-piece with nice graphics and infrequently changing links.
You wander around a city called Fahlstaff, absorbing local culture. Occasionally bizarre events will hapoen.
You make a choice at the beginning that determines the bizarre events. My choice led to some truly clever ideas.
The game seemed to have no ending.
A tiny experiment in tailoring the Marriage of Figaro to a player's choices, August 23, 2016In this game, you are hiding to discover if your wife is cheating on you.
It's very short, with just a few options. The idea is that each choice changes the nature of the setting, including altering past events.
It's an intriguing idea, but at such a small level it is hard to see what it could turn out like. In many ways, Choicescript games do this (how did you get here? Etc. As part of their world building).
A keyword based surreal twine game, August 23, 2016This twine game is inspired by Pacian's Weird City Interloper. In both games, you use keywords in different locations to advance the story.
In this game, you have a few locations, and an inventory. Both are dynamic. You move to a new area and use a new item. Being porpentine, the inventory includes things like emotions.
Overall, the mechanic was nice, and the vaguely futuristic surrealism worked for me. However the overall gameplay turned into repeatedly cycling through the inventory in every location, hoping for something to pop out. An interesting experiment
An intense surreal/hallucinogenic experience, August 21, 2016This game by Porpentine features excellent writing and good effects. It contains some strong profanity and features some violence towards transgender individuals from a sympathetic point of view.
You decide to sell part of yourself, a mental part, to make money. The process is disorienting and frightening, and it causes you a variety of mixed emotions.
I felt like the disjointed experiences lasted too long; Porpentine's other longish games tend to have larger 'chunks' of texts at a time, which is easier to handle. Other people may not have an issue with this extended disorientation.
A character creation tool using Twine, August 21, 2016This isn't really something to try and beat as much as it is a tool to come up with characters. It chooses things like name, sex and appearance, but also personality types, astrological signs, concerns about body image, etc.
There is a message of sorts in what options are generated, but it seemed mostly just like a fun tool rather than a means to a greater end.
Edit:
I've just replayed this, and discovered the black text is links to mini-stories, many of which are really good. I recommend this game now. Some strong profanity. I've increased the rating from 3 stars to 5.
A short Twine story about a woman in a broken spaceship, August 21, 2016In this game, you play as a woman who wakes up in a spaceship, not remembering the events leading up to the spaceship's damage.
You move about the space station, uncovering a variety of unusual circumstances.
The styling is done well, with different colors for different kinds of links, and some nice visual tricks.
Overall, an enjoyable light snack.
An intriguing short 2-pane game with simultaneous stories, August 21, 2016This is a short Twine game that was part of a challenge to make short games based on the theme of 'pairs', and was later submitted to Sub-Q magazine.
The game is split into two sides, one dark and one light. One with a villain, one with a heroine.
The story is brief, and only hints at greater things. There is a great deal of world building, but most things are left unexplained.
A fun, light snack.
A multiple-viewpoint game about saving a newborn girl's life, August 21, 2016In this game, you play as a variety of characters who are all tied up together. The story is simple; a pregnant mother is injured, and the baby needs to be delivered. You need to help.
The game starts out in reality and veers into allegory. As others did, I enjoyed the real part more, if only because the symbolism later was hard to puzzle out. The game contains extreme violence.
Overall, the writing was excellent, as was the polishing. An interesting game.
Excellent sci fi game about rebirth , August 20, 2016This is a mid length Twine game set in a post apocalyptic world. You awake from a long sleep, not knowing who or what you are, but knowing what to do.
The game has only a few locations, but each one is packed with detail. The other characters in the game are vivid.
I found the general setting and characters to be very compelling. A must-play for sci fi fans.
A series of moral problems in parser form, August 20, 2016This game has a fairly simple concept. You're placed into a sequence of distinct dilemmas where you have to choose between, for instance, killing one person or many people.
It's all pretty heavy handed, and has typos and some issues with implementation. But it's interesting to play, if for no other reason than that it's unusual.
A large Lovecraftian horror game with some rough edges, August 20, 2016This game features the same detective as The Surprising Case of Brian Timmons. This game is larger than that one, with less bugs, but also with a less compelling story.
You are investigating several disappearances, and are drawn to the town of Castronegro in New Mexico. There you explore a large map while unraveling a mystery. However, each location has only one (or none) interesting things, and each NPC can only say one thing.
The climactic scenes are often abrupt, and some puzzles are a bit odd in what works and what doesn't.
Overall, I didn't like this one as much as Brian Timmons, but it isn't bad. Like the previous game, it contains some derogatory attitudes towards women.
A sarcastic political game set in Iraqis future, August 20, 2016This is a large, spare game where you are sent out to discover who was behind Sadam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction or the conspiracy.
You wander from embassy to embassy and so on until you discover the truth. The game is frequently under clued, and the writing is often spare. It makes its point, but in an ineffective way.
An apocalyptic riff on Aisle, August 20, 2016Like Aisle, this is a one-move game where every recognized command tells a little story before ending the game.
In this game, each move ends the world, at least for you, and in a different way each time. The tone is dramatic, sometimes veering into the melodramatic; it's hard to know if this is parody or not.
The game recognizes most commands like examine and so oj, but almost none of the directional commands work, which would have provided a good amount of commands to experiment with.
A charming fairy tale about a quest for a lost love, August 20, 2016This twine game takes a lot of well-used tropes and works then into something special.
This is a 10-20 minute game with 9 endings. You seek a loved one in the fairy woods, and face a sequence of 2-3 choices at a time when finding them.
The game takes classic fairy ideas like fairy rings or greedy trolls and somehow gives them a sense of realness. The NPCS are all thoughtful.
The styling is individualized for this game and uses occasional special fonts.
A brief surreal Spider horror game, August 20, 2016This game is short with some interesting branching. You play as a variety of characters, all of which are tied up with a sort of Spider God manifested in webs and small spiders.
The writing is uneven, varying between creepy and jokey, which causes some disruption when reading. I enjoy this type of story a lot, but it doesn't really distinguish itself from other creepypasta.
Recommended for fans like me of surreal, amnesiatic type games.
A solid but flawed mid-length Lovecraftian detective game, August 16, 2016According to my rating system, this is a 4 star game. It is not polished, but it is descriptive, it made me feel intrigued, the often frustrating mechanics somehow had their own logic that worked, and I could see myself playing it again one day.
However, my personality enjoyment was around 3 stars. In particular, I disliked the macho attitude, especially towards women, the overblown metaphors, and the unnecessary fiddly interactions.
The basic story, which is very solid, is based on preexisting content from Lovecraft, filtered through a paper RPG along the way. You are asked to investigate a young man who has gone insane and is robbing graves. You have to travel to a variety of locations to unravel the story.
You are a stereotypical detective with fedora, trench coat and revolver. The game is lengthy, and many of the programming seems to be simple hacks. For instance, all important conversation occurs on a timer, where NPCS come in, talk, and walk away over several turns. The command 'dig' returns a command that only pertains to one area as the author assumed no one would type that command elsewhere. Rooms are occasionally left empty, many synonyms are left unimplemented, etc. I encountered a bug early on where a character told me to leave, and I didnt, and they just repeated their command over and over, but I was not allowed to leave. Commands were sometimes purposely obtuse, like telling me to push doorbell instead of ring doorbell.
But somehow all of it makes a pattern; if you know a game wants to be unfair, you keep your eyes out. The author has a good grasp of pacing, and of world building. But the sexualization of women and the crazy metaphors are a real drawback.
A dramatization of the printing of Galileo's book Two Sciences, August 16, 2016This is a short parser game about a man named Andrea helping smuggle Galileo's book Two Sciences to a publisher.
The general story is interesting, but there are numerous bugs, and the interaction has some issues. It ended fairly quickly.
A long, procgen graphical twine game about data stored in a frozen world, August 16, 2016In this game, you play as the sole survivor of a frozen outpost in a world where the Internet has been converted into animate objects of ice.
You've been tasked with converting the ice into data to restore the futture. Equipped with a gauntlet that converts material into data. Yo7 have to collect 100TB of data, requiring ten separate trips into a large graphical map of a region.
There seems to be an alternate mission besides the obvious one, with an environmental bent, but I just used the gauntlet to win. The ending was fun, but a bit underwhelming.
Overall, I found the game slow on mobile, and the grinding repetitive. Despite this, I enjoyed the game and will play again.
A very strong free SimEarth-type game with substantial additional paid content, August 15, 2016(Caveat: I played a final (non-beta) version of this game without graphics right before it was released).
Wordsmith by Ade McTavish is a very, very good game. In 2014, the author released Fifteen Minutes, which was one of the best difficult puzzle games in a long time, an intricate time travel game involving half a dozen copies of yourself. Then, in 2015, he took 2nd place in IFComp with Map, a mostly puzzle less but big story-based game that was emotionally powerful.
In this game, he's combined his best of story, setting and puzzles. The game has a free version and a commercial version.
In the free version, you create worlds in several stages, like Sim Earth. Your solar system ages over time, making different planetary orbits more or less favorable over time; you can make a planet for each orbit out of different alchemical materials. You then try to create a form of life that fits that planet , and then you teach the life culture and skills until, hopefully, they develop interstellar travel.
I found this thrilling, well-written (with procedural generation) and difficult. Fortunately, with 6 orbits in each solar system, it isn't too hard to get one to interstellar travel.
The game seemed to require a big info dump at first, which put me off, until I just ignored it and experimented. This worked much better; I should have thought of the book you get as a reference guide, not a book to be read back to back but to be consulted.
As for the commercial portion of the game, it's just getting started after the world building ends. You explore an absolutely huge, 7-level space station with a sprawling plot involving a widespread conspiracy and opposing forces.
I found the world building fascinating, although it was hard to keep track of the various locations; this should be a lot easier with the graphics in the finished version. I especially got lost in the ground floor a few times, as the building rotates.
There is a complicated card game in the finished version which I have yet to try, as I found an alternate path around that part of the game.
Overall, I recommend this game, and would rank it around the level of Blue Lacuna or Sorcery!.
Edit: I forgot to mention that this game uses graphics in a way not seen in parser games ever. The graphics respond to commands in this game in an extremely useful way. It's a technical masterpiece in this sense.
A series of unfortunate events in your house, August 14, 2016This game is a short-to-mid-length parser game about trying to send a check to the bank. As you try to do so, things go terribly wrong.
This game felt a little bland and under implemented, but then great moments were sprinkled throughout that would make me want to play it again. A cockroach and a young child provide some memorable interactions, and unexpected events at the bank add to the story as well. But it overall feels a bit unpolished or unfinished, as if the author ran out of time.
It has a timer puzzle early on, and a couple of sticky points verb-wise later on.
A short and slightly buggy game with 4 PCs, August 13, 2016This game has one big innovation, where it has a personality test at the beginning and you end up playing one of four characters. Each of the 4 characters has a special section of the game that only they play. Then you work together with one friend, and then with all 4 to solve the game.
The plot is jumbled, and the writing is spare and choppy. The game is under implemented, and very short. However, the key concept makes it interesting.
A gory, long tale about the urge to torture and kill, August 13, 2016This is perhaps paperblurts most compelling story for me, but also the most troublesome content. You play a serial killer who just can't get enough of killing.
The pacing, the graphics and animations, are all excellent, although it drags on to six acts.
It goes into detail about the gore, but it's over the top, silly gore.
The story gets interesting with the addition of a couple of major npc's. Both of them get wrapped up in a somewhat rushed way. Also there is no save feature for this long game with many slow pauses.
A gorgeous, well-written Undum game based on a Poe story, August 9, 2016This game is brief, and is based on (I believe) on the Masque of the Red Death.
The game is sub-q style, short and straightforward, but Bruno manages to make it interesting. The writing is heavy, like Devil's Food Cake. The game is an adaptation, but with enough early changes that I was intrigued to see where it would go storywise.
The game has good replay value due to a sequence of end actions wandering about a party and choosing what rooms to visit. I found at least two different interesting sequences.
I recommend this game as a short literary bite.
A short love story in Twine with nice effects, August 9, 2016This game is a short Twine game with two main branches that mirror each other. You play through the love story of a boy and a girl struggling to discuss their feelings with each other.
The game uses Twine effects well, with color changing links, hover-over links, real-time cycling links, etc. making the game a dynamic and enjoyable experience, although brief.
The writing is a bit spare, but fresh. I was pleased with the overall experience.
A short fantasy game followed by a personality test, August 9, 2016This game was written as an independent study project for a student as part of their graduation. For a small project, it's not bad; the 1 star doesn't mean that the author did a bad job, just that it didn't match my criteria.
You play through a short fantasy sequence leading into a castle, where you have to answer a series of questions about what you love most, and power, and so on. Depending on your answers, you are awarded a magical Arcanum and a distinct ending.
The styling is standard CSS and the game doesn't allow much flexibility in actions until the highly branching finale.
A twine game about making a last-minute IFComp entry, August 9, 2016In this Twine game, you play an IFComp author who has to throw together a game in the last minute.
You look around your room for inspiration for a good guy, a bad guy, and a evil plan. Then, you combine them into an action-packed story which you can play and replay.
The game is goofy and fun, and well-put together. It uses out-of-the-box Twine with no special styling (I think the later game Machine of Death by this author did more with styling).
Overall, though, the game felt slight, and not as comedically compelling as it could be.
A short, illustrated grungy story about intertwined fates, August 6, 2016This game won 3rd place in the IFComp the year it was entered, and is one of the shortest games to ever make the top 3. It has quite a few illustrations in it in a comics style.
As a content warning, this game has 3 parts, and the first part is full of large amounts of strong profanity and a general sort of vague nastiness. It made me put of this game for a long time, and I don't intend to play again.
Besides that, the game is very well written, with strong characterization and clever interaction. You play as 3 distinct PCs whose fates revolve around a small store called Cost Cutters. Each character gets 1 or 2 short scenarios where you are given strong guidance, until the final scenario where you have a tight time schedule (with infinite chances to retry) and a more difficult puzzle.
An interesting game with some implementation difficulties., August 6, 2016This game has descriptive writing and a good story. You wake up on an exam table in a bare room.
This game is short, with 3 total points to earn. However, the sequence of actions necessary to get those points is arbitrary and difficult to come up with on one's one. This is further muddled by implementation bugs (especially the 'violence isn't the answer to this one' me tinned in other reviews).
I recommend playing this one with the walkthrough.
A graphic rape and murder game with long story segments, August 1, 2016This game has you play as a violent rapist and murderer as you go about your business, as well as playing as someone investigating them.
The writing is free of errors, and unfortunately too descriptive. The game tells you what conversation topics to ask about, but it feels clunky and hard to get right.
The story is not particularly clever, but it has some twists.
A short TADS game with some paragraph-size text substitutions, July 30, 2016This game was a CYOA-experiment in 1999's IFComp. You simply choose whether to advance the story or end the game.
You can only advance the story 4-5 times before it ends.
The writing is well-done, although (probably purposely) overblown. The interactivity comes from the fact that each advancing paragraph has a number of variations. If you wish, you can cycle through these variations by typing 'No'.
This was an interesting experiment by Ian Finley, author of many experiments, such as Exhibition, where you just examine paintings.
A lengthy retelling of a Russian folk tale in parser form, July 30, 2016This game does a good job of recreating the feel of an old Russian folk tale, similar to the feel in Grimm's fairy tales.
You are tasked with finding the mythical Firebird. In your journey, you'll encounter frogs to kiss, princesses to court, series of 3 or 4 objects in a row with increasing magical properties, and so on.
The game was quite enchanting, although it comes from an earlier era of the internet that was somewhat less sensitive to some hot-topic issues today (like culture); however, part of this may just be tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at the same insensitivity in old myths.
A delightful game for fans of fairy tales.
A college bro-type goofy game that is polished and long, July 30, 2016Between the end of Infocom and the beginning of Inform, the biggest news was Unnkulia. This was the first game in the series; it is long, polished, and interesting.
It is also juvenile, with 'cheez' products that are toxic, some sex jokes, names like 'Kuulest' and 'Beegashell' mountains.
As the series progressed, it got better, until The Legend Lives! is actually quite a good game. But this first entry in the series is plagued by unfair puzzles and other features that made more sense when most of its players would be in a small community sharing tips with each other.
Mainly interesting as a historical curiosity. Another good game by the authors, I now remember, is the Horror of Rylvania.
A shortish, buggy game about wandering around your own house, July 30, 2016This game seems like it was written quickly, not beta tested, and by someone with not much inform experience at the time.
It is riddled with bugs and spotty implementation. (Spoiler - click to show)You can open a door if you are holding crowbar by typing OPEN DOOR, but not PRY DOOR or OPEN DOOR WITH CROWBAR. Exits don't match up. Doors don't open by themselves.
The writing is sparse and thin.
There is no real emotional connection to the game. Perhaps if it was better implemented, a lower class white life and its issues could take the stage.
The puzzles are not hinted at all. Sensible commands are frequently try ignored.
This game placed last or close to last in 1997's IFComp. Games like these lead to later movements for more beta testing.
A joke knockoff of a joke knockoff, July 28, 2016In 2002, there was an author who became angry at the interactive fiction usenet community. They started trolling the forums, and used several fake accounts to pretend they were starting a company called Santoonie, and that they were working on an incredible game called Amissville for TADS.
The game was released, but was buggy. Someone later made this game, which Santoonie denied ownership of. It's just 4 rooms with one instant death and one way to get trapped in a dark room. It is really poorly done but funny at a few points.
The poem A Night Before Christmas, one line at a time, July 28, 2016This game seems to have been intended as a noke, but it's actually not bad. You are the papa in the poem, and the children, mamma, and stocking are there. And the poem's action just plays out one line at a time.
So, it's not that bad as interactivish poetry.
A straightforward game with few failings about being stranded on the road., July 25, 2016This game was entered in IFCOMP in 2005. It's about getting stuck on the highway, and exploring an abandoned motel to get out.
This game has few major flaws; it has a few typos, the puzzles are original, the writing has a lot of clever notes.
But the game never takes off; the descriptions are fairly sparse, and so on.
A time travel high school game, July 24, 2016This is a mid-length ifcomp game about time travel. You go back to your high school so that you can change your boring future.
The game is well-polished, but not very descriptive. You wander about, investigating different rooms. I had some issues with guessing commands.
It lasts about an hour.
A two-part game involving a cupcake heist, July 24, 2016The bulk of this game consists of attending a party where you need to gather a dozen cupcakes of different kinds. Before this, there is a lengthy prelude involving your friend.
The writing is polished and creative, but somehow it never clicked for me. The game seemed kind of slow.
The puzzles are well-done, letting the PCs motivations lead instead of the player's.
Overall, a pleasant snack.
A heavy game twine game about the horror of war, July 24, 2016This twine game consists of several accounts from World War II, some real, some otherwise. Every page has a bunch of blue links. One link is a 'truth', and moves the story forward. One link is a 'lie', and sends you back to the very beginning of the game.
This is very obnoxious, making you have to restart the entire game at various times. Part of this is to reinforce the meaninglessness of propaganda. The text of this game is heavy, and dark.
A game that reveals its own Inform code as a tutorial, July 24, 2016In this game you are supposed to be taught how to program in Inform. But you have to work for it. After some hard puzzles, you get a device that prints out the inform 6 code of any item you look at.
This is really cool, but you have to do a lot to get to it, and the rest of the game is quite a jumble.
The author compares this game to Lists and Lists, and I think that that's a fair comparison.
A huge, spare fantasy game with spotty inplementation, July 24, 2016This game is very large, and it's not too bad content-wise. There's a number of temples, a town with several shops, a castle with more than 10 rooms, and extensive woodlands, mountains, and so on. This takes several hours to finish.
However, the game has a hard time hinting things. Most rooms are described well, but have few items. It's almost impossible to know how to communicate with individuals.
Laura Knauth went on to write Trapped in a One Room Dilly, which had much better puzzles but only one room. She then wrote Winter Wonderland, a cute, mid-sized game with plenty of rooms but also great puzzles, and it won IFComp. It's interesting to see the author's progress through the different games.
A compelling story muddled by bugs, July 24, 2016This game has a unique vision and concept, but falls flat in implementation.
You survive an avalanche and end up in a secluded wooded area with 2 npcs. The game becomes a mixture of exploration and conversation: you try to find interesting landmarks and ask both npcs about it several times.
The implementation and writing fall flat; a few rounds of beta testing would have smoothed things over. The tone varies widely, some objects and directions have difficult to guess commands, and so on.
However, the main idea was so fun that I peresevered through bizarre bugs in the hint system to read all the text in the game. I would play it again.
Recreating intense planning sessions at a video game company, July 23, 2016This is a mid-length twine game where you a part of a small video game company, hired as the writer.
You go through several conversations with your co-workers, intended to show the plight of game writers and why they are in a tough position. You get blamed for the faults of others, you don't get the resources you need, and so on. It has some twists.
Overall, this didn't really gel for me. I worked for a video game company before in a variety of positions, and pretty much everybody gets the exact same bad treatment. But the twine was well put together.
A cutthroat business Choice of Games with eldritch abilities, July 23, 2016In this first entrant of the Choice of the Deathless series, you play as a young Craftsmen (i.e. magic user) in a law firm run by a lich and two sorcerers, and you have to work with demons, etc.
This game gives you quite a bit of freedom, letting you pick between a few romances, choose to be a fisticuffs type or magic-using type on a sliding scale, and letting you choose what factions you support.
Many people have enjoyed the simple touches like having to pay off your student loans, or the excellent descriptions of the non-humans.
Somehow this game didn't appeal to me as much as the sequel, The City's Thirst. The sequel is not strongly connected to the first, so you could play that one first.
A smaller sequel to Mulldoon Legacy, July 23, 2016This game is a sequel to Mulldoon Legacy, and is smaller.
In an interesting take on the sequel concept, you arrive after the events of the first game, and the effects of your predecessor's actions are everywhere. Items they dropped, doors they opened, things they moved.
Everything is slightly different in the museum, though; a sort of darker version of things. This game expands on the mythology a bit, while still being confusing.
If you liked the first game, you should try this one for sure.
A short game with many typos about fixing an alien ship, July 23, 2016In this game, you find a crashed alien ship and have to repair it.
It was submitted to IFComp many years ago, and it was the author's first game. In it, they apologize for not including more puzzles.
There are numerous typos. Also, the most important, winning command involves a scenery object that was never described.
A haunting multimedia Twine about an inuit legend, July 21, 2016This game uses many full-color illustrations and background music to tell the story of a young inuit child, her relationship with outsiders, and an inuit legend.
The music and sound effects are well-chosen to establish the atmosphere. The illustrations are nice, too, with a couple of cool tricks with them.
The pacing of the twine story was effective for me, with appropriate use of fade-ins and repeated links.
Overall, a nice short creepy story.
A joke game toying with IF conventions, July 18, 2016This is a tiny game, whose tininess is enhanced by the central joke, which is a commentary of sorts on actions and 'helping' features of interactive fiction.
The setting is ancient Greek myth and Heracles' labor with obtaining the skin of the name and lion. It can be finished in two moves.
A game about investigating corruption in a castle, July 11, 2016This game has a fairly large map,with a small number of puzzles that makes the whole game manageable.
You are a spy called Archer who is investigating corruption for a king.
There are only a few puzzles, and the solutions are generally very easy or of the guess-what-the-author is thinking type.
The writing was very descriptive, but the game is unpolished (like when a room contains An Evidence). The interectivity was frustrating at times.
A truly epic Choicescript game focusing on people, grudges, and storytelling , July 7, 2016This game is truly epic. I felt like I was reading a novel as I played. It lasted long; longer than any of the other choicescript games I played.
I had trouble putting it down. A game about professional wrestling seemed so silly, but it's cinematic, almost like Rocky. There's a lot about second chances, betrayals, seeing the truth. It's so much better than it seemed from the blurb and art.
Subplots include a variety of romances, long term relationships with a rival, and so on. You can choose to be a face or a heel, and seeing the psychology about being a heel was very interesting.
Strongest recommendation.
A brief Twine game with a classic creepypasta vibe, July 6, 2016This game adheres closer to creepypasta tropes than most Twine I've seen, and it does a faithful job of recreating the creepypasta vibe of stories like Asylum or No End House.
You are driving down the road when you have to pull off and go the bathroom. But the bathrooms are boarded up, and the rest stop is deserted.
The game is polished, with good CSS. It never becomes exceptional to me, but it's a fun, short play for fans of creepypasta. If you don't like creepypasta, however, you may be put off by the over-the-top horror, casual language and amnesia common to the genre.
Show how good you are at dying. An Infidel spoof , July 5, 2016This game is a spoof of Infidel by a teenage Andrew Plotkin, written in Basic and ported to Inform.
The opening part is a much easier version of Infidels opening story. Once you are in the tomb, though, you have to prove how bad of an adventurer you are by dying in 9 traps.
The traps are fairly simple, mostly just exploring each area and trying everything. They are very clever, however; the glue pit really kept me guessing.
The commentary is enjoyable. The game itself is spare, and not completely compelling, but it is valuable for historic purposes.
A complex and misunderstood game, July 1, 2016This game received very low ratings in the 2014 ifcomp. I feel like most of those votes are in error.
First, the game starts with a series of multiple choice answers filled with semi-gibberish. Many people likely saw the first few questions and quit.
Second, after the intake form, you go through 4 rooms, and the second room purposefully contains Twine code, revealing what would have been various choices and reveals. Many assumed this was a mistake.
B-minus has a style that is part impressionistic and part Dada. The gibberish evokes a variety of feelings in a primeval way, and the 'hacked' parts of the game completely change the way you interact with the world.
Overall, a technically brilliant game. However, it was not a joy to play or replay, but more of a crazy experience where once was enough for me.
A tightly focused Ectocomp game about fish and memories, June 28, 2016In this game, you okay a shark like creature who learns the story of two humans through an unusual mechanic.
This is an Ectocomp game, and that means it was written in 3 hours or less. The author made excellent design decisions here by severely restricting the scope of your actions and then implementing the remaining actions with a high degree of polish.
This is a gory game, but I didn't really notice the gore. You have only a few basic actions, but they allow you to slowly develop the story of the two humans in an interesting way. I liked it.
A beautiful contemplation piece set in an 1860's beach, June 27, 2016This game was the winner of the 'Landscape' portion of the 2000 IF art show, the same art show where Galatea won the 'Portrait' segment.
You play as a woman who has second thoughts about her engagement, visiting a cove to be alone with her memories. Points are given based on memories remembered and animals examined, as well as for exploration.
The writing is peaceful and beautiful.
The game has a very small puzzle aspect that didn't really work for me.
Overall, I recommend this for fans of the IF art show. If you haven't tried any IF art show games, you should.
Play a historical Greek scholar advising princes and kings, June 27, 2016This is one of my favorite Choice of Games games. You play as Eratosthenes (male or female), a real historical figure who estimated the radius of the earth and advised Ptolemy IV.
In this game, you have to deal with snarky advisors and scholars, reign in ambitious kings, work on engineering, romance a variety of people, or study mathematics. I felt a good deal of flexibility.
The writing is good, as is to be expected of the author of Choice of Robots, one the best Choice of Games of all time.
I enjoyed this game, because I'm a mathematician, and the game allowed me to hang out with with a female Euclid and with Archiemedes.
This game will appeal to fans of the Civilization series of games, and fans of math, classics, history, or engineering. The human emotions investigated are universal.
A 24-hour countdown timer, June 26, 2016Soda 51 is known for making minimalist Twine games, like one that is a single sentence (the Are You Racist? one). This one is just a timer that lasts 24 hours and counts down.
You can look at the page source to see what happens when the timer is over. It's not very exciting; in fact, I've forgotten what it was as I write this. Just a simple message.
However, there is something poetic about it; maybe a reminder that every day will come, will last just as long as every other day.
A highly-branching action game with achievements, June 26, 2016This game has over 280,000 words, and is written in the 'time cave' style, where different choices lead to wildly different stories (80 different endings, in fact). Most time caves end up having each branch be fairly weak and underdeveloped, but this game does a great job on each branch.
The action is fast paced, and takes you through spy thrillers and possibly hell.
The feel is that of an old-time CYOA book, with sudden changes in genre and situation.
Recommended for fans of fast paced twine.
A long, well-developed 'dramedy' about summer camp and dreams, June 26, 2016This game from IFComp 2015 is, in my opinion, one of the best Twine games of all time, and certainly the best outside of the well-developed horror/darkness segment.
In this game, gameplay is split up between a summer camp with a slice-of-life scenario and dreams with an absurdist take on talking birds. As the game progresses, the two halves become more related.
The game takes a stats-based approach, with a twist. You develop statistics at night during your dreams; in the day, it affects what options you have for various activities. At first, I felt like the stats didn't matter, because scene follows scene in the same order regardless of your actions. However, on replay, I found that some of the best material is contained in stats-enabled actions.
This story is long and has several surprising turns. It's split into several days, each of which can be accessed independently in case you can't finish in one sitting. Because stats seem to be reset each night, I don't think you lose anything just skipping ahead.
The game includes some mild summer-camp-normal sexual references near the beginning, and one branch of one scene contains strong profanity.
Recommended for everyone.
Edit: When I played through again, I counted the distinct pages I viewed, and I took 234 choices/pages to complete the game.
A complex undum mix of parser and choice about dinosaurs, June 26, 2016In this game (15-30 minutes long), you play as various PCs working on a new planet with dinosaur-like alien. They are so similar, in fact, that you can use them to study earth's own dinosaurs.
The highlight of this game is the new text input system, where you start typing and it autocompletes into various choices. The idea here is that it's still a choice game, but you can't see the choices unless you guess some. However, it's very heavily hinted, so it ends up being more like a regular choice game with longer input times.
Although each part of this game was a bit iffy, the overall experience was nice, and I would recommend this for others to try out.
A game with 5 sub worlds but spotty implementation, June 26, 2016In this game, you play as a magical writer married to a magical painter.
Your house has been invaded, so you have to gain inspiration regarding your wife's paintings in order to enter into the worlds of your books and resolve one issue per world.
This is a great concept, but the implementation falls flat. Its hard to guess what you need to do in each situation, and the game is a bit buggy here and there. The last few worlds are less well described.
Overall, though, I may revisit this game, because its concept was good.
A dreamlike tale of a Monkey and a Bear, June 26, 2016This game follows fairly closely the story of a song called Monkey and Bear, whose lyrics you can look up online.
You play as a dancing bear, muzzled and wearing dancing clothes. Your compatriot monkey helps you escape and run away to the hills.
This is a shuffle comp game, which means it was created in a fairly short time period. However, most of this time seems to have been used to take a short concept and make it very polished, with innovative setting and writing, an XYZZY-nominated NPC, and text effects.
A short game, and an interesting one. I had some trouble guessing commands, but that was my only hangup.
A mermaid adventure with combat and romance, June 25, 2016This game is hard for me to describe. It is a long Choice of Games work, polished, descriptive, with a well-thought out underwater setting involving a complex relationship between merpeople, whales, giant squid, and humans. The majority of the game deals with navigating and adjusting this complex relationship through diplomacy and combat.
The combat is centered on strategic choices rather than rng's or blow by blow play. All of the aspects I have mentioned so far worked well for me.
But I struggled with the story. I kept having surprises where I realized that the game was not going where I thought it would as a result of me misunderstanding what I had read earlier. I think the best way to describe the plot structure is that there are several major threads that seem like the focus of the whole story, which then get buried and resurface later. Each one is interesting, and each one I wanted to see the end of, but I felt like none got the screen time they deserved. Only by playing 3 times was I able to get a satisfying resolution to threads like the mermaids' past, the squid-whale conflict, and gender issues.
That said, there were many moments of brilliance in this game, clever plot choices that made me want to play it through multiple times. Its treatment of the nature of reality resonated with me, and the mythology behind the merpeoples origin was very well done. I feel like I paid a very reasonable amount for a lot of excellent writing and gameplay, and I recommend this game.
A poor imitation of bad games, June 25, 2016This game is a bad parody of bad games. It's most stuff like "haha u moron I putt a lot of bua,gs in dis game!". As parody it falls very short.
I don't really see much of anything of worth in this game other than historical interest. (Spoiler - click to show)If you get stuck in the secret room, examine the door.
A short speedIF about Ravel and their zombified friend, June 24, 2016This was an ectocomp game where most of the time seems to have been spent on a charming setting. You are Maurice Ravel, and your friend Debussy has been zombified.
The writing is very descriptive, and I didn't encounter any bugs. The game is quite short, with just a puzzle or two. As a speed-IF, this is a decorative gem.
Recommended for fans of great settings or the impressionistic period.
A movie-making simulation set during the McCarthy era, June 24, 2016This game was nominated for an XYZZY for best game, and for best NPCs.
This is one of the larger Choice of Games, with quite an epic storyline. You conceive of a movie using a large amount of customization (how many leads? what genre? what subgenre? What other subgenera? Highbrow or lowbrow? Who directs? Who writes? Who stars?). The number of possibilities here really unlocks the game's potential as a wish-fulfillment device.
But making your movie comes with its own challenges. Getting a studio running, winning financial support, dealing with deadlines and spotty talent. I spent a large amount of money to get Frank Capra to direct my ensemble western.
Overarching everything is the shadow of repressive anti-communism hunters. You have to choose how you interact with Hollywood black listers, and what to say in communism hearings.
All of this makes the games general goal (making a great movie) very difficult; I found it more rewarding to focus on personal goals.
Finally, this game includes some parts quite unlike the standard choice of games format; for instance, there is a large puzzly section that has a well-developed location and object model as you search for a dog. This part feels a lot more like a parser game or like a twine game with strong world model (like Hallowmoor).
Overall, I believe this game deserves the XYZZY nomination, and stands among the best games of 2015.
A small game with a cut-off story about time travel, June 21, 2016This game came in last place the year it came in IFCOMP because the author revealed that it was incomplete.
However, as an incomplete game, it is better than quite a few completed games. You play as a researcher exploring an odd facility in space. A blast of energy transports them to an area with a time travel device.
The game is short, and the backstory is never developed. The time travel mechanic has confusing rules about where you appear, but overall, I enjoyed this game. The writing is descriptive. John Evans is known for writing great but unfinished games, so if you like this one, check out the others.
An atmospheric speed if Halloween game, June 20, 2016The atmosphere in this game is great, an odd post apocalyptic trick or treat adventure et near a crater. With a 3 hour time limit, this game didn't get everything implemented, including hints for directions.
It is written in a vague style, with no capitalization in room names and allusive texts. This worked well for me.
There were two things that would have made the game much easier for me: (Spoiler - click to show)The verb Trick or Treat and the ability to go west at first.
A bug-ridden game of great promise, June 16, 2016This game received last place in the 1999 IFComp due to a game-crashing bug whenever the player takes inventory.
Pressing the "play online" button for this game currently takes to that version. The inventory bug doesn't happen on Parchment, but half of the rooms are in complete darkness.
If you download and play the version in the zip file, you will see that your character can actually see in the dark. This is the version I played.
In this version, the game is quite interesting. You knock on the door and greet a lich (your employer) who takes you to his study and asks you to guard his treasure. He then gives you a mysterious map and keys and then leaves.
The real game then begins. You can wander around a complex and interesting map with many treasures. Quite a few adventurers (4-6) are also wandering around independently, each with their own light source.
I played for about thirty minutes, obtaining many treasures. I experienced more bugs, like repeated "no parent of nothing" messages whenever an adventurer looked behind the clock.
I can only conclude that there are more bugs in the game, as the adventurers never tried to take anything. It's a real shame, because the game seems intricate and fun. If the IF community hadn't been so harsh on Jason Finx and had encouraged him and helped him beta test this game, it could have been spectacular.
A bare bones speedif about a family curse, June 12, 2016This is an ectocomps game, so it comes equipped with spare room descriptions and under implemented items.
The overall storyline idea isn't bad, but there wasn't enough time to implement everything fully. There are some well-done secrets, and for me, the highlight of the game was the dog.
Took me about 15 minutes to finish.
A combat/conversation western with one room and one npc, June 12, 2016This game is a gunfight and/or conversation with someone who chased you down for shooting a relative.
You can select between a few preset verbs like attack, ready, explain, placate, etc.
There are multiple difficulty levels, some randomization, and an interesting story. Howver, the combat system didn't really work for me, and I wasn't drawn in by the writing.
A short, linear time travel story, June 11, 2016This game is a short, linear time travel story about a person working for a time traveling antique company. A system of technology is developed, and a complex and intriguing backstory.
The writing is adequate and doesn't get in the way of the action. Navigation takes a bit of getting used to, and I didn't like a few sequences where you are told to wait but 'wait' doesn't work (you have to complete tasks in your area first).
There was a bit of gender stereotyping and some hamminess, but I would recommend this story to fans of time travel stories.
A Conan the Barbarian story adapted to IF, June 11, 2016I really enjoyed the story of this game, which makes sense, because it was adapted from a famous Conan the Barbarian story. The author has done a good job adapting it.
The game could use more synonyms; you often climb by going east instead of going up, and up doesn't work.
The action sort of slows down in the main conversation part of the game.
This game is fairly short.
A shortish inform game with an innovative file-tree interface, June 10, 2016The Endling Archive manipulates Inform 7 in a truly interesting way.
The game treats the player as someone using a database written in the traditional Inform menu system (using N, P, Enter, and Q to navigate). As you read more of the database, more and more becomes unlocked.
The game uses interesting pictures. The story is based on the idea of survivors, the last of their kind. The database starts out with different real-life examples of endlings, and then transitions to different material.
I really enjoyed it, although the ending fell a bit flat. It took 10 or 15 minutes to play.
A game that requires you to torture someone, June 10, 2016In this game, you have to torture an Arabic-speaking individual. Quite a few body parts are implemented, and you have to torture the individual 30 times, using each technique no more than 3 times, and affecting each body part some limited number of times.
I feel like it was attempting to be deep, but not very successfully.In the end, it just seems like it's trying to shock.
A game that sets out to annoy through tedium, June 10, 2016This game is just trying to bother you. It sends you through 350 rooms in a row to win the game.
Like many games that set out to be bad, it is not as bad as sincere games that fail. It attracted a lot of attention when it came out, mostly negative, and references to it are sprinkled about old IF discussions.
A highly illustrated exploration game centered on a mail-delivering pony, June 10, 2016This is a mid-length Twine game with large illustrations on each page.
You play as a pony sailing an ocean, delivering mail everywhere you go. You meet a variety of NPCS, encounter environmental effects, and so on.
The first time I played, I visited many different locations, none repeated, and relatively quickly found an imaginative and fun battle involving kinds of mail
My second playthrough, I encountered a lot of repeated locales and content, and it took a while to find the battle.
I would rate my first experience as a 4-star experience, and my second playthrough as a 3-star experience. Averaging and rounding up gives 4.
A branching story about a magical tower, June 10, 2016This is a short, highly branching Twine game published by Sub-Q magazine.
In this game, you play as an individual who investigates a mysterious, magical tower in your town whose owner has been missing.
All sorts of things can happen through the various brwnches, including various toucan encounters.
The game was charming, but the branching and writing didn't really pull me in.
A shortish parser game about two rats making a stew., June 10, 2016In this relatively short parser game, you play as a rat helping to make a stew.
This game has a small map with several interesting NPCs. The goals are pretty easy tonaccpmplish, although some parts got me stuck for a bit.
This is a good, light game when you're in the mood for something quick and not too frustrating.
A short, thoughtful piece on the Holocaust, June 9, 2016This game is a short, fast-paced but contemplative work about the holocaust. It seems influenced by Photopia, with scene change after scene change, non-linear storytelling, and the same general dreamlike tone.
The story takes you back and forth between some sort of afterlife, a museum, and the life of a young Jewish child.
The story was contemplative and thoughtful, and fairly short. It was somewhat under described.
A short, mildly puzzly game about aliens, June 9, 2016This game was the first in a planned series of five small games that were intended to be a gentle introduction to If.
The writing and pacing are excellent, with smooth scene changes.
It took me a while to understand the core mechanic of the first scene, but once I figured it out the rest of the game went smoothly.
The game is a sort of a mix between early 1900's-1950's American culture and a sort of gentlemanly version of the MIB.
The game was enjoyable overall.
A tightly-paced and well-written ghost story, June 9, 2016Ryan Veeder is known for tongue-in-cheek, polished games. This game is well polished and paced, but this time it's a creepy ghost story. Like a campfire tile, it is spooky, and dark, but has a vague hint of a smile at times (which may just be my interpretation).
I found the game to be effectively creepy, banking on anticipation, slow changes in writing, and gradual, creepy, realizations.
I strongly recommend this game, especially for fans of campfire tales.
A surrealist, almost self loathing twine game, June 9, 2016This twine game was entered in the 2013 IFComp. It takes about 10-20 minutes to play.
In this game, you play someone confined to an apartment with a few furnishings like a futon, tv and game console, like Howling Dogs, you spend each day interacting with the same items in a confined space. However, each interaction brings on a strange sort of surreal narrative.
Some parts were done very well, while others felt less effective. I couldn't decide if it was genius or madness.
A short piece with linking magic in ancient Rome, June 9, 2016This is a short, fast paced game. You are a Roman and a user of magic. The local officials are storming your house, and you must hide all incriminating evidence.
This game uses the linking magic popular from Emily Shorts own Savoir Faire. You can create direct links and reverse links, although I had trouble distinguishing the two.
The game includes the possibility of violence, but it is not necessary. It lasts at most a few dozen turns.
A large mystical/horror game with some bugs and typos, June 9, 2016This game is quite large, taking place in 3 acts. The first act is slow, exploring a house full of arcane writings and mystical objects.
The setting turns to horror soon, as you explore a realm of evil.
The writing is uneven, with some very mundane parts and some parts (like the last few commands of part I) of brilliance.
There seemed to be some bugs. I couldn't finish the very last part of the game with the walkthrough.
A huge vampire fan fiction with occasional choices, June 9, 2016Tia Orisney is one of my favorite Twine authors, but I was disappointed in this game. It is a huge vampire fan fiction, of the Buffy type more than the Twilight type.
The format is a page-long chunk of text followed by one or two choices. I wasn't sure how much the story branched, but part of it at least seemed gauntlet style.
The writing is earnest but with several typos. There is frequent profanity. The story is generally interesting, but gets cluttered up in details.
Overall, there was just too much text all at once. I recommend this author's Following Me and Who Among Us instead.
An exploration game or two, with a fun, easy atmosphere , June 9, 2016This game is classic Ryan Veeder: smooth implementation and rich settings, a linear story with some tension balanced with down-to-earth humor.
You play as someone who is, in fact, mildly obsessed with climbing to the top of a tower. The tower is described in rich detail.
The game contains a sub-game that is also quite enjoyable, and which uses changes in text over time in a brilliant way.
If you like Ryan Veeder's other games, you'll like this one, and vice versa.
A one room, easy escape game, June 9, 2016In this game, you have been imprisoned by something not human, and they have tied a donut to the ceiling. Your job is to retrieve it.
The game is reasonably well implemented, and I only found one typo (appart instead of apart). The game gives you hints on how to proceed if you type the wrong thing.
The scenery is inventive and well-described, and the pacing is excellent.
A spooky, visually beautiful Halloween game with sound, June 9, 2016This game is genuinely creepy in many of its parts. It has gorgeous css and html styling, with nice background music.
You play a police officer investigating the disappearance of a shut-in. As you enter his home, you discover more and more about his history and his solitary life, as well as interacting with a variety of candles.
Everything worked well for me in this game; it was effective and well styled.
A long sci fi game with several twists, about a dystopia future and racism, June 8, 2016LASH is a long, well-polished game by Paul O Brian. This game predates the Earth and Sky games by a year.
This game has a major twist, so some of this review will be in spoilers.
The first half of the game is a scavenger hunt similar to adventure or Zork but in a near future world. You command a partially organic robot. You collect items for money.
(Spoiler - click to show)This half is a shame. None of the puzzles matter at all besides entering the large steel door. When you do, in the atric you find a realistic simulation of the slavery era, where you take the identity of a young girl. It seems open and difficult, but this part of the game is completely linear with very mild puzzles. Once you complete it, you return to the real world where you and the partially organic robot deal with its future.
This is a psychologically intense game, with some strong profanity, racial slurs, torture and rape, presented in a non-gratuitous way.
Great cyberpunk story with fiddly puzzles, June 8, 2016This shortish game has been praised by many for its well written story. In a world of cybernetic implants and high tech, you have to carry out a theft and deal with the crazy implications.
The puzzles in this game are so-so, with a lot of guess the verb and hidden conversation topics.
I recommend playing this one with the walkthrough ready, to be able to read the excellent story.
A faithful interpretation of the Monty Python Cheeseshop sketch, June 8, 2016This game recreates the Monty Python cheeshop sketch, which required asking about large numbers of cheeses.
The game is much more successful than most adaptations, as there is a natural puzzle structure here (figuring out what to sell).
I was put off by a moment of strong profanity which, however, is in the original sketch.
As other reviewers said, it's necessary to type quite fast. However, shortcuts are allowed (I.e. Typing part of a name).
A short, linear game about an infamous person, June 8, 2016This game was entered in Smoochiecomp as a sort of anti-game.
You play a creepy individual who is writing poetry for a girl you like and shoving it under her door.
It turns out that this game is based on a real life person that played an important role in American history in 1981. I found it interesting.
The game is short, but well polished and historically interesting.
An inform implementation of robot finds kitten, June 8, 2016This game is just an inform implementation of a nethack-type game called robot find kitten.
You navigate a white # sign on a black field with color coded letters, bumping into them in an attempt to find the kitten.
It was I presented very well but this isn't really my thing. If you want to play nethack clones on inform, this is your game.
A short, small game showing off In form's ability to deal with identical objects, June 8, 2016This game is well-described, but is essentially a coding exercise. There are three collections of identical objects that you can manipulate including tennis balls and acorns.
Generally, there's not much of a puzzle here, or a stoey. However, it is fun to play with all the materials, and it is polished.
A frustrating but rewarding mix of 5 mini games, June 8, 2016This game has some great content, which makes it a real shame that it is covered with an impenetrable shell of obnoxious obstructions.
The first puzzle is a huge issue. Solution: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a quarter shining machine that is completely useless, and a weird box behind the tent where you have to turn off one switch, so that the announcer's criteria for a shiny quarter turns to just shiny or quarter..
Once you get past that hurdles the central conceit of the game is genius. There are 5 mini games that you can get sent to, each with a different concept. They all have one thing in common: (Spoiler - click to show)the word that the wheel landed on is vital to the mini game..
The mini games are varied, with a couple of fantasy games, a few sci fi, and a real life game.
A short keyword based game about a space native and earth, June 7, 2016This game is about a young person born in space who wished more than anything else to go to the earth home they've never experienced.
It is keyword based, and in the inform version I played, it had some nice styling. The undum/vorple version has gorgeous UI and sound effects, but it did not display properly for me.
Overall, though, the game was very short with what felt like some missed opportunities for alternative routes. It was a well crafted but small bite.
A cute, short game about four tiny ninjas in a bedroom, June 7, 2016This game was entered in the cover stories competition, where cover art was provided first, and games were developed based on them.
You play as a tiny ninja that lives under a bed. You're job is to go around the room, cheering up your comrades one at a time in a classic linear type puzzle system.
The writing is compact and cute, and the game is short. I recommend it for a light snack. I did get stuck at the very end.
An important conversation about impostor syndrome, in Twine, June 7, 2016The author of this game has specifically said that they did not intend this work to be a popular game, but that it was intended to provoke thought and discussion, and to be seen by many people.
This work is mostly lielnear, with a sequence of side comment links and a single story progress link at the bottom.l, until the end when you get some binary choices.
The piece is about imposter syndrome, the feeling that you are not competent at what you do, especially in the context of women, trans individuals, and other minorities.
As a description of imposter syndrome, it excels. As a mindless diversion, it is only mildly successful, but that was never it's goal.
A fun, short parody of surreal dream games, June 7, 2016This game was a fun take on the surfeit of surreal dream/coma games. The game map is shaped like a nautilus, hence the name.
In this game, you explore symbolic areas, with the symbolism spelled out, you take symbolic keys and put them in symbolic locks, and face your fears, hopes, and your truths.
I liked it, but it didn't draw me in; the game was intended as a quick, fun romp, but it eventually turned into a monotonic hunt, which, while true to the genre, could have been avoided.
Recommended for fans of short, funny games and surreal games.
Visually rich linear Twine game about a mysterious ritual, June 6, 2016In this entry in the Veeder Exposition, you hear the story of the Veeder, a person with enigmatic power and status.
This game is in Twine with nice graphics. The interactivity comes in by shuffling through a series of replacements for a word or two in a sentence, then moving forward. Sometimes the choice of words influences the story.
The game made me smile, especially with its use and misuse of the word Veeder. And the imagery was poetic and beautiful at times.
Overall, though, it didn't really grab me emotionally, and I wished for more depth in the interaction.
Anarchy in a grungy magic world, June 6, 2016This games, an entrant in last year's Spring Thing, is an Undum game (meaning you can click on links to advance the story, graphics are included, and the story can be scrolled back to see what came before.
The story is about a small group of anarchists rebelling against an oppressive hierarchy. While the game uses magic, it feels more like a stand-in for power that allows the author to discuss class struggle in an attention-grabbing way.
I feel like this game has something to say, and does so in a way that deserves attention.
A short, mostly puzzleless exploration surreal afterlife game, June 6, 2016The surreal afterlife exploration game is a popular genre in IF, and one of my favorite.
This game is a fairly typical such game; you have a central hub from which you explore other areas, gathering color coded items and taking them to color coded rooms. In doing so, you experience memories of your past life.
It's spare, and with few items implemented, but this is my favorite genre, so I liked it.
An intricate mid-length AI-training game with proc gen content, June 5, 2016This game was created by Emily Short as a prize for IFComp, resulting in a game set in Steph Cherrywell's world of Canyonville from Brain Guzzlers From Beyond.
You are Mary Jane, creating a robot for your friend Jenny. You have to train your robot to become just like Jenny. You train it by having it read books in your lab on different topics. However, some books have negative side effects, so it becomes quite the puzzle to figure out what books to read and when.
The major innovation in this game is the use of procedural generation for your conversations with the robot. The robots conversation is affected by numerous variables affecting its emotion, tone, and knowledge. A large corpus is included in the source code, allowing for huge variety. This represents an immense accomplishment, and provides proc gen that is actually fun to read.
This game took me about 45 minutes to finish without hints. I restarted several times, but I don't think you ever need to.
A Twine exploration game with numerous combination locks, June 5, 2016This mid-length Twine game has you looking for a solid quicksilver pickaxe enchanted by dwarfs. It's twine, with items and exits implemented in a sequence of rooms.
At several places, there are complicated locks or other mechanisms to fiddle with. I found these to be frustrating. Overqll, the setting was the best part of the game.
A short, branching game about a Pakistani child bride, June 5, 2016This game uses a setting not commonly explored: Pakistan, with a young girl protagonist.
This game uses a branch and bottleneck structure, and is fairly short., with a dozen or so choices on average.
I found the explora5ion of unfamiliar culture and issues fascinating. The game played smoothly, and the writing was descriptive.
A children's story with great production values, June 5, 2016I played the sequel to this game before this one. In both of the games, the details are really attended to; the graphics are well done, the writing is polished, and the game is segmented into nice, easy segments.
This game is about a house with a magic inhabitant. Crazy stuff happens all of the time in this house; lava, magic rooms, moving pictures, etc.
I didn't really get caught up in the game, but it is well done.
An illustrated Twine take on the 'glitch game' genre of creepypasta, June 4, 2016This game starts out as an illustrated twine implementation of Hugo's House of Horrors, an old game similar to Maniac Mansion.
The author has added vivid descriptions of the graphics. Not all the original game is implemented. The game has not been implemented in exactly the same way as the original as there is, for instance, new dialogue, including strong profanity.
The game begins to glitch out, as in the classic glitch creepypasta.
I felt like the horror never really took hold, although it was better at times.
It took me 20 minutes to finish the game.
Two short stories played simultaneously, June 4, 2016This is a short hypertext game about two people, one on a bike and one running. The screen is split into two windows, one for each story.
Each story has a sequence of 8 or so binary choices. You can either play as one character the whole time, with the other character's choices proceeding on its own, or you can play both characters at once (although you still make just one choice each 'second').
I found the story to be really short, and looking back and forth at the two panels detracted from the slice of life style of the story. However, it was well done in a technical way.
A short game of keys and doors and a dragon, June 4, 2016Tower was the second game entered by Simon Deimel in ifcomp 2014, and to be honest, I prefer Enigma, a well-written drama.
This game, Tower, leans heavily on classic IF tropes: locked doors and keys, amnesia, a dragon, an unusual combination lock, a generic fantasy setting. The descriptions are spare, but everything runs fairly smoothly.
Still, I wouldn't mind playing this game again. It's fun wandering around and trying everything.
A pure word puzzle game in a gridlike world., June 3, 2016Andrew Schultz is known for taking a word puzzle idea (like anagrams or reversible compound nouns) and running with it. Most of his games encourage you to explore the world first to figure out what the theme is, so I won't give away the theme in this game.
The world is spare and empty, but this helps identify key items. The game is also highly polished, with no bugs or typos that I am aware of.
The mechanic in this game is harder to do by hand than his other games, resulting in either frustration or grinding, unless you're in the mood for it.
Overall, this game works, but his other games (especially shuffling around, threediopolis or their sequels) worked better for me.
A creative parser-alternative game with flexible powers., June 3, 2016This game was entered in IFCOMP 2014. Like Robin Johnsons draculaland, this game implements a hyperlink based parser system. Unlike Johnsons game, this game doesn't have scrollbars capability.
You have about a dozen verbs you can click at any time, which then gives you a menu of choices, or just guesses what you want to do.
The storyline is interesting but not gripping. You are in prison, and can bend through bars. You want to get out and bring your friends.
The interactivity in this game had some issues; actions often bring results quite different than what you would expect, making it very difficult to know how to proceed
An illustrated/animated crappy-life sim with an absurd edge, June 3, 2016Zest combines the talent of Richard Goodness (who later made the amusing and thoughtful Tombs of Reschette), lectroniae (a musical artist), and PaperBlurt (a frequent author of well-illustrated twine games).
In this rather long Twine game, you play as someone who works at some sort of fast food place, and can go to church or the tobacco shop to buy tobacco to 'zest'.
The game has a mix of the absurd, the mundane, and the thoughtful. You have 3 meters, including grossness, and you have to repeat the same options/tasks each day.
The game is at its most absurd in the store, or in dreams; its at its most thoughtful in its depiction of the poor, and of Christian prayers and sermons. And frequently it is both.
This game contains frequent use of the f-word.
An innovative game set in a tangle of worlds, June 3, 2016Invisible Parties is the best known shufflecomp game, and an xyzzy nominee for best setting. And what a setting it has!
It is set in a tangle of worlds, which in practice is a 3x3 grid (at first) of scenes, where each scene is a party in a different world. You change as you travel between worlds, and much else does as well. The parties chosen are vivid and varied: miserable office parties, funerals, feasts, and so on.
The inventory system is highly unusual as well: you carry powers, instead of items. The powers are things like Art Critic and troublemaker, and provide some highly amusing or interesting responses depending on the location.
The plot slowly unravels, and this is where I had the most trouble. Knowing what to do next was hard, due to the conventions breaking nature of the game. I quickly reached a bad ending without knowing what to do not get a good one. I looked at the source code a bit, and that gave me some ideas for going back and trying again. I did, and I enjoyed it quite a bit the second time.
As a final note, this game contains an above-average amount of profanity. I stopped playing because of it a few times, and I'm not sure I'll play it again. For those who aren't troubled by profanity, I would strongly recommend this game.
A game written half in Scots, dealing with panic attacks, June 2, 2016This game is unusual in that is written in the Scots dialect, which is quite different from American English, my native language. However, the author has provided in game translations, and it's not too hard to see the meaning in Scots even without translation.
The game has two parts, a Scots part about a modern day person who is trying to resist a panic attafck, and a standard English part about a person on a Celtic quest for a magic staff.
The game was not too long, but the combination lock required some research and there are opportunities for losing in the middle. There is also a maze.
Overall, I liked this game, but the Celtic part seemed just added in; I wished it was integrated more fully. I did not play the commercial version, which may have resolved this issue, being twice as long.
A single moment of time, which you must explore, June 1, 2016I really enjoyed the concept and execution of this game, except for some slow points at the beginning and end.
This game is, in fact, an enigma. You start in an almost blank room, frozen in time, and must slowly recall and piece together what's going on.
The story that unfolds is gloomy and perhaps over dramatic, but I found it intriguing.
The main mechanic, which I won't describe here, is almost like a hunt the pixel game, but in text. The initial hiccup is finding out how the mechanic works. The final hiccup is trying to figure out which thing you have neglected to search.
As Emily short said in a review of Toby's Nose, that game has a similar mechanic that was also effective.
An early experiment in puzzleless IF, a moody and dark piece, May 31, 2016This game was well known a decade or two ago. This is a dark and moody, puzzleless game. You go to a funeral, meet with some NPCS, and experience some moody set pieces.
The interactivity is off; you have to guess a lot what to do, from beginning to end.
This game was ahead of its time in many ways. It doesn't use the compass it was puzzleless 2 years before photopia, and it restricted the parser. It is descriptive and polished.
A tedious barebones adventure game, May 31, 2016This game is full of empty locations and mazes, with a light sprinkling of items. Many items have one chance to use them correctly, which, if you miss, there is no way to fix it.
You are trying to get into a castle to rescue a princess. Or are you? It's hard to tell. I felt a good Scott Adams vibe from this at first, but the sheer number of mazes and empty rooms became frustrating.
Three stories intertwine as one, May 30, 2016This game uses a complicated custom interface to tell three stories at the same time. You play as three agent:, agent Alpha, agent Bravo, and agent Charlie, whose job is to prevent certain secrets from falling into the wrong hands.
You can push time forward or reverse it at any time, and hop between the three threads of the story. There are only a few decision points scattered between the different stories, so you have to hunt for them.
I felt that the interaction didn't quite work; it ended being a hunt-the-pixel game translated to text. It wasn't obvious what different elements in the interface did, or what consequences your effects had.
A pulpy American Revolution witchcraft choicescript game, May 30, 2016This choicescript game was entered in ifcomp 2010. It was one of the first choicescript games ever entered in ifcomp.
This game has the unusual setting if the American revolution. You play as a witch using one of any variety of kinds of witchcraft. You can tailor your character quite a bit.
The game isn't quite polished, with some heavy-handed choices (basically 'give up' or 'continue the story'). But I liked the overall result. It is shorter than most choicescript games.
A string of puzzle rooms, including a complicated card puzzle, May 29, 2016This game is just a string of puzzles with a thin story set up around it. The first few puzzles are fairly fun, though occasionally underclued. The last puzzle is just brtual, involving a machine that transforms playing cards.
The game doesn't seem to be butgy, and it seems to be intended to be frustrating and difficult, so it succeeds at what it wants to be. But it is under described, and too hard for my taste.
A game about understanding the game and wordplay, May 29, 2016From the Apollo 18 tribute album, this is a brief web-based game by Nick Montfort.
The game is all in palindromic sentences, so the words themselves aren't palindromes, but the sentences remain the same if you reverse the word order.
I tried several ideas, and got stuck, lost interest, and looked up the solution online. If you work at it, you can figure it out. I tried (Spoiler - click to show)VIEW CANYON VIEW, X ME X,<\spoiler> and stuff like that. It turns out I was close.
A chicken-themed parody of Spider and Web, May 28, 2016This game was entered in chicken comp, where all chickens had to cross the road.
It is just a parody of Spider and Web, with some spoilers. You have a menu of topics to say, displayed in the status line, and you pick them.
Overall, it was mildly amusing, but seemed to have been put together in a hurry.
There's not that much more to say about the game.
A game inspired by the Worms of the Earth , May 27, 2016This game is inspired by a book written by the creator of Conan the Barbarian. You wander about a dark and grim city after reading the book in-game.
The atmosphere is creepy and the writing starts out descriptive, but the game sort of devolves into sparer writing later on.
The biggest trouble here is the very difficult set of puzzles, requiring you to carry out a large number of very unintuitive actions in order to progress.
The second part of an adaptation of a GK Chesterton novel, May 27, 2016The first Manalive game, constituting the first part of the book, did not impress me very much. It was confusing and difficult. I liked the second one much better, as it has better mechanics and wraps up the plot in a pleasant way.
On the other hand, the game is still rather finicky about commands, and has huge, huge text dumps directly from the novel.
If anything, the best parts of this game are those from the novel itself.
A shortish parser game with color effects and a fantasy/Escape story , May 26, 2016In this game, you play someone who has lost their memory and finds themselves in a room with nothing but a mysterious colored rod.
6ou go through a sequence of escapes with some genuinely creative and fun puzzles before transitioning to another genre.
There were some bugs and many typos, but I enjoyed it overall, especially the first half. The author was 14 at the time of writing, and this game is a significant accomplishment for someone of that age.
A rare game that is goofy in a good way. Save your village, May 24, 2016This is the author's first Twine game. It uses no styling, and is based on goofy, crazy humor. These are usually signs for disaster, so I was skeptical when I saw it was highly rated.
But this game has a lot of thought and some actually pretty funny humor. You play a villager sent on a quest to find a magical item that can save your people from a tribe.
The narrator frequently talks with you, and the game discusses the balance between choices and story and free will and so on, but only in a goofy way.
I enjoyed this story, but I had low expectations. People expecting it to be great may be less impressed, but this is a long, funny Twine game.
A short, highly branching game about going west, May 24, 2016This is the first Clickventure game I tried. These games are written by the staff of the website Clickhole,, and consist of a couple of choices per page.
The game seems to branch highly, with some later recombining. It is also a bit of a mockery of Oregon Trail, with choices about how to equip yourself and with disasters occurring on your trip.
Overall, it seemed like it had some gross-out humor, and I'm not sure I'm interested in playing their other games.
A clever small game with no room, May 23, 2016This game consists of no rooms at all. The author has exploited some set locations in Inform to remove the need for rooms.
Instead, we have some fun responses to standard commands, plus a fairly well known science experiment. It's almost too plain, but then there are clever bits that redeem it.
A short game.
A game about psychology and identity set in Germany, May 23, 2016This game has you take on the role of an early psychologist in the time of horses and carriages. You have an unusual patient who has disappeared, and you must use your knowledge of them to find them.
The game has a compelling idea, especially when a major shift happens midway through. But there is little guidance, meagre descriptions, and a general sense of incompleteness.
A Zorkian game in reverse with a steep learning curve, May 23, 2016This game intimidated me. You are a janitor whose job is to clean up after adventurers (i.e. reset the game world after each player). This is an idea that was present in Adventure, the original text adventure, but it has been taken to a fun level here.
The problem is that setup is hard. There are two sets of doorways, one natural (leading about the game world), and one in a grid system (backstage) that is very confusing. Also, it's hard to know how to start using your mimesis disrupting mop.
Once you get into it, this game is fun. You have to use clues to guess how things used to be, and reset them to that state.
A very fun Zorkian game. Unfortunately, it contains ASCII art of a nude woman, but its completely avoidable.
A surreal game of random, strongly driven scenes , May 23, 2016This game is surreal, psychedelic and dreamlike. The author plays freely with punctuation and capitalization. Scenes proceed generally no matter what you do.
The scenes generally center around the phrase "you know what?" along with sexual encounters with an elderly woman, an eighth grader, and a computer-woman hybrid.
I didn't enjoy the tone of the game, and I don't plan to play again. However, it is polished and descriptive, and the interactivity works.
A short, duct tape fueled spy game, May 23, 2016In this game, you wander through 6 rooms with duct tape and the corpse of your sidekick.
You can tape various things to each other, and interact in a few ways with the corpse. Many responses are coded, but many other natural things are not coded.
Some people have said this is an IFMud in joke, which would make sense, because the game doesn't make much sense.
Overall, it is descriptive, but not very funny.
Get chased by a psycho with a family of lions, May 22, 2016In this mid length if comp game, you play as someone who just met a cute girl at a party. As you walk home, a strange man lets out a bunch of lions to have them attack you, and then follows you, reciting poetry.
The game was free of typos and grammar mistakes, as far as I can tell, and was written fairly well sentence by sentence, although the overall effect was way over the top, especially the sex-and-violence filled finale.
The interactivity left a lot to be desired. And many have commented on the difficulty of figuring out the final sequence.
Take care of a crying baby. Short and spare., May 22, 2016In this short ifcomp game, you run around trying to feed, change, and put your baby to sleep.
The game is spare with uncapitalized room names and stray punctuation. Reasonable solutions to the puzzles are often not accepted and provide no clues as to what would be acceptable.
A meta-game about the role of PC and player, May 22, 2016In this game, the main character discovers that they have been paralyzed unless someone (the player) types them commands; they have become a sort of puppet.
The game explores the interaction between player and PC, while a mysterious voice gives dark quotes in the background.
The game is very descriptive and the writing is good, but eventually holes start showing up, and the puzzles can be very unintuitive and frustrating.
David Welbourn has an excellent walkthrough for this game.
A somewhat buggy, mid length CRPG , May 22, 2016In this game, you find scrolls and potions and weapons, and you engage in randomized combat with a variety of monsters while trying to prove yourself to an employer.
The randomized combat takes place automatically when you enter a room with a monster. After the first turn, you can make your own choices. Many times, you'll walk in a room and die or someone else will die.
The storyline is fairly standard, but some of the monsters were described in a fun way.
Overall, a frustrating CRPG.
A short, spare haunted house game, May 21, 2016This 2013 ifcomp game is a short, small game with about a dozen rooms. The game has some atmospheric effects and a context sensitive help system, as well as some clever details.
However, it has many typos and some programming bugs, as well as being very short. Also, for me at least, it was difficult to guess the necessary actions.
A short twine game with graphics about finding a friend in an airport, May 21, 2016In this short Twine game, you are looking for a friend in an airport.
This version of Twine uses unlimited scroll back, a nice feature. Each passage is illustrated with an image from a warning sign or other kind of sign.
There are multiple endings, but the ways to achieve them are not clear. This made me feel frustrated at times.
The writing doesn't sparkle, but it does its job. There's a bit of a fantasy/altered reality element at one point that was interesting.
A massive, lock-and-key goofy humor game, May 21, 2016This is a very large, spare game entered into IFComp. You wander around a large variety of areas, including a library, a secret lab, a castle, and a haunted pyramid.
Gameplay consists of three main mechanics: finding gold rings in odd places, finding keys and later unlocking things, and giving a variety of appropriate ethnic foods to crazed individuals who generally jump out of cabinets, boxes, coffins, and so on. You also have a pirate bird companion whom you can talk to, and a large number of NPCs who lampshade the games incompleteness by saying things like "I would have more powers if I had been implemented correctly!"
Room descriptions are spare, and gameplay can get repetitive.
A giant, sparse if comp game hunting for and selling treasure, May 20, 2016If you look at the walkthrough for this game, you'll see that it's absolutely huge for an if comp game (perhaps 4+ hours), and that the same commands are repeated over and over.
Much of this starship game consists of walking back and forth between two halves of a navigation system and pushing the same sequence of buttons.
The idea of this game is that you must travel to other worlds to find treasure, which you then take to an android bazaar to sell, to buy new items such as star maps or keys.
The writing is sparse, but the game is creative, especially the stage that is a huge statue of a human. The ending was disappointing, and the game was somewhat repetitive.
Extremely limited one-move game with ASCII graphics, May 19, 2016In this game, you see a graphical image of 2 hands, and you have to type in the number of fingers you see.
If you're right, you get one ending. If you are wrong, you get another.
If I missed something big here, please comment.
Edit:
Joey Jones pointed out that there is another ending, which does make the game better, in my opinion. Also, looking over again, the graphics are really pretty good. So I've changed my rating to one star for polish, one star for writing (the three endings were pretty good), and one star for being willing to play it again, because I did play it again, and enjoyed it.
A Dr. Who-like Choicescript game, May 18, 2016John Evans is known for making big, complicated games that often end up being unfinished or buggy.
This game was his first in Choicescript, and the choice of language has greatly improved the game. It is not buggy as far as I can tell, gameplay is smooth, and the game feels complete.
The story is a fun romp on Dr. Who-like themes. You go on 3 training missions and then one real mission. The amount of detail and description varies, but it's overall well done.
Recommended for fans of hard sci-fi.
A miniature, semi-silly game about a cursed pyramid , May 18, 2016This Ryan Veeder game was a speed-IF entered in the Ectocomp one year. It was later tuned up and rereleased for Sub Q magazine.
The game has a small but detailed set of locations. As you explore the pyramid, you encounter a variety of Egyptian treasures and artwork. The plot thickens as it goes onward.
I enjoyed the writing and feeling of this game quite a bit. But I didn't really get into the puzzles quite as much. Considering its origin as speed IF, though, the game is quite remarkable.
A semi-goofy, slightly buggy Lovecraftian game, May 18, 2016I've always enjoyed Lovecraftian interactive fiction games. This one hits up a lot of the good elements: a cult, unspeakable horrors, creative monsters.
You explore a mansion, trying to rescue the father of a little girl from an untrustable friend.
Unfortunately, the game is marred by both bugs (like room text appearing in incorrect rooms) and questionable puzzle design (like having 20 hiding places to search to find 2 or 3 items).
Also, there is a lot of goofy humor interspersed throughout the game, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
A goofy but enjoyable parser game on a timer about an apocalypse, May 18, 2016I don't usually like super goofy games, but this one combines silliness with some earnestness and good descriptions. You play a conspiracy theorist with a talking British cat. Your house is small, with important objects clearly marked in descriptions, and only a few secrets.
This game has a timer of about 75 turns, displayed every turn. In this case, the timer served as a reassurance to me that the game would be small and solvable in a few turns. Unlike most timers, this one improved the game experience.
There were some typos, but I found this to be a better experience overall than I expected. Most people would probably find this game to be a 2-3 star experience.
A shortish parser game in a house, trying to avoid a killer, May 18, 2016In this game, a serial killer is on the loose, and you have to try and make it out alive.
The game is unpolished, with many unimplemented synonyms and some illogical responses at times.
The writing is somewhat descriptive, but most of the effort goes into making the narrator snarky and insulting towards the player.
This keeps the game from having a strong emotional impact, as it constantly tells you you are dumb or that you don't deserve easy solutions. Also, the final sequence of required actions is somewhat tasteless.
The puzzles are generally "guess what the author is thinking", and I don't plan on playing it again.
The author did put a lot of effort in this game, but I feel that an author that is antagonistic towards the player should reasonably expect negative feedback.
A puzzle game in a small club about finding insults, May 17, 2016In this game, you are in a 3x3 club and must find some dirt on the reigning Yo Momma champion. You have to wander around and try to look at his stuff and talk to his friends to find incriminating things.
This game is really well-polished and descriptive; I didn't find any bugs and everything was good and smooth. The dialogue was clever and witty, the puzzles were fantastic.
This game does contain some kinds of questionable material, since it's based on insulting other people's mothers, and their is some intended (but not completed) violence against women by other people. Overall, though, this was a good game.
An on the rails parser game about a school shooting, May 17, 2016East Grove hills tells the story of a group of friends who go through a school bombing/shooting. Like photopia, it is told using non linear time, and it uses Photopias conversation system.
Unlike photopia, it is told through large text dumps, and doesn't provide many natural actions for the protagonist to take.
Overall, a good story.
A short, small slice of life game., May 17, 2016This game is small, but relatively neat and tidy. You have to go out and get groceries and check on a book before a meeting.
It's fairly typical for a 'My apartment' type game. There are a couple of guess the verb issues, but on the other hand the writing is very good in places, especially crossing the road.
It turns out the game has a hidden aspect to it, described in the ABOUT text, that puts an interesting spin on the action. I took about 10 minutes to play it.
A somewhat clunky afterlife surreal game in space, May 16, 2016This game came in 22nd out of 27 or so games in 2007, and that surprised me at first. It's a fairly large game with some nice writing. However, the concept is kind of jumbled. You are wearing a spacesuit, but you are also in a world of thoughts, but you may be dead or may be not dead. And then the game ends mid-story!
There are some problems with guessing the verb and figuring out what to do.
The general story was interesting, and the writing was descriptive, but the implementation has numerous issues.
A post-apocalyptic world of bizarre fantasy and many PCs, May 16, 2016In this game by Porpentine, an author known for creating bio-mechanical worlds that are almost hallucinatory. This game is a great example of her world building power.
You play in a dust-covered world of raiders and scavengers. You can create yourself, but also destroy yourself, and both are necessary.
This game is unusual for Twine in that you have to enter city names in text when traveling. This gives more of a riddle aspect to the game. However, you have a map storing names you've met. There are less than 10 total cities.
The game ends in a sort of transformation that is best experience rather than described. Overall, it has a feeling of exploration and of 'just living'. One of the least disgusting porpentine games, and one of my favorites of hers.
A text-heavy game about gladiatorial fighting, May 16, 2016This game won Spring Thing in 2014. This game is written using ChooseYourStory, which focuses on half-pages full of text with a few small choices that then affect your stats, like Choice of Games mechanics-wise but a bit different stye-wise.
You play one of two brothers betrayed into slavery. You enter a slave ship and train in Rome. You might a variety of people whom you have relationships with, and you have a few skills like strength and speed.
The writing was okay, but the story was interesting. It does suffer from some stereotypes; there are african slaves who speak in broken english, and are all strong and athletic, while the white slaves are praised for being intelligent and good at strategy despite their weakness. A fair, blue-eyed redheaded girl is a main love interest, and so on.
Outstanding fantasy/sci fi blend. Lengthy illustrated twine game., May 16, 2016This game plays out over the course of several days in-game, perhaps a week. It is quite large, on the order of size of Twine games like Birdland, but feels a bit smaller than Spy Intrigue. I have played it once, but it seems to have high replay value.
The visuals on this game are gorgeous, especially when sleeping. The font, letter spacing, and color choices give a DOS type feel. The game is sprinkled with occasional images and animation.
You play a living firewall, an elemental charged with protecting a magic/tech network with 4 locations.
You are presented with a sequence of mysteries, one a day, which you use clues to solve. You can then deal with the mystery in many ways, raising and lowering various stats a la choice of games.
The game includes several times sequences, some violence and some sexual activity.
My only quibble is about one image, and it's a tiny issue: (Spoiler - click to show)I didn't like the illustration of the main antagonist, I thought it was cheesy.<\spoiler>
A short story with dynamic text about slaying a semi-silly monster, May 16, 2016This game shows the power of Undum by allowing you to adapt a text from beginning to end.
You are a parent telling a story to a kid at night about a pumpkin slayee (or other kind of fun monster). But the kid keeps complaining, so you go back and edit the story.
The writing is charming, and you really feel part of the storytelling process. The effects are well-polished however, the story didn't completely grip me as much as the technical capabilities.
A long, fascinating but clunky thriller about a mysterious device, May 16, 2016This is a game in 3 parts that would reasonably take a couple of hours to complete or more.
It starts out with good programming and a good concept: you receive a package with a device that gives you mysterious instructions. Following it gives you the ride of your life.
However, it quickly devolves into impossible situations where you have to guess what the author was tbinking, and the writing quality goes down.
I recommend the first scene or two.
A large, interesting fantasy game marred by translation and programming bugs, May 16, 2016This game is a large and ambitious fantasy adventure with a lengthy prologue, a lot of dialogue, scenery changes, colored text, etc.
However, the game was translated from italian, and the translation has many problems. Fortunately, a walkthrough was provided, but at one point it becomes useless, and no amount of wandering could help me find the exit.
This game exists in an Italian version; given the promise of this game in english, I can only assume that this game is quite good in italian. I don't know if the other bugs still exist in that version.
An ambitious, flawed fantasy game about being able to create anything, May 16, 2016John Evans creates games that are very ambitious but generally not thoroughly tested. This gane, though, I really enjoyed.
You are a spirit summoned to a floating magic castle island. You can create anything! Well, actually, you can create whatever the author implemented. You are presented with six challenges, and have to guess what to create. I beat about 3 and a half on my own. At least one depends on you seeing something not in the room descriotion, which I thought was unfair.
A brief demo for a parser system, May 15, 2016This ifcomp game was a demo for what was apparently a beta parser system (version 0.75).
In this game, you are a cat who helps their owner get dressed and go out, and nothing much else.
The parser is okay, but not equal to inform, tads, or Robin Johnson's parsers. An interesting artefact for those interested in various parser systems.
A speed if about theatre, where you assume many roles, May 15, 2016This game was entered in a 24-hour speed if competition. For a speed if, it is surprisingly detailed and polished, on the order of Emily Short's Lavender or better.
In this game, you play three different characters. To do so, you use various props in many ways.
The writing is descriptive. The puzzles are tricky but fair; when I resorted to the hints, it turned out that my next idea would have worked, so I just should have tried a bit longer.
My one caveat is that the difficulty of the puzzles and the frequent motion on and off stage drew me out of the story of the play itself.
Two short TV-themed mini games in an unusual framing story, May 14, 2016This game has a framing story about visiting the house of a friendly old man who you knew as a kid who recently passed away. You explore a treehouse and his house, with some weird happenings going on.
Once inside, you experience two strange episodes based off of classic television shows.
The puzzles are a bit odd, with mechanics that mostly involve trying everything.
Somehow, though, the game had something appealing in the descriptive writing which would make me play again.
A poetic game about aromanticism with strong use of text effects, May 13, 2016Stone is a beautiful, short, ambiguous game. Its blurb says its about aromanticism, but it could have many interpretations standing on its own.
It's a very short game, more of a poem than a story. A sentence is presented, and clicking on the few highlighted words will shuffle the text around, frequently leaving blank spaces to present staggered words in an unusual effect.
The tale presented is surprising, and, like I said, ambiguous, making it easy to apply it to yourself.
Very successful in what it attempts to be, a short poetic experience.
A faux-retro corporate game metaphor for trans, May 13, 2016Like many Porpentine games, this game is one big metaphor for the experiences of a trans individual, in this case also (Spoiler - click to show) abused by their parents.
You play a corporate executive, trying to make a million dollars. Porpentine enjoys the liberal use of irony, such as expounding on the beauty and wonderful taste of trash.
The game is quite complex, with some difficult action scenes and with one part that took me a week to figure out.
The game has a strong emotional effect. It also has a lot of sexual references and some strong language.
A game where the author challenges you to understand some mechanics, May 12, 2016In this game, there are two cats, a camera, and a device in a box. Moving around changes what you see, and you can take pictures.
The game is small, and it has no ending. The author poses it as a challenge; once you understand it, you win.
I played with it enough to get some basic ideas, but I did not find it inspiring.
A purposely ridiculous game about a cat, May 12, 2016This game is one of those "mess with the player" games, but it's better than most. It seems bug free (one apparent bug is actually the final joke), and the writing isn't bad, although it tries to be offensive to the player at times.
It's on rails, and goes through a variety of scenes. It seems like a troll game, to be honest, but many people might enjoy it if they like abusive language from parser and fun ridiculousness
A tiny game about IFMud. , May 12, 2016This game is apparently a big in-joke about ifmud, an online forum/interactive multiplayer world that many IF authors and players once used.
In ifmud, there were many monkey jokes, and people would pass 'bananas' made from text to each other. It includes a parser that allows people to play games together known as Floyd, modeled on the robot in Planetfall. It's main area is an adventurers lounge, with maps and a trophy case.
This game takes those elements and makes a tiny game out of it. That's really all there is to it.
A dark story of a man and his loves, May 12, 2016In this game, you play a thin, waifish man who constantly wears all black and is reminiscing in his bedroom.
You explore a variety of vignettes from your past, related to women you had loved. Locations are detailed in loving care, and the writing in this game is quite descriptive.
As a general spoiler, though it's not too hard to figure out early on, (Spoiler - click to show)your character seems to be transgender. As a late spoiler, also not too hard to guess, (Spoiler - click to show)you are a serial killer. These two facts are presented in interesting, allusion ways, but at times the interactivity seems off, especially when wandering the beach for a long time.
It was an interesting game; I'm not sure what I thought about it. There are 7 endings.
An intricate game about trying to serve a god, May 10, 2016In this game, you try to act out Pascal's wager, which is that serving God has an infinite reward if God exists, so you should serve him no matter what chance he has of existing,
In this game, there are six possible gods you must serve, including quite a wide variety. You must do everything you can in three periods of your life to show the God that you serve them.
The game is well put together and descriptive. Some of the gods are absolutely horrible in ways that are rarely exceeded in If, but the game warns you ahead of time to steer clear.
I would not play some paths again, but I'm interested in some of the paths.
My own quibble is that actual gameplay is very opaque, making hints more necessary.
A tiny parser game with one puzzle: tying two strings, May 9, 2016In this game, you are in a single room with a single puzzle. You have to tie two strings together.
This game has about 5 or 6 items. The one puzzle is clever, but it's it. For that one puzzle, the author has made a very polished game, with the responses you'd hope for implemented, and descriptive writing.
If you like brainteaser-type puzzles, this is a good game for you. But it is very, very short.
A long, complex game about wandering around a movie studio, May 9, 2016This game was the first Spring Thing winner. It was the only entrant in its year, but it probably would have won if there were more. This game is one the author worked on for many years.
You play a hopeful hollywood writer, going to deliver your scripts to a producer for evaluation when they are scattered and stolen by a mailboy!
You have to find each of the seven scripts. This is an old, old-school adventure. Timed challenges, complicated machinery with ascii displays, hidden items, leaps of intuition, locks and keys, it has it all.
It also has a lot of Infocom references. There is a movie set that is a faithful reproduction of the Zork house, and quite large. There is a parrot squawking 'Hello sailor', a set for Hades from Zork, and so on.
This is a real treat for puzzle fans, but for everyone else, it could be fun just checking out the map and area and exploring for a while.
A short, easy sound-enhanced horror game at home, May 9, 2016This game is a fairly popular horror game. With sounds on, late at night, it is pretty creepy.
You play a young woman home alone. Various ambient noises come through as you walk around. The radio says a miller is loose, but soon things get worse.
I didn't really understand the ending, even after multiple playthroughs. This game didn't quite click with my sense of hirro, but the first time I did not use sound and just played during the day.
Recommended.
A branching narrative about a maiden and hunting unicorns, May 8, 2016This game is set in an unspecified fantasy setting. You play as a poor young woman, who, unlike most poor young women in fantasy stories, is very ugly.
You have been coerced into things that you may not want to participate in, but your actions remain your choice. There are 8 or so endings depending on what course you decide to take.
The writing is well-done, with rich descriptions and a well-conceived plot. The game is polished and smooth, and includes some text effects and images.
Overall, recommended. This was I believe the author's first game, and they have gone on to win several competitions. This first effort was a sign of things to come.
A brief, well-written light horror about staying the night in a haunted house, May 8, 2016In this game, you play a medieval character who has been dared to spend the night in the house of a deceased nobleman.
This game is divided into a couple of parts, the first of which is figuring out just what is going on. The game has three inventories, including one for things worn and one for memories.
The memory mechanic works well for me, as does the big last puzzle at the end.
Overall, this is a light treat, lasting 15 minutes or less. The writing is very descriptive and gameplay is definitely polished.
Manages to combine the worst of AIF and Rybread Celsius, May 8, 2016This Rybread Celsius game has the usual implementation and spelling errors. But this time the goal is to get an erection. There are two locations, one item, and one NPC. All the commands are obvious.
I'm not really into AIF at all, making this my least favorite Celsius game.
A somewhat buggy first game. Escape the room., May 7, 2016This short game was the authors first game. They later went on to create Human Resource Stories, a multiple choice quizzes in Inform that was ahead of its time.
The author himself describes this game as buggy and unfinished. However, reading the other review on ifdb gave me fair warning about the worst problems, so it wasn't too bad, but it is hard to beat this game without a walkthrough due to reasonable commands not being recognized.
The setup is fairly clever, if short. Recommended for those who want to study first games.
A very nice little game that ends abruptly. An underground civilization., May 6, 2016This game is meant to serve as an introduction to a longer game. As such, it ends before the story really gets started. It's very similar to an opening village area in Zelda.
The author has done a good job building up an underground civilization, with a variety of npcs and some simple puzzles.
The activities you do are not compelling, but the game is polished and the setting is well done.
A short, smooth parser game based on the book by the same name, May 6, 2016This game is more or less a faithful adaptation of the Paper Bag Princess with some classic puzzles thrown in.
The game is well-polished. Events occur on timers in a smooth way, the plot progresses at a good speed, most appropriate commands are recognized.
The story, taken from the book with permission, is cute. Overall though, the game felt slight and not as involving as it could have.
A great concept frustrated by mechanics. Stay calm or die., May 6, 2016In this game, you can customize your name, background, goals, etc. You then are let loose in a world where a mutant fungus makes you die if you stress out.
The customization is fun, and a sliding scale of emotions is provided in the corner.
However, this ambitious game falls short in execution with a wide variety of bugs, mainly synonym bugs. This causes frustration.
Overall, recommended for the beginning.
A linear sci fi game with an amazing start that falls apart near the end, May 5, 2016I loved the beginning of this game. The year is 2080 and you're headed to a base on the moon with a German colleague. You are experiencing strange flashes of light attributed to cosmic rays.
The writing is very descriptive and the setting is believable. The game is polished at first, but near the end I was picking up items that shouldn't be takable, room descriptions conflicted with npc descriptions, etc.
Overall, I would still play this again, but watch out for some bugs.
A four part game about Soviet sadness and Stalin, May 4, 2016In this game, you play through 4 separate vignettes. Each one is a short, description-heavy vignette of someone in Soviet Russia. The vignettes increase in the social status of the pc.
The game is fairly serious, with some elements of parody, intentional or not.
The gameplay is fairly smooth and polished. Many people have said in reviews that they couldn't finish the game; however, every scene can be completed by either repeating some repetitive task (such as waiting) or making sure to explore each area thoroughly. The way you die usually tells you what to do next time.
Despite the heavy-handedness, the game worked for me. The last scene had a large amount of strong profanity, so I don't think I'll play again.
Also, at one point the game seemed bizarrely broken until I realized that it was displaying chess notation.
A polished Western about traveling worlds. Old-school puzzler, May 4, 2016This longish game is an old-school puzzler, like So Far or Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina. It's a well-done puzzler, as well.
This game is a Western, a rare setting in IF. It starts out in the modern day, but things soon change.
The writing is descriptive and based on real locations and people known by the author.
It's hard to say more about the game without giving it away. Suffice it to say, this game is a real treat for puzzle fans, but probably not going to please those interested in story alone, as the story is 'gated' behind a series of complicated introductory puzzles.
This is perhaps the best puzzler game I have played that was not nominated for any XYZZY awards and did not enter a comp.
A German survival horror/exploration game in Inklewriter, May 4, 2016This game is the best-developed inkle writer game I've seen. I tried it because it won the venerable Grand Prix competition.
This game is centered around a tightly-developed world model. You wake up in a strange white room and have to figure out where you are and what's going on.
This of course is the premise of dozens of IF games (including, most famously, Babel), but where Tag Der Toten shines is in its strong narrative voice. It's full of goofy humor, but it's clever goofy humor, essentially a conversation between the PC and theirself/the narrator through the use of the links.
I found the game very descriptive. Also, inkle writer can be easy to lawnmower in a parser-like world model, but the author has provided several surprises to keep you on your toes.
I give three caveats to my 5-star rating:
1. I love amnesia games.
2. I love German stories.
3. This game is not complete, in that the author plans on extra chapters being added later. That said, it took me about 2 hours to finish. However, I am not a native speaker.
A surreal interview with Rybread Celsius, infamous IF author, May 3, 2016Rybread Celsius has been called the worst author in IF (as stated in this game). His games, such as Symetry, are poorly coded and misspelled and often laughably bad.
This game is more polished in programming, but with the same style of writing and gameplay. You go through a series of disconnected scenes, which include numerous pieces of a hilarious interview with Celsius.
The game contains some profanity, some lewdness. If you like absurd games or learning more about the IF community, you may enjoy this game. It references all of his previous games, Graham Nelson and his games, Unnkulia, Spider and Web, and many more.
Edit: Since I wrote this article, Johanna De Niro has written a very interesting article on Rybread Celsius that has made me appreciate their work much more. It is available at Sub-Q magazine.
A minimalist, creative utopia. Web-based game featuring graphics and sound., May 2, 2016This game was entered in the Tiny Utopias jam. The author has represented their Utopia by a sequence of words and a jaunty, synth-style background song that reminds me of early NES games like punchout.
The sequence of words chosen seems to represent a daily life, with one special option that seems directly tied to the author's idea of what Utopia is.
The special option made me enjoy the interactivity of this game. It is descriptive in its minimalism, and polished overall.
A still life of an electric guitar and amp with all knobs and switches, May 1, 2016This game was entered in the IF Art Show, a competition over the years that asked participants to create portraits, still lives, or landscapes using Interactive Fiction.
This is a still life of an electric guitar. Rather than playing specific chords, you have an amp and a patch cord and knobs affecting treble, bass, tremolo, pick up, and so on.
Not knowing much about guitars, I just fiddled around, but it was a lot of fun. My favorite moment was when the parser recognized "PLAY STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN".
Recommended for fans of other art show pieces like Galatea or the Fire Tower.
A space trader parser game with a nice layout and smooth gameplay, April 30, 2016This is one of Pacian's best games, which is saying a lot. It is intricate but casual, and lasts 1-2 hours for the main storyline.
You play as a ship captain whose twin brother has been taken and frozen due to your unpaid loans. You must travel to a variety of worlds and systems to get enough cash to free your brother.
The world model is purposely simple. Each world and its orbit constitute a single location. Each location has 1-5 npcs and 0-2 other nouns. The only interaction available with most NPCs is TALK TO, although some can BUY and SELL, and a few other interactions pop up later.
You can't examine anything, and there's no searching or any such thing. You just travel from world to world, building up money until you're done. There's no climactic finale, but it's still rewarding.
This game is one of the best science fiction games I have played.
An interesting multimedia experiment with a tiny utopia, April 30, 2016Entered into the tiny utopia jam, this game presents a series of graphical vignettes, which, when examined, provide details into a beautiful but mysterious woodsy life.
Like most tiny utopias, this is a small, comfortable game. The graphics and sound effects are lovely, but I found the interaction confusing at first.
I appreciated the nature interactions and the innovative interface.
A pacific island-themed game about a volcanic eruption, April 30, 2016This is a charming short game about a person waking up on a volcanic island that's ready to explode.
You have to complete a few simple tasks in order to get off the island. The game gives good hints about this. I completely missed the last puzzle because I didn't examine carefully enough.
The game is polished and descriptive, with fair puzzles, but it didn't come to life for me, and I'm not sure I would play again.
A fairytale story about escape from the mundane, April 29, 2016This game is about a young person who longs to be free from the mundane world. They try to escape, and begin to find the faery world.
The game has a variety of branches, picking from 2 sets of three big options and many smaller ones.
The game is very successful at creating and maintaining a wistful, deep atmosphere.
S. Woodson is a talented author, and it comes out in this brief game.
An evocative little piece that serves as a counterpoint to Feu de Joie, April 29, 2016Feu de Joie was a serial story released starting in 2015. It was about someone working for an online company who started getting weird messages from elsewhere.
This game is set from the other side, and manages to make powerful statements about war and world history. It's hard to go into more detail without exposing the plot.
It is very brief. I give it five stars for its polish and for its important place in the Feu de Joie series as a whole.
A game packed with npcs interacting with each other. Camp horror, April 29, 2016This game is about a specimen that escapes and attacks a summer camp.
The main idea of this game is that there are six npcs walking around, each with their own personalities and talents. You have to get them to work together.
Unfortinstely, it can be maddeningly difficult to know what to say to each person.
The writing is descriptive, and the game doesn't seem very buggy.
A smooth little game about cavemen and knowledge, April 28, 2016Ryan Veeder is known for making polished, smooth, amusing games, and has made another great example here.
You are a caveman with an unusually intelligent wife and surrounded by a variety of animal life.
The game is fairly short, with only 2 or 3 small puzzles, but the setting is charming and the game feels cohesive. It is an interesting counterpoint to the Edifice, a long, difficult, serious game treating some of the same material.
A cut-and-paste game following a 5-room house for 100 years, April 28, 2016In this web-based game, you have a house (whose address is 18 Cadence) with a map with 5 rooms and you have a year that varies from 1900 to 2000. As you change the year, the description of each room varies. You can take portions of the text out (represented as cutting it out with a knife), and lay it on a table below. As you cut out different pieces, you can arrange them all to form a story, even overlapping some to form a new sentence.
I wasn't super impressed with the cutout system as I played, but afterwards, I saw someone's story using 'Browse' and I realized that I hadn't been very creative.
The story of the succession of people and the changing quality of the neighborhood was really interesting. I know a house near where I live that was constructed in the late 1800's, and it has gone through a life cycle very similar to that of 18 Cadence.
If you try it, try browsing some stories.
A game with three nonintuitive puzzles about Psyche from mythology, April 27, 2016This game is about Psyche, who is cursed by Aphrodite after ignoring rules about her husband Cupid.
In this game, you are given three tasks to complete. Each has a special trick to it, and one involves graphics.
The game has some pretty big problems with guessing what the author is thinking, including the first significant verb you have to use after the prologue. Two of the puzzles depend on assembling complicated equipment and using another unusual command.
The writing was descriptive though, and everything was well-polished, so I'm giving it 2 stars.
A surreal Twine game with nice styling., April 26, 2016This game is a short Twine game with a beautiful font and use of different coloring tricks.
The story is hard to describe, except to say it is highly disjointed and deals with the nature of reality.
The writing is descriptive, but the interactivity is troublesome. In a list of links, only one will move forward, and it's hard to know what order to look at stuff if you want to look around.
A small nugget of nostalgia by original Infocom implementers, April 26, 2016Years after Infocom died and Activision was about to put out a graphical Zork game, this parser game was commissioned and then produced by two Infocom writers (Marc Blank of Zork and Mike Berlin of Infidel).
The game is almost pure nostalgia, and fairly short. It compares to Unnkulia One Half, which was similarly a small promo game riffing on older material.
In this game you find an undiscovered part of the Great Underground Empire and explore it. The game is very small, with one big square that has doors leading to three smaller areas, each with 3-5 rooms. There are little models of Zork items, Grue references, and the heads of the two implementers waxing nostalgic. There are references to the IF MUD (essentially an elaborate chat room that was once a multiplayer online parser game) and so on.
If you have nostalgia for infocom, this game could be lots of fun. If you have just barely learned about ibfocom, maybe not so much. The actual games themselves are more fun.
An interactive retelling of an old short story, April 26, 2016This Twine game is longer than most Twine games running from 30 to 60 minutes.
It is an adaptation of an old short story about a Griffin and a church official that had a good grasp of location to begin with. Groover has assembled all the locations in the story into a coherent world.
The story itself is poignant and meaningful, which has led to its enduring popularity as a short story.
Overall, the writing is descriptive, and I enjoyed the interactivity. At the time that I played the game, there was more timed delays than I preferred, but the author was contemplating shortening them.
A fix-the-machine game including a typo fixer, April 26, 2016This game is a shortish parser game about a trial run of an automatic typo corrector. The majority of the game is spent trying to fix a bizarre machine.
This game had several implementation issues, including fatally crashing the game when looking up various topics in the manual.
The puzzles in this game are fiddly. I have a distaste for machinery puzzles, but those who enjoy them will like this game.
The writing is descriptive, and though the first part was bland, I loved the ending, so I'm giving this 2 stars.
A game about getting coffee in the office, April 25, 2016This is a short game with multiple paths to getting through each puzzle. You are trying to get coffee to stay buzzed at work.
Many of the puzzles are unintuitive, like (Spoiler - click to show)looking in a book to get an apron for a different store. However, at least there are multiple routes for each puzzle. The implementation is spotty (TAKE ALL let's you take a door). Overall, I recommend it only for fans of the office genre.
A thrilling spy game with undercover puzzles, April 24, 2016This game placed near the middle of IFCOMP 2002. In this game, you play a spy who must infiltrate a building, steal information, but leave no trace.
The leaving no trace bit is interesting, similar to Sub Rosa and the orange room in The Recruit. However, all of the puzzles are difficult, as they only admit one solution, even if other reasonable solutions are avilable. Also, the game is inconsistent in what it considers as leaving a trace or not.
The writing was descriptive and the game would be thrilling if not for the frequent interruptions due to odd puzzles.
Defeat a dragon through 4 subgames. Violent, and D&Dish., April 24, 2016Fort Aegea is a well made game about a priestess dealing with a dragon. After a brief prologue, you confront a dragon who challenges you to evade them for a day, or else they will kill all virgins in the area.
The map has 4 subareas that you can run off too. Each contains its own miniature quest. Some are much easier than others.
This game has unusual amounts of violence, in the sense that many people die in scenarios that would not kill them in most IF games.
Recommended for fantasy fans.
A tiny utopia game about love and home, April 24, 2016Helado has written one of the more homey and comforting Tiny Utopia games. It is short, only a few choices long, but manages to evoke a feel of comfort and home.
There are 8 endings which I wasn't aware of at first. The smallness of this game works for it; it feels like the author has challenged themselves to make their 'utopia' as 'tiny' as possible. I feel like context matters for many games, and this game is well-suited to the requirements of the jam.
Overall, I didn't identify strongly with the characters, and I wished for my choices to draw me more into the game world but this is completely subjective, and may not reflect others' experiences. Recommended for those looking for a quick, feel-good game.
An innovative Twine game about a curious dream, April 24, 2016This game, one of the later entrants to the tiny utopia jam, has several unusual features. Fist, it uses neutral pronouns (ze, zir,..). I found that this helped with establishing the tone of the game and the allowing the player to identify with the protagonist.
The second unusual feature is in its branching structure. The game has an unusual structure in its branching that had me playing again and again. This is a strongly branching games but is short enough that replay is easy, similar to Porpentine's Myriad.
Unlike most strongly branching games this game's branches build on each other and create a unified story. Also, the author left little surprises and added variety in the branches.
A complex, underclued game about shuffling crystals and elements around, April 23, 2016John Evans is know for large, complex games that are often unfinished or broken. This game is the most polished of his that I have played. It is complete, and free of typos.
However, the plot and puzzles are confusing. You are wandering around a cave with colored crystals and rooms corresponding to elements. There are tons of interactions that just make no sense, and some guess the verb
Recommended, with hints, only for fans of big puzzles games.
A text port of the graphical game Return To Zork, April 23, 2016This longish game is a text port of the graphical game Return to Zork. This text port was entered in IFCOMP.
Porting this game was a big task, and many parts of it were rushed. Typos abound, and some implementation is spotty.
Overall, though, I enjoyed playing this as an alternative to downloading the graphical game. I've played most Infocom games so this was a nice way to continue onward.
In the game you have to return to the areas of Zork I and Zork II to investigate disappearances.
A linear parser game about supernatual creatures, April 23, 2016In this game, you visit a small village and learn a terrible secret.
This game begins with a very unrealistic but mercifully short sex scene. As others have noted, the game accepts only one command in each scene to advance the plot.
The writing is vivid and descriptive, but the plot zigzags. The main path is implemented well. Overall, an interesting storyline with some potholes and weaker implementation.
A surprisingly fun but finicky game about delivering pizza and the mafia, April 23, 2016This game started off with some guess-the-verb puzzles and some rough edges in room descriptions, but once the game started picking up, the storyline became very enjoyable.
You play a pizza delivery boy who has to run a pizza to a courthouse. As the game progresses, you experience ruins with the mafia, natural disasters, and essentially the collapse of society in your town. The last scene in the game is truly awesome.
Hard without the walkthrough due to a lack of synonyms
An excellent mid length sci fi game in 3 sections. Like Star Trek, April 22, 2016This game is similar to the plot of Star Trek insurrection. You are part of a galactic league which monitors non-spacefaring worlds. A monitoring station has failed, so you must visit it in disguise in a cloaked shuttle to see what is going on.
The first part of the game has some tedious bureaucracy similar to that of stationfall. You then explore an alien village, learning their religion, and so on. The finale of the game is action packed.
Strongly recommended.
An office game about getting things wrapped up before a date, April 22, 2016This game placed in the middle of ifcomp the year it came out.
You play an office workers who is excited for a date after work, but has been asked to stay late to finish some stuff up.
You go around a small, 5-room office, negotiating, searching, etc.
Some of the puzzles are clever, but others are pretty opaque. I felt like I had to really lean on the walkthrough.
The setting was portrayed fairly accurately. There was one unfortunate part with a pin-up calendar, but the game is completely tame otherwise.
A strongly branching Twine game about valkyries with one large branch, April 21, 2016This Twine game was written by 3 community college students working together. It is about valkyries, spirits that aid the residents of Valhalla. Early on, the game splits into three very different branches, the first two being relatively short, the last having a few huge pages of text.
The stories generally are about a non-Valkyrie helping retrieve a necklace that Freya made and Loki stole. Two of the stories mention the ability to see when people die.
Overall, there are many typos and formatting issues, and the story swerves wildly. However, there are many options in the game, so you feel in control.
A short fishing game about The Old One, April 21, 2016In this game with only 4 or so locations, you have a variety of fishing equipment and have to try to catch a giant old fish called the Old One.
You have a variety of options for bait and weights and so on. The actual puzzle, though, is solved by lateral thinking.
It's interesting seeing this and other games from the very first IFComp. It seems like there was more originality and experimentation in the first competition than in the others, where originality was often localized in a few entries.
Somewhat unfair. Recommended for fishing fans.
A short, surreal game with some straightforward puzzles , April 21, 2016The Island is a relatively short surreal game with some straightforward puzzles (guess a riddle, search every item, push everything, follow instructions, etc.). It includes some old-school puzzles that are tricky to program (like a raising/lowering bucket puzzle similar to the one in Zork I).
I actually like surreal creepy games like this. The plot structure was strongy reminiscent of Recorded, from a later IFComp.
The ending implies that (Spoiler - click to show)everything is a loop, with you becoming the new screaming man and the screaming man becoming the new guy in the coffin.
A tiny parser game about a happy happy sheep, April 21, 2016Well, I don't know if the sheep is happy, but I was. In the tradition of Lost Pig and baby tree (2 very different games), we have sheep here, a terse, uncapitalized game consisting of brief sentences.
The aesthetic works for the game. A large chunk of the game consists of randomized text, with many clever results.
The game accounts for many, but not all, standard responses. A couple of these responses made me laugh out loud.
The subtitle about non-procedurally generated grass probably refers to a discussion in intfiction and euphoria chat about how randomness is not the same as procedural generation.
This game was entered in the Tiny Utopia jam, providing a fascinating concept of "utopia".
There were a few issues (like the moon being listed after it left), and even more commands could have been implemented. But these are minor quibbles.
A short parser game with a haunting atmosphere about a couple, April 20, 2016This game by Ade McT is an interesting entry in the Tiny Utopias jam. More than any other entry, this game had a haunting, desolate, stoic feel.
You play a character sat at a table who is sorting through pieces of glass in the evening light. Each piece has a story to it.
The game felt almost like a ritualistic cleansing of the soul after a deep wound. I felt like the Utopia in this game could be the healing and strengthening feeling you have after surviving a terrible period in your life. However, it is open to many interpretations.
I had some trouble at the beginning of the game, because I did not notice everything in the room description. Due to the speedy nature of the Tiny Utopias jam, there were many things left unimplemented. However, those who read closely will probably experience no hiccups.
A utopian vision of society expressed through a soccer league, April 20, 2016This is one of the entries in the Tiny Utopia jam. Johanna has picked perhaps the most 'utopian' of all the utopias, as this game provides a direct and detailed vision of a better society.
The writing is fervent, and it is easy to feel the authors conviction and the heart put into the game.
Stylistically, the game has an interesting division of links into different types that works well. While I usually don't include cover art in reviews, I feel that the cover art really suggests a certain interpretation of the game that is hard to put into words.
I did feel a certain lack of options in the game, both of reflective options and of more meaningful choices. This is not always necessary in a Twine game, but I felt like the subject and tone of the game could do with more interaction with the games or your emotional responses. Like usual, this is just my opinion.
A bite-sized game about wrapping up a magical life, April 20, 2016This is an entry in the Tiny Utopias jam. In this short Short Twine game, you play a figure in a medieval-esque world dealing with the aftermath of a magical life.
The writing is Short's characteristic style, with imaginative magical inventions and a dignified but slightly dangerous tone.
I found the game enjoyable, with good interactivity through the design of the links. However, I felt an emotional distance from the narrator, and I felt that the game could have used some more graphical love (the standard Twine styling is not bad, but it didnt seem as effective in this game).
A tiny utopia jam game about love and work in a mysterious setting, April 20, 2016This game was made for the tiny utopia jam. The authors version of Utopia is different from many of the other entries. In this short game, you play as a couple in mysterious circumstances. There is peace and happiness, like the other utopias, but there is also challenge, hard work, and a healthy dose of chaos.
I found this to be an effective vision. I am giving this game 3 stars for its emotional delivery, polish (including subtle use of backgrounds), and descriptive writing. However, I felt that the story could have been developed a bit more or wrapped up more neatly. This is a stylistic choice of the author, though, that may work better for some.
A brief Twine game about a skull scraper with nice effects, April 20, 2016This game is a Tiny Utopia jam game, and Groover has picked an unusual vision for his utopia. You play a skull-scraper in a house of skulls, and you interact with the world in unusual ways.
This game has great production values, with combinations of advanced visuals, sound effects, etc. The setting is macabre but not gory, dark but not depressing.
The writing is well-paced, with a truly beautiful and almost-hidden turning point. Perhaps my favorite Tiny Utopias game.
A fascinating mini game toying with word choices and association, April 20, 2016This game was part of the Tiny Utopias game jam. In this game, you select between two words at a time, each selection generating the next two words in a process that is opaque but interesting to experiment with. At every stage, you can change any previous answers, rewinding the game to that point.
This game is small, but it's mechanic is fun. As the name suggests, the number of possible choices is a large power of 2. I found the Utopian part of this game to be the freedom of choice the ability to make decisions in life without criticism or outside analysis. This is obviously up to interpretation.
This game did not affect me emotionally as much as other tiny utopian games, and (although it was meant to be tiny), I wished for a bit longer exploration of the central idea.
A tiny, soothing poem of peace in Twine format., April 20, 2016This game is an entry in the Tiny Utopias jam, where participants created small games representing some idea of Utopia.
Many people have commented on the peaceful feeling and relaxation this game offers. This is not a puzzle game or a long, strongly branching narrative, both of which are fine; instead, this is a bite-sized poem, most likely to be enjoyed by those in the right mindset looking for something chill.
Interesting slice of life with game stopping bug , April 20, 2016Thus is a fairly short game about a friend who died and their funeral. As you begin to remember more about them, the plot thickens.
The writing is descriptive and pleasant. Unfortunately, there is a bug with the album which prevents you from winning. Otherwise, an intriguing slice of life.
Edit: Okay, I found another review online that says "Read Album" is the correct move. The game ends in a shockingly stupid troll message, and gives you a new verb to get two other dumb endings.
I agree with one reviewer's hypothesis that the author couldn't finish it in time and made a troll game.
A buggy but fun game with a walkthrough/map that are almost better than the game, April 20, 2016This game was one of the last place entries in IFComp the year it came out. It's a traditional treasure romp where you gather 4 gems and then put them in a museum.
It's buggy quite a bit; examining a sign can switch the room you're in, there's no way to get a "You've won" message, and some items have names like pedestal3.
Someone went through several years later and decompiled the game and wrote a walkthrough and made a map. The map and walkthrough are fascinating, and provide an interesting insight into game design.
Recommended (with its walkthrough) for those who are interested in writing games.
A mid length horror game with a ton of PCs in the same environment, April 20, 2016In this game, you are in a Manor with about 8 or 10 people and a dog, and you are all being hunted down one by one by a malevolent creature.
Your viewpoint changes dramatically and repeatedly, with each character viewing the environs differently. The actions you can take and the feelings you can have are all so different. It was a great experience.
After a ton of hand holding through different PCs, the game dumps you in a puzzley environment, which throws off the timing of the game. I only got one interesting ending, and not the best, but other reviewers have noted that no endings seemed satisfying.
Still, I recommend this for its atmosphere.
A tedious game about getting ready for bed, April 19, 2016This game has a well-simulated house. The writing has many typos and grammar errors. You have to go pee, eat food, play with your hamster, and follow various other urgent needs.
This gets tedious eventually. The puzzles are unnecessarily fiddly in many places.
This game came in the bottom half of the ifcomp the year it came out.
A meandering game with many ways to lock you out of victory, April 19, 2016In this game, you are in a seminary and are trying to do... something. The game is never clear about what you need to do.
The game is short, with a few puzzles. I kept trying things on my own, then looking at the walkthrough for the next step, but there are so many ways to lock yourself out of victory.
In the end, I think that this game is a bit too fiddly for my tastes.
A campy horror game. Fairly small, with some unfair puzzles., April 19, 2016This game placed in the lower half of IFCOMP the year it came out. Unlike many lower placing games, it has a sincerity and a good overall plan that made it enjoyable for me to play, though I skipped out on the 3 mazes.
You are searching for the tomb of an ancient warrior king. You have to explore an abandoned, rotting town, a tower, and a cave. There are some silly instant-death puzzles that undo solves nicely, but what I found nice about this game was the underlying story concept.
Explore a bit of history in New Mexico, April 18, 2016This is essentially a tourism game, like the non-puzzly parts of Bolivia By Night or The Race.
You are late to a tour of a Plaza in New Mexico. The game shines in its wonderful descriptions of New Mexican history, and the feeling of wonder. However, the game is under implemented and puzzles are a bit odd.
A short game.
Great for fans of the American Southwest.
A Greek mythology game with a difficult parser, April 18, 2016This game is written in Javascript using a homemade parser. In the game, you wander through areas with minimal descriptions gathering items. The parser doesn't have default messages, so if you use a correct verb with the wrong noun, it treats it lime you've written nonsense.
The game itself isn't too bad, but it's very spare. The author must have put a lot of work into this gane, but in the end, it seems that the parser needed more work.
A one-puzzle, spare game, April 18, 2016This game is not terrible. You are in a 3x3 grid of rooms with various objects. Your goal is to break a stone slab.
This is the whole puzzle of the game. There is helpful writing in the four corners.
As David notes in his walkthrough (which gives away the solution up front), he notes that the game is a bit underimplemented, and many responses are misleading.
A dramatic game about suicide, April 18, 2016This game is a linear, story-driven game about a group of friends and their thoughts on suicide.
You talk to people several times, follow their directions, and then the game quickly wraps up.
The writing was descriptive and brought out the desired emotion. However, the interactivity felt off, especially when it required long amounts of waiting. The melodrama may not work for some.
An inform model of the house of the authors aunts. Puzzleless set piece., April 18, 2016This game was a coding exercise designed to show the house of the author's aunt.
Many things are modelled, including a working TV and vcr combi, drinks and cups, an electric train. However, descriptions are sparse and the implementation is spotty.
The best part of this game is the melancholy feel. Nothing tells you how you should feel, but the sadness and nostalgia is palpable.
A buggy, rough spy game with a fun concept, April 18, 2016This game has grammar and spelling trouble, illogical puzzles and a tendency to switch colors randomly while playing in parchment (including to all back).
This is a shame, because the story concept and writing are a lot of fun. After a brief opening scene or two, the game picks up and changes direction.
You might as well use the walkthrough, as the games puzzles don't make much sense without it. This is yet another early game that shows the need for tools like Twine that let people write interactive stories without worrying about implementing a lot of background or freedom.
A 15-puzzle, a big maze, and one other puzzle, April 18, 2016This game was intended to recall Scott Adams' early adventured, which were spare due to space limitations. However, they also used evocative and unexpected descriptions given the space. This game just cuts down room descriptions, with no evocativeness.
The puzzles include getting a kitchen down from a tree and a large maze with no redeeming qualities.
Where this game shines is its implementation of the sliding 15 puzzles where you have tiles numbered 1-15 on a 4x4 board and must get them in the correct order. The puzzle is shuffled randomly each game, but the author let's you opt out.
An early IFComp puzzler based on So Far, April 18, 2016This game was inspired by So Far, and written in 3-4 weeks in 1996.
You play a college student who travels to three different worlds. The game was originally intended to have deep psychological meaning, but the author ran out of time.
The highlight of the game is the descriptive writing and setting. The puzzles are more or less unmotivated and revolve around levers and dials. In addition, the author expects many actions that are not typically allowed in interactive fiction.
An early Javascript game about a time loop, April 18, 2016In this game built using the javascript-fueled Bloom engine, you play as a time traveller trying to stop an assassination using knowledge from several loops.
Like Axolotl Project or Hallowmoor, this is an exploration and inventory based game driven by links.
I found the engine to be polished on both mobile and PC, and the writing to be descriptive. But I felt distant from the narrator and overall, vaguely unsatisfied.
Recommended for time travel fans.
A series of 7 short answer questions about history. Only works in IE., April 18, 2016This placed below every other game in 2013's IFComp. Much of that was due to the fact that it was a web game that only worked on Internet explorer.
However, by inspecting the page source, it's easy to figure out how the game would go otherwise. After a brief introduction, this game leads to a sequence of 8 math and history questions. You type the answer in a box, and in Internet Explorer, you can check your answer and move on. In all other browsers, you can't.
Overall, the questions are interesting, and the commentary is descriptive, but overall I didn't feel that this was a compelling game.
A very short Twine game about surviving monsters using weapons, April 18, 2016The Lift is the first last-place IFComp game to be written in Twine. In this game, you are in underground bunker of sorts and have to choose from four weapons. You then have the choice to use pornography or not, then you choose from four rooms of monsters. If your weapon works out, you win! If not, you die.
So there are 16 possibilities, 3 of which are winning ones. Theres not really any rhyme or reason to which ones work, so its just bare experimentation. Also, the pornography just seems thrown in.
Overall, this game is somewhat memorable in a B-movie way, but doesn't take advantage of Twine's power.
An atmospheric game that is buggy and has a partial story, April 18, 2016This game feels like a slightly unfinished trailer for a very cool book. You wake up in a crypt, apparently resurrected, and have to find out what happened.
Doors and gates are very common in this game, apparently disambiguation by plurals. A room will have "a door" and "a doors". You travel by using "enter doors" and so on.
The game is story driven, but puzzle light. The puzzles that are there are made difficult by spotty implementation.
I found this game entertaining in its promise and concept. I found it not satisfying on its own.
A sparsely implemented, unfinishable game inspired by Zork., April 17, 2016This game looks like a first game that was over ambitious and was entered unfinished into the IF competition.
It is a 30 or so room game with Zork inspired objects scattered about, sparse descriptions, grammar and programming errors, and some bugs that render the game unfinishable.
The game concept is just fine, and what's here isn't bad, it's just unfinished.
A semi-random maze, April 17, 2016This is a semi-random maze, with a thin plot. The other reviews have touched on this game a lot, but it's safe to say that this is not the worst IF game of all time.
Apparently, the maze is small but solvable. The name of the winning item uses unicode, so you can't type it, but you can GET ALL.
Not as interesting as other "bad" if.
An on-the-rails, rough-around-the-edges surreal parser game, April 17, 2016This was the lowest-scoring Inform game in IFCOMP the year it came out. As was common due to IFCOMP'S rules about updates at the time, it was only in the lowest place due to a game-crippling bug.
The version now on IFDB works fine with the Play Now button. So what about the game itself?
It is a surreal adventure, where a fourth-dimensional person takes you to their world to turn off a leak in the pool of knowledge.
The game is rough, and the interactivity is off. This is a game where that author knew exactly what they wanted a playthrough to look like, and coded only one way in. Plot progresses only by waiting around or by guessing precise sequences of moves to advance the plot.
Hiwever, the writing was evocative, if raw, and the surreal feeling made the game stand out. I would enjoy playing it again.
This is a game that would have been much better in Twine, and shows how people were trying to bend Inform to do Twine like things for years.
A sisyphian game, April 17, 2016This is a game where you play Sisyphus, condemned to pushing a stone up a hill in hell forever.
And that's what you do. This game gives out the emotion of sisyphus very well, evoking boredom. It's polished and smooth, and descriptive.
Unfortunately, as Sisyphus, there isn't much to do.
A mockery of the state of video games in 2005, April 17, 2016This is a joke game. It has a long spiel about using science to make the most enjoyable game possible.
Then you make (Spoiler - click to show)two choices and end the game. This makes the game very short..
This sort of game, using short CYOA to mock game culture, came into vogue a decade later with authors like Soda51.
A space based game with missed potential. , April 17, 2016This game starts out at your house, but quickly shifts locales. The main location is a 5-level space station.
The game is mechanically impressive, with forced input, ASCII graphics, a topology machine and other nifty tricks. These alone make me want to play again.
However, the puzzles are hopelessly underclued (including one that is only possible if you have experienced a certain Infocom game or its imitators).
The writing is also rough. Bugwise, there was one room where I couldn't leave and had to undo.
This game didn't call out to me emotionally. It was the lowest placing z-machine game the year it came out in IFComp, but it is much better than other last place games.
An obscene game that does nothing but insult you, April 17, 2016In this game, you are the fat lardo. In one room, there is a duck.
Most standard verbs are implemented, and result in insulting you.
Why three stars? The game is polished. It is very descriptive in its insults. And it succeeds in producing an emotional reaction.
But the interactivity is bkring, and I would not play it again. I do not recommend this. Includes frequent strong profanity.
A tiny game about two prisoners in space, April 17, 2016This game is about a trial in a science fiction setting. You witness a verdict in a courtroom, a friend gets upset, and new people arrive.
There are four locations, a few NPCS with a total of 10 or so topic responses,and a total game time of 20 turns or less.
There are a lot of guess-the-verb problems that mess with the polish and interactivity. Some descriptions are skimped on. And there's not enough information to care about the characters.
An unfinished IFComp 01 game in a fantasy setting, April 17, 2016In this game, you are in some of paeduo-roman setting where an Oracle has incited everyone to violence.
This game is known for unfinished room descriptions such as "$$$". There are two npcs that do almost nothing unless you guess the right verbs.
However, the story that is there is interesting.
As to finishing the game...
(Spoiler - click to show)After 5-10 turns, you die. If you type XYZZY, time stops, but you can't win.
There are two ways to win: type Z over and over again, or SING over and over again.
Because of these unusual features, many speculated that this was a joke game. Its hard to know.
News reporter gets a tip about the mayor and an intern, April 17, 2016In this game with a small map, you play a brand new reporter who caught a tip about the mayor and his intern stuffing ballot boxes.
The puzzles in this game have multiple solutions, and I felt like the game was more believable than usual.
Overall, a well written detective romp. However, the writing felt detached, and I don't feel like revisiting it in the future.
A series of speculative essays accessed by a menu, April 16, 2016This game is a series of essays about "What if major historical events had happened differently?"
It is interesting reading but not polished. It is quite descriptive, however.
The interactivity didn't really draw me in, and I don't see myself reading it again. While the essays were fascinating, I felt no emotional connection to the text.
Not the worst game of all time. MC test as a job interview., April 16, 2016This game was last place in 1998's IFComp, and has an average rating of 1 star (out of 12 ratings) on ifdb as of this writing.
This game consists of 9 multiple choice questions presented as a job interview. There are several paragraphs of intro, a huge response to XYZZY, and a final score in three categories as well as a salary.
Why was this game so poorly regarded? CYOA in general was looked down upon until Twine and Choice of Games took off. Also, the author has a bitter tone, and includes lines like "That's not how life works" if you try to restart.
But the game is polished. The author spent a great deal of time creating a workable CYOA structure, and it looks good.
The writing is descriptive, and does an excellent job of representing the author's feelings
The game communicates an emotion of frustration, bitterness and helplessness.
However, it is difficult to know how your choices affect the outcomes, and disabled restart is obnoxious. Also, there is not much replay value.
A mid-length RPG CYOA with 15 endings and moral choices, April 16, 2016This is an excellent gamebook style RPG centered around a dragon's lair. There are two real goals in the game: to maximize a treasure score, and to choose how you interpret the events of the game, by means of various moral choices. This leads to 15 possible endings.
The game gave me the feel of old Dnd modules, the kind where you don't realize that a sword is a cursed demon in weapon form, or where you don't know if trapdoor is safe to open.
I played several times. The game is polished and descriptive, and the interactivity was very effective. But I felt emotionally distant from the protagonist and their life.
Recommended for DND fans.
A fantasy game about womanhood and abuse, April 16, 2016In this game, you take a metaphorical journey through a fantasy land that you have created to avoid your abusive father.
At first, I was intimidated, and stuck to the walkthrough straight to the ending. I found the game intriguing as it dealt with blood, innocence, betrayal, and basically a lot of metaphors about women and femininity (such as a unicorn you can kill or help, a female vampires, and so on).
Afterwards, I heard there were several endings. I tried to find hints on them, but finally I had to just look for myself. And it wasn't hard to find a lot; many people give you quests, and if you finish them, you get an ending.
Some events were traumatic (like a (Spoiler - click to show)rape, not in the walkthrough) and others were mysterious.
The implementation is spotty in places.
Excellent game. Highly recommended.
A magical girl confronts reality, April 16, 2016In this game, you flash back and forth between two different times; yesterday, when you were a Stellar Girl, and now as a mundane human.
The game is mostly choosing the order of four options, moving to a new scene, and repeating. I found myself eager to know what happened the day before. I found the game exciting.
However, I didn't feel strongly connected to the protagonist, and I felt satisfied with my first playthrough without exploring more options.
A two worlds Christmas themed game, April 16, 2016This game is reasonably well polished and descriptive. You play as a young woman in two worlds, one where she eagerly awaits her Grandfather's visit and one where she explores a forest and island filled with magical creatures.
This is a 30 minutes or less game with two real puzzles, each of which can be solved by gathering or constructing things or by guessing obscure verbs. The game did not draw me in or affect me emotionally.
A game that challenges fantasy conventions, April 15, 2016In this shortish game, you have to escape a dungeon, slay some monsters, and find the dragon terrorizing the neighborhood.
The puzzles are a bit hard; I stuck to the walkthrough. The game has a hidden subtext that makes you question what you want to do.
I found the game to be effective. Even once I though I knew what was going on, it pulled out another surprise on me.
Recommended for the twist; however, aside from the twist, the game lacks polish or direction.
A short, darkish comedy about an AI in a damaged ship making its way home, April 12, 2016In this game, you play a computerized AI trying to head towards earth. There is a linear path to and away from earth, and a few branches along the way.
The main interesting feature of the game is the various choices that you can make. You are the AI of a ship that has been severely damaged, with all crew and colonists in cryosleep. You can choose to go straight home, or to try a variety of other things.
The game is funny, and well-written. At times I suspected it to be a parody of Hoist Sail for Heliopause and Home.
This game is short and enjoyable, and recommended for everyone. I gave 4 stars instead of 5 because I felt like the interactions available didn't really draw me into the world.
A strategy game with multiple paths to victory and endings, April 10, 2016I should say upfront that I probably missed some important subtext in this game, because it just seems like a straight-up resource management game in a porpentine world.
You try to obtain enough currency (in the form of Vespine shards) to keep a crying Eye Moon from flooding your villages. You can hire mercenaries to destroy tears, gamble to get more cash, fire a cannon, or build a boat. The boat is a reasonable way to beat the game.
There are several npcs, including one who tries to worm their way into your life.
Overall, it's an amusing diversion. It is polished and descriptive, but I did not find it emotionally compelling. I enjoyed the sim aspects, and I could see myself playing again.
An intricate, chess/crossword-puzzle like game about hidden codes, April 9, 2016This Andrew Schultz game builds and expands on one of my favorite Schultz games, Threediopolis. If you haven't played that game, you should try it out first, as this game contains spoilers for the basic concept of that game.
If you have played threediopolis, (Spoiler - click to show)this is the same sort of game, except some chess-like moves have been added, h,i,j,k. Each of these teleports you 2 spaces away in each direction. For instance, h teleports you n,e, and u, while i teleports you w,s, and u.
This makes the game more difficult. I found it helpful to read some of the documentation on the spring thing website, which will most likely be included on IFDB afterwards. It gives a helpful list of the results of 2- and 3- letter combinations, like hi.
My rating of this game is certainly subjective. The puzzles appeal to me as a mathematician because I love the interplay between freedom and constraint. Emotionally, it draws you into an exploratory/puzzly/celebratory mood. The game is definitely polished, and I plan on playing again (it's a long game, and I've only played through part of it. It's the kind of game I feel I could return to frequently to play around with). I though of taking off one point due to the lack of descriptive text, but I realized that more text would make the game difficult and tedious. The scarcity of text is a necessary part of the design.
Like I said, this game will only appeal to a certain group of people, so I can't recommend it to everyone. But fans of crosswords, cryptograms, and codewords will enjoy this game.
An unfinished-feeling short Twine game with randomly changing content, April 9, 2016I'm giving this very short Twine work a point for being well-polished (it runs smooth as a whistle) and 1 point for its smooth writing. What the author has so far works.
Unfortunately, as of Spring Thing, it is too short. You play a baby who is famous, and performs every night. Each day you can pick between one of four baby options (sleep, eat, poop, or pee). Then you hope to have a successful career. The furthest I got was four days.each day has only a few paragraphs of content.
The author references begscape by Porpentine, and these games share many similarities. I liked where the author was going with this.
My reaction may be colored by the author's apologetic blurb on Spring Thing's website. If it had been presented to me as a whole game, I may have given it another star.
A sprawling game about blurring reality and game with a 70s feel, April 9, 2016This game feels like what I would imagine the 70's would feel like during summer-long drug trip. However, it is set in 2013 and based on a real manic episode one of the authors experienced, during which he thought he was in an interactive fiction game (according to the blurb).
This game belongs to the relatively rare genre of games where you explore a big city and story events have to be searched for one at a time, while the rest of the city serves as decoration. Nick Montfort has done this multiple times (Book and Volume, Winchester's Nightmare) and Adam Cadre did this 3 times over in the branches of his game Narcolepsy. But the authors of this game have managed to avoid the crushing loneliness of Montfort's world as well as the frustration of Cadre's. They do this by filling the world with wonderful, descriptive things, packing in long text sequences and even song numbers downloadable from the author's website. They also do it by keeping the game simple. The first half of the game is just following instructions on where to go, and the second half has a great hint system. Both of these facets keep the game fast-paced and interesting.
The writing is trippy. Crystals, music, sex, co-ops, all give the feel of a hippie documentary. The main idea of the game is that the character has managed to bind reality and fiction together, so that he realizes he is in a game and the two start bleeding together.
The game doesn't have actual explicit sex, but it has several very sensual metaphors of sex, and implies sex at various times. Because I don't enjoy these types of scenes, I am unlikely to replay it.
The game took me about 1500 moves to get about 819/999 points (there are many optional points). It is the longest game of 2016 that I am aware of, and most likely longer than anything in 2015 (it has more text than Scroll Thief, I believe).
A stat-and-story heavy mobile-friendly game about Robin Hood., April 8, 2016This Spring Thing entry is a preview of a big mobile friendly game about Robin Hood. Gameplay-wise, it most resembles Choice of Games, with stats and romances and branch and bottleneck gameplay. However, the finished game will have several illustrations, and the game is not constrained by CoG conventions.
Gameplay was exciting, keeping me guessing at what was important but rewarding careful planning. The game is already large, with a great deal of mythology and folklore mixed in.
I recommend this to anyone, especially Robin Hood fans. The one drawback I found was that I did not feel emotionally invested in the story, which of course may vary from player to player.
An atmospheric game about assasination, religious hierarchy, and pomp, April 8, 2016This game paints a unique world, where religious hierarchies are structured by the alphabet, and assassination is a good career move.
You are an A, right at the top of the line, but everyone is gunning for you. In this mid length, relatively easy game, you have to dodge multiple assassination attempts while thinking on your feet.
Wonderful for fans of atmosphere, setting, and world-building.
Monster mayhem in downtown Tokyo! Short, with two perspectives, April 8, 2016This game has an interesting opening; you are in a movie theatre, watching a giant monster movie. The game is in third person, with the main character's actions being narrated by the observer in the audience.
The actual action has a brief intro, followed by the actual puzzle. You move in 3d on a map with a ton of fake locations and some (labelled) real locations. This puzzle seemed really hard, but it turns out that there are 4 different solutions.
This is the only giant monster attack game I have played, and it was really fun in its sphere.
An amusing and thoughtful long game that is (not?) a multiple choice game, April 7, 2016Dr. Sourpuss is an orangecat that just hates multiple choice games. He works with a man and a woman for Scandron, a multiple choice test grading company.
You have to help find two missing things: the grading machine, and a student named Mark Passingrad.
Gameplay rolls out in three main ways: you are given a series of multiple choice quizzes. Before answering each question, you can click on boxed links to get more detail. Finally, there are three different 'tests' where you have to go to a lab to create new items.
The game is purposefully confusing, and it succeeded in creating this emotion. In the end, much of it is a long discussion about people who hate multiple choice and why. I chose to interpret this as part of the debate about weblink games such as Twine or Raconteur. The game talks about marginalized individuals and those who refuse to validate them or allow them to be part of their world. The game admits many interpretations, however.
I took off one star because the game is very tedious at times, trying to sort out a path through repetitive text. Overall, an interesting and thoughtful game.
A game about the horror of war and the battle of Verdun, April 7, 2016This is a short, simulation-heavy game. You carry a variety of weapons and command two other soldiers. You are a german in the battle of Verdun, fighting in a French trench. In what is perhaps a mockery of FPS's that glorify war, you can use a bayonet, a spade, a flamethrower, grenades, automatic rifle, etc. and command your followers to equip whatever you want.
I'll put what happens in the game in spoilers, but it's just what you'll discover after playing for 3 or 4 turns:
(Spoiler - click to show)You go around the trench trying to clear it out. As you encounter the french, you stab, burn, or shoot each other to death, with the dying praying in agony or weeping. You keep track of your body count. I've not been able to find any more about the game.</spolier>
Overall, I found the combat mechanics a bit clunky and the game not fun to play, but I believe this is intentional. Reading the INFO text, its clear the author wants to remind us about the truth of war. It was a sobering game, and I believe that author really has something effective here.
A technical marvel with a disjointed story about identity, April 7, 2016This game has obviously been worked on for a long time; it has sound effects, a hand-made typewriting visual effect, some unconventional interactions with the browser, and several background images of what appear to be hand-drawn images, all by the same artist. This makes for a very polished experience.
However, I found myself frustrated by the slow typewriter effect. I frequently wanted to skip ahead. The only time I found it effective was at the very end.
The story is disjointed and odd. At first, I didn't like it, but it began to gel together the further along it went. It was a bit over the top at times, but it succeeded in the very end of keeping me intrigued and invested.
I'm giving it a star for polish, a star for descriptive writing, and a star for emotional impact.
A blend of nursery rhymes, puns, and Ryan Veeder references with great NPCs, April 7, 2016This game was the winner of the Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction. That contest was judged solely by Ryan Veeder, a prominent IF author.
This game takes the nursery rhyme "Little Bunny Foo Foo" and references from Veeder's games and blends them into a truly enjoyable story. The highlight of this story is the dialog, masterfully written and emotionally affecting.
You play the Good Fairy who is trying to help out Foo Foo the rabbit. There's a long street with shops and people to investigate.
It's hard to describe the game more without having you play it. Suffice it to say that this is my favorite game of 2016 (up to mid-April, when I'm rating this).
A shortish, story-driven parser game about dueling magicians at an exposition, April 7, 2016Chandler Groover has put his characteristic mark on the magician genre. The game is similar to "An Act of Misdirection" in tone and concept (where the player is forced to perform magic tricks without completely knowing how, in a grim setting). However, the focus is on atmosphere over puzzles. I felt on the edge of my seat the whole time, wavering between fear and mild disgust.
The game is about dueling magicians who will go to any length to disrupt each other. This part reminded me in a good way of The Prestige, especially as the magicians use new tricks to upstage each other and try sabotage.
The game is thoroughly polished, and credits a lot of testers for a compact game, which helps explain its smooth gameplay. I encountered no bugs, and the parser was very well-stocked with synonyms. Playing this game was like watching a thriller, with the parser so slick that it essentially disappeared, leaving the player to interact directly with the story.
A surreal two-protagonist game with two worlds, April 7, 2016In this darkly atmospheric game, you play as two different characters bound on a train. The game allows you to switch back and forth between these characters.
The main gameplay is set in two seemingly disconnected areas: a giant pit of hell, and a vast machine chewing up the earth and feeding it to a horrible beast.
In both areas, you are trying to collect pieces of yourself or your memories. Painful recollections come to mind.
This game is nonintuitive; there are some pretty crazy leaps you have to make to get the game started. The very biggest leap (which you need to know pretty early on) is that (Spoiler - click to show)by destroying something in one world, you can make it appear in another. A much milder spoiler is the command to switch between worlds: (Spoiler - click to show)BE [PERSON].
I got one bad ending and one good ending. I like this kind of story. If you like this game, you may like Sentencing Mr. Liddell.
A game about robots, robots, and cables, April 7, 2016Atomic heart is a good game at heart, but with an annoying number of missing synonyms, unclear descriptions, and a lot of tedious commands. It prominently features a cable and socket system which reminds me of Jack Witham's later Final Exam.
You play a nanny robot protecting a boy. After a brief introductory segment, you enter a larger and dangerous world. With a fragile companion, you explore a landscape fraught with danger and cables.
A key object in the opening area gave me no indication of what I was able to do with it. One room had no description except for "This is Gary's room", or something like that.
If these flaws were patched up, this game would be pretty sweet. But as it is, it's an exercise in frustration.
A short, well-styled tale of a woman's love for Eva Peron, April 7, 2016This game has a nice choice of background and font. It is a mostly linear Twine game with a slow, deliberate pace. The text often appears on a slow timer, and the links that don't progress the story are generally reflective cycles. Both of these design choices force the reader to contemplate the game at a relaxed pace.
The story offered several surprises to me. I found it to be well-developed, a description of one woman's lifetime. Everything was understated and hinted at rather than pushed through.
My only issues with the game were that I felt that the placement of links and the available choices didn't make me feel involved in the story, and that the story could have been more descriptive. I only feel comfortable mentioning these flaws, though, because the rest of the game did such a good job.
A short, superhero twine game with 3 or 4 branches and some moral choices, April 7, 2016This is a short superhero game written in Twine. Each screen has one to two choices about your actions as a superhero. Save many, or save one? Conserve strength or use your energy?
The game lasts about a dozen or twenty moves. The presentation is minimalist blue on black. The names of the villains made me laugh, but overall I feel the game could be fleshed out more.
A truly dynamic text written in twine about two sisters in a new civilization, April 7, 2016This game has several interesting features. First, it is available in English or Spanish, which I found delightful. This was my first real experience in Spanish, although I only did 1 out of 5 'chapters' in Spanish.
The other most interesting feature is its dynamic text. The only thing I've seen like it is Plotkin's Matter of the Monster, but this game has more depth. You click on links to expand the text, but the expansion can occur at different locations from where you click, opening the beginning of the story, the middle, or the end. In later chalters, the mechanic opens up in unexpected and delightful ways.
Visually, I found the text color and background to be somewhat unaplealing, but it adds to the games character somewhat.
The story is about a couple that leaves a city in an unspecified setting (could be prehistoric, futuristic, magical, etc.). Together they must deal with their children and the new society they take part in.
A game worth sticking with. Adventures in the sand., April 7, 2016This is a game that I was not impressed with at first. I found the writing to be a bit over the top and disjointed. My initial impression was not completely unfavorable, because the story was interesting and the game worked very well on mobile.
But as I pushed on to the end, the game took an unexpected turn which made me reevaluate my initial feelings. It made me chuckle. I played again for fun, trying to see how much branching there is (a medium amount, it turned out), and I thought I didnt like it as much the second time, but again, the ending made me chuckle.
If you try this one, make sure to finish it. Especially if you find it frustrating at first.
An immersive submarine experience. Twine game with 3d world model., April 6, 2016This game is generally about exploring in a submarine. You catalog new species you find, you can descend, ascend, or go left or right.
Perhaps the best thing about this game to me is the ability to make and execute plans. I had an idea from the beginning of what I wanted to do, and the game let me do it very well. You are constantly presented with choices to explore, to go deeper, to chase something, to return.
You have an air meter that goes down when you make choices. The beginning is more linear than the midge me and endgame.
I only played once, but it seems to be highly branching.
An extensive, map-based CYOA game with an enormous amount of polished content, April 6, 2016In this commercial game, you are trying to get around the world in 80 Days with Phineas Fogg. It is ostensibly based on the novel, although I haven't read it yet.
This game employs a beautiful map used to select various routes across the world, and has nice, mostly static visuals representing your conveyance, the city you're in, and various NPCs as well as the player and his luggage. However, this game is very much CYOA in beautiful packaging rather than just a text-heavy graphical game.
The usual pattern of the game is that you start each day in your current city with some funds and the chance to get more funds, buy some luggage, sell old luggage, or explore. You then pick a route to travel onto the next city, which may or may not require waiting a few hours or days for.
Each route can cost between a few dozen pounds to 7000 or more pounds. Faster routes generally cost more. Along each route, various events happen such as mutinies, romance, murders, etc. which you have to deal with. Your choices affect what city you are in, how fast you get there, NPC reactions, your amount of money, Phineas' health, and extremely poor choices can lead to death.
The setting is steampunk, a genre which I am on the fence about. Among steampunk games, the writing is very good. Some highlights for me were Haiti (Spoiler - click to show)with organic automata, Agra (Spoiler - click to show)A city that walks on four legs, with the Taj Mahal on top, and Salt Lake City, which provided my first glimpse at an interactive fiction treatment of Mormons, my religion. On their treatment of Mormons, I was pleased to see that they treated it fairly kindly, with any negative reactions being those typical of the day. This is typical of the whole game, in that it seems remarkably well-researched (although never perfectly) for its scope.
I found the game somewhat tedious at times, especially on multiple replays. I frequently found myself skipping filler text or repeatedly tapping on the clock. However, on playthroughs where I focused on exploration over time, I had an enjoyable experience.
Overall, I strongly recommend this game for anyone without a distaste for steampunk. I know several people who would love this game if it had a more realistic flavor. But the steampunk setting allows any historical inaccuracies to be waved away, and provides for some fun pictures, so it's a trade-off.
An amusing journey through a massive winter storm, April 6, 2016This game begins with a fun text-effect introduction, teaching you about the background of Winter Storm Draco.
You then begin to try to get home from the grocery store to your house. You will encounter a striking variety of puzzles, including classic-style puzzles, combat, and conversation.
Overall, the writing is amusing (although the game clearly states that it is a serious documentary, and not intended to amuse).
This is a short parser game, and I strongly recommend it.
An interactive flashback game, April 6, 2016In this game, you play a sort of police officer in space. You interrogate a murder suspect, then investigate their house. Using the knowledge from each trip, you restart and try again with new 'insight'. Each trip is fairly short.
The mechanic was fun, but the game is difficult. I strongly recommend it for puzzler fans, and just recommend it for everyone else. Has a club floyd transcript.
A short parser game tying in the authors other games, April 5, 2016This game is a short amusement that ties in a few elements from the author's different games. As far as I know, this is the author's only parser game.
It has a small command set, requiring only Examine, Look, and Interject. You are a bar owner around Christmas time when an irregular regular comes into the bar with a crazy project.
Overall, I recommend this game for fans of any of Bruno's games.
A poetic meditation on court life and rivalry with simple command set, March 30, 2016This Sub-Q game is tightly focused and compact. You play as Fuwa Bansaku, a samurai based on a real-life Japanese swordsman. You are investigating an abandoned shrine that is rumored to be haunted.
This game uses a small number of directional commands and tightly-written poetry to achieve a compact and peaceful feel.
The story revolves around court drama and the story of the abandoned shrine.
An enjoyable, short piece.
A fantasy narrative about a vengeful God, March 30, 2016This Sub-Q game is by a great author, Hannah Powell-Smith. In this Twine game, you play a character (which I interpreted as a woman) fleeing from the influence of a vengeful God. You have to deal with a variety of disasters and help those you love.
I only played once, so I don't know how much your choices affect the outcome, but I had the impression of making big choices, and I liked that.
The link presentation was slightly unusual, with some in-line links and some links presented as a menu at important choice points, but I felt that this was effective in promoting the feeling that my choices mattered.
Overall, well written and designed. I recommend it.
An oddball wizard apocalypse game with nice atmosphere, March 28, 2016This game was entered in the First Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition. In this game, you play as one of the last surviving humans after an apocalypse has turned most people into wizards.
The wizards can turn anyone else into a wizard. It's your job to escape! The games is fairly short, but has a well-thought-out notebook and help system. The world has been thought through pretty well, with a variety of spells and effects.
Overall, this is a fun, light snack and is pretty well-polished.
A Scott Adams/Zork-type web parser game about a local necromancer, March 28, 2016This game is in green text on a black background and is a home-brew web parser. However, it is more polished than most such games.
You play a simple village resident who decides to help some adventurers defeat an evil necromancer. By dealing with some clever puzzles (a color-based code, some animals, a trading game, etc.), you can deal with the necromancer and your adventurer friends.
The puzzles were occasionally too clever for their own good ((Spoiler - click to show)I'm thinking of the mummy solution, or the hellhound), but this should appeal to the game's main target demographic of old school fans.
Strongly recommended for fans of Scott Adam's games.
Massive, illustrated, NPC-heavy French mystery game, March 28, 2016Ekphrasis is very long and packed with stuff. Every screen has a large background image on which photos of NPCs appear and disappear.
You play a French art history expire who is a mix of Hercules Poirot and Indiana Jones. You chase clues around Europe as you chase an ancient treasure.
I completed the majority of the game before losing my save. This game is so big I just can't imagine going back through all of that, so I doubt I will finish it.
There are a couple of romances, a lot of excitement, and a lot of difficult puzzles.
Strongly recommended for Francophones.
A mid-length, difficult office drama about frustration and conformity, March 25, 2016Little Blue Men is a mid-length entry in the genre of 'I absolutely hate my job and office life sucks' genre (other notable examples include Building and Above and Beyond). You have incredibly annoying coworkers and a terrifying boss. As the game progresses, you uncover a deep evil.
This game has strong profanity, most notably at the beginning and at the end.
This game is a classic 90's game difficulty-wise, with some portions very difficult to guess without hints. I had some trouble, as did the Club Floyd team.
The writing, by the author of Anchorhead, is excellent, although I don't plan on playing it again due to the excessive profanity. The game includes some mean-spirited violence which is later justified.
A short maximally branching twine Ectocomp game about voice, March 24, 2016This game has three choices, resulting in 8 distinct paths. Each choice gives a short paragraph of text; making the whole game about 15 paragraphs long.
This game was originally intended for the 2015 Ectocomp 3-hour speed game division, but the author spent extra time crafting it, which is why it ended up in the longer division.
The game was very disjointed to me. I feel like the theme is gender identity, which comes through very well in some branches, but in others it just went over my head.
Each choice is SEEK or WEEP. What do these options mean? Well, just SEEKING 3 times or WEEPING 3 times and contrasting the results can help, but it's hard to see how the intermediate results fit in.
However, as an almost-speed IF, it is very well crafted.
A brief Twine game musing about nature and honey, March 20, 2016Someone reviewed this game saying it had "Endings for grownups", and that's accurate. This is a mature game, with an older protagonist thinking about life in a bittersweet way.
The focus is on honey, describing it in rich detail, from both scientific and aesthetic viewpoints.
A fun game, especially for foodies. Had one use of yellow font that seemed ill-advised, but only at one point.
A longish link-driven parser game about Dracula and Van Helsing, March 19, 2016Draculaland gave me several hours of playtime, even though I resorted to hints near the end of my playing time. It uses an innovative system where it is a parser, but all commands are chosen by clicking buttons instead of typing them in.
This is definitely a parser with some web UI thrown in as opposed to games such as Hallowmoor or the Axolotl Project which were Twine games but with heavy parser elements.
The parser effect is achieved by having an actual parser on half of the screen, with commands passed to it when you click on the buttons on the right-side (which consists of an inventory and room description).
The big worry here of course is that the button system might detract from the freedom of the parser, and that was my experience at first. It was difficult going back and forth between the two interfaces, and I felt like I was just trying every button in every situation.
However, as the game progressed, the dual interface became more natural, and as the inventory and its options grew, I was no longer able to get anyway by random button presses. I had to resort to the hallmark of the parser system, which is planning and carrying out a complex sequence of events.
Overall, I found the writing charming when the game wasn't being frustrating. That ended up being the one drawback of the game; I felt that many of the puzzle solutions, even in hindsight, didn't make sense or didn't allow for reasonable alternatives. (Spoiler - click to show)For instance, I felt like you should be able to distract the magpie with shiny objects or hide the keys in the box or bury them or kill the bird in its nest, or that you could slow the flies down by having them get drunk just like you did with the Magpie, etc. However, I would still rank the puzzles in the top half of all adventure games, especially for a patient player.
Overall, I recommend it; as an experiment, it's worth spending some time with, and as a game, it should appeal to the minimalist Scott Adams fans (which includes me).
A pun-based cheese game, March 17, 2016In this game, you have a huge inventory of cheeses that you carry into six or seven rooms. Each room has a setup missing one thing; you have to place the correct cheese in the setting to create a pun.
Overall, I found the game to be funny and the puns amusing. Occasionally the puns were strained, so I just tried each cheese in turn. Also, there were occasional bugs (well, I just had one, if you try to give something to the punster).
Overall, a fun snack for fans of wordplay and puns.
Note that this is from Veeder Comp, a competition designed purely to please Ryan Veeder, who organized the competition. This explains the references to Ryan.
A multiple choice quiz with some in-jokes about the Veeder Exposition, March 15, 2016This game is a series of point-and-click multiple choice questions with some branching and/or randomization in the sequence of questions asked.
I found several of the questions to be amusing, such as recalling the correct actions to take in doing CPR and so on. Many of the questions relate to Ryan Veeder himself and the stewards Emily Boegheim and Jenni Polodna who helped organize the Ryan Veeder Exposition. This makes sense, because the competition was to write games just for him.
Overall, I hoped for more feedback on the question answers, and for more of a focus in the story. But it was a fun way to while away the minutes.
An unfinished Sim-type game about Hell, February 19, 2016In this game, you pick your gender and characteristics and start building your own little corner of hell.
You have a catalog that you can buy stuff from, including new room types (represented by gemstones). You dig out rooms in any direction you want, then drop a soul in it. You get 1-3 points for each soul you place in a room. To get more points, you might have to buy a torture device or set a demon in charge of the person.
I went up levels pretty quickly, but eventually stalled. Many reviewers (and me) have come to the conclusion that the game is unfinished, and you can't actually play it in the intended way. This same author went on to wrote several more massive games with brilliant systems that ended up not being implemented.
A humorous game collecting various fake deaths, February 16, 2016In this game, you are part of an anti-smoking ad, and you are supposed to die dramatically. But you keep getting distracted by everything around you.
I enjoyed the variety of deaths and non-deaths, as well as having a main antagonist whom you have a sort of relationship with, rather than a romantic interest.
A collection of mini-logic puzzles, February 16, 2016In this game, you are helped by a ghost to understand a variety of logic puzzles, including a chess puzzle, forming a magic square, and playing the 'Lights Out' game on a 3x5 board.
For puzzle fans, this is a pleasant diversion, with Schultz's usual good implementation.
Poorly done parody of Rybread Celsius, February 16, 2016Honestly, I expected more of Nate Cull, author of games such as the incredible Glowgrass and the polished Frobozz Magic Support and Nevermore.
This game is a poor imitation of Rybread Celsius. Rybread was known as one of the worst IF authors of the late 90s. He had frequent typos, and often withheld critical information from players, and had bizarre, humorous writing.
This parody is essentially limited to the bad spelling and the Adventure references. I felt that the author's could have done much better here.
A parser implementation of a classic logic puzzle, February 16, 2016This game is a classic logic puzzle with a lot of hints or red herrings to its solution.
You wear a spacesuit with a lever that records your movement in a certain way.
The implementation of the surroundings is fun here. Schultz's well developed style shows through.
This same logic puzzle is the main puzzle in another IF game, (Spoiler - click to show)Grounded in Space .
Apollo 18 game about a man who hypnotizes women, February 15, 2016Perhaps the weakest game in a very strong collection. You are the hypnotist of women. With no inventory or items or conversation, you wander about. Examining the Ladies makes your points go up until you win.
There are some typos. Overall, an odd game. But I'm glad the album was completed.
A typing game; race to rhyme as many words as you can, February 15, 2016In this game, the doctors are testing to see if you have recovered from a mental illness. They test you by having you rhyme words that they say, but in an odd way and with a timer counting down quickly.
In no way is this an epic or life changing games but it satisfies all of my criteria for 5 stars, which is why I'm giving it that score.
A surprisingly short, gruesome game set in a hall of heads, February 15, 2016This game is another Apollo 18 Tribute album game. You had a horrible accident and land in a hall of heads in your own blood.
The game gives you hints and nudges throughout to help you along. There is one real puzzle to solve.
The atmosphere here is good, but the game teases on more possibilities that it can't really deliver on.
A short, buggy story about a lion commanding a spaceship, February 15, 2016This game is built up directly out of the lyrics of the corresponding They might be giants song.
In this game, you alternate between a lion man in charge of a space ship and a kids' garage band.
The game is very buggy, with typos in procedurally generated text. It is often confusing knowing what to do, the hints are not really hints, and the consoles in the spaceship do not give hints on what to do.
For me, much of the gameplay was waiting until the game prompted me on what to do.
I enjoyed the game's story, which is why I gave it a star (I know you can't give 0 stars on ifdb, but if you could, I would not have done it). But it's unpolished and didn't really affect me.
I feel like a lot of this could be improved if one of the authors went back and patched things up.
A mid-length combinatorics/geometry game, February 15, 2016In this game, you are taken to a secret government lab where you must destroy some spiders and a gun. The spiders are destroyed in conventional IF ways, but the guns require you to position mirrors, considering angle of incidence and so on, and must be destroyed in a certain order.
I played to an okay ending, getting 83 out of 100. I couldn't figure out what I did wrong; then I tried again, and got 100.
The writing is classic Schultz, with a kind of easy-going chatter with self-consciousness about intelligence.
The puzzle was fun; recommended for geometry fans.
A collect-themed-items game, like Dinner Bell, February 15, 2016This game is similar to Dinner Bell, and appear in the same collection. You have to gather 14 kinds of mammal dna (like Dinner Bell, the list comes from a They Might Be Giants song).
You have to do this because your lizard-people overlords are forcing you to. So there is a genocidal aspect to the game.
I found this game to be somewhat difficult near the end because I didn't realize how many items had additional uses.
I used the Club Floyd transcript for the last two puzzles.
I found it enjoyable, but sometimes wonky (hidden items aren't listed in the room description even after you discover them, you can wind things you really oughtn't be able to wind, and so on).
An effective short mirror world game about an evil twin, February 15, 2016This my second Muckenhoupt game after Gostak, and I found it compelling. You have an evil twin who is always out to get you, and you him. You go out to try and stop him from hurting others.
There is another world out there, his world, a mirror world of evil. The main mechanic of the game is travelling between the worlds and using their transformative properties.
The plot has a few surprises to pull out, and their are some tricky (but no too tricky) puzzles.
I love this game, but I'm a big fan of dual-world games.
A two part game with a mysterious mechanic, February 14, 2016In this game, you play a young man with a huge crush on a girl. You clean up your room to make it ready for when she comes over. You frequently try think about a dream you had about her.
Then you play the girl, who is mysteriously huge. Somehow, your actions in the first half affect what happens to you in the second, and you have to figure out how.
The pattern took me a while, but then the game tries to point it out to you in multiple ways.
I found the story amusing. There was strong profanity on the first page, but not after.
A very Veederesque afterlife. A short game, February 14, 2016This game reminds me of Taco Fiction, if the protagonist passed away. You are with a corpse and have to bury it, but the corpse has something to say.
This game plays around with the format and packaging of IF games, especially standard Inform library messages.
It is quite short, but funny. I had trouble figuring out what to do for 30 seconds in Part ii, but figured it out soon enough.
A teenager store clerk makes a big decision, February 14, 2016In the Apollo 18 Album, this game has you play as a teenage boy working as a store clerk. A lot happens around you, and you can look and examine, but you can't do much.
Or can you? On my second play through, armed with knowledge from the mini-sequel Fingertips: All Alone, I tried something else. And this is where the game shines; your attempts to do something unlock a lot of your real feelings.
I felt like this game captured a lot of the feeling of a teenager. Although it is short, it managed to meet my criteria of being polished, descriptive, having interactivity that draws you in, and affecting me emotionally.
A large, very early TADS game with in-jokes set in Princeton, February 14, 2016I mainly played this game for historical interest, so I just played it straight through with the walkthrough.
It is a classic 'my crappy university' game, which probably started with The Lurking Horror and has been perpetuated over the years (Christminster was probably the most successful university game, along with Return to Ditch Day). This game resembles the original Ditch Day Drifter, but larger, and with a large number of insufferable in jokes (the game is full of the authors' friends, and talks about how they feel about appearing in the game). Everything is based off of real Princeton locations, and follows the real map fairly accurately.
This game made a relatively large splash in the community at the time (thought not as big as the Unnkulia games), as there were not that many games at all, and this one was large and polished.
And it is polished. I used the walkthrough, but the game seems fair. I can only recommend it to fans of big old school games without much plot.
A conversation game romance, February 14, 2016This game by the great author C.E.J. Pacian follows two airplane pilots in an alternate world who have been shot down and must spend time together before rescue.
You play Lucas Thane, who is the main opponent of the beautiful Scarlet Baroness.
This game has 8 decision points, according to its author, and many topics. It can be quite difficult at times to know what to do, a situation that is very common with conversation games.
Overall, the writing was good, and the game was emotionally satisfying, but the pacing was a bit off.
Still, I recommend it for fans of conversation or romance games.
A fantasy/sci-fi blend with polymorphing, February 14, 2016In this game from an early IFComp, you have to earn the right to become a journeyman wizard when a fearsome dragon appears and attacks the town.
Things aren't how they seem, and soon you are playing ambassador to an alien. In the tradition of Infocom and Douglas Adams, you have to assemble a machine out of bizarre parts.
The game focuses on a polymorph spell that takes you from place to place. People have mentioned how this can lock you out of victory; however, the part where you need it is so small that you can just undo a few turns and try again.
Near the end, though, the game got really hard. I accidentally combined two ingredients too early, which basically meant I had a bomb that would go off all the time and end the game. Then, the final portion of the game can be tricky.
Has an almanac with a ton of information in it that you can carry around.
A sting parody in one move, and very small, February 14, 2016This is one of the smallest of the Fingertips games on the Apollo 18 album, made by the other who seems to have pitched in to finish the most games. It made me chuckle with its reference to Sting, but it doesn't have much substance.
Only a few responses seem coded for. What writing there is is good.
A classic logic puzzle (the kind you solve with a grid), February 14, 2016This one move game is more puzzly than most games in the Fingertips portion of the Apollo 18 album.
It is a classic logic puzzle, where you are given a dozen or so facts about several people and several properties they have, and you have to deduce who is next to you.
Because I wasn't in the mood for this puzzle, I just guessed, and go it right. Good for fans of such puzzles.
A one move game with divergent endings all about blue things, February 14, 2016Like Fingertips:All Alone and Fingertips: Who wrecked my car, this one move game has completely different narratives depending on what action you take.
All of these actions have a blue thing in them. While this game implemented more than All Alone, I felt like it was too self-conscious, hammering home the multiple endings and talking about the Fingertip:I don't understand game. On its own, however, it is a solid game, with some particularly good endings.
A cute one move game between siblings with a hint of menace, February 14, 2016Like Adri's other Apollo 18 album game, this game is a cute story with some lurkier undertones.
You are sitting with your brother Sam eating brownies. He has just eaten a brownie and is asking him for the milk. You can give him the milk, or do anything else that comes to mind. Adri has coded quite a few responses which can be found in the Endings and Amusing sections.
Recommended.
A one room game with slightly eery quotes, February 14, 2016In the Apollo 18 Tribute album, this is a one-move game about strange whispers.
Basically, if you listen, you can hear random quotes and sayings. The game keeps score of how many you hear. However, sometimes actions are necessary to hear all of the sounds. I did not hear all of them, only 2/3 of them all.
An excellent one move, mostly puzzleless game with distinct branches, February 14, 2016This is my favorite Apollo 18 one move game so far. It is very simple; someone is chasing you, and you have one chance to escape them. There is a correct solution, but all endings are interesting (I found 11 or so).
This game really shines in its writing and creativity. It affected me emotionally in a mild, pleasant way.
There is some mild profanity right at the beginning.
For fans of super hard mathy puzzles., February 14, 2016This is one of the one-move games from the Apollo 18 album.
You are dumped in a room with a huge number of complex counting and mathematical clues to give you the combination of a door. This is a beast of a game. I am a professional mathematician, but I ran fleeing from this game to the Club Floyd transcript, where I discovered this game was, in fact, incredibly hard.
The writing is top-notch Andrew Schultz style, and the game is polished.
Ultra small one move game, February 14, 2016This Apollo 18 Tribute game is incredibly short. You are told what to do, you do it, the end.
There's really not much else to say about it, except that the writing is good and the error messages are good.
A one note game, as the title suggests, February 13, 2016For the Apollo 18 Tribute album, authors wrote 20 one-room games (and 18 larger games) based off the titles of tracks in the album.
The title of this track suggests something immediate to fans of parser fiction, and the author ran with it. They did a good job with the implementation; I imagine this was not easy to code.
A cute one move game about a friend under a pillow, February 13, 2016Another Apollo 18 album game. In this game, you are going to bed in your PJ'S but something is wiggling underneath it.
Unlike most Apollo 18 games, this game wasn't much fun for me until I found the Amusing and Endings menus, after which it became fun just seeing what she had coded.
Certainly the most charming of the one move Apollo games, with a small sliver of the creepy or gruesome.
A number theory one move game set in jail, February 13, 2016As a mathematician, I was excited by a one move game set in jail (a frequent location for logic puzzles) with a strong number theory puzzle.
I immediately pulled out my number theory techniques, trying to remember the difference in the tau function between powers of primes and other numbers.
Then I found the solution, and I was embarassed.
It was a fun ten minutes.
Creepy one-move Apollo 18 album game, February 13, 2016I hear the wind blows is definitely one of the better one-move games in the Apollo 18 Tribute Album.
It is a creepy, atmospheric game. You wake up in the dark, hearing the wind blow. The writing is crisp and teases at the truth.
It can be a bit difficult guessing what verbs to use, but like most one move games, it's more fun to stop without trying to plumb the depths. The HELP command allows you to read the whole backstory, but I found that this destroyed the effect of the game.
Great one move game.
A short, easy one move game, February 13, 2016This game disappointed me in its shortness and easiness. A one move game, like the other fingertips games, you'd think being short and easy would be fine. But this game has promise, seems like it would have more depth.
You are an undercover spy whose house is on fire, and you have to get out. Examining the objects will quickly tell you what to do, and then you're gone.
Polished, with good writing, but not compelling.
A one-move game with wildly varying results, February 13, 2016This game has more variation in it than any other one-move game I have seen. Depending on your action, you could be a human, a robot, a galaxy, or who knows?
Each scenario is well written. I would have given this game 4 stars, but it has a meter telling you how many of the endings this reached, and this just made it frustrating as its quite difficult to guess all the verbs.
Amusing little one move Apollo 18 game about barfights, February 13, 2016This game has one clever puzzle in it. It's Tuesday night at the bar, and like every other Tuesday night, someone is getting punched in the eye.
The game tells you explicitly what the most interesting actions are, but it can take some time to get it to work. A meta puzzle is going on, which makes sense for a one move game.
Recommended for one move fans.
Another Apollo 18 one move game about a critical decision, February 13, 2016This one move game, based on the Apollo 18 album, has you standing in front of a grocery store late at night, trying to make an important decision.
I found this game less effective than the others in the album, but I may not have seen the best endings (I carried out what I meant to do, I chickened out, and I walked away).
Not to be confused with the Ian Finley game All Alone.
A one move alien game about math and alphanumeric codes, February 13, 2016This is a surprisingly complex one move game. It was written for the Apollo 18 Tribute album and named after the corresponding song.
You are stuck in a time loop as a reactor core explodes on a station over a black hole. You have to look at everything, learn a new number system, and figure out some alphanumeric codes.
As a mathematician, this was pretty fun. As an IF player, I appreciated how much work went into this. Great game.
A cute speed IF about a star leaping to the earth, February 13, 2016This is an exceptionally polished release of a speed IF, with brief story about a star on the moon who is ready to leap to the earth.
The writing is descriptive, and the settings are creative. I had some trouble actually leaping due to not reading the description, but the help menu is quite clever and just as fun as the actual game.
A window into a complex fantasy world of Djinn, February 13, 2016In this short game, you play as three separate djinn, magical creatures who have various powers. Each one usually deals with characters with flaws (a separate flaw for each djinni) that prevents them from being happy. But the masters in this game is different.
The puzzles in this game are clever, but it is really unpolished. There is a mysterious counter in the status line that takes some time to figure out, you are given only a few hints on what commands to do or what is possible, and even movement and inventory behave differently).
Reading the beginning of the walkthrough is immensely helpful.
God for fans of setting and story who don't mind some fussy commands.
A cute little art piece about catching a rabbit, February 13, 2016In this charming little gem from the IF art show, you play an amateur farmer trying to keep a rabbit out of his garden by catching it. As is usual for the art show, the focus is on the experience more than puzzles, so you have tons of items that are well-implemented (a ladder, a tractor, a chainsaw, a net, carrots, etc.) and can use them in creative ways.
The writing is cute, and much of the subtext is about your feelings about the rabbit.
It was based on a true story. I was impatient, so I looked up the ending, but winning isn't really the point; the point is your experience.
One room extra puzzly game with Halo-like plot, February 13, 2016The Weapon is an excellent, polished puzzler. You are handcuffed and take in to understand a piece of technology left by an ancient space-faring race. You have your own agenda, though.
There is a well-loved NPC keeping an eye on you. This makes the puzzles that much harder. But they aren't impossible. You basically have to distract her while deciphering the code.
Overall, strongly recommended.
A short surreal loop with no save, restore, or undo, February 13, 2016The City has some great descriptive writing, but suffers from a few problems.
You wake up with amnesia in a mostly empty area and follow a surreal plot with a What Happened? ending. This has been done in shows like The Island, in short stories, and many times in interactive fiction (although this is an early example). The City doesn't bring much new to the table plot wise.
The game is short enough that the author felt justified in disabling save, restart, undo. This had an interesting effect on the atmosphere.
The puzzles were highly unclued with some guess the verb problems.
This may sound like a negative review, but the descriptive writing was a joy.
Open-ended paranormal investigation game, February 11, 2016Transparent is a full IFComp-sized game (about 2 hours) set in an abandoned mansion. This game eschews the traditional linear format most common for horror games and adopts a 'slow-burn' instead. This didn't mesh well with the hectic format of IFComp, which may have caused it to be overlooked.
In this game, you are a photographer as part of a film crew investigating a location that is rumored to be haunted. You are provided with a map (as an in-game graphic and as a feel). You make it to the mansion, but the film crew is nowhere to be seen.
As you go about the mansion, various things happen. You have a camera you can wear around your neck, and you photograph everything. Sometimes the pictures don't turn out the way they should.
Eventually, the power goes out, but you can still see by using your flash. This often does not reveal what you want it to.
You can make your own goals in this game, and there are endings for most reasonable goals. I achieved one good ending and one bad ending, and I found the bad ending to be very appropriate, so I didn't try to fix it.
There are sounds, but my interpreter did not support them.
Finally, many , many people complained about the inventory limit, but there is nothing you need to carry for 90% of the game. Don't carry notes, leaflets, and memos, and drop keys if you're done with them (I recommend holding onto the property key).
Recommended for fans of the creepy.
Similar to first Frenetic Five game, with superpowers in tedious situations, February 11, 2016This game is similar to the first Frenetic Five game. In both games, you have to complete a sequence of tedious tasks using super powers. You are improv man, who uses random items in random ways; there is Clapper, who can find nearby objects by clapping (good for clues); Lexicon, who can find new words (and new commands for you to use); newsboy, who can telepathically read the news and other printed sources; and pastiche, who can do whatever the situation demands (including phasing through material).
Like the last game, the puzzles suffer from having to guess exactly the real thing to do. Out of 20 possible solutions, only 2 or 3 will be implemented. For instance, to (Spoiler - click to show)get a quarter, why can't pastiche help grab one out of someone's purse?.
This game was nominated for Best NPC's and Best Individual Puzzle in the XYZZY Awards.
A romance game based on Tartans and adverbs, February 11, 2016I put off this review for months because I hoped to find the solution to the game. But, I cant, so here goes. You play a Scottish man who is trying to stop the wedding of his love.
It has two interesting mechanics. First, you change Tartans to change how others perceive you. Second, you modify actions with adverbs.
In practice, this is very difficult. The number of possible adverbs is staggering, and there is no IF tradition to rely on. Even though the game is short, it's hard to find the solution.
Overall, an intriguing experiment.
A cold fairy tale and story of identity, February 11, 2016I found this game to be haunting, especially on the second playthrough months later. You are a young woman who experiences strange jumps, or transilience. You travel between world's when you sleep, and it leaves you disoriented and frightened.
Both worlds deal with unwanted sexual advances or effects, although there is no graphic content. In one world, you are sleeping beauty, and in the other, you are mysteriously pregnant.
Short and well crafted, and recommended.
A long twine game about gaming culture with pacing issues , February 11, 2016Michael Lutz is one of the best Twine authors, with My Father's Long Long Legs and The Uncle that works for Nintendo. This game shares the excellent visual effects and tight writing of the original.
You play a character in an FPS, with a joystick simulate by "press A", and so on. You can play through a scenario multiple times, then enter a bizarre multiplayer game. Eventually, you enter a completely new scenario involving the bloodlord, whom you confront.
All of this gets supremely tedious; the repetition at the beginning, the final battle with pages and pages of texts, the slowly animated denouement. I lost interest multiple times, but played through out of curiosity. It makes some good points about gaming culture, though.
Contains strong profanity.
A short game about identity fear , February 11, 2016This game is about a man with a 'twin', a doppelganger named Patrick. The game is short and straightforward, so I won't say too much about the plot.
The game has graphics drawn from day to day scenes such as conferences and streets, but faces and eyes aren't really seen.
To me, the game was much more effective on later replays, when I had time to think about it. I especially was struck on my most recent playthrough with the 'digression'.
Recommended.
A short Lovecraftian revenant game, February 10, 2016In this game, you wake in a grave near a church, and you have to explore it to discover what is going on.
The setting is Lovecraftian, and there are only a few interesting locations. The writing is not bad, and there seem to be no bugs, but some of the puzzles require extremely obscure commands (I'm looking at you, trapdoor).
Overall, not bad, but not incredible.
An allegorical alt game about lesbian and/or trans, February 10, 2016This twine game has an oddly kinetic interaction; you carry a gun, which you can use to shoot things (with sound) or to flip it from holster to holster with a button that changes sides.
The game is fairly short; you are a city girl trying to be an impressive cowgirl, but you find another woman whom you have romantic relationship with.
The games text is about a Lesbian relationship, but the pistol could signify a transwoman.
A short coding exercise about a lighthouse, February 10, 2016This is a game I played last year. You have 3 doors, 4 rooms, two keys, a container, and a button. Nothing is hidden, there are some typos, and the authors manually insert the winning text into the game without actually ending the game.
As a historical curiosity, this, along with Detective, is one of the best known games with minimal coding due to its entry in IFComp, among other reasons.
A hunt the pixel game transformed into counting, February 10, 2016In this game, there are 69,105 keys, only one of which will open the door. The key you need is the only unique key.
There are many categories of keys, and you can count each category. The number 69105 is I believe a riff off of Zork I.
As a mathematician, I hoped that the puzzle would involve some kind of bizarre combinatorial computation; instead, it's mostly just trying every category until you find a pattern.
A room with multiple messages about how dark it is., February 10, 2016The last of the Rybread Celsius games I played. This is pretty much nothing; one room with all exits leading to itself, with some random messages about how dark it is and a help menu with mostly blank entries.
What more can you say?
A super short Rybread Celsius game about body image, February 10, 2016This is an unfinished Rybread Celsius game about body image. More than other Celsius games, there are bugs, entrances not matching with exits, u implemented items, quirky syntax.
At least this one has a message, about body image. It wasn't that bad of a message; as I said in another review, this author would fit in well with some of the absurdist Twine authors.
The shortest Rybread Celsius game. Short and dreamlike, February 10, 2016Rybread Celsius was just ahead of his time; he would have fit in well with B Minus Seven, paperblurt, or especially Soda51. His game are nonsensical, poorly spelled, and badly implemented, but somehow occasionally sublime.
Here is a writing sample from this game:
"The ceiling takes the brunt of this cacophony, letting only the occasional squealing triode echo back towards the floor only to be squelched by its own impenetrable membrane."
This game has four locations and no way to end it, as far as anyone has found. His last game.
A pastiche of horror tropes with bad writing and implementation , February 10, 2016This is a Rybread Celsius game, which means a bunch of poorly written nonsense that may or may not be intentional.
This one was actually fun, though it it impossible without the walkthrough and still challenging with it.
You go through a pastiche of every horror movie ever: Saw, Alien, Psycho, Are You Afraid of the Dark, etc. You do traditional adventure things. Here is a quote:
>i
You are carrying: your tummy
>feel tummy
You feel your stomach. The flesh seems to eat your fingers as they dive in. Can something be happening already?
[Your score has just gone up by five points.]
IF you like one Rybread game, you will like them all.
The original Rybread Celsius, February 9, 2016This game can be best described with a quote: "As the water attempts its cruel defication of your body, it meats its enemy." Rybread Celsius is infamous for games with bad grammar, bad implementation, and small, confusing maps.
But some of it seems to be intentional. This game is about a magical town where everyone can glow. But you don't know this unless you read the walkthrough, which contains a lot of necessary background information. The game has randok, unnecessary items like a mirror that shows your bones.
If you like purposely bad games, here you go.
A Rybread Celsius game about a mirror being, February 9, 2016Rybread Celsius is an infamous author from the late 90s. His games were characterized by bad plotlines, poor spelling, and lame implementation. There is evidence that it was at least partially tongue in cheek.
This game tells you you are in the dark before you turn off the lamp. You Ellettsville in bed, and it tells you you are in bed, then you get in bed. The puzzles solution is a huge guess the verb problem. The story is disjointed; you read a letter, and face a mirror being.
One of the earliest horror games. Vampire horror, nonlinear., February 9, 2016This game was the earliest big horror hit after the Lurking Horror. It was made by Adventions, who were the most influential group between the end of Infocom and the rise of Inform.
Rylvania is one of their better games, with The Legend Lives!, because it eschews the horrible puns and bad humor of earlier games (except for one item which is an ad for Unnkulia 0). However, it is still all over the map with tone.
It has some of the feel of Bram Smoker's original Dracula, with a trip through Europe, wolves, a fearful village, an abandoned castle, the torment of a loved one.
Like all Adventions games, it is a bit unfair or tedious at times, but overall not bad for fans of old school games.
It has some gratuitous violence at some points which made the PCs characterization hard to figure out.
An amusing conversation with a past self about 2014 IFComp , February 9, 2016This game is a Twine review of all the 2014 IFComp games, portrayed as a conversation with the author's 2004 self. The old self is surprised to hear about Twine, Inform 7, Dr Who, etc.
It's all fairly amusing, but it also has great value as a snapshot of a changing IF landscape.
There is some strong profanity, but the reviews are generally benign, with some real moments of pathos as they discuss their response to games that touched them.
An in depth review with some technical charm and real thought, February 9, 2016Life on Mars? was an experimental IFCOMP game that included an email system with simulated typing and so on.
This review goes into depth about things good and bad in the game. It presents some criticism of the typing system and shows a proposed alternative. Overall it leaves a favorable impression of both itself and the game it reviews.
A somewhat confusing wordplay game finding hidden letters, February 9, 2016I've rarely been as confused playing a game as I was starting this one. You wander through a house, gathering traditional adventure items (a light source, a key, etc.), but also hidden letters of the alphabet. When you find eachone, you read a letter from around WWII that has no real plot or connection to other letters. I felt frustrated.
Eventually, I began to understood. Each letter is hidden in a weird way. For instance, you might find a railroad crossing sign and take the X in it, or find a line of people and take the queue (Q). There is no real rhyme or reason to the puzzles.
There is also a cryptic crossword, which I love, although it was a little weaker than some cryptic crosswords I've seen.
Overall, a well done but flawed game.
A larger technically brilliant detective game with clever hint system, February 9, 2016This game can be overwhelming at first, with a large map (including a building with almost 300 rooms), an extensive time span (measured in days and hours), and a lack of strong direction. However, approached correctly, this is an enjoyable detective game.
You are paid to exonerate Jessica Kincaid from the charge of running over her husband. You take to the streets, examining items, talking to people, and generally investigating.
There are only about 4 or 5 things you have to do, and each of them are in obvious locations. However, it's hard to know what actions to take. Going to the movie theatre gives you a hint without telling you how to do it.
Even thrn, some things are hard. I thought the way to deal with the cop was disingeneous.
Overall, a solid game, and one of the better mystery games.
Note that part of the game takes place in a strip club.
A short, dark philosophical fantasy game (updated), February 7, 2016I knew what De Baron was like before I tried it, so its my own fault, but this game made me feel bad and uncomfortable. Many people equate this with greatness, which explains why books like The Kiterunner are so popular. But in both this game and the Kiterunner, I feel the author is simply going for shock value.
This game centers around a man in search of his daughter, who is held captive by an evil Baron. In travelling to the baron, you meet a linear succession of creatures and characters, with some exploration required. Everything is vastly symbolic, and includes long, philosophical conversations.
The baron has dark intentions for your daughter, and you yourself have some issues to work out.
I played this game, so I can't tell others not to; but I can say that I think that you can get your fix of philosophy and deepness in better ways.
Note that the author and others have provided an alternative viewpoint in the comments.
A 'dissociative' exploration of gender identity through jumbles, February 7, 2016This game claims to contain "dissociation, dysphoria and disassembled discourse", which is pretty accurate. You play as a character going to a bureau of some sorts to get a new name. You first get to pick how to travel there; once you get there, there are a few different methods of getting in; and once in, you are ambushed by a series of groups of three that you have to deal with, before confronting the narrator (in some endings).
This game is about gender identity (one speaker says they remember you as an active boy, and now you are a beautiful woman). So there are a lot of metaphors about social acceptance, feelings of loss or renewal, predatory friends or judgmental family members.
The level of detail in the purposely scattered writing and the variety of choices giving a feeling of agency really make this game effective at communicating the author's feelings.
The final game in the Unnkulia series. More mature, more difficult, February 6, 2016This game is set many, many years after the other Unnkulia games, when everything has become a legend and space travel is more common.
The ACME company has survived as AKMI, and there is a whole world called Kuhl where Dudhists live, but fortunately most of the dumb humor seems to have died off.
Instead, we have a sci fi world more similar to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game of Leather Goddesses of Phobos. You teleport from location to location based off of RGB values for different colors.
The game has you trying to stop a virus that has been unleashed throughout the internet (or AKnet for AKMEnet).
While this game was much more mature, I also didn't find it especially exciting. This game came right after Curses, before Theatre and Christminster, and the same time as Jigsaw. The time of Adventions was coming to an end before the onslaught of theses z-machine games (TADS would experience a resurgence just a few years later). The game even references this; when you try to play the first two Unnkulia games on a computer, you are told that the z-machine does not support their formats.
A defeat-the-aliens game after a slow start, February 4, 2016This is a bit longer than most IFComp games; I didn't like it at first, but it really grew on me. In this game, you have to sneak onto a spaceship (a tedious opening sequence). Afterwards, you get to space and discover the (strongly telegraphed from the beginning) secret that the aliens are out to get the humans!
The game has some unusually graphic violence for a sci fi romp as you take down 6 aliens using a variety of devices and items scattered around the spaceship.
I had trouble transferring items from one location to another for a while, until I realized that you later gain the capability of returning to some locations (not the initial one, however).
The hints were incomplete, which made this game more difficult than me (as I always use hints). But I still finished it, and enjoyed it.
The best so far of the Unnkulia series; more mature and better-developed, February 4, 2016This game redeemed my opinion of the Unnkulia series. Up to now, they had been juvenile and full of lame humor, especially Unnkulia 1/2 (written as an ad for this game). However, this game seemed to have grown up a little bit more.
The game references all previous games, with locations like Dawg Rock and Dragon's Lair for Unnkulia II and the grate, lake, and some underground areas of Unnkulia I. It also openly (by name) references Colossal Cave Adventure on several occasions, including a dwarf that throws knives at you in a cave and a toll bridge/troll bridge/stoll bridge.
This game is completely overshadowed by Curses! which came out the same year, and which had a coherent, interesting plot and incredible production values.
For fans of the Unnkulia series, this is the best so far (I haven't tried The Legend Lives! yet, which I hear is good).
A minimalist game set in a jail cell, February 4, 2016In this game, you play a prisoner stuck in a jail cell with a minimum of furnishings and things to do. You periodically sleep, and dream, providing more things to do and try. In this sense, it is like a stripped down version of Howling Dogs.
The game is very short, and gives you a sense of claustrophobia. However, everything is resolved too quickly and in too tidy a manner.
I believe this game was entered in a speed comp, and as such, I recommend it for fans of speed comps.
An experiment in making parsers more storylike. Near-future sci fi, February 4, 2016This game focuses on a career involving mood-altering or mood-activated equipment; however, the real story here is a slice-of-stressed-out-life story of a woman, her career, and her love interests.
This game responds with story text no matter what you do, and it's purposely written in a style that can jump back and forth between different topics. This allows the transcript of the game to read as a short story.
It also presents a novel challenge: decipher if your text comes from real commands or the 'floater text' (the name for the text from wrong commands). It helped me a lot to just type important keywords. You'd think UNDO would help you figure out what's real and what's not, but it's cleverly been disabled.
Worth checking out.
(note: I beta tested this game.)
As of now, longest Twine game ever. Part crazy, part deep, February 4, 2016Spy Intrigue is not my type of game. But it is an incredible game, which I have played through twice, and is excellently crafted.
It is a game of layers. It literally has two layers of text, interwoven within each other.
It also has two levels of meaning. The top level is just crazy and silly (you very quickly learn that most spies have died of "spy-mumps"). But there is a much deeper subtext in the game, much like another 2015 IFComp entry TOMBS of Reschette. Both games encourage you to look under the standard shoot-kill-loot structure of normal games and see what existence would really be like for protagonist and enemy.
That's probably the deepest contribution of this game: to show the protagonists humanity. The author has succeeded in a very well-crafted game, which I feel should be nominated for several XYZZY awards. She has done an excellent work here.
As I said, this isn't really my type of game; I'm not into profanity or sex, of which the game has it's fair share. But it's certainly never exploitative, and it all makes sense in the context of the game. I will also always fondly remember (early spoiler)(Spoiler - click to show)"OATMEAL TIME."
A cute Halloween SpeedIF about a tiny Ninja, February 4, 2016This was my favorite game of Ectocomp 2015, a SpeedIF competition where games were written in 2 hours or less. You play a tiny little ninja wandering around a small landscape with big pumpkins and friendly creatures.
The game just has a cute atmosphere. The puzzles are easy, and I solved them within 10 minutes.
Recommended as a good introduction to SpeedIf.
A text-heavy Halloween SpeedIF game about roommates, February 4, 2016This game was entered in EctoComp 2015. It was written in two hours or less. The author is good at writing a lot of text quickly, and so this is quite a large game.
It is written in Choicescript, with many choices per turn, but I believe the story plays out roughly the same whatever you do.
The story is set in Australia, and is a goofy game about a girl who gets a variety of new roommates, one of which has left a bizarre and nasty experiment in the refrigerator.
References a lot of wildlife, like axolotls,kangaroos, maggots, etc.
A speedif on a haunted ship, February 4, 2016In this Ectocomp 2015 game, you have to get out of a haunted ship to make it to freedom.
As a speedIF, it is ambitious, and I enjoyed it. You have to escape a series of locked rooms or gauntlets, and often the wrong choices will kill you.
Like most puzzle SpeedIF, the puzzles are underclued, but the game is small enough to allow you to experiment with it.
Fun for SpeedIF fans.
A short, atmospheric Ectocomp game in a dark office, February 4, 2016This Ectocomp game (which had to be written in two hours) feels like the author ran out of time. It is set in a dark and brooding office of a physiognomist who is not present. It puts off a real abandoned hospital sort of vibe, like Mariel or One Eye Open.
Nothing much happens, though. There is just about one puzzle, and that puzzle is escaping. Once you do, the game is over. There were no NPCs as far as I can tell.
In a normal game, this would be off-putting, but SpeedIF is different. Taking your 2 hours to build a compelling setting is not a bad thing.
An ectocomp game about a cat and their nine lives, February 4, 2016In this shortish parser game, you play a cat in a house with all sort of goofy horrors, anyone of which can destroy you. It turns out that you have nine lives, and need to use them all up.
There are many different ways to go here, from simple deaths to magical and obscure.
This game was intended for the 3 hour comp, but grew and grew, so it was entered in the longer competition.
I found it to be fun for a quick play. Multiple solutions help as well. Good for those looking for a short, humorous game.
A collection of standard parser puzzles in an amusing atmosphere, February 4, 2016This game is centered around two standard parser puzzles: learning a subject from books, and filling cups with different sizes to get a certain amount. These are the entirety of the game.
The atmosphere is amusing; you are visiting an alien ambassador and have to learn their culture and traditions to make a good impression. Part of this includes making food and drink.
I had fun, but then I did use the walkthrough to skip the main puzzle. Fun for fans of alien humor or cups/jugs puzzles.
A beautifully gorgeous text game with excellent combat/magic systems, February 4, 2016These games are an adaptation of a series of gamebooks, i.e. paper CYOA books. They must have been absolutely incredible, because this game is rich in detail and options. The game is played on a large 3d-map which you place a DND miniature-type figure on, moving it around to indicate your choice of route (between 2 or 3 options at a time).
You have stamina, gold, rations, spells, etc. The spells are cast by using up some stamina and selecting 3-letter words out of a cloud of letters. The available words differ quite a bit from situation to situation.
The combat system involves guessing a number at the same time as your opponent, trying to beat them without using up too much of your strength. It ends up being a sort of dance between attack and defend.
There are numerous side quests; the main quest can be finished extremely quickly, while one side quest took up an hour of gameplay by itself.
Highly, highly recommended.
A lightweight game about a library focused on interactive fiction, February 4, 2016This game was entered in the very first IFComp, which was originally intended to provide examples of code for the then-new programming language Inform. It didn't actually work out that way, because few people released code and many TADS games were also entered, but that's how it started.
This game came in 5th of six in the Inform division. It is about a library that you know contains a copy of a biography of Graham Nelson. The library also contains the Infocom games, Christminster, Avalon, Curses!, Balances, and references to interactive fiction servers.
The gameplay is fairly light, just searching and trying basic NPC actions. Many of the points are bonus points for bizarre actions.
A mini game about eating chocolate on the train., February 4, 2016This game came in last place in the very first IFComp, but it's not nearly as bad as later last-place finishers. However, it is rather sparse and unfair. Much of the game is dependent on waiting for 5-10 turns in a row without justification.
Overall, an interesting game for those interested in the history of amateur interactive fiction.
A superhero game based on unusual navigation , February 4, 2016This game was started out of leftover, difficult to code puzzles from another game and grew into something more. You play a flight-capable superhero who must stop an evil villains plot.
You can fly to a variety of altitudes, and many of the puzzles depend on this. The very first puzzle through me for a real loop, as there is a trick to flight that you are supposed to discover on your own, with some hints when you fail.
The storyline is a bit thin, with most of the exciting parts passed over. It really seems like more of a technical exercise that grew a story rather than a story with deep implementation. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Overall, recommended for superhero fans.
A minimalist surreal horror/dread game, February 4, 2016This game is almost like westernized Haiku, with short, clipped, uncapitalized sentences, usually of two or three words.
It is minimalistic, with perhaps less than 50 words in the entire game, two rooms, etc.
It is essentially puzzleless, but I was stuck a bit at the very end. But with so many objects, it's easy to try.
The game attempts to be one of deep/shocking/horrifying at random, and somewhat succeeds.
A fascinating look at a day in the life of a simple factory worker, February 4, 2016In this game, you pay a young worker who has to go through their daily life. You wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, work, and that's more than half the game.
The fun is what happens along the way; your character has a unique perspective on life, interspersing the conversation with famous quotations, generally trying to find consistency in their life.
Overarching the game's sense of routine and mundanity is a more sinister plot. Someone is making large changes in your life and in your routine.
This game won an XYZZY award for best individual PC without being nominated for any other awards, which is rare in the XYZZY's.
A small absurdity from the first IFComp, February 4, 2016This is a brief, 5 room game with purposely minimal implementation.You find things like pits of binary numbers, syntax errors, and self referential rooms.
The puzzles are ridiculous, but there's so few items, you can just try everything. The solution to the main puzzle is based off a joke that the author used to tell to their friend.
Many people like this game, including me, because it's absurd and silly but has logical puzzles.
A somewhat long Twine game about a chancellor and a duke, February 4, 2016This game is one of the most well-regarded Twine games available, as demonstrated by its listing on the IFDB Top 100 as of 2016.
In this game, you play as a chancellor of a university, brother to a Duke. The setting is not historical England, though there are similarities.
The game is serious, and focuses on your relationship with your brother. You remember your past, learn about his present activities, and make choices about your future.
It's very interesting as a study in relationships, and also as a medieval-esque game.
A mid-length parser game drawing on graduate mathematics, February 4, 2016In this game, you play a young person who wants to be friends with the town's cool kid and his friends. However, to play his game, you need dice. Five dice. As you go on a search for them, things begin to get weird.
This game incorporates a number of concepts in geometry and topology, such as the Klein bottle (a surface with no inside or outside, which also was featured in Trinity); platonic solids (the five solid shapes which are as symmetric as possible); duality (where vertices and faces of a shape are swapped); Hamiltonian circuits (where you walk through every vertex of a graph without repetition); connected sums (which amounts to wormholes in physics); and a few other references such as the equations for quaternions.
A lot of this amounts to an extended in-joke, but otherwise the game is fairly well put-together. I feel that it would have benefited from some more explanations, such as an in-game textbook.
A game in third person and first person; rally the order of beet mongers, February 4, 2016In this game, you play as an archaeologist through the eyes of their assistant, Aubrey. In the course of the game, you discover a journal, sending you to a first-person flashback, where you play the leader of the secret order of beet mongers.
The game is wacky and fun. The beginning somehow reminded me of Michael Robert's Ditch Day Drifter opening, which is one of my favorites.
The beet monger part has two paths: war and peace. The war part was relatively easy, and I played to both of its endings. The peace ending seemed more difficult.
Overall, recommended for fans of dry, quirky humor.
An experiment in item descriptions, and a heist game, February 4, 2016In this mid-length game, you are about to be kicked out of the Thieve's Guild (in a modern town), and have to do one last big heist to impress them and not be kicked out.
The big concept of this game is that the author is sick of boring, unmotivated "That is not important" messages when examining items, so he has included flowery, motivated "That is not important messages". As a professional thief, you automatically know when an item, person, or room is unimportant to you.
Sometimes this is deceptive, as an unimportant thing may conceal an important thing.
This is a hard game, but I finished it without hints or walkthrough, because the versions I played had none (even the original competition version; I wonder if it had time-enabled hints). I had a vague hint from reading if comp reviews of the game on how to solve the soccer puzzle.
The English is a little iffy in places, but otherwise not bad.
Good for fans of heist games.
A confusing futuristic game about... I'm not sure, February 4, 2016In this game, you play a young photographer during acts of terrorism on a campus. Crime is rampant, and people across the world are moving underground.
You have been receiving messages telling you to do various things. As you carry them out, you get closer to finding your way to your family and/or safety.
The game has an odd hook, which is that it's written in first person with all scenery objects included in two lists: "Good" and "bad".
Overall, the story is interesting and fun but didn't make sense to me yet. I'm interested to read other reviews and see what other people thought.
Learn LISP by playing a game, February 4, 2016In this game, you have a manual, a computer, and a genie. The genie gives you a programming task in LISP, which you must then try to complete. The genie then tests your code, and gives you feedback.
I enjoyed the game, getting up to the SUM command before quitting.
A good game for those interested in learning a computer programming language.
A delightful early 1900s game with some surprises up its sleeves, February 4, 2016This game surprised me with its emotional effect, because it has a slow burn opening. You are a huge fan of theatre actress Mirada Lily, and have come on the opening night of her big show to give her a rose.
This game is relatively short and easy. I wasn't sure what to do with one item, but you just use everything.
Your main goal is to get into the theatre, as you are not dressed well enough to be allowed in.
Strongly recommended.
A game about authors responsibility for their creations, February 4, 2016This is a pretty long IfComp game about an author who is sucked into the world of a manuscript which he has attempted to destroy.
The puzzles aren't too bad; the worst is skippable. There are some color coded key puzzles, but you are told in the notes that they are a parody of other adventure games.
Overall, I enjoyed the first few chapters, but it stretched thin by the ending.
Mildly recommended
A story-heavy short conversation/romance fantasy game, February 4, 2016In this game, you play a knight who has defeated a powerful evil. You are attending a boring party, hoping to see the love of your life there.
The world is one of magic and mystery and intrigue. Many have commented on the powerful draw of the story, and I felt it too. You have scars and a history.
The game primarily depends on ask/tell. I won mostly by asking people about other people's names, plus a few topics that came up in conversation.
The game lasted about 15-20 minutes.
A WWII officer comes into a household full of secrets, February 4, 2016In this game, you are stuck in the rain when your car breaks down and come into a strange household where everyone is carrying a secret.
You explore the house while trying to patch together the truth on your own. Some puzzles are much easier if you remember what everyone is doing.
The gimmick of this game is that you can select past or present tense x and first, second, or third person. It didn't make much of a difference to me.
Overall, a nice game. Recommended.
A tightly timed ghost story in a mansion, February 4, 2016In this game from the second IFcomp, you play a sword wielding Britainer in the time of Cromwell, investigating a haunted house.
The house is haunted by the maiden of the moonlight, daughter of a witchcraft using Baron.
You have to discover their story and put her to rest. The focus on the puzzles is sources of moonlight, which you must deal with in increasingly complicated ways.
The game has a timer.
A small one puzzle game set in heaven, February 4, 2016In this game, you are an angel bored to death with heaven you can move through three different rooms, which are well described, waiting for something to happen.
When something does happen, you don't have long to act. You only have a couple of turns before losing your chance forever.
I found this game to be less substantial than the other entries in the Jay is games casual gameplay competition, but with excellent writing and a good setting.
A challenging and intricate old-school sci-fi game. , February 4, 2016This game draws a lot of inspiration from planetfall. You wake up from cryogenic storage to save your ship with a wisecracking robot companion. By accessing computer systems and elevators, you try to figure out how disaster struck.
I played for about 10 minutes without the walkthrough, but a power countdown was stressful, leaving (it seemed) little room for error.
It wasn't bad, but I had some issues with guessing verbs and the aforementioned timer.
A mid-sized puzzlefest in a mall at Christmas, February 4, 2016This game is a classic-style puzzle adventure strung together into a thin plot. Your keys are stolen in a cheesy Christmas area at a mall, and you have to get it back by operating a series of complicated machines.
This game hits up a lot of the classic puzzle types. Light source puzzle, complicated lock and key, disassembling and reassembling items, removing obstructing NPCs, trial and error puzzles, etc.
The puzzles are mildly difficult for a puzzlefest and the game is not too long. A compass rose aids navigation and the writing spruces up the whole affair.
Basically, if you like Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, you'll like this, it's younger, smaller cousin.
A chess simulation; not much else, but well-done, February 4, 2016In this game, you awake a genie who can tell you about chess, its history and rules. You then play chess, with a graphic display.
That's pretty much it. I didn't finish a game; the computer seems to use some kind of machine learning algorithm (with a bunch of nodes mentioned).
I'd like to come back to this at some point. It belongs to the same class as Textfire Golf and Lists and Lists, a category separate from most IF, but still interesting.
A large, linear worklife/conspiracy game , February 4, 2016Above and Beyond is a pretty large and well-polished game. You play a programmer on their first day of work; the first third consists of getting into work after losing your card, the second third consists of getting a form signed by jumping through exhausting hoops, and the third is an endgame dealing with a conspiracy.
The feel is a mixture of spy stuff and extreme tedium of work. The walkthrough is 600 moves or so.
I was pretty impressed with this game. It's linear and hard, but it's fun walking through a dozen rooms with 2-4 offices each and meet all of the workers.
A mid-length series of puzzles showcasing classic IF puzzle types, February 4, 2016In this game, you go through a series of 7 rooms, each of which require you to complete a classic IF puzzle style. Rooms include a light source puzzle, a puzzleless puzzle, an NPC, and so on.
I found it to be hit or miss. I enjoyed the puzzles overall, though. I did use all of the hints, but the walkthrough was disabled, and so it was fun to try and make the intuitive leaps.
And the leaps are fun. I really recommend this for puzzle fans.
Somewhat buggy Lovecraftian game with truly strange geometries, February 4, 2016This is one of the more unusual interactive fiction games out there. The story at first is generally Lovecraftian; horrors from beyond, a dark, mostly deserted old town, madness, etc.
You play a newspaper reporter who lives in a town on the edge of civilization. You are investigating a number of disappearances. Things get weird.
I had some trouble even getting out of the first room, but after that, things sped up. You spend a lot of time wandering around the smallish map, trying to see what happens next.
The game is definitely unpolished. For instance, opening a certain box said that "you see Filled_Right". There are typos and other issues.
Overall, the story is fun. There is a mind-blowing twist in the middle of the game that really took me by surprise, making this game worthwhile to play for that reason alone.
A short, hard one-room game on a spaceship with goofy theme, February 4, 2016This game (which is a play-die-repeat game) is the combination of three themes that were suggested to the author (mild spoilers):(Spoiler - click to show)zombie pirates in space.
You are in a single enclosed room in a space station with a variety of buttons that control video (including recording and playback), temperature, self-destruct, and so on.
Each playthrough is short, but it will take a lot of work to get it right.
The game is funny and enjoyable.
On a side note, I always thought the cover art was a hunched monster with its head on backwards, but I think it's actually a brain-like monster on an asteroid.
A short yes/no CYOA that is more than it seems, February 4, 2016I swear I remember playing this game from years back, but I only finished it in 2015.
It was originally in adrift, but now in Choicescript. You are a young man (?) offered a cursed ascot, and embroiled in a quest to find a hidden treasure. This sounds like a big game, but there are less than 15 choices in a typical playthrough. The only options are yes/no (and, in choicescript, ?).
It turns out, on multiple playthroughs, that there is more to the game than it seems, making many people rate this game highly.
A resource management puzzle in space, February 4, 2016This game was intimidating before I played it, but I was able to complete it to 3-4 endings before going to the walkthrough for the best ending.
You are in a jeffries tube in a ship that had an explosion. Your job is to get systems working and then transfer oxygen to various parts of the ship, deciding who should get what.
The game has an in-game reference manual that is helpful on several occasions. There is also an NPC whom you can converse with after some work (as the ABOUT section of the game hints).
I've had an opinion recently that hard puzzles aren't as fun as puzzles that make you feel smart. Even though I didn't get the best ending on my own, getting any ending at all made me feel smart. I recommend the game for that reason.
Fun, shortish German game about stopping a rascally child., February 4, 2016This is the first IF game I've played in another language, and it was actually very enjoyable. I had to dust off my german and use google translate to get most of the commands (I didn't know 'look under', 'turn on the lights', 'extinguish' etc.) I got one hint from ifwizz.de
The game is set in a 6-room apartment. The girl you're interested in has to leave for 30 minutes, and has asked you to watch her 4-year old Kai. Unfortunately, as soon as she leaves, Kai steals your lighter and sets fire to a trashcan!
No matter what you do, Tanja comes home after a half hour, and she talks it out with you. The talks range from very bad to very good. Fortunately, the talks give you hints on replay.
As indicated on ifwizz.de, there is a bit of 'guess the noun' going on here. Occasionally, if you are looking for something, you have to use the exactly correct adjective-noun combination.
I'm grateful to have tried IF in a new language, and I recommend this game. Maybe the authors should translate it for next years IFComp.
A deeply rewarding, but long and perhaps unfair, mythological game, February 4, 2016Asgard is a game that I deeply enjoyed. The first part is not like the rest of the game; you play a deeply ticked-off repairman that has to fix a hole in a roof. This is an odd segment; there are dozens of items, a mood counter, and some small puzzles. But it turns out that you don't need to worry too much, you don't have to get everything right... yet.
But as the game suggests, you pass on to an afterlife that is a blend of Norse, Greek, and Judeochristian mythology. You have access to several areas, and an opportunity to revisit them on multiple occasions to get them right.
I had fun with this, getting 2 of the areas right on my own. After checking the walkthrough, I made it to another area with 8 subareas. By then, though, I was stuck using the walkthrough.
Overall, this game is pretty hard, and the best part is stuck after a less interesting intro. But I just loved it.
A small chunk of game, part of the infamous 4-game Hat Puzzle, February 4, 2016Together with Cold Iron, Playing Games, and The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M, this game was part of a meta-puzzle in IFComp 2011. The idea was that four games would have connections, and by pursuing clues in one, you could open more in the other games.
Last Day of Summer is probably the slightest of the games, finishable in just a few minutes. You have to sell you cranberries, so you go to town. You wander through 5 or 6 scenes, examine stuff, take stuff, etc. It's hard to guess the right verb some times.
The ambiance is charming. Playing all 4 games at once really blends well together (except for Life and Death).
A game with a few mini-maze puzzles. Part of the infamous hat puzzle, February 4, 2016Together with Cold Iron, Last Day of Summer, and The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M, this game was part of a meta-puzzle in IFComp 2011. The idea was that four games would have connections, and by pursuing clues in one, you could open more in the other games.
This game was shorter than Doctor M, but more well-developed than the other two. You play 3 minigames where you have to move stones about a maze. It's a fun use of z-machine displays. There is an option to bypass the puzzles, intended for screen readers, but they form the bulk of the display.
Plotkin's contribution to the Hat Meta-Puzzle. A charming walk in the woods, February 4, 2016Together with Last Day of Summer, Playing Games, and The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M, this game was part of a meta-puzzle in IFComp 2011. The idea was that four games would have connections, and by pursuing clues in one, you could open more in the other games.
Cold Iron is Plotkin's contribution, and he has said that he rushed to get the smallest Plotkin game possible. It's charming; you are a bumpkin searching for an axe. By recalling stories, you progress through the game.
I felt like this game contained more of the hat puzzle than the other 3 games. Also, I didn't really understand what happened in the plot.
Playing all 4 games together is great. Doctor M is more independent and large, a real good game by itself. The other 3 are great en ensemble.
A brief superhero origin with much optional material, February 4, 2016This Adrift game is a brief prelude to a much larger proposed work by David Whyld called Scarlet. It shows how a woman named Suzy obtains her superpowers.
It is a small game. There are 5 locations, and I found 2 NPCs and 2 items.
This game was nominated for an XYZZY for Best Individual Puzzle for 'putting out the fire'.
The game has pretty typical writing for Adrift. Similar to the PK Girl (by a different author), the female lead is described in a kind of anime/pedestal way; for instance, it says:
". You’re small for your age (“short” as your father would so
eloquently put it) but pretty in an elfin sort of way (so you like to think) and you have perfect,
sparkling blue eyes (again, in your opinion). You keep your hair (light blonde) at shoulder
length, having neither the willpower to let it grow any longer (and look like a bimbo) or the
nerve to cut it short (and look like you’re one of those horribly professional business women)."
Overall, it was a fun, short exercise. I beat it with only 9/22 points, so there may be more I didn't see.
A short-to-mid-length zombie game with zombie violence, February 4, 2016This game is a bit like a mix of Walking Dead and My Boyfriend's Back. You play a zombie who is trying to help stop their headache; this can only be stopped by eating more brains.
The game has only a few puzzles, but they can be difficult to get right, especially just getting out of the door at the beginning.
Your body parts can fall off, remain animated, move around, etc. The game gets somewhat gruesome; there was at least one part that made my stomach sink.
Overall, an interesting game. Only recommended for fans of the zombie genre.
A German horror game with great promise that feels cut short, February 4, 2016This game was written to showcase the German extension of Inform 7. You play someone who wakes up with scanty memories and some wounds in a dark and deserted castle/hospital, in the care of a nurse named Mariel.
The game demonstrates a lot of Inform's capabilities: scripted scenes, openable containers, movable objects, alterable exits, consumable objects, hidable objects, conversation, locks and keys, books, and so on.
The atmosphere really worked for me. A large, dirty, empty castle/cathedral converted into a hospital, the combination of freedom and restriction under Mariel, etc. But the game felt like it just suddenly cut off at the end, with no real resolution. This makes the game more like a toy demonstration, like Graham Nelson's Balances or Michael Robert's Ditch Day Drifter.
Overall, though, I enjoyed this game. Recommended for horror fans.
A somewhat uneven detective-type game about a magician, February 4, 2016In this game, you play a graduate student who does investigative work with their supervisor, Dr. Todd. Dr. Todd accompanies you, and was nominated for an XYZZY award for Best Individual NPC.
The idea is that you are investigating a magician who's staying at a hotel, and you want to determine if they are legitimate or fake. You have to solve a series of puzzles to do so, such as breaking in, collecting evidence, etc.
The story is a bit odd; an old knitting lady is a bodyguard, a random child seems to have snuck into the magicians apartment (neither of these have anything to do with the rest of the story).
Overall, not strongly recommended.
One-room joke game about the troll in Zork, February 4, 2016In this short game, you play the troll in Zork. You wait around for adventurers, and deal with them as they come.
The PC is well implemented, and the game was nominated for an XYZZY award for best individual pc.
The about text changes each time you read it, which is amusing.
Recommended as a small treat for Infocom fans.
A third person game about effects of guns. huge world with little content, February 4, 2016This game was nominated for an xyzzy award for best individual pc. It is a vast world, a city with 8-10 locations, each with a night or day mode, each with 2-4 sublocations, each with a couple of rooms.
The story and puzzles are hidden away in this vast expanze, with only 4 or 5 things to do in the game.
You are sarah winschester, representing gun manufacturers. You confront and stop the horror of gun violence. I didn't finish the last puzzle because I got frustrated.
The game is all in third person, and abbreviations are disabled.
A resource management/optimization game about an orphanage, February 4, 2016Resource management games aren't super common in IF (Suspended and the Geisha part of When Help Collides come to mind). In this game, you have to manage 30 orphans over several weeks. You can buy equipment for them, assign them various tasks, discipline them, clean them, etc.
The goal is to have a lot of money and to have your kids do well in society. I ended up having 28 of them run away, even though I never disciplined and gave the best food.
As a resource management game, it's very enjoyable. Recommended for fans of sim-type games.
A physical representation of the internet and associated devices, February 4, 2016In this game, you are a computer, and you explore a physical representation of the internet and computer programs. Search engines are obelisks, the blogosphere is a bunch of balloonists, and so on.
Your goal is to keep your master from going on a date with someone of the wrong gender or sexual orientation. You have to access their phone, their work, and more to achieve this goal.
The game allows for some customization at first, because you also are a character in an MMORPG.
There are 3 endings, each better than the last.
Recommended for those interested in a physical representation of technology.
A sad allegory based on Alice in Wonderland, February 4, 2016In this game, you play Alistair Lidell, a father who is going to a fair with his wife. Things are not good in the Lidell family.
You enter a surreal world based on Alice in Wonderland and on your own life. You experience a variety of events that have tragic connections to real life. Also, you have a paper that you carry around, and you are supposed to write some words on it, but it's hard to know what to write.
Overall, good writing, but the hinting is off.
Linear, long comedy game about old time chivalry, automobiles, and fun, February 4, 2016Fine-tuned is a well-polished and lengthy comedy game, in which you play two characters. The first is a strong but dim motorist, possessing an early automobile. The second is a young opera star with perfect pitch.
The game opens with a few cheerful, comedic scenes that are largely led by the hand in an entertaining way. Then the game opens up into a more free, more linear area.
I used the walkthrough by this point, and stuck with it. It seems like some parts would be quite hard to guess on your own.
This game is very well put-together and enjoyable. Recommended.
A very short, charming story of a rogue kisser, February 4, 2016You play a young man in costume who goes about a ball stealing kisses from young women.
This game was part of SmoochieComp, which I've seen a lot from recently. It was a veil tines day themed comp.
The game tells you what to do for each next step, but gives you some freedom. The setting is in the olden days, probably a ball.
The game has a twist at the end, which made me feel a bit better about the premise. Going about kissing girls against their will is unpleasant. But the ending makes it more charming.
Recommended.
A short Ectocomp game with text graphics and one big puzzle, February 4, 2016Andrew Schultz is known for his wordplay games, and has managed to make quite a good SpeedIF game puzzle here. Watch out for Full Nelson and Half Nelson as they chase you for your candy!
The game centers on a large graphical display representing various words. The goal of the puzzle is to figure out how to defeat your enemies based on information you gain in the chase.
It's just one puzzle, but it's a pretty good one. Recommended for puzzle fans.
A speedIF about a mummy in modern life, February 4, 2016This is a well-put together Speed IF about a mummy waking up in a modern laboratory after centuries of slumber. With your mummified cat friend, you need to pull a Wizard of Oz and get a heart, a brain, a stomach, etc.
The game is fairly descriptive for a speed-IF, but the puzzles are undervalued, most likely due to time constraints (it was written in 2 hours!).
The ending has a twist that introduces a very different tone into the piece that some found effective and some found off-putting.
Recommended for Speed-IF fans.
A surreal Halloween SpeedIF about nesting and reality, February 4, 2016This game was entered in EctoComp 2015, the annual Halloween Speed IF, where it took first place.
The game is class Chandler Groover; a constrained set of interactions, non-standard parser directions, and a style that is rich like Devil's food cake.
The story is fairly gory, but in a surreal way. It is surreal and allegorical; Groover likes readers to develop their own interpretations, and their are many you can make here. The game is linear, running from start to end, with many surprises.
A martial arts game with occasional chinese characters, February 4, 2016This game was nominated for an XYZZY for Best Setting. In it, you play an individual who is seeking enlightenment, and for a path between strength and wisdom.
The game map is relatively small, with descriptions reminiscent of The Moonlit Tower. The puzzles are fairly standard fair; a lot of searching will generally be rewarded, and a combat lesson tells you how to win battles.
Most of the game is about quiet contemplation, and the game is related to some legends about the development of TaiChi.
A polished choice script game about WWII in the pacific theatre, February 4, 2016In this game, you play the leader of a platoon of Marines during WWII. In the pacific theatre, you are commanded to attack the island of Espirtu Santu, and you must decide how to do so.
The game focuses on both strategy and tactics. What weapon do you pick? Do you ambush or charge in? When do you stop? When do you go?
I played through to one ending, trying to play conservatively to reduce losses.
I felt this was an effective Choicescript game. It seems to be well-researched.
Recommended for Choicescript fans and military history buffs.
An easy, fascinating ride-on-the-rails sci fi followed by really hard flight sim, February 4, 2016Star City has a nice, evocative beginning. It's no wonder it was nominated for an XYZZY for Best Setting. You end up exploring a vast, cylindrical space station, like a simplified version of the Starcross spaceship. Its origins and your means of getting there are highly, intensely original and fun.
The gameplay is a bit uneven, and the scoring as well. Some events are worth 5 points; one is worth 50; and you reach 100 before the hardest part of the game!
That hard part is a flight simulator. It requires some guesswork, some examination, and some knowledge of how airplanes work. Surprisingly difficult, given the rest of the game,
It might be worth it more to play just up until the simulator, then use the walkthrough.
A pretty small game set in a campus computer center at night, February 4, 2016This game was one of the first games ever nominated for a Best Setting XYZZY. It's set in a charming campus building used as a computer center. There are three floors, with interesting things on each floor.
The puzzles, writing, and storyline are not super compelling, but their are a variety of charming touches that add to the game. The two significant NPCs are unexpected and cute. There are a variety of extra features that add to the game.
Overall, a very short game with a charming setting.
A mid-length humorous dinner date with a series of disasters, February 4, 2016This mid-length parser game is the humorous story of a young woman on a date that gets worse and worse. You have to use quick thinking and a bit of slyness to get past overpriced food and clumsy waiters.
The writing is memorable and funny. The puzzles are a bit underclued, though, and many reviewers (including me) turned to the copious hints.
There are two or three puzzles in quick succession, followed by one big, mega puzzle involving a collection of obstructing waiters.
Overall, fun with hints.
A lengthy, well-polished Enchanter-like game with magical music, February 4, 2016Augmented Fourth is one of those games that everyone hopes for, a longish, well-implemented parser game with great writing and fun puzzles.
You play a court musician cast into a pit. After a couple of linear puzzles, you're brought into a large underground town where you have to complete a sequence of unlikely tasks.
You learn to play a variety of magical musical song spells. These affect the environment around you.
The game is fun, amusing, but also hard. Many logical ideas don't work, and some illogical ideas are needed to complete the game. However, this is normal for oldschool games, and Augmented Fourth is something of a homage to oldschool games.
I recommend it for fans of Infocom games, which is quite a few people. It really brings that same feel.
Wonderful D&D feel; same game with 5 choices for NPC, February 4, 2016This is one of my favorites. You play as one of four characters who stole a gem from a dragon, and then lost it. You want to get it back. You can also be the dragon.
There is the adventurer, who plays as a Zork-type PC, gathering items and chatting with guards; the thief, who remains hidden and has special tools; the wizard, who can use spells; and the royal, who can command everyone and has an entourage. The dragon does, you know, dragon things.
The game is hard, but you can switch between characters at any time, and one character can see things that will help another.
Location and object descriptions are different with each character, giving the game a really varied feel.
By far, this game is the closest to a straight-up D&D type setting, which I love.
A narration of The Tempest, with some mild interactivity, February 4, 2016This is a text adventure version of The Tempest. This is the entire play, just slightly reworded and split up into various pieces. As you move about the game, you unlock different conversations which get pagedumped onto the screen a line at a time.
I love the Tempest, but I didn't really enjoy reading it this way, if anything because Parchment kept scrolling to the top of the screen whenever a new line of text occurred.
You can't really do anything besides try to trigger the next section of the game. However, all of Inform's basic messages are changed around, and the parser itself is changed all around.
You play Prospero, commanding Ariel.
A game about a sentient IF character in an unfinished game, February 4, 2016A New Day has an interesting concept. An IF creator died before they finished their game, and one of the NPCs still wants the game to get attention, so the NPC enters it in the IFComp.
The game is mostly unfinished, but as you play, you reach some finished parts. For instance, you go to Greece and uncover a terrorist plot which you have to stop.
The game reaches some parts with messed-up text and weird descriptions you have to get through, before reaching an ultimate scene that is a commentary on text adventures in general.
The ideas are fun, but some of the execution has difficulty. For instance, this time I couldn't use the commands (Spoiler - click to show)PULL ROD or PUSH ROD, although I've completed the game before and thus must have had access to another solution. Also, the puzzle solutions are unlikely to be solved on one's own.
Recommended for fans of IF about IF.
An odd little game where you are a God, February 4, 2016In this game, you play a God, the parser is an angel, and the PC is a worshipper named Bellclap.
The game is fairly short with some unintuitive puzzles. Essentially, you have to help your worshipper make it to safety. He has a variety of tools, but what you have to do with them is pretty odd.
To me, this game is primarily enjoyable as an experiment in parser implementation, with the 3 main characters all working together. Also, the setting is well-described and fun.
Overall, I recommend that people try the first scene.
Great, folksy writing with fairly standard puzzles, February 4, 2016Hoosegow's writing is a delight. In this straightforward but slightly difficult one-room escape game, you play a reluctant outlaw with his silly buddy and a drunken pastor trying to get out of a jail cell.
All of the standard messages have been changed to be folksy and homelike. The writing is just great, if you're into hometown western stuff.
The puzzles did not inspire me. It's one of the large class of puzzle games where one or two of the puzzles are unfair, and you could play forever and then give up. It's rare to find a game where the challenges are difficult but fair.
I recommend this game, and very strongly recommend it for group play, to get through the puzzles and have fun reading the responses.
A historical/cultural game with photographs that becomes more, February 4, 2016Bolivia by Night surprised me on multiple levels, throughout the game. It begins with you as a reporter in a Bolivian city who has to interview different people, getting in some comic situations. The game has a lot of real photos included, as well as quotes about Bolivia.
Then, the game changes fundamentally, again and again. I don't think I can put into words how entertaining it was and how deeply different from the opening sequence.
The puzzles are very simple. Sometimes, though, it's just a guess-the-author's brain game. Many solutions rely on applying objects to to things that share common traits (for instance, if it were a fighting game, you would use a blue spear against a blue-eyed warrior). The hints section is well-done, and the game almost delights in guiding you through what to do.
Somehow, this game enchanted me.
More substance than I expected; a golf simulator, February 4, 2016In this game, you play through 9 holes of golf with 3 coworkers. I never actually beat it, due to bad golfing.
It's actually fairly fun; instead of normal puzzles, you have a real-time drive meter and a left-to-right meter, and you have to get it right in correct spot to win.
I especially had trouble, thinking that a 9-iron would go farther than a 3-iron. But it was still fun.
The NPCs are entertaining, and there are some practice sessions for putting and driving.
A fun diversion.
Like Roald Dahl with crayon illustrations; an alien game, February 4, 2016This shortish HTML TADS game was the first to use that platform, incorporating images into the text. The images are crayon drawings and playdough photographs. These worked in HTML TADS on my Windows machine, but something was wrong with the text formatting and status line, and the game crashed. I finished on Gargoyle with no images.
The story and puzzles are simple; aliens land in your backyard and demand some items; you have to investigate them and deal with your parents, too.
Some of the puzzles were a bit obscure, but there aren't too many to go through. The writing was fun.
I was frustrated by the interpreter issues, and so I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have if it worked perfectly. This reinforces my thoughts that pure text without effects is the best for long-term use.
A fairly standard escape-the-room game with inversion of scoring, February 4, 2016This game purports to be a parody of escape-the-room puzzles, but it really ends up being a fairly standard version of the game, using the 'parody' aspect as an excuse for silly plot points or obscure puzzles.
The main difference between this and a standard game is scoring; you get no points for actions that lead to you winning. Instead, you get points for finding easter eggs.
At least one of the puzzles in the game is pretty clever, though, and not completely trivial to code.
Recommended for fans of one-room escape games.
Another ultra ultra long Andy Phillips game about a talented thief, February 4, 2016Like all of his other games, this Andy Phillips game is extremely long. Typing in and reading the output of the walkthrough took me several days of playing.
You have an beginning area that is longer than most games, and then you can teleport to 6 different sub-areas. Each sub-area is fairly long, about as long as an IFComp game but with high difficulty.
The idea is that in the first area, you become a thief, and then in each subarea, you pull off a heist. Every kind of theft is represented: (Spoiler - click to show) housebreaking, military espionage, a booby-trapped pirate cave, a ritzy ocean liner, a museum, and the crown jewels. Each area has its own inventory separate from the others.
As always, the writing is evocative and beautiful, and the puzzles are vastly and deeply unfair. If you don't do exactly the right thing, you will die. Unusually for these games, however, is a large randomized element, so that even those using the walkthrough will have to experiment for some time. This was fun.
Overall, you really have to have a taste for this type of game to enjoy it. Without a walkthrough, don't expect to see more than 10% of the game.
A difficult parser game written in pseud-code from a machine's view, February 4, 2016In this game, you play a machine in a sort of factory that is malfunctioning. I assume the eventual goal is to escape; even with the walkthrough, I ended up dying at the second-to-last move.
The game is written bizarrely. Here is an example of it at it's worst, when going west at the beginning:
?w
Dir ALT{ER}DDDisplace-: 2 [west -> south]
(self.travelTo(loc) = nil && m$ve(her@) FAILED
At the best, it is pretty understandable; here's LOOK's output in the first room:
?l
Reclamation Sector (2)
Cleared area amongst to-be-reforged bodies; gap(s) movement(allow) west, north; other exits apparent lacking.
To the north you see salvager-class machine.
So you see now what type of game this is. There are enemies that will harm you, there are other units whose parts you can scavenge. It's all bizarre.
A unique experience.
An almost Rogue-like murder mystery with magic and randomization, February 4, 2016I've played through this game around a dozen without beating it, but it's just a lot fun. Once you've played through once, you can play through it super fast.
You are in a house with about six other people, all of whom have been invited to search for some lost treasure. Murders start happening, and you have to find the treasure and the killer.
The house has a ton of hiding places, with randomized stuff inside; there are around 4 different kinds of tools that you can use to open special hiding locations. At first, I kept restarting to get these tools, until I realized that you don't need to restart to get one of each tool.
There's a surprising backstory going on involving magic in the background. As usual for Emily Short, the story is intriguing, and involves a unique sort of magic.
It has overall a rogue-like feel. Good for fans of mystery or Rogue-likes.
An all caps, minimal Speed-IF homage to Adventureland., February 4, 2016Adventureland was the first commercial adventure game, written by Scott Adams. It was all caps, with short, simple sentences and basic verbs.
This game is a homage to that, a Speed-IF with 7 treasures, an interesting map, and several enemies.
The game is actually very appealing; people haven't changed in the last 40 years, and there is a reason that adventureland was appealing back then. Pure minimalism really stokes the imagination. I got the same sort of feel I have talking to characters in the original Zelda game.
It's short, but difficult. With the small number of combinations possible, however, it should be possible to beat it. Pretty fun!
A strange cybertopia with a big map and lots of tasks, February 4, 2016You are a computer repairman in this game, set in a big city with dozens of buildings and a time-date system.
You are assigned various tasks, such as resetting servers or helping people with passwords. As you do so, you immediately see that the city is bizarre and strange.
If you follow your instructions to the later, you have a good chance of finding something unusual, getting pretty far, and getting stuck. To finish the game, there are 2 or 3 nondescript places you should visit, as indicated in the 'spoiler' version of the map.
There is a club floyd transcript of this game, if that helps.
Odd game, something like A Mind Forever Voyaging mixed with an Andrew Schultz game.
A fleshed-out introcomp game with magic system and odd pc, February 4, 2016In this game, you play a wizard commanding a crow familiar. It is one of many long games set in a Zork/Enchanter-like world with light-hearted but increasingly difficult puzzles (such as Frobozz Magic Support, Augmented Fourth and Risorgimento Represso). In these games, I usually start out delighted, and solve some puzzles, then slowly get weary of it and give up, turning to the walkthrough and enjoying the ride. I think that one reason they lack the magic of Zork or Enchanter is that those old games had a real sense of decay and loss around them, and of personal growth. It's like the difference between milk chocolate and semi-sweet chocolate: a little bitterness goes a long way.
Anyways, this game is great for having its own magic system, for for allowing you to beat the game with only having solved 4 out of the big puzzles, and for making the first four easy. I smiled at the first bank puzzle. The last 3 puzzles and the endgame involve the old standbys of alchemy and complicated machinery that you have to experiment with.
Overall, this game is better-written and more funny than Frobozz magic support, and its two-tiered puzzle structure makes it more accessible and likely to be beaten than most such games, so I think this will be my go-to game to suggest to people in this sub-genre.
A pre-WWI era escape the room game as a little boy , February 4, 2016In this mid-length, well-polished parser game, you play a young boy who is stuck inside on a nice summers day with his maiden aunt and boring reverend uncle.
You have to escape using a series of clever moves, such as emotional manipulation and standard search, take, combine/use.
The walkthrough is short, but the atmosphere and parser messages are nice.
The game has a hidden framing story, generally worked in with Easter eggs. This framing story added some poignancy to the game that really improved it.
An ultrashort parser game with 1 object, 1 NPC, and 2-3 responses, February 4, 2016This game is a fun experiment in ultra-short parser games. Unlike the other reviewers, I was not able to read Aaron Reed's commentary on the game, but I still found it very enjoyable. It was part of a competition to create a game whose code could be tweeted.
There is one item, one NPC, and one meaningful interaction.
Overall, a fun experiment in minimalism. Mirrored by the later Twiny Jam games, which had Twine games with <300 words of text.
A short and charming Vorple game about omnipotence and loneliness, February 4, 2016This beautiful web-based game (made with Vorple) tells the story of an omnipotent being who is alone and comes into contact with ordinary beings, before a more significant encounter.
The text shifts and changes on a white and black screen, with background decorations and smooth panning of screens.
The game, as others have said, seems to save the responses of previous players, and integrates them into the current game.
It's so short that you could play it 2 or 3 times in 15 minutes. Recommended.
An early example of an NPC-rich TADS game. Help John study!, February 4, 2016This game was the very first winner of the XYZZY for best NPCs. Your roommate John is studying, and four of his buddies come over. You have to eliminate them one or two at a time, and quiet down your environment, until John can study.
The PCs are well-written and entertaining. The puzzles are early-90's standard: a series of events that seem logical afterwards, but which ignore many alternative solutions (for instance, you can't (Spoiler - click to show)tape the wrapper or the towel across the hole in the window).
Good for fans of busy, interactive rooms of NPCs.
A long spy/fantasy puzzlefest. Somewhat sparse implementation, February 4, 2016This game is very long and puzzly. You play a spy who has a flashback to a scene taken from Ingold's earlier Mulldoon Legacy. Then you have to break into a house, then are transported to a fantasy land.
The game has a lot of spotty implementation issues, so if you don't type the right thing, you might get stuck (just try opening the crackers!)
The hints leaves huge gaps as well, but perhaps that is for the better, as it makes you think.
Only for hardcore puzzle fans.
Early game about IF itself and the community. Fun setting., February 4, 2016This game heavily references early interactive fiction and the usenet groups. I was not involved in the community in the 90's or even the aught's, but the ifwiki page for this game has a little bit of background. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this game in the same way one enjoys Gulliver's Travels or Don Quijote without familiarity with the things they are parodying.
You have a mimesis plant (a joke explained in the game), and you have to commmit the seven deadly sins with it. Once you do, you progress to two more areas, encountering foes and friends.
The game heavily references the following:
-John's Fire Witch. An early puzzle game where you have to collect seven sins to get by a devil.
-Curses! The game contains three of the most important objects in Curses! and spoils the game a bit.
-So Far. The game mimics the ending of So Far, spoiling that ending.
-Jigsaw. The game is framed in terms of the main NPC from Jigsaw having abandoned you. It references some activities in Jigsaw.
In addition, it names 7 games to represent the seven sins, and contains one room each from games such as Adventure, So Far, Zork I, and so on.
I like works about the genre they are part of (like The Book with No Pictures for children's books). If you like self-referential work, I recommend this game.
A journey through symbolic fear. Oldschool puzzlefest; very difficult, February 4, 2016Fear is one of those games I tried a long time ago, tried to play without hints, got stuck, tried again, and quit. So I walked through it just now with the hints, and it was interesting to see what the game was like.
You navigate a small house, but your fears don't let you do anything you want to do. Three objects in the game will give you flashbacks, like the game Photograph. Each of these flashbacks contains a difficult puzzle, all of which require lateral thinking.
Overall, an interesting game, but much too hard in my opinion, and not entirely compelling outside of the puzzles. However, if you do like puzzles a lot, this game is pretty fun.
A web game with a classic CYOA-book style about witches, February 4, 2016This game is cute, and intricate, and illustrated with whimsically primitive but talented drawings. It is the story of two friends in a magical world who go on a quest to save the world.
Like the PDF game Trapped in Time or the Twine game You Will Select a Decision, Witch's Girl uses page numbers and 'Turn to page ...'. About a fourth or a fifth of pages have an illustration.
The game is quite intricate; it has an inventory system and a time travel system, and much of the game consists of using time travel to obtain various items and revisit different areas. I would budget a significant amount of time to play it (1-3 hours).
Excellent game.
Clever surrealism based on Don Giovanni and They Might Be Giants, February 4, 2016This game is short and absurd. It appears at first to be a difficult logic puzzle, where you have to decide who sits where at dinner. It then becomes increasingly absurd.
This is from the Apollo 18 Tribute Album, which apparently was a collection of games which were based on the lyrics of songs on the so-named album by They Might Be Giants, and which included other great games like Dinner Bell.
All in all, it's just a fun descent into madness. No drugs involved, as far as I can see.
A very cute mid-length game set on a tiny world with 10 portions, February 4, 2016In this game, you walk around a literal "small world". You are a giant that can grab things from space, get shot at by missiles and not care, and do other giant things. The world is not spinning, so some parts are perpetually hot, some perpetually cold and dark.
The game is packed with tiny details, and a blending of big and small. The writing is plain but descriptive.
The puzzles are a mixed bag. It's mostly "guess the author's brain", which is easy to do some of the time and hard other times. The world is so small that you can just try everything on everyone and it will work out.
This game was nominated for many XYZZY's, and won best setting.
A cyclical game about war and perspective, February 3, 2016This game contains six or so cycling scenes that all tell the story of a single moment in a war. That moment is when an Islamic man rushes towards a soldier.
The voices all have their own ideas about what you should do; your buddies, your uncle, your diversity trainer.
As you play, you unlock some more verbs you can use. Each page has a picture from a FPS in the Middle East, with a red or green bar. You can change all bars to green eventually, but I wasn't able to unlock anything.
This game has strong profanity, and depicts a PTSD-inducing type scenario. I'm told there is audio, but I haven't tried it.
An entertaining Twine take on And Then There Were None set in Russia, February 3, 2016This is the third Tia Orisney game I have tried. I am a huge fan of Agatha Christie and Alistair Maclean, and this game was a great homage to them.
Set in Russia, you are a thief coming to pick up your stash. You meet a cast of 10 characters, and deaths start to happen.
The game is in Twine. Most paths are identical in result, but the game feels very interactive because the choices feel REALLY important (e.g. do you attack someone or team up with them?)
Orisney's games are their own genre, closer to old CYOA books, and in that genre they are superb. This game has more rough edges than Following Me or Kane County, though. The warden is called WARD once, some notes slipped into the text (something like "click snd choice to continue"), "brake" is mispelled as "break". Also, the plot has a few big holes in it, but most murder mysteries do.
Overall, the rough edges were made up for by the great story. I may come back and play this again in the future just for fun. I'd read a book by Orisney for sure.
Slick implementation of ordering NPC's, coupled with compelling story, February 3, 2016This game is set in a military school after an attack that has left you, a teacher, weak and helpless. You have to give orders to six children, each of which has their own problems. Together, you have to get out.
I played with this game for about a half hour to get a feel for it before going to the walkthrough. For puzzle fans, it's worth trying much longer, teasing out the next step, etc.
For those using David W's walkthrough, note that the walkthrough itself contains major spoilers at the very end (which makes sense), so it is perhaps best to go through it in order. However, I still enjoyed the game as I was spoiled.
The writing and setting are excellent, as in the other IFComp game by VanEseltine I tried, One Eye Open. If you like a sense of urgency, of hope fighting against darkness, of slick implementation, then both these games are for you.
Interesting printed game with parser-like elements, February 3, 2016Trapped in Time is a classic "Turn to page 20"-style CYOA work. You are a Chrononaut experimenting with a time machine. Things start to go wrong. The game invites many replays, being a 'replay'-style game where you just try to get it write.
The real innovation here is something that is beyond Twine's basic capabilities (although it could be implemented if someone worked hard at it). The game starts giving you mathematical formulas so that you can use a limited set of commands (something like, "To examine a room, add 50 to the first page that you enter the room in.") this makes the game both fun and challenging, because you can't easily reverse engineer the game, and you have to keep track of all the formulas.
The game includes a variety of bonus material and is fun. The story is not quite as exciting as most good Twine games, but the novelty of the presentation really made this game enjoyable for me.
Recommended due to fun factor.
A sci-fi game with hints and friendly features. Made for kids/teens by Infocom, February 3, 2016Seastalker was Oneida my least favorite Infocom games, but part of that is my own fault. The game is fairly simple, and I didn't need a walkthrough, until about halfway through the game I started some kind of timer and would die after 40 or 50 turns. It turned out that (Spoiler - click to show)there was some sort of black box I didn't fix that lead a monster to the base. So that made me lose interest, until I went through with a walkthrough.
The game comes with some hint cards that are missing some information. When the time comes in the game, the game itself will fill in the blanks in the hint cards.
There are some tricky parts to the game like using sonar to pilot a sub, and the endgame, but over all it was pretty fun.
Note: The GO TO command makes this game MUCH more enjoyable.
A shortish hospital parser game; strong writing and compelling story, February 3, 2016Mercy is an interesting game from a couple of decades past. Not entered in IFComp, it nevertheless managed to earn recognition, including a nomination for Best Story Xyzzy.
You play a euthanized at a hospital. The game is a linear thriller type game and has a branch and bottleneck structure which became the characteristic of Twine games many years later.
You wander around a relatively small map with a gloomy, moody atmosphere strongly reminiscent of Vespers, but less disgusting. Your goals begin to change around the halfway point, which is also where the game becomes more ambiguous and confusing.
I recommend this game for fans of a great story and/or atmosphere.
A multimedia Twine game about body identity, February 3, 2016Krypteia is a richly textured hyperlink game, making extensive use of graphics, text styling, and music.
It's something of an rpg, with two stats (wolf and stealth) and a variety of items and battles that affect the stats. However, the system is very simple, so you don't have to grind and battles are finished in one click.
The two stats represent two ways of dealing with your feelings, most likely about transgenderism. Wolf stats make you fierce, and you wear stilettos. Shadow let's you hide from the world.
Overall, a well done game, if a bit heavy-handed at times. It has a very annoying habit of putting stealth related text as black on black text.
An innovative fantasy parser game which reads like a novel, February 3, 2016Like the more recent experimental work Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory, My Angel strives to make a transcript of the game read like a book. Error messages are turned off, diddling around too long makes the story progress by itself, room descriptions are varied so they don't repeat enough, and it is written in first person present tense.
When I first played this game a year or more ago, I lost interest and stopped because I couldn't tell how well I was doing or know what to do next. This time, I just went with instinct and tried obvious commands and I beat the game without hints. The author's notes are very interesting, as much or more than the game itself.
The story is about a couple with unusual abilities running away from a group, and then later exploring ruins.
Jon Ingold is really a master of innovation. Looking over his career, it seems he was really trying over and over to find something that could draw in people outside of traditional IF, and he finally succeeded with the wildly popular 80 Days. This game is interesting in light of that history as well.
Shortish 1800's romance game with many endings and few puzzles, February 3, 2016This game was nominated for an xyzzy award for Best Story when it came out, and I agree that the story is excellent.
You are an independent young woman trying to run a business but running into trouble due to the male-dominated society. You encounter a few suitors while trying to save your business.
The puzzles are fairly light, until the ending. Then it branches into a lot of endings. I found 6 endings and it was hard to tell what made me get them.
Also, the game is pretty short, about 20 to 30 minutes.
Overall, a pleasant game, especially for those interested in romance games.
A short sci-fi parser game with great atmosphere and compelling plot, February 3, 2016Vicious Cycles is a complex game. It contains two interwoven narratives; it deals with complex issues in real life; it has puzzles requiring many replays to solve.
The game has a few early surprise which I won't mention here, but I can say that the atmosphere is a sort of dogged determination to overcome despite discouraging odds. The gritty feel reminded me of Cape by Bruno Dias, although the stories themselves are very different.
Overall, I highly recommend this game. It is fairly short, about 100-400 moves for a typical playthrough, although a perfect playthrough is probably 50 or less.
A short religious/historical parser game with unusual pc/narrator voice, February 3, 2016Voices is a strong, story-driven parser game told from the perspective of a mysterious invisible figure, whom we learn more about throughout the game. The narrator is the figure, while the PC is a young girl they speak to.
This is a strong story, and most of the game is designed to funnel you through the story. This would easily make a good Twine game; this is in fact the kind of game Twine was designed for. However, the author has done a great job of changing default messages and adding extra surprises, making it worthwhile to have it in a parser.
Much of the game progresses by repeatedly using "TALK TO", and by making a few decisions.
A great choice for fans of story telling. No puzzles to speak of. I had a lot of fun with this.
An escape-the-room parser game based on Egyptian mythology, February 3, 2016This was a short-to-mid-length enjoyable parser game. You awake from your slumber, buried in the egyptian way, and must progress into the afterlife.
The games takes the form of an escape game. You are given a spellbook of sorts, which you must use, but then you must solve a sequence of puzzles. Many of the puzzles seemed unintuitive to me, but because the game is short, it may be possible to just keep plugging away until you get it.
The atmosphere is very good. This game was recommended to me based on its characterization of Egyptian mythology, and this was the most entertaining aspect of the game.
Recommended for fans of mythology or escape games.
An extended Highlander-like parser game with great story, on rails, February 3, 2016Augustine was nominated for an XYZZY for best story and best setting. It shows; the story is really intriguing, about two figures who battle each other in different guises throughout the ages.
You and a warlock from the 1300s are doomed to live until one defeats the other. You pass back and forth between modern times and ancient times through flashbacks, learning much about St. Augustine's history (I don't know how much was real, and how much made up for this game).
The writing is iffy and the implementation is definitely buggy, playing cutscenes in the wrong rooms or order. I didn't really like this game at first, but two things made me end up liking it: the story really is compelling, going in unexpected directions; and the combat system is really fun (although I had to UNDO a lot the first time). The final fight in particular was very exciting.
Recommended for those who can excuse spotty implementation/writing for the sake of a good tale.
I'm not quite sure what I just played. A meta-game about help systems, February 3, 2016This is a shortish parser game that has a main game and three subgames. You are the help system for several interactive fiction games, but something keeps malfunctioning.
I tried this game with and without the walkthrough, and it was honestly bewildering. You can spend a long time on things that turn out to be completely unimportant. You frequently have to repeat commands multiple times without feedback that you are on the right track. Several areas require you to wait and wait and wait and wait.
The three minigames are interesting; I believe they represent games that you could give help for.
One is a Geisha simulator, where you don't have the regular verbs, and you can only schedule clients and reserve rooms while training for your Geisha exam. This is randomized and hard.
Another is a Lovecraftian western. This one was confusing, but fun.
The last game was really very creative and fun. You are playing Dungeons and Dragons one-on-one with a Dungeon Master, and he becomes the parser. You have a character sheet, and quests, and so on. It was really fun, especially because the Dungeon Master is purposely bad.
Overall, a mixed bag. I feel like others would be less confused than me, but I found this game very confusing. The minigames were fun, though.
An enjoyable though short conversational maze, February 3, 2016I've recently discovered Kathleen Fischer's games, after playing Masquerade and trying Cove a bit, and I love her writing. This is a short game about a prisoner confessing to a friar. The game is primarily conversation-based, although some non-conversation actions are required to win.
The game is a conversational maze. Most conversation options lead to bad endings. The good ending requires some very specific and perhaps non-intuitive choices (being a good boy and a yes-man don't help).
The story was a bit hard to piece together, but it really looked good overall. Recommended for fans of conversation games.
Clever and inventive, easy game with avoidable strongly adult content, February 3, 2016This review has some early spoilers and spoils one big concept; however, it let's you know how to avoid any explicit content
(Spoiler - click to show)
Narcolepsy has a great concept; the main character has narcolepsy, and every time they fall asleep, they enter a different, randomly chosen dream, each written by a different IF author.
Even better, this is actually three different games, and which game you play is governed by your first few actions.
Unfortunately, some branches have pretty explicit and unpleasant content.
One branch involves a klutz spy agency. This branch was my least favorite, requiring a lot of wandering around. Also, it has a running joke where you got port spam emails which are just as explicit and gross as real life ones blocked by filters. I stopped playing twice because I was disgusted; but I'm glad I tried the other branches.
Branch 2 involves your sister a lot. I loved this branch, and it was one of the funnest games I've played in a while. Also, it had very little adult content.
The third involves holes, and this one was pretty funny, with some old school game references. Part of it takes place in a strip club, though, but it's not very explicit.
I can strongly recommend the middle branch, obtained by answering the phone first.
Funny, fast-paced excitement. Indiana Jones with IF references, February 3, 2016This game was one of my favorite types of IF: fast, action-packed thriller games. It is a string of conversations mixed with intermittent, simple puzzles.
The plot is just references to old IF groups. The idea is that there is a cabal of authors that all support each other and hang out and act as gatekeepers. To some extent, I think this is true. IF is a small group, all the big authors and many others know each other well, and they organize stuff with each other. But this is normal; everyone craves companionship and wants to be part of a group. Cabals and cliques form in the academic world for the same reason. And the IF cabal seems to have open membership. If anything, I think the cabal(s) wish that everyone would join them.
I wasn't around during the events of this game, but it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the game. The game parodies right wing sexist men, which I think anyone can enjoy. It mentions Graham Nelson and Andrew Plotkin, which are still fairly familiar names. And everyone is characterized in such a silly way that it really doesn't matter who they are. There were two or three characters I never heard of, but it doesn't matter.
Overall, a fun game. It really does spoil Infidel by Mike Berlin a lot, so watch out for that.
A mid-length, complicated Twine game about a date and secrets, February 3, 2016I came to this game after playing the sequel, and I loved learning more about the protagonist. This series is about a young girl who has deep secrets, and the men she is involved with.
The links in this game are cleverly colored, with one color for cycling text, another for branches, etc. This makes the game much more enjoyable than standard Twine.
The story is about a date with a boy after ditching school. Both of you have secrets. The game is pretty complicated, with many options to branch out on.
The one thing I didn't like as much was the styling. It looks like an aquarium, which really fits the story, but I found it mildly irritating. I loved the CSS of Thanksgiving, the sequel. However, this is a minor complaint.
An ultra long and difficult superhero game, February 3, 2016Andy Phillips games are basically movie plots where you have to guess the exactly right actions. They are extremely long, and so difficult that I doubt anyone has completed them singlehandedly without hints.
This one is about a superhero name the Golden Crusader in Atlantic city. After an opening that is longer than most games, you are given a tutorial on how to become the next Golden Crusader and use her four big powers, you then are given five locations to visit to stop evil henchmen. The villains are memorable. One is unnecessarily sexual, killing people with sex and attraction perfume. She is the most encountered villain. The others include an evil toy maker, a pirate captain with a laser sword, a cult leader, and a magician with deadly tricks.
There's really no way to beat this without hints, but it can be fun to play with the walkthrough until you get to a cool part, play around for a bit, then continue with the walkthrough.
An enjoyable short romp in the darhkness. Beautiful writing, February 3, 2016This is a shortish game with the almost unique trick of placing a lot of gameplay in darkness in a cave. The only similar game I can think of is Hunter in Darkness or parts of So Far.
You are searching for a magical crystal in an underground cavern. The rest of the story is mainly atmosphere, and it works well. This game was nominated for an XYZZY for best writing, and deserves it.
Overall, a short, simple game, with at least 3 endings depending on your final actions.
Recommended for its fun-to-length ratio.
A long two-character James Bond/Superhero game, February 3, 2016This is a complex and interesting game. It contains a number of movie-like cut scenes and text effects. You play Max Blaster (with a gun and fancy force generator) or Doris de Lightning (an acrobatic hacker with special tools) as you stop the parrot creatures from attacking the earth.
You can switch between the characters whenever they are together, which is good if one path is harder than the other (twice, there was a seeming bug which rendered the game unfinishable, but I went back to my last save when they were together and switched to the other person). (Spoiler - click to show)One bug was that a key step in the sandwich machine did not work. The other bug is that I could not getup of the mud as Doris. In both cases, I was following the walkthrough when the problems happened.
The writing is fun, and the game was nominated for an XYZZY award for it. Overall, I can strongly recommend it.
A short, linear slice-of-life game about love with heavy music references, February 3, 2016This game is pretty much a short story in parser form; it would likely have been written as a web-based game if the technology was available at the time.
The story is about a boy and a girl conducting a post-mortem on their relationship (although not phrased that way, and not so grim). They revisit their past through flashbacks.
The game was short but fun, and well-written. There was one verb I couldn't guess to end the scene in Peter's house: (Spoiler - click to show)SERVE DINNER.
Recommended to fans of slice-of-life.
An experiment in player agency and in creating an uncomfortable feeling, February 3, 2016I played this long (but purposely repetetive) IFComp 2015 Twine game twice, about two weeks apart.
Let's just say what it's about now; this is a game whose experience does not depend on spoilers.
You are enacting an ancient scottish ritual where you are trying to summon a demon by roasting cats alive over several days.
In the game, you repeatedly click on the same thing over and over again, with some procedural text generation changing some minor details.
The game changes over time, but it takes a long, long time to do so. In the mean time, you can, as I did the first time, just start letting cats go and give up on the whole ritual. In fact, it may be cathartic for some (including myself) to play again and just let all the cats ago.
You have to roast somewhere between (Spoiler - click to show)40-100 cats to reach the ending.
I did not listen with audio, as I never do, but many say it contributes to the experience, for good or for ill.
An utterly remarkable game; solve crazy puzzles and learn about engineering, February 3, 2016I'll be upfront and say that, by modern standards, I wasn't impressed with the original Ditch Day Drifter. This sequel, however blows my mind.
The introduction is especially good. Reminding me of the hidden temple sequence in Lydia's Heart, you have to race another tech firm to pitch a product to a southeast asian company. You have to deal with both fidgety technology and a decaying factory.
The game then makes a huge transition to Caltech, scene of the original Ditch Day Drifter. As then, you must explore the campus, solving stacks, reading memos, going in the tunnels, going to the store and kitchen.
But boy, the world has changed! Crowds of independent NPCs, immersive room descriptions, real conversations, etc.
The game has a fairly unique premise: your character must learn (or relearn) about physics and engineering to crack the code on a high-tech box. Puzzles are drawn from real-life techniques, and you learn a lot; however, the game is adapted for those with no real-life experience. You convert IP addresses to hex form and back; you learn about quantum coherence and decoherence; you learn how to use network analyzers and even cherry pickers.
I enjoyed the beginning more than the rest of the game, but that's because open nonlinear games often intimidate me.
I recommend this game for everyone. Even if you're not great at IT, like me, the game treats it like any other 'magic system', telling you how to use things. It's fun.
An only mildly interactive Twine game with photos, but a powerful story, February 3, 2016This game was written both for IFComp 2015 and for an undergraduate research project at Hope.
It is just a choice between three linear sequences. After each choice has been picked at least once, two more open up. There are scattered photographs.
Interactivity-wise, this game doesn't make any groundbreaking changes. But the story is great. It is based on real-life journalist Marie Colvin, a war correspondent with an eye patch who died in an explosion.
I played this game twice, 3 weeks apart. The first time, I was rushing through IFComp, and dismissed it. But the second time, it struck a real emotional cord with me, and I really enjoyed it.
A one-move game combined with an alternative, time-warping reality, February 3, 2016Midnight, Swordfight was an IFComp 2015 game. This game is a one-move game like Aisle or Rematch, where you are in a duel with a countess and have only limited actions available. Innovatively, these actions are listed in a playscript in your inventory.
Another innovation is that you can enter an alternate reality, where you can travel through and around time to change the setup of the duel.
The world is mysterious and bizarre, with some of the darker parts of Lewis Carroll mixed with David Eddings mixed with all sorts of things. The game is dark, and contains explicit descriptions of sex and intense violence (although the violence is not to the level of, say, One Eye Open). The worksmanship is impeccable.
A mid-length puzzle-less parser game about choices with a cool map, February 3, 2016This was my absolute favorite IFComp 2015 game. In Map, you play a woman with a troubled relationship with her family members. You spend most of the day alone in your house, and as you immediately learn, the house is slowly growing new rooms, which is reflected in a map you carry.
During the course of a week, you have the opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)go back and make changes in your life, which affects your current life greatly. This allows for a lot of flexibility in gameplay, and many endings.
The feeling of the game is poignant and thoughtful, and mildly creepy, especially when strange things happen and noone, least of all YOU, seems to care.
Love this game.
Edit: Before I posted this review, I went through and played again. It was a slow start, but I teared up during the last few days of gameplay. This game really gets me in an emotional place. It had an emotional impact on me that rivals games like Photopia or the Warbler's Nest. It affected me a lot because many decisions revolved around family and relationships.
A mid-length parser game with an intriguing in-game email system, February 3, 2016Life on Mars? is an IFComp 2015 entry that is a translation of the winner of the French IF competition of the same year. It was one of my favorites of IFComp.
This game centers around a woman stranded in a lone base after a terrible event. Her main access to the world is a computer terminal with e-mail. The game has implemented a marvelous e-mail system, with dozens of e-mails to read, with each sender having a different personality. The thoughts and replies of the woman are typed out in real time. The speed of the typing is adjustable; the default is too slow for most people, and the fastest is too fast, so make sure to play around with it before diving in.
The atmosphere of this game worked well for me. Outside of the e-mails, there are a few puzzles and a good amount of exploration. Overall, I would highly recommend this game, especially to fans of puzzle-light games such as Photopia.
A long TADS game about immortals and ennui, February 3, 2016This game was the longest game entered in IFComp 2015, and I enjoyed it. It is complex and long, and well-detailed.
The game is centered around the tedium of immortality. You find yourself a brand new immortal, in a sort of retirement home or country club for immortals. Each has immersed themselves into some sort of activity, whether artistic endeavors, sports, art, or insanity.
The game has a very ancient and purposely static feeling. It implements a 'zz' command that lets you wait for a very long time. It has a few puzzles requiring long patience, and repetitive actions.
This all meshes very well with the story, and when things finally start changing, it makes it more exciting.
Overall, the feeling of this game was similar to the Myst series, but with more people. I recommend it.
Twine survival game with inventory, set in southern Utah, February 3, 2016I'm from Utah and I love the desert, so this IFComp 2015 Twine game intrigued me.
It's a long-form Twine game about surviving after an accident in the desert. In real life, the Utah desert is very dangerous to be lost in, and that's reflected in the game.
The main idea is that you have water supplies, food supplies, and tools. You constantly make decisions about where to look for water, where to sleep for the night, whether to risk a boat trip, etc. Each option carries an associated cost in terms of water and stamina, which you don't know ahead of time.
Overall, it ends up being a bit like Oregon Trail. There are two main ways of surviving. I came close to finishing both trails, but I died at the very end each time, which, as I said, isn't too far off from reality.
This game is well-written. I wasn't a huge fan of the visual layout, but overall, it was pretty good. I have to admit, I probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't died right at the end a few times, but I've heard the authors are thinking of making the ending a bit easier.
A mid-to-long 90's parser game with great muder story but some bugs, February 3, 2016This game is a murder mystery with a twist. The game is written in third person, with the protagonist being Madame L'Estrange, spiritualist detective.
The focus here is the story, and it's what got the game nominated for a '97 XYZZY Best Story award. You travel to various locations and get big text dumps spinning a marvelous tale of murder, Australian animals, and the occult.
The rest of the game is a bit spotty. There are numerous typos and spotty implementation. Sometimes you talk to people automatically when you see them; you almost always have to 'ask about' something even if you want to tell, except for one spot in the game where you have to 'tell' several things. A lot of guess-the-verb, but you can do most of the game on your own before using the walkthrough (you don't get any points at all until you're about 3/4 of the way through the game). Even the inventory has a typo with a misplaced colon.
Overall, a great game if you're into a good story, which I am.
A costume-party murder mystery with timed events, February 3, 2016Suspect is an Infocom mystery game. It resembles Deadline more than Witness or Ballyhoo. You are at a party with a large crowd of people, and you are set up for the murder of the hostess.
This game features a large number of NPCs with independent actions. You have to figure out who committed the murder, and we, and who helped them.
Overall, it seemed difficult, but I just used a walkthrough after playing around a bit. I don't enjoy replaying long games over and over, (except for Adventure and Zork I, where you really just need to optimize your lantern use). The story was fun, and I enjoyed the feelies.
The game does give you clues on the actions you need to perform, usually by seeing something happen and saying to yourself "Oh! If I had done such and such EARLIER, I would have been fine!"
A gentle, linear reflection on a long and troubled life, February 3, 2016This game reminds me of Photopia in many ways. You have a photograph and a variety of other items in your house. As you CONSIDER (or C) each of them, you receive a flashback to your past.
Between your interactions in the past, you move around a bit in real life.
The game is very gentle; if you go the wrong way, the game will tell you to come back. All flashbacks can be revisited repeatedly. If you do nothing for a long time, the game will give you a hint.
I complete 90% of games with a walkthrough, but I didn't need one here (although I did know a bit of what to do in one flashback because I had skimmed through the ClubFloyd Transcript earlier).
I liked this game; it was reflective and contemplative.
An allegorical journey exploring the role of 'Nice Guys' in relationships, February 3, 2016In the Friend Zone is an allegory like Gulliver's Travels or Alice in Wonderland, but centered around the plight of the Nice Guys who get stuck in the Friend Zone by women.
Although the love interest and PC can have their gender chosen, it seems to be centered around men; after all, the entire world seems to be (Spoiler - click to show)a woman, where you explore her arm, eye, mouth, anus, and vagina, getting progressively more disturbing.
Gameplay is linear at first, turning into exploration later on. The game directs towards different 'questions', which you hunt through to find. I enjoyed this part of the game, as well as parts of the openings.
The overall theme is something I don't quite identify with, and as a prudish person, there are more sexual references than I would like. The general feel seems to be that women are torturing men by placing them in the Friend Zone, but the subtext is that the men are torturing themselves. Nowhere, though, does it suggest open dialogue or communication as ways of developing relationships.
So I had mixed feelings about it. I loved the execution and writing, and I'd be very happy to see more from this author.
A short homebrew cyoa game with fullscreen illustrations, February 3, 2016This IFComp 2015 entry was made from scratch by the author. It is a rebelling of the story Godfather Death by the Brothers Grimm. In the original story, a father chose one of three godfathers for their child: God, Satan, or Death. He chose Death.
This game lets you choose God or Satan as well. While it is interesting to see how it plays out, each branch is fairly short, and the graphics are somewhat lacking compared to other graphics in the comp.
Fans of fairy tales may like it, though.
A short combinatorial Twine game with tons of options , February 3, 2016This was one of the most-played IFComp 2015 games, most likely due to its intriguing premise (a machine that can do anything!) and its shortness.
What happens is that you pick one of a few different openings that affects the flavor text of the game, and get a semi-random ending. In between is the real meat of the game: a visually beautiful form of sorts where you place different attributes (like quantity or sound) into 2-3 slots and combine them to something new.
Many combinations don't work, but there's a manual that helps. After tinkering around a bit, you should look at the walkthrough and see just how much WAS implemented.
Overall, short but fun for a moment.
A 3-verb minimalist parser game about a fun-filled puzzle cube, February 3, 2016This minimalist parser game feels like it learned a lot from the success of Twine games, and responded by making a stripped-down straightforward puzzle box. I really liked it.
The box has different moving parts you have to interact with (using the single command U for USE or UNDERTAKE TO INTERACT WITH, according to the author). As you do, more and more pieces show up. You are taught how to use some pieces that you have to remember later; other puzzles require leaps of intuition or timing. I finished without hints, which is very unusual for me.
A richly detailed mid-length game set in a seedy part of Tokyo, February 3, 2016Gotomomi was one of the better long games of the 2015 IFComp. The author spent four years making this game.
You play a young woman who is need of cash in a Tokyo train station. A fairly compact map with a few hidden exits allows you to explore carefully and get to no the culture and economy.
The game is all about money. You buy and sell a lot, negotiating everything. Some jobs or ways of making money require several prerequisites. It's important to examine background objects on a regular basis.
The atmosphere is grungy, sad and dangerous. I really enjoyed this game, but it takes more time than a typical IFComp game.
Fun, short Magic:The Gathering-like Twine combat game , February 3, 2016In this game, you and an opponent are tied to opposite poles and required to battle each other. You have around seven abilities or powers, and your opponent has some preset attacks.
You have to figure what order to combine your attacks, as well as when to wait for an advantage. It becomes an optimization puzzle, where you frequently restart. Some have said that they thought it through logically and reduced the number of repeats.
The writing is beautiful and evocative, and reminds me of Magic:The Gathering. Giant collosi, swarms of bugs, whispered madness.
For fans of strategy-based combat.
The middle game of a sci-fi trilogy; a Twine game with images/animations, February 3, 2016Capsule II is an IFComp 2015 game that was well-received by many people. It involves a group of people called the Sandmen who are custodians over a giant ship. Each one spends years alone, and the game deals with their isolation.
The game has some great animations and illustrations in a sort of vintage washed-out/watercolor look (look at the cover art). I think it is just fantastic as in-game art.
The game has some profanity, references to porn, etc., which is a turn-off for me. But all of it fits with the character's personality. Many people have expressed the opinion that they expected the game to not be that great but that it somehow has that essential 'it'-ness that makes a game good. I see people talking about this game for a long time to come.
A game about fate and modern culture, February 3, 2016This is a short Twine IFComp game about fate. A vagabond is passing through a wood, making a variety of moral choices and inconsequential choices. They meet a strange figure with an air of mystery.
The game has more to it than it looks at first. I enjoyed trying various options to see how the game turned out in the end.
A nice part of the game is the visuals. The game has a beautiful set of images later in the game that are worth checking out.
I recommend this game to those who are interested in discussions of fate and morality.
A grungy look at superhero origins in Undum, February 3, 2016Cape is, in my opinion, one of the best web-based interactive fiction games of all time. It is an engrossing story about a young petty criminal who has 'greatness thrust upon them' as a result of their crimes.
The most influential choice you make in this long Undum game is the choice of your super powers. I've heard some people say that the powers end up seeming the same, but I felt that all three big options were very different from each other. I think what people are talking about is a fact that the actual story is the same; just the details of it change from choice to choice.
Your superhero comes to grips with their powers and their crime-fighting. They are simultaneously uncomfortable and thrilled by their powers. There is an interesting mystery leading to a thrilling climactic confrontation.
The feel is grungy, dark; I lived in Manhattan for a while, and this really reminds me of the feel of the Lower East Side at night. I just loved this game. Loved it loved it loved it. (Note: whenever someone hypes up a game to me, I am always disappointed in it, so you might not like it as much as I did. I just happen to really like grungy superhero stories).
A short, simple heartwarming choice game about a cat, February 3, 2016Forever Meow is an IFComp 2015 game. It has an interesting mechanism where you advance the game by clicking a key on the computer or clicking a link, and go back by clicking a permanent button.
The story has plot twists, but the way it starts out is that you're just a cat doing cat things. Throughout the game, you can bat stuff around, meow, hiss, jump on furniture.
This game was a bit simpler than a lot of the other IFComp games, but it made me feel good. I've seen a few people rate it as one of their favorites in the comp, and I can see why.
Recommended for people who like cats (so, quite a few people).
Beautiful, short game about loss and Greek mythology, February 3, 2016Eurydice is one of those games that felt intimidatingly large, but after playing through it, I was relieved to see it is actually short, sweet, and simple. A huge number of NPC's lie in an early room, but only require minimal interaction. It seems at two different points that there are many different directions to go in, but in both cases the different directions lead to small areas.
The game is a modern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice. It has a beautiful and haunting atmosphere, and excellent writing.
I won't spoil the plot too much, but this short game has 4 possible endings. The main NPC is painted vividly, while you yourself are left vague and nebulous. The whole feeling is that of a dark afternoon on a November day when the snow hasn't fallen but the world is already dead and gray.
Recommended for everyone. Incredible game.
A short replay-game about dealing with grief, February 3, 2016In this game, you do everything you can to avoid having your son die. You have to replay the game over and over again.
The game gives you plenty of hints on how to do better next time, and there are 8 or less endings. Some verbs are hard to guess, but typing 'hint' gives some mild hints.
The writing and implementation are so-so, and the game does not last long. It's been about 7 years since the game came out, but I feel that a new release could resolve a lot of issues and make the game great.
A juvenile short Unnkulia game advertising Unnkulia Zero, February 3, 2016The Unnkulia games were a series of popular games that filled the gap between the end of Infocom and the beginning of the IFComp/XYZZY Award era.
After Unnkulia 1 and 2, the developers made a prequel called Unnkulia Zero, and released this game as a sort of advertisement for the new game. It hints at events in Unnkulia 0 and sets up the events of the original game. It is short and easy.
Like all the games, this is juvenile. You carry a condom made of swiss Cheez, you let a little girl (Spoiler - click to show)drown due to foolish beliefs,
It's not very large, and fairly easy. You find four keys, then you find some treasure and put it back.
If you want to try out an Unnkulia game, this is the easiest and shortest of the bunch.
A big, Infocom style adventure with juvenile humor, February 3, 2016As a sequel to Unnkulia Underworld, this game is perhaps even more juvenile. Apparently women have been giving you their favors due to your fame, so you're trying to find something famous to do to keep up your popularity. There are two main areas, one on both sides of a river, two mazes, and a large underground complex.
Like the first game, you have ACME company making Cheez products, a monk that loves eggs, and so on. Your goal is the construction of an elaborate machine, like Leather Goddesses.
The game is well-made, but the main idea didn't appeal to me (of being a Kuul Duhd). It is large and a treat for adventurer fans in the right mindset.
A short, charming game based on eastern folklore, February 3, 2016This game can be played in less than a half hour. You play as a chinese farmer who discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him. Through the aid of magic, he can escape her dangerous plans.
The game is tightly narrated, with new actions occurring frequently. The puzzles are very simple in general, with a couple of sticky points where it's hard to know what your abilities should be.
Recommended for fans of story-driven IF.
A "hard sci fi" game about two alien cultures, culture and family, February 3, 2016This is a story-driven game set in 3 parts, with a prelude, interludes, and a postlude.
The game is about two brothers who witness a new civilization come in contact with their own, the Incenders, a race of humanoid fiery beings. Over time, the brothers deal with a variety of forms of conflict.
The puzzles are a bit odd; the first big puzzle is serving drinks to a large group of people, and this can be tedious. It gets more exciting with dangerous exploration puzzles in parts 2 and 3.
A lot of world building has gone on here, similar to that on Worlds Apart, but on a smaller scale.
Recommended for fans of "hard sci-fi".
A well coded body transfer Sci fi game with some story issues, February 3, 2016This game is generally well implemented and has smooth gameplay. You have a machine that lets you switch bodies, and you can switch with quite a few creatures in the game.
But the game is a bit weaker in the story department. You are trying to solve a mystery in a lab, and some people oppose you while some aid you. But as other reviewers noted, you can directly do crazy things around them without them noticing or caring, including setting things on fire, doing crazy and dangerous acrobatics, or even stealing important things as they watch you. Some of this is explained away later, but it is hard to stay motivated.
Otherwise, this is a nice science fiction game of moderate length.
A cute story about helping your grandparents make up, February 3, 2016In this short-to-mid length farm game, you are a young girl trying to help grandma and grandpa make up after a fight.
You explore a farm, learn about your family's history, and try to help the two of them out. The main puzzles of the game involve a battery used in three locations.
The writing was charming, the puzzles were mild, and the setting was fairly unusual for interactive fiction.
Good for fans of mildly puzzly slice of life.
A short, many-ending hide and seek game with class warfare, February 3, 2016In this game, you play a girl playing hide and seek at a party. The party is at Emma's house, and Emma's mom is the employer of your mom and some other people's mom. Emma is well-dressed and you other three are not. There is a poorer red haired girl you don't know, and Emma's croney Yvonne.
The game ends very quickly, but you can find a lot of endings. I found at least 5 or 6. The most satisfying ending to me ignores Emma and finds you a new friend.
The programming and NPCs are quite well done. It's a fun little take on girl's social structures.
A forgotten classic; a huge, 666-point romp through bureaucratic hell, February 3, 2016This game was released in 1993. a year that saw several significant advances in interactive fiction. Perdition's Flames is one of the largest TADS games available, going up to 666 points in increments ranging from less than 10 points to 50.
You arrive in hell on a boat to discover that it's been improving it's image and applying for environmental disaster contracts to clean up hell so they can compete with heaven. But you don't like heaven or hell; you want adventure!
But adventure requires a series of magical protective amulets, the search for which occupies the bulk of the game.
This game is devilish, with some puzzles that are quite difficult. They are very inventive and fun, however. Perhaps the best sequence of the game is a detour to a haunted house (haunted by you!) where you have to get a silver ring that you can only barely nudge with your ghost fingers, all while being chased by a priest and the media.
This is just about as good as it gets for big, old-school puzzle tests, so if you're a fan of Zork, the Enchanter games, or Curses!, you should definitely check this out.
An early one room game that is pure puzzlefest, February 3, 2016While not the first, this game was near the beginning of the wave of one room games. It was entered into IFCOMP the same year as Enlightenment, another popular one room game.
This game is just pure puzzle fest. Solve a puzzle and another pops out. There is a lights out type puzzle with pegs, a mathematical dart board, hidden objects, codes, etc. It's similar to the more recent Grandma Bethlindas puzzlebox.
Recommended for pure puzzle fans.
A polished, simple old school robot game, February 3, 2016This game was inspired by early Infocom games. Your uncle puts you in a robot's body and sends you home with a secretly subversive employee.
It's fairly short, with about a half dozen puzzles, usually where you are presented with an obstacle and have to find an object to defeat it.
Somehow, it reminded me of the newer game Nine Lives by Merlin Fisher. Both are fun little old school games set in a house with similar aesthetics.
The first TADS demo game; sparse and simple, but some innovation, February 3, 2016This game is a demo, showing what TADS can do (back in 1990, before the many updates it has experienced). In that sense, it's somewhat similar to Graham Nelson's Deja Vu and/or Balances, which were meant to show off Inform.
The writing is fairly spare, and most rooms have only one item. Many things are shown off: ability to tie things and thus change exits; chutes leading from one area to another; putting things in an object; NPCs that follow you around; a money system; a funnel; etc.
The storyline was only thinly sketched; you walk around collecting a random series of objects on a college campus for Ditch Day, when seniors pose problems to freshmen.
I haven't played the sequels yet, but I intend to. Deep Space Drifter was an immediate sequel, which had mixed reception. But Return to Ditch Day, written over a decade later to show off TADS 3, was good enough to get a Best Game XYZZY nomination, so I look forward to playing it.
My favorite Gijsbers game; easy to get an ending, hard to get the best, February 3, 2016As soon as I read the premise of Fate, I found it exciting. As you immediately learn, you are a pregnant queen about to give birth; you also have the capacity to see your child's future. Your goal is to change that future.
Gijsbers' game has excellent writing, reminding me of the best parts of Ian Finley's Kaged and Adam Cadre's Varicella. But what I appreciated most was something else; no matter how many IF games I play, I still seem to need walkthroughs for everything. But I didn't have this issue for this game, because:
1. You can always reach some sort of ending in the game, and your endings improve as you go on. So if you can't get more than halfway in the game, you get a halfway-decent ending.
2. Almost all of the puzzles seem to have multiple solutions.
The game has a dark theme, and includes violence. But your character is clearly motivated by a positive goal, and the game rewards you whether you choose violence or not. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that you can reach what I consider the best ending without (Spoiler - click to show)injuring the pixie. However, I didn't find a way to avoid (Spoiler - click to show)killing the gardener; but as I said, the game doesn't force you to do anything you don't want to.
The moral choices seemed a bit easier to me as well, since your character is (Spoiler - click to show)a prisoner, and (Spoiler - click to show)her family is at war with her husband, who stole her away and won't promise to stop her child from being killed.
The most famous IF game in a decade. A long, long CYOA game about depression, February 3, 2016This game was involved in a huge dispute beginning in 2014, a dispute later known as Gamergate.
But I'd like to focus on the game itself. It is a Twine CYOA game that simulates depression. It is very long; there are about 20 or more choices, each with a full page of text, and several non-choices with their own text.
You play a depressed individual, and have to choose how to deal with work, your girlfriend, your family, your real friends and internet friends. The best option is always struck out and in red, while the actual options are in blue.
You have three meters: depression level, therapy level, and medication level.
The game has very high production values, among the highest in CYOA games.
Forgotten gem about two realities and facing fear, February 3, 2016Chancellor is a game that got a bit overlooked in the IFcomp for being long, of moderately hard difficulty, and not having a walkthrough. Later, it got more attention, being nominated for Best Game, Best Story, Best Writing, and Best Individual Puzzle in the XYZZY awards.
You play in two different worlds. The first is a fantasy world, where you must leave your father to undertake a quest. The second is (Spoiler - click to show)the real world, where you are a chancellor (like a resident aide) in an abandoned dormitory.
Both have a grim and brooding atmosphere, but also one of wonder at the world around you. The two worlds are interconnected.
The writing is excellent. The game is excellent. The author has a hints guide up somewhere that got me through a few tricky points, although the guide is very very minimal.
Strongly recommended.
Excellent short-to-mid length time travel game with rebellious PC, February 3, 2016This game came in second in the 2006 IfComp, and was nominated for best game in the XYZZY awards.
I didn't play it for a while, because it seemed like it would be a LONG game, but it actually was shockingly short. Shorter than Photopia, for instance.
You play a middle-aged woman whose neighbor and on/off love interest is shot by his mother. You have to teleport, time travel, and explore to discover a way to fix things,
The protagonist, near he end, is conscious of the player, and so some endings are best for her, some for you, some for neither or both.
It's a fun game. Most people need hints (I used one hint in the middle, and one at the end). I recommend this game, especially due to its length.
An unusually nonlinear old-school game about fighting pirates, February 3, 2016You play a captain whose ship has been conquered by pirates, and yourself thrown in the brig.
After a brief, linear opening sequence, the game opens up into a large map, on a ship (the feelies include a diagram of the ship). Random encounters happen, but I saw no timers at work. You have a dozen or more options for overcoming the Pirates, and you can basically select completely different routes each time.
I wasn't completely into the game, so after exploring every room and checking things out, I went to the walkthrough for one possible solution (of which there are many). I enjoyed it. This is a game requiring a lot of exploration and experimentation if you want to solve it on your own.
I recommend the beginning to everyone, and then that you decide on your own if you want to continue.
A fiddly Infocom game about deep sea diving for Titanic/pirate ships, February 3, 2016This game is by the author of Infidels, plus Jerry Wolper. To a greater extent than most Infocom games, this game is full of small, tiny choices that will keep you from winning much, much later.
The game at first is fairly straightforward. You are a diver on an island who discovers the existence of sunken treasure (in one version of the game, it's in the Titanic; in the other, it's in a pirate ship). You're given a sequence of instructions telling you to go to different places at different times, and you just have to follow them.
Eventually, you dive, and search the wreck, finding treasure.
So where can you go wrong? You can be carrying the wrong things around the wrong people, shutting you out of victory. I think you can have stuff stolen. You can buy the wrong equipment. You can guess the wrong wreck. You can neglect to do certain activities when everyone else is busy.
So this game must be replayed over and over, following the same directions each time.
I enjoyed the story. I ended up using eristic's walk through.
Large, well polished game that is nominally historical but feels like fantasy, February 3, 20161893 is a game set entirely in the real world. The map is based on the actual layout of the 1893 world's fair, and has hundreds of locations. The game includes 500 historical photographs used to illustrate these locations. Your enemies are counterfeiters, thieves and murderers. There is no magic or advanced technology (except in a hidden easter egg).
But at it's heart, this is a fantasy game. If the game said at the beginning 'You are at a bustling magical metropolis on the world called blah blah blah' and assigned random names to the buildings, this game would make an excellent fantasy game.
Explore bizarre cultures and exotic locations. Walk on an enormous cheese, witness arcane rituals, use devilishly complicated machines, and, most importantly, deal with a madman leaving a trail of dead bodies and missing diamonds.
The game asks you to find 2 persons of interest and 8 diamonds. These quests are almost entirely independent of each other, which is good, because this game is so huge and non-linear that it would be a great challenge to complete a linear sequence of events. After finding the 2 people of interest, you have the opportunity to complete a final quest.
I could not complete the final quest, because the event that triggers to find one of the people (Greenback Bob) never happened for me, even though I was following the walkthrough. However, I completed the rest of the game, and found it enjoyable.
There are many, many NPC's, some implemented well and others just sketched in.
The game includes in-game hints; the person who stole the diamonds WANTS to be found, and will give you hints if you call him.
Overall, an under-appreciated game. Few will be able to complete it on their own, but it is worthwhile to try. Try exploring the fair, picking up everything you can, and investigating everything. The 7 days that you have are very, very long, so you can afford to look around a while first.
A short, simple puzzle game about pirates and treasure with two main goals, February 3, 2016This is an IFComp 2015 game, and was written to be a clear and simple example for middle school students to learn about writing games. In this game, you wash up on an island after a pirate attack, and need to find treasure on your own, without the guide of your professor.
You have frequent humorous memories about your time with the professor, providing much of the humor of the game.
You have two main goals in the game:(Spoiler - click to show)find the treasure, and get off the island. Both goals are fairly simple; if you get stuck, what to do next is fairly well-clued, although I did forget to examine the scenery at one point, getting stuck for a while.
Hopefully, the author will release the source code at some point, as it was specifically meant to help people learn to write in Inform.
Mid-length Twine game about identity and fate, February 3, 2016Unbeknown is one of those games that is hard to discuss without spoiling it. It is mostly a sci-fi game, mid-length, with two significant endings. It was created for IFComp 2015.
Alan De Niro has produced some incredible writing before, with Solarium and Deadline Enchanter being my favorites. So I entered into this game with high hopes.
However, it draws most of its imagery and setting from a place that I don't really identify with:(Spoiler - click to show)an MMORPG, a genre I tried one summer, but didn't really get into. This impacts my experience, but will probably enhance the game for those with more familiarity with that area.
The game offered a couple of choices that were especially interesting, and which were the highlights of the game to me: (Spoiler - click to show)the choice of name was especially significant to me; I chose the love interest's name once, and I let Able name me once, too. The other big choice is whether the past keeps up with you or not.
Overall, something didn't click for me, keeping this game from being perfect. But it is a good game, and I still recommend it to everyone.
A Twine game with many endings and hidden content/meaning, February 3, 2016This is an IFComp 2015 game. Many people seem to have played this for a couple of minutes, grinded a few enemies or beaten the boss, and quit, giving it a bad review. The game is so much more than that.
It is a retro-style RPG game, in the vein of old DnD adventures. It's stated purpose is to be a game about killing monsters. But as you go about the dungeon, things change. The rest is in spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)You begin to learn more about the monsters in the dungeon and their pasts. You can befriend many of them; you can heal them; the game in the ultimate ending proclaims that it is about love.
I recommend this game to everyone; but if you play it, play it for a while to see what lies beneath.
A visually and verbally dense/rich CYOA game about a lost city and melancholy, February 3, 2016To Burn in Memory is an IFComp 2015 game. It has a visual style very different from other CYOA games such as Twine. It is all black with intricate white tracings underneath the text, and a series of icons on either side of the screen indicates what objects you pick up.
The writing style matches the visual richness. The opening line is a good example:‘Breathtaking isn't it?’ says Salandré, gesturing out over the vista, ‘Here is the city as I saw it — empty, painted in rust and gold, below tormented skies writhing in cruel fire.’ she continues, in a tone somewhere between opera and pantomime. ...
The gameplay consists of exploring an abandoned city, activating stored memories, and gathering keys to open different doors.
The game has a strong sense of melancholy. Because of its stylistic innovations, everyone should try out the first part of the game, until you've gathered a few items. Those who want to can then continue.
A mid-length dream/surreal game set in a lab and a city, February 3, 2016This IFComp 2015 Inform game has many parallels with Losing Your Grip; it includes someone taking an experimental medication that causes hallucinations/dreams; it includes a recurring grim authority figure; it includes boxes with hard-to-open packing tape; and it has several moments when you wake up.
Beyond that, they're pretty different. This game is open and non-linear, with many different avenues you can pursue at once. I played it first with a walkthrough, and then tried it again without a walkthrough two weeks later. I got stuck again at the very end, and had to check the walkthrough. There are two points in the game that are fairly underclued, including the main interesting mechanic.
The map consits of a small house and a rectangular grid-like city, with a path connecting them. The city is small, with one building or less per grid spot and each building having one or two rooms each with one or two items.
Overall, this is a game that is good but could use some tune-up on cluing and on some guess-the-verbs (for instance, you can CONSULT BOOKS ABOUT but you can't LOOK UP). A postcomp release would be great.
A short Twine game about working for an alien author; many endings, February 3, 2016This is an IFComp 2015 game. You get hired to type for a disabled alien in a future where aliens are common.
The game has a short series of moral choices, some of which you can backtrack on, and few of which are clearcut. Although this was not clear to me at first, I later realized that the different endings are, in fact, very different, sometimes in ways not clearly connected to the choices you make.
Overall, it's not a very long game, and it has some interesting replay content. Recommended to those who find the blurb interesting, as I did.
A two-puzzle game with plenty of Easter eggs and hidden things, February 3, 2016This short IFcomp 2015 game is, I think, the author's first game, though they are planning on future games. You play a king who has to face the day and his people, and needs to find his King and crown.
This game is notable in that the hidden content massively outnumbers the actual puzzles. The game can be beaten in less than 10 turns. However, the ending is very different, depending on your actions. There are magic words, background stories to find in the scenery, and a hidden part of a novel, as well as a ton of customized error messages and such.
Overall, I would like to see the author make a longer game with similar attention to detail. It would be difficult, but having that much hidden stuff, coupled with more puzzles and a longer plot arc, would make for a great and memorable game.
A game about puns, society, oppression, and charismatic leaders, February 3, 2016This IfComp 2015 game is mid-length, and is full of reversed compound nouns (so, for instance, you are Alec Smart, seeking out the Complex Messiah).
The big inspiration here is the Phantom Tollbooth. As in that book, the clever jokes are the focus, with story being out to the sidelines. Also like the book, you wander about the world, undertaking different quests and talking to interesting characters.
Much of the game is social commentary, specifically on 'smart people'; those who are socially awkward, those who are pretentious, those who are idolized, etc.
I beta tested this game, and it was interesting to see how much work the author put into revisions; many things in the game are vastly different from before, fortunately, the author allows you to tour sections of the game that were removed, which is a very nice bonus.
Recommended for fans of the Phantom Tollbooth, or those interested in games that comment on real-life issues.
A rapidly branching Twine game with very very different endings, February 3, 2016Crossroads is an IFComp 2015 Twine game about choices and a witch. Unlike most IF games which have paths that temporarily branch then converge, Crossroads branches and stays branched. Some paths visit your past, some involve only mild fantasy, some involve sci fi, some let you type material in, etc.
All of the branches have the common theme of desperation. Well, I think they all do; I doubt anyone besides the author has found all of the branches.
Each branch is fairly short. This game becomes better and better the more you play it.
Intense Infocom spy game where the clock runs between actions, February 3, 2016Border zone is stressful for me. Unlike most IF, you have to type very fast, as the clock keeps running and running. I had to type super fast on the iPad and I kept dying from typos, even using slow time and the walkthrough.
The story and puzzles are actually really fun. I enjoyed the game a lot, especially the first act (where you have to smuggle information out of a train) and the third act (where you are a double agent, and have to stop an assassination without people knowing you did it). The three acts can be started at any time, and each follows a different person.
Stressful, but rewarding.
A short story about time travel with minimal interactivity, February 3, 2016This IFComp 2015 game is written using inklewriter. It contains a fairly large amount of text for an interactive fiction game, but it stops at the most interesting point of the story. To me, it felt like the first two chapters of a long novel.
The story is about time travel, and is complicated and intricate. It is clear that the author is excellent at worldbuilding; I read through this game twice, about two weeks apart, and the second time I appreciated the story much more. I was excited to read more, and I hope the author continues the story.
There are a couple of typos, but I think the author may be fixing them, as I remember there being more the first time I read it.
So this story is more of non-interactive fiction, but it is not bad for a sci-fi short story.
An entirely dialogue-based sci-fi Twine game about a space station murder, February 3, 2016This was an IFComp 2015 entry. This is a mid-length Twine game with an interesting format: each page is written somewhat like a play, listing the location and people present, each in their own color. Then dialogue appears a line at a time, each in the color belonging to the person.
The game is set on a space station. You are a computer, and there has been a murder on the station.
I enjoyed the story, especially the 2nd and 3rd times I played it. Most of the interactivity is found in selecting the order of presentation. I am beginning to become a fan of dialogue-only games, like this and Birdland.
Natural disaster sci-fi in a city/lab. Much better than would first appear, February 3, 2016Andromeda Apocalypse seemed unappealing to me for a long time (I imagined some kind of space battle simulator). And when I first started playing, the language seemed a bit weird.
But then it all pulled together. This is a great exploration/adventure sci-fi game. The focus is on understanding the mystery, with the occasional computer log and a fun electronic encyclopedia called the e-Pad.
A short-to-mid length game, right on the upper end of most IF comp entries. The game is very polished except for annoying 'guess the noun' issues (you must say 'windows' not 'window''; a 'large strange object' is 'object', etc.)
Overall, a great feel. Reminded me of Eric Eve's nightfall, and a bit like Scavenger. Definitely worth playing.
Fun superhero story with two PC's where I had trouble guessing the solutions, February 3, 2016This is part 3 of Earth and Sky. I played the second one only a few weeks ago, but I already forgot an important power of the characters, and it made the first puzzle very hard for me. However, talking to to each other enough gives you all solutions.
You play two characters, one with sky powers (flying, zapping, fogging), and one with earth powers (punching, lifting, jumping). You are trying to rescue your parents.
The game is pretty short, with a linear sequence of puzzles that you have to solve one-by-one. The writing was good, the graphics were fun (mostly "BLAM!"-type comic words). I was disappointed that I had forgotten so much of the plot from the last playthrough.
This game is very good, but not the best. I think that a few of the other games from 2004 IFComp were better, but that the whole set of 3 Earth and Sky games make a very good package, like a Chopped chef that wins because of three solid courses, while the other chefs had one incredible course and a few poor courses.
Frankly, I just used a walkthrough and enjoyed the show, February 3, 2016Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy is co-written by Douglas Adams, and the strong prose shows this. The game is very imaginative and vibrant.
On the other hand, the puzzles are (I assume) by Steve Meretzky, who is one of my least favorite puzzle writers from Infocom. Sorcerer, though great, was my least favorite Enchanter game, and I get tired of Planetfall early on. So when I started this game, I was scared of any misstep sending me on a wild goose chase into an unsavable state.
So I just used a walkthrough and sailed through the game, enjoying the witty prose. I plan to go back and read more of the room descriptions and the actual guide. I often find that this approach works with very difficult or unfair games, because the second playthrough can be done without a walkthrough, allowing your memory to help you on some puzzles but still having fun with those you forgot.
The game has several puzzles that are frequently referenced in interactive fiction reviews and forums: the Babel-fish puzzle, and the tea. It may be worthwhile to play through with a walkthrough just to see these.
Note that Douglas Adams released this game for free when Activision went a long time without selling it. I don't know the current status of it, but he intended to freely distribute it at least once in the past. It is not available on Lost Treasures of Infocom for iPad, my usual go-to place for Infocom games.
Very clever puzzles in a heartwarming Christmas story., February 3, 2016Many people seem put off by the homey charm of this Christmas game, perhaps more interested in gore or adult content. But this ASCII-art using winter game is deep and well-polished, and on the longer end for an IFComp game. It won the comp for a good reason.
First, it is beautiful. Visually, the ASCII art and color scheme help the immersion (I loved the snowflakes in the status bar). And the descriptions and responses of the text are all well-crafted and contribute to the atmosphere significantly.
Second, the puzzles are ingenious, though some reasonable alternatives are not implemented. The majority of the game centers on magical creatures, and working with them. NPC interaction is present, though limited, as is usual in games of this time period.
The story starts out extraordinarily over sweetly, but I enjoyed it, and it soon became a magic-themed puzzle fest. This game drew me in, and I would love to see more games with a fun family atmosphere instead of gritty dystopias or gruesome underground labs.
Interesting grim fantasy game with alalchemy and messing with IF conventions, February 3, 2016This game is about a warrior who destroys a baron, only to discover himself cursed. You wander around a castle while investigating hidden rooms, ancient texts, and complicated puzzles, as well as running into some NPC's. The atmosphere is anti-heroic.
The main attraction of the game is the nature of the curse, which messes with IF conventions.(Spoiler - click to show)As the game progresses, room descriptions and objects become less and less implemented, until each room is just a number with nothing in it.
A treasure trove of non-interactive short stories with one puzzle, February 3, 2016Six Stories is an interesting game. I came across it because it did will in 1999 IFComp.
Six Stories was notable at the time for using sound and graphics as an integral part of the game. The game contains six short stories, which are narrated (I had to use HTML TADS, and download the sound files with the non-bundled game. The bundled game didn't play the sound). The graphics are mainly backdrops.
I enjoyed the short stories. There is a brief sequence before hearing them, and then one short puzzle after hearing them. The imagery in the game is imaginative and enjoyable.
If you enjoy fables/fairytales, you will enjoy this game.
A mid-length conversation-based Victorian game about romance, February 3, 2016Muse is a bit on the long side for an IFComp game. In this game, you play an English clergyman who becomes interested in a young woman.
The game is focused on conversation and a few keyed actions. This is a game with good writing, but underclued puzzles, and so I took my standard tack for such games of just using a walkthrough after muddling about for a bit. (As an example of an underclued puzzle, (Spoiler - click to show)It says your room is stuffy. If you don't open your window, you can go around and do things for hours, but you will never solve the puzzle.).
There were also other word issues. You have to say "daughter" instead of the daughters name sometimes when speaking to the father.
All in all, I think that everyone would enjoy this game more with a walkthrough than just playing through. The puzzles are not compelling.
But I strongly recommend the text.
A mid-long beautiful realistic game exploring the wilderness with good NPC, February 3, 2016In this game, written for the author's hot-spring loving wife, you explore an expansive wilderness region with a hot spring, wild animals, a friendly old NPC, and beautiful descriptions of nature.
One of my favorite games of all time is Suzanne Britton's novel-length Worlds Apart sci-fi. She specifically cites this game and Sunset over Savannah (a game focusing on a beach and nature) as being an inspiration to her. Having played the two games, I really see how Worlds Apart took inspiration from this game. Worlds Apart is set in a forest near a beach. The forest part of the game is extremely similar to She's Got A Thing for A Spring, with vivid nature descriptions, a guidebook where you can look up plants and animals, and a specific animal (the pika/pakal) that seems almost directly borrowed, with slightly similar puzzles.
This made me appreciate both games more, as it helped me see some of the creative process. She's got a thing for spring is rare as being a realistic game without horror or magical elements. The closest game to it I've seen is A Change in the Weather, which came out a year or two before it.
There are some negatives; the game makes the unfortunate mistake of combining a large, nonlinear map with independent NPCs and tightly timed puzzles. This is a bad combination, as Jim Aikin learned with his game Last Resort, which also featured a huge map and tightly-timed puzzles. He solved the problem by re-tuning the game so that time changes are triggered by events, resulting in the excellent Lydia's Heart game.
Other games, like old Infocom games, have tightly-timed puzzles, but generally they have small maps that make replay easy, or confine the puzzles to a specific time and place.
So I just used a walkthrough to see the fun. The walkthrough was wrong in several places, so I had to improvise, and that was fun.
A valley-girl one-room witch puzzle with interesting puzzle system, February 3, 2016In this game, you play a witch who has been confined to a single room during a potion competition. You must brew a potion to win, however, you suffer a major disadvantage, because there is something wrong with your magic.
I was hesitant about this game at first, because I found the language annoying (imagine the writing by Anna from Frozen: "I am SO going to catch her!"). Also, the first few puzzles were almost trivial.
However, I realized as time went on that the writing produced a consistent and interesting worldview (as the backstory unfolded), and that the first puzzles were just an easy tutorial. The game got progressively more difficult, until I needed 3 hints to get through puzzles.
The hints are very mild, provided entirely by your cat's actions.
There's a few red herrings in this game, and a bit of 'guess the author's brain', but by the time I finished, I realized that I genuinely enjoyed this game.
A Ludum Dare competition game with classic Porpentine elements., February 3, 2016This game was entered in Ludum Dare, a 24-hour game competition.
This game is classic Porpentine. Strong writing, extreme repetition, the game as a metaphor for a relationship, occasional profanity, and a variety of bodily fluids. This game has little violence or sexual references compared to her other games.
The main mechanic is climbing. You climb a wall. Then stuff happens.
Porpentine as an author is reminiscent of the 19th century authors who wrote extremely triply material. Samuel Coleridge and Edgar Allen Poe come to mind.
A metaphorical Twine game set as a retro video game. , February 3, 2016King of Bees is short, with a braided storyline (where choices temporarily affect the storyline before converging again.
This game reminds me a bit of Endless, Nameless in its visual design,with a combination of types.
You play a space knight, who is sent to kill the king of bees. The game has several layers of meaning, and it is hard to know what the ultimate message is ((Spoiler - click to show)for instance, is the heavy-handed environmental subtext meant as part of the ultimate message, or is it presented ironically?).
I recommend it.
Jokey walls-o'-text by a great author. Pretty linear story about roguelikes/RPGs, February 3, 2016Hennessy has some very good twine games, but I didn't feel like this is one. It still has metaphorical meaning, an interesting 'cover story', good narrative voice, etc. like his other games. The story is about a dungeon, and about rpgs and dungeons in general.
However, one of the games features is that every link provides a huge wall of often repetitive text. Also, the narrative voice is jokey/juvenile, whichI personally don't enjoy very much in a game.
Overall, this is an above average twine game, but I don't recommend it. I strongly recommend the other games by the author.
Very short (less than one minute), but interesting take on history and future, February 3, 2016This game is a one-trick pony. At first, I thought it would be a random text generator like Begscape. However, it turned out to be much simpler.
Once I thought it through, I enjoyed it. Not much else to say.
Fun Twine game with clever, skippable puzzles, February 3, 2016Missive is clever and fun, but is a bit of a mismatch. It has a gripping and interesting story about a man who just went through a breakup interacting with both his ex girlfriend and a mysterious present.
These form two fairly distinct stories that are both good. The true relationship between you and your ex slowly comes out in a very clever way. The present story involves sifting through old letters and deciphering puzzles. If you get the puzzles right, you pick the correct next letter to read. It doesn't tell you if you were right till the end, making lawnmowering hard. You can have a great experience without solving all the puzzles.
The game has some scattered profanity and frequent alcohol use. These usually turn me off of a game, but the PC was painted as a (to me) lovable guy going through a hard time, so I had sympathy for him. Good game.
An old-school game. A teddy bear explores the house of his IF-loving owner, February 3, 2016A Bear's Night Out was nominated for an XYZZY award for Best Game in its second year. You play as a teddy bear exploring the house of your owner.
This is a classic 90's game. Tight puzzles, jokey references to other games, a real sense of atmosphere, many unexaminable objects. If you enjoyed Plotkin's or Nelson's early games, you will enjoy this game.
By the game's own count, it has 32 references to previous games, including letting you (Spoiler - click to show)play Curses!, Dungeon, and Adventureland.
Creepy game about reality and refuge, February 3, 2016This game is about two women, one staying in another' s home. The story of how they got there and who they are is slowly unraveled throughout the game.
As I played the first 3/4 of the game, I thought it was one of the best horror games I had ever played, with good implementation. The little hints to the real nature of the situation came out so well.
But I didn't care for the endings. I felt it didn't mesh well with the earlier setup. But this is common to most horror games.
There are a few annoying search-everywhere puzzles, so don't feel bad getting help.
Great reverse puzzle: You build the dungeon, your enemy tries to get out., February 3, 2016This is one of my favorite Cadre games, best known for Photopia and 9:05 (and my other favorite, Endless, Nameless).
In this fantasy game, you play a dungeon maker charged with building an inescapable dungeon. Unfortunately, your first test subject is extremely resourceful, producing items out of nowhere and charming all opponents.
You have to place traps on a path through a 4x4 grid. You have to get the right traps and in the right order. It is tedious, but each playthrough (besides a few cutscenes) is different, as the adventurer reacts to your challenges with new resources.
Buying each trap is also funny.
It got a little tedious after 3-4 times; I had the basic idea, but I knew it would take a lot more to get it down right, so I used the walkthroughs.
Wonderful game.
The best murder mystery I have played. You are Sherlock Holmes' dog., February 3, 2016In this game, you play as Sherlock Holmes' dog as you investigate a murder. The game features an innovative movement system based on Pacian's Castle of the Red Prince.
You explore a huge variety of locales with what seems like a hundred or more objects, but due to the system, it can be done quickly.
The one aspect of the game that initially turned me off is that it requires exhaustive search of all such objects. You have a single command to search them, but you have to repeat it over, and over, and over. It becomes like Where's Waldo.
However, as the story unfolded (using hints occasionally because I hurried through it in an hour), I became enthralled. This is a good mystery. As the author states, it is intended to be solved in your head, and not through gameplay mechanics (contrast this with the wonderful Infocom mystery Ballyhoo, where the focus is on solving puzzles to obtain more evidence, but a psychological element is still present).
I found the solution to be very logical and satisfying. I had two false accusations I was convinced of in the middle of the game before I realized I had missed crucial evidence.
Strongly recommended.
P.S. I was stuck at the very beginning because I did not understand the mechanic. You need to (Spoiler - click to show)smell nouns that appear in the descriptions of people, even if they are not present. So if someone smells like they went to a party, type SMELL PARTY, etc..
Excellent twisted version of a young detective story, February 3, 2016Bell Park is one of the four games put out by the author in 2013, and is one of the best.
You play a youth detective like Nancy Drew or the Hardy boys, but get in way over your head. Most of the game is a parody of these books, showing what would happen if someone really tried to solve crimes as a youth.
I enjoyed the game. The ending was strange, but fits the story. I recommend this game.
A treasure-hunt for content. An award-winning Twine game., February 3, 2016Rat Chaos's opening is purposely bad. You are in a position of authority over an area, with the option to summon rats or not.
The game is goofy and fun at first. But the 'real' content takes some searching to find. In the end, Rat Chaos has a powerful, visceral message.
It's hard to say too much more about it without spoiling it.
As of Septembet 2015, the link no longer functions, but I found someone on an IF forum willing to share a copy.
A weaker Infocom title; a mystery for kids with four modes (UPDATED), February 3, 2016Edit:I found the reason the game felt weaker to me in another review:
The room descriptions are in the feelies!
This explains why the game felt so lame. Random objects seemed to appear out of nowhere, and major rooms seemed to have no description at all. But the feelies seemed rich and interesting. I didn't realize that you were supposed to constantly refer to the feelies as you go.
I wonder if this was a way to make the game fit on a smaller disk with four variants.
This makes the game SO much better. Thanks for the tip, Victor!
*****************************************************
For those who have access to the feelies (such as in the iPad Lost Treasures of Infocom app), the backstories in the manual for this game were very enjoyable, much more than the game itself. I thought I should throw that out there.
This game is similar to An Act of Murder, where there are numerous possible suspects, multiple clues, and a variety of possible variations determined at the beginning of the game.
Both games were weaker, I feel, because they had to be adapted to work with multiple endings. For instance, in Moonmist, you find 'clues' that are just called 'clues'. Not scraps of paper, shreds of fabric, cards, etc. Just 'clues'. I assume they are different in each of the variations when you examine them (I only felt like playing through the 'green' version).
Moonmist is a kids game. This makes the game a bit harder at time; for instance, the room descriptions and directions get annoying at times.
The game is on a tight schedule, so you may have to restart before some characters leave.
The game has a cute idea where it calls you by your first name, and also by your title and last name when appropriate.
You play in a large castle with seven guests, investigating a supposed ghost that haunts the castle. Several mysterious deaths have occurred recently, and your friend is marrying the new Lord of the castle.
I don't recommend this game. I do recommend the manual.
Well-crafted, big fantasy game with weird dating sim vibe on the side, February 3, 2016This fantasy game was a lot of fun. You are washed up on an island after a big storm, and you slowly have to piece what happened together. The game purposely leads you to thinking one thing, then gives you a bit of a fakeout (or doesn't, depending on your point of view).
There are a dozen or more NPCs, and there are a great deal of sidequests. Most of the game can be skipped on a good walkthrough (or at least a good chunk of it).
The weird part was the fact that all single woman in the game are written as gorgeous and interested in your character, with you getting the pick of them. Now, dating simulation in general isn't a horrible idea, but one when character's description is that "The word 'buxom' was invented for her', it gets pretty lame. Fortunately, you can avoid anything you don't like.
This is a big, rich world, with a very large map. I only needed hints 2 or 3 times. On one puzzle, though, the whole puzzle revolved around examining an item only mentioned once in the middle of a room description that was one of dozens of room descriptions of no importance, so I don't think I would ever have solved it on my own, because I was skimming the descriptions by then.
A short atypical Lovecraftian story with sidebars and graphics., February 3, 2016This is perhaps the most unique Lovecraftian story I have played from IFDB. Jon Ingold, one of the great writers of interactive fiction, has put together a fairly odd game here.
First of all, the game tells you what you should type each turn. This was off-putting at first, but gave me a bit of a start when it stopped right when I would actually need it. Also, on replays, there are very significant areas of the game that you can't access if you follow the cues.
Next, there are odd pencil sketches that appear in every room.
Third, your inventory always shows up. I liked this.
Noone seems to know if they got the right ending or not, because the game is somewhat anticlimactic. However, reading the author's notes, you see that one of the requirements of the game was that it has a 'dubious ending' (or 'doubtful ending' or something like that).
The game is about an old man with a precious book collection. There are no tentacles, no cult, no fog, no slime or sacrifices in this game. It does manage to be fairly creepy, however.
It is short. I recommend it to everyone just to try it out, as it is fairly unusual and not at all like The Lurking Horror/Anchorhead and their imitators.
An engrossing, short fractured fairy tale by numerous authors, February 3, 2016I tried to play this game years ago on the iPad but failed. I'm very glad I have now finished it. It is a very interesting take on Snow White, mixed with other legends. It was a collaboration among many authors, and has eighteen different endings.
It works very well. The story is engrossing, and perhaps due to the large number of authors, it feels like most topics and commands have good responses.
This is a one room game, where you as the huntsman are with Snow White and a dead Hart in the forest.
A surreal trippy journey to Christian afterlife; mid-length, well-written game, February 3, 2016This game is a typical Eric Eve game:
Good points of Eve games: several NPC's, large map that doesn't really need mapping, optional side quests, great writing, interesting plot.
This game is a bit like Dante's inferno, but with a more 'modern' take. In particular, there are forces that disbelieve the truth of heaven and hell, and the game doesn't say who's right and who is wrong. As a case in point, one of the first things you see is that hell is closed, due to mythologicalization.
The general gameplay was very enjoyable. It felt like Blue Chairs without the drugs and profanity.
Bad points: trophy-ization of women.
Just like Elysium Enigma with the naked Lena and Blighted Isle with Betty the buxom, All Hope Abandon is chauvinistic. The main woman is referred to frequently as just 'the blonde', and there is a green-skinned demon, who makes you uneasy because they 'use sexuality as a weapon, just like many mortal women'.
It's a shame that these games all pigeonhole women, as otherwise I would strongly recommend them to everyone.
A well-crafted, short game about a witch; appropriate for children, February 3, 2016Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret is about a woman in your neighborhood who stole your skateboard and is pretty mean.
You investigate her, and discover quite a bit about her past. You meet some interesting NPC's, and have to work out some really very clever puzzles.
The game lasts not very long; it took me 508 moves the first time I played it. It really feels like investigating the home of the antagonist in Wishbringer.
I recommend this game; it is short and entertaining.
Essentially two games in one. Short, mosly linear, fairly easy and fun, February 3, 2016As others have noted, this game has essentially two parts (not including short, one-shot scenes).
The first part is very enjoyable, more than any Eric Eve game I have played. In its crispness, focus, and detail, and linearity, it reminded me of Dual Transform by Plotkin. You are an adventurer in the snow, trying to helo your civilization.
The second part fell flat for me, especially the ending. It seemed the author left much unfinished. The puzzles were still good; although I missed an inventory item by not reading descriptions.
Overall, I recommend this gamee.
Slow start leading to surprisingly fun game; easy to beat, hard to master, February 3, 2016In this game, you slap about 10 fish to death in order to survive and to avenge.
I thought Slap That Fish was boring at first, but by the fourth or fifth fight, the game started getting really fun. It turns out that just slapping is not optimal; it'll get you through the first few fights, but there are other methods that can sometimes even end a fight in one hit.
The later fights require inventive items and difficult items.
I had no shame using the walkthrough when I got stuck on the shark, because the puzzles were a little obscure, and the walkthrough will NOT give you the best score. You have to be creative to get a perfect score.
I managed to get a perfect score on the first 3 fish the second time around, but I don't know how to perfectly defeat the catfish or the tuna.
Wonderful speed IF with innovative magic system, February 3, 2016Sometimes I think Emily Short has a competition with herself to see how many different magic systems she can come up with.
In this short game, you can take amounts of time from an object and place them in another object. The game makes this fairly simple.
This is a speed-IF, which generally means messy implementation. That doesn't show up as much here, except for leaving the tower. Also, the ending took me a bit to figure out.
Beyond being just a speed IF, this was a new-language speed IF, which means that Emily Short learned TADS and made this game all in a couple of days. Extremely impressive.
Fun real-life job simulation that takes a sharp turn to Crazyville, February 3, 2016This game is pretty bizarre. In this game, you are a health inspector checking out a horribly disgusting bar. You get points by 'noting' things in your notebook.
I really enjoyed this part of the game. It's fun trying to think of every way you can get the jerk owner on stuff. Although I should have known weird things were going on when (MAJOR SPOILER)(Spoiler - click to show) I found eyeballs floating in the gutter). I realized that this game may not be for the squeamish; I felt a bit uncomfortable.
After a while, you start to find out weird stuff. I formed an initial theory. After I found the weirdest of the weird stuff, my theory took a blow, and then was shattered into millions of pieces. The final plot of the game was a little cliche, but done inventively enough that I had a great time. At least it wasn't a poorly-done Lovecraftian game (although I have to say, of the seven Lovecraftian games I have played, all were well done).
I needed a couple of hints.
Great B-Movie material. Pretty short, not hard, fun superhero game, February 3, 2016In Earth and Sky, you play as a woman who discovers superpowers, together with her brother.
There are two times where you use your powers: a training session, and a battle. Before each of these events is a short exposition/exploration segment.
The exposition sections use a menu conversation system with the chance to be normal or to use crazy B-movie dialog.
The plot is silly, but the writing is vivid and you can really imagine what is going on. I think the author was very successful here.
I recommend this game, especially because it is so short that you have nothing to lose by playing it.
Interactive storytelling with innovative keywords and moral choices, February 3, 2016Whom the Telling Changed consists of numerous choices. The game frequently asks you to do something, but the order is ambiguous, with two or more meanings. The way you interpret it changes the game. You also listen to a storyteller to whom you can ask questions,
This game uses the same keyword system Aaron Reed later used in Blue Lacuna, his ultra-massive epic. Fans of one game will likely be fans of the other.
I didn't really enjoy this game. I felt that it resisted me trying to play myself. One might say that the author merely wanted to add surprises, however Glasser's Creatures Such as We used a similar moral choice system where playing as myself led to both big surprises and a feeling that the game understood me.
A fairly well-known game. I pushed through it to the end, and was glad I did. There are many endings.
Giant Infocom-style wizard game with chemistry and 65 'AMUSING' items at the end, February 3, 2016This is a very large game that you could spend a long time playing. It is slightly shorter than Curses!, and about half as long as Muldoon Legacy.
You play a college student who is immediately sucked into another world, where a renegade befuddled wizard is asking for your help.
The game has a tower that gets bigger and bigger and more complicated as you discover a huge number of chemical ingredients. Then you realize you have only seen less than half of the game. The game is so big, there are 65 AMUSING options at the end.
It has copious hints, and great world details. But it was too hard for me; I just went through the walkthrough. You could play it for a long, long time without hints and still have fun.
If you liked Mulldoon Legacy, you will like this.
Wonderful Infocom puzzlefest in a pyramid with coded language, February 3, 2016I loved Infidel. You play a jerk adventurer who has alienated everyone he knows as he searches for a hidden pyramid. The game has a long intro sequence in your camp before reaching the actual pyramid.
The game is very Indiana-Jonesish, although there are no NPC's. Every few rooms, there is a death trap waiting to destroy you. Hieroglyphics on the wall tell you how to avoid some traps, but they sometimes describe things far away, and you have to puzzle out the meaning of the hieroglyphics yourself.
This game is advanced, but I got much further between hints than I usually do in an Infocom game (although Emily Short mentioned two guess-the-verb problems in her review that I found helpful before I even played the game).
This game has a great flavor and style, similar to Ballyhoo's dark circus theme. I strongly recommend this game.
Interesting short psychological thriller on a beach, February 3, 2016This short, linear game is a supernatural thriller that is a bit spotty and unfinished but raw and interesting.
The next step at each moment is relatively clear, so there are only minor puzzles. You play a fisherman or beach bum with memory problems on a cold, dark shore.
This game is a horror game, so there are some gross moments, including one that made my stomach turn. In its mood, it reminds me of The Warbler's Nest.
Enjoyable short adventure from the early years of home-made IF, February 3, 2016John's Fire Witch is a short, fun collect-the-item and solve-the-puzzle game. The feel reminded me a lot of Enchanter, but without the magic.
I've been more interested in story than puzzles recently, so I used a walkthrough at a couple of points (which made me realize I had forgotten that I dropped some items).
Two big puzzles were very fun; the (Spoiler - click to show)crystal card and the devil's bag. The last puzzle was a bit unfair, I thought.
There are no mind-bending surprises or big innovations here; just well-thought out puzzles. If you like this, you would enjoy Uncle Zebulon's Will.
Long, intricate, mostly fair Infocom treasure hunt set in Malibu house., February 3, 2016Hollywood Hijinx is long and complex, more so than Zork. You play the nephew of a famous movie producing couple who have died and left you their fortune, on the condition that you are smart enough to find all ten of their movie treasures.
The premise didn't really excite me, but as I read the feelies, I began to be more interested. Also, I had heard many people mention this as a favorite Infocom game. Later, during the game, I began to really get into it, especially with the (Spoiler - click to show)remote controlled model of the Atomic Chihuahua set in Tokyo.
The game is hard. I literally couldn't solve the first problem: getting into the house. I had to look up the invisiclues. The game in general was complex, and I honestly just explored the house once, then relied on the walkthrough to see the rest of the game.
Only a few puzzles seemed really unfair, especially the 'last' big puzzle. But the creativity of this game is outstanding. If I had been looking for a long game to play over a month, this would have been it.
A depressing game utilising randomisation and frequent repetition, February 3, 2016This game is like a Verdi opera stuck in Act III. Verdi once wrote that he wanted to show the impossibility of human happiness, and this game is similar.
You generally only have two options at any time, and more often, just one: beg. You beg, and beg, and beg, and then leave or beg more. You try to get enough money for food and shelter, but you don't always succeed.
The game uses the same scenes over and over again; I think there are only two or three real screens, and each is like a mad-lib filled with different information every time.
Some people found this powerful, and I've really enjoyed the effect of depressing repetition with other Twine games, but I didn't really enjoy this game. With Those We Love Alive was much better, one of my favorite games of all time, and it was released in the same competition.
Life after death after death after death...mid-length puzzle game, February 3, 2016Monk-fish is a mid-length puzzle-y game in which you must deal with the after-effects of a failed scientific experiment. You explore an underwater base, encounter monk-fish, and generally have to puzzle out a very enjoyable story with vague similarities to Ingold's All Roads game.
The game is vaguely futuristic, somewhat like Walker and Silhouette. It gave me several laugh-out-loud moments.
This game was nominated for Best Game, Best Writing, Best Story, and Best Individual Puzzle. The puzzle it was nominated for was discovering a password, and is one of those 'to get A, you need B. So you get B, but first you have to do C, which you must have D to make sense of'. It is very, very fun, although I couldn't do step 'D' (whichever step that was).
The plot reminded me of a lot of TV shows going on right now where the protagonists is partly dead or partly alive.
Sci-fi Inform murder mystery with Russian theme and some bugs , February 3, 2016In this game, you play a Russian official investigating a death on the moon with the help of your trusty robot DUFFY. As you gather evidence and use DUFFY to analyze it, you come to discover who the true murderer was.
This is a shufflecomp game, and as such it was produced quickly, and it shows. Trying to reenter the shuttle you came in from is frustrating; you can't x shuttle, enter shuttle, up, down, go in any direction, open shuttle, etc. By consulting the walkthrough, I discovered that the correct response was "in".
There are numerous NPC's, but for most of them I found only a single topic that they respond to.
The base itself is well-designed; for some reason I enjoyed the wide use of diagonal directions, and the sickle-shape of the base.
Unfortunately, I was unable to complete the game, as the walkthrough does not work at one point (Spoiler - click to show)You cannot go down in the greenhouse, and no other command such as open grill or x shutters could get me into the air duct. However, I wish I could; the writing isn't perfect, the npcs aren't implemented very strongly, but somehow it all comes together to a game that is actually very fun.
Edit: Another user showed me how to finish the game, and the additional content made the game much better for me. It feels larger.
Brief Inform shufflecomp game about teenagers with surprisingly good NPC, February 3, 2016This shufflecomp game is about two teenagers and life changes. There are two main puzzles and then a branching mini-puzzle at the end.
The teenagers are young potheads, and their language reflects that. The game includes some fun experiments in formatting to reflect the world the kids live in.
Because of my experience with other shufflecomp games, I didn't try talking to the NPC much, but after I beat the game, I went back to the walkthrough and was shocked by the amount of programming that went into the NPC.
For those who have played through the second 'act':
(Spoiler - click to show)I thought there could have been more hints for the car. I just typed in obects I know exist in a car, and I collected all the change this way, but I thought it odd that 'look' didn't work. In the hints section, I discovered that I could have asked Jane, which is another point in this NPC's favor.
An in-joke twine game where everyone is named after forum members, February 3, 2016This game is essentially just a way to cram the names of a lot of people from a certain Twine forum into a game. If you aren't one of those people, there is not any real reason to play the game, because the names are distracting.
Perhaps the author could include a version in the future that allows you to toggle back and forth between the usernames and more ordinary names.
A fantastic retooling of material from MIT Zork, with some new material, February 3, 2016Zork II incorporates my favorite puzzles from MIT Zork: the palantirs, the tea room, the round room, the robot, the volcano, the glacier room. The dragon (a callback to Adventure) was a fun challenge, and the two or three NPCs made the game quite fun. I enjoyed watching the wizard travel around zapping me.
I prefer Zork I's treasure drop off system, however. It was annoying having a huge pile of treasure, not knowing what to do with it.
I used a walkthrough on a few places (especially the oddly-angled room), because I wanted to see the whole game. Having completed MIT Zork before made some of the hardest puzzles trivial.
A short Twine game about going to work or not, February 3, 2016This is a short Twine game with short sentences and a large font. There are three endings, bad, neutral, and good. There are some pretty sad choices you can make, but they are not rewarded.
This game is just a simulation of going to work and coming back, with a complete play resulting in about 20 total lines of text. It's kind of like a Twine version of 9:05 without the more intense parts, and with a condensed text.
There are a few spelling errors (e.g. 'cublicle' instead of 'cubicle').
A twine game about coming out as a transsexual, February 3, 2016In this game, you go through years worth of trying to talk to people about being transsexual. You have some control, but things tend to happen whether you like them or not.
This results in a fairly linear narrative, but the choices make you feel like you are participating.
You either like this type of game or you don't. The author did a good job of making you feel like you understand the pc.
A mid-length goofy playground magic Twine game., February 3, 2016Broken Wand is a short Twine game with multiple endings, text input, and some non-trivial puzzles.
In the game, you discover a broken wand under the playground slide that you must repair. You encounter a few villains and some nontrivial puzzles, including some math.
The atmosphere is goofy and silly, like a story a kid on the playground would tell. Events in the game are often illogical and disconnected. If you like goofy games, you will like this.
Mid-length sci fi game with strong opening and more typical finale, February 3, 2016The first scene(s) in Legion are truly ingenious, one of those "What on earth is going on?" type games. It took me quite a while to figure out what was even possible, but I had fun exploring. There is basically one important verb that you can try on everything, and then reading in-game clues should give you some ideas of what else to do.
Once the game transitions into it's second section (signified by changes in the in-game color), it becomes a bit more standard, similar to Babel and the many games inspired by it. It uses some profane language, which is mostly appropriate for the nature of the person and the situation. The puzzles are still very good, the writing is still good, but the opening is so great that the rest of the game pales in comparison.
Infocom's Lovecraftian game set on a campus: mixed puzzles, great creatures, February 3, 2016It's hard for me to review this game (the first horror IF game by Infocom, and one of the first horror games ever) without comparing it to later Interactive Fiction based on Lovecraft's work. Specifically, Theatre, Anchorhead, and Lydia's Heart come to mind. How does this one compare?
First, size. The Lurking Horror is on the small side, due to PC capabilities at the time of publication. It is about the same size as Theatre, and much smaller than Anchorhead or Lydia's Heart.
Next, setting. The game is set in an alternate version of the MIT campus called GUE Tech during the winter. This worked well for me in the end, with the creepy Department of Alchemy, dark buildings and deep basements, and the gross muddy areas. It gave them game a more campy feel though, like Theatre, as opposed to the bigger games.
NPC's and enemies. While The Lurking Horror has a few okay PC's, it really shines in the creature department. I had played for a few hours without encountering more than one 'creature', and nothing that threatened me, so I was quite shocked when I (Spoiler - click to show)buried an axe in the chest of the maintenance man without any reaction from him. The further the game got, the more disturbing the creatures got. The enemies are more like Theatre's than the later games.
Puzzles. The Lurking Horror has some puzzles that are just dumb (especially the carton in the fridge). Later on, though, the puzzles get more fun, especially as you use the same objects in more and more ways. In the end, the puzzles are more like Lydia's Heart than the other two games, although there are much less puzzles overall.
Overall, it seems to me that the Lurking Horror was a great success that became eclipsed by later games. Theatre ('95) seems to be strongly inspired by The Lurking Horror, while Anchorhead ('98) seems to be inspired at least partially by Theatre (as it includes some similar puzzles). Lydia's Heart ('07) was more of a successful reboot of the Lovecraft idea using newer technology.
A well-polished sci-fi game with a teenage plant protagonist, February 3, 2016Chlorophyll felt like a commercial game to me. If Infocom had lived longer, I could see this as being one of their "Beginner" games (which were never very easy, as far as I can tell). It's well-polished, with a strong background story and lots of extra details.
It's a mid-length game set on a distant world. You play a young plant-woman with her plant-woman mother. You must explore a base while also coming to grips with your own coming adulthood and independence.
At times, I stopped playing Chlorophyll for a few weeks because the game seemed too open without much direction, and I felt overwhelmed. As I pressed through, though, I found that you were guided pretty well, and I found the last three areas enjoyable.
The only other sticking point was the long intro where you can't do very much. It made it annoying to restart. Other than that, this is one of the best 'recent' games.
An early star with spotty implementation but ingenious puzzles, February 3, 2016This game was the cowinner of the first IF Comp with A Change in the Weather by Andrew Plotkin.
This game has some very ingenious puzzles. It focuses on alchemy, metals, and a bit of mythology. There was a puzzle with bottles that I thought at first might have been like Emily Short's later bottle puzzle in Savoir Faire, but then the solution was very different.
I didn't really enjoy the middle of the game. After exploring all the areas, including the tower, I was overwhelmed by the number of items and possibilities, and just felt like moving on to a different game. However, I've been wanting to finish games, in case there is better material at the end, and that was the case this time. Following the walkthrough, I accessed the end puzzles, which were really good; it almost made me wish I had just stuck it out and experimented more.
The story was not that great, but it's not a bad story; I feel like the very first and very last scenes got the most work, and the rest were pretty unmotivated. The rooms are sparse; there is an in-game reason for the emptiness of the house, but it felt forced.
Puzzle lovers will love it; story lovers should just use a walkthrough to catch the best bits.
A non-Interactive Fiction game made with Twine. Meant as a parlor game., February 3, 2016This program generates fake Buzzfeed titles, which participants are supposed to use to write articles, which are then judged by a judge.
The titles are supposed to be darkly humorous.
Many of Soda51's games are similar, short, one message games, often one-screen games.
A never-finished, 3-page twine game tutoring you on French, February 3, 2016The date on this game is 2014, and as of 2015, it is just three pages of french vocabulary with one or two tests.
This game is not yet completed at all.
A wildly inventive game with graphic content, February 3, 2016Shrapnel messes with your head and with IF conventions in very creative ways. It starts out in typical Zorkian fashion (standing west of a white house) and quickly degenerates into bizarreness.
It has perhaps the most creative implementation I have ever seen. It is completely linear, and just pushes you through a story. It presents scenes out of sequence and you have to piece everything together, and it may take more than one playthrough to understand.
Unfortunately, it contains just about everything that could be considered as inappropriate content. Sexual abuse, violence, racism, and strong profanity. Not recommended for everyone. I felt uncomfortable playing it, but I think I am glad I tried it.
Short, trippy game about perspective., February 3, 2016I found this game on Juhana's list of Mindbenders. It was very unusual; I don't think I've ever seen something like this done before.
The whole game is about trying to understand what is going on, similar to games like Legion in theory but very different in practice.
Once I understood what was going on, I simply used a walkthrough to complete the rest of the game. The rest of the puzzles are only mildly interesting. But the main puzzle is very, very good.
A sentence that changes two nouns whenever you refresh it, February 3, 2016This game consists of a single sentence that changes the names in it every time you refresh. It also has backdrop images of paintings of Adam and Eve that change every time you refresh, as well.
It's not really a game; most of Soda51's games are like this. But they do attract a certain amount of attention, so you have to wonder if Soda51 has a good plan after all.
****
Note: I reviewed this game a month ago; it is just a random coincidence that Soda51 posted another game today.
A beginning close to Poe and an ending close to Lovecraft, February 3, 2016This game gives me mixed feelings. On one hand, the constant hunger issue (or addiciion issue) is annoying, and the big puzzle is a "collect an enormous number of items and decipher the formula for a magic spell" puzzle, which I am terrible at.
This game is loosely based on The Raven, diverging into Lovecraft horror near the end.
On the other hand, I loved the beginning of the game, exploring, not knowing what is going on. But I lost interest about a third of the way through. I read through a transcript to see what kind of things were necessary for the rest of the game. It looked interesting, but hinges on a very difficult puzzle.
I recommend everyone at least start the game, and then see how far your interests take you.
An overwhelming mix of wordplay, exploration and story, February 3, 2016Note: This review was written months in advance. A week before this review was published, another review came out saying that counterfeit monkey was overwhelming and was very negative about the author and game in general. While I was overwhelmed, I think this is an incredible game, and that the author is extremely talented.
*********
Counterfeit Monkey is a technical marvel of wordplay and implementation. The game is a large exploration game where you can alter almost any item by adding or removing letters, reversing letters, performing anagrams, etc.
This game has been rated highly by the majority of those who played it, and I must praise its puzzles, writing, implementation, and craftsmanship.
These very qualities led me to feel overwhelmed playing this game. I had a similar experience with Blue Lacuna. In both games, so much is implemented that I had a hard time thinking of what to do next. In both games, you have a certain sense of urgency, so you want to move forward, but both reward experimentation. So I have a feeling of being torn in two directions (much like the protagonist of this game).
I wonder if the reason I feel drawn to interactive fiction in general is its minimalist, constrained atmosphere. Games like Zork or Curses! where you are noone, and exploration is the only goal; games like Glass, where you can only steer a conversation; games like Rogue of The Multiverse that are split into several parts with clear goals. Even games like Ad Verbum, which mirror the puzzle parts of Counterfeit Monkey without the plot.
Most will not feel the same as me, but I love the minimalism and asceticism of classic games, and I don't know if I enjoy those games which have been built up into a rich, huge world.
A short, violent horror story in Inform with some technical problems, February 3, 2016In my original review, I complained about parser problems, especially for a particular puzzle. Two people disagreed with my review, so I wondered if I was just being dumb and not understanding. I went back and tried again, and I found the correct solution, which was imaginative, so I have to give the author credit for that. The game is very short. Perhaps others may find the game more fun than I did; in the end, it seems a bit like the one-puzzle game "More", which similarly involves a relationship, crime, rooms with little interaction, and a single puzzle requiring a leap of intuition.
Original review: I'll begin by saying I haven't finished the game for reasons that will soon be apparent. This game starts out with a very graphic scene of violence, after which you are able to take a little more action. I found it hard to find anything to do at all, but once I discovered where to go and what to do, I started enjoying things more.
But then I was plagued by parser issues. It was just one guess-the-verb game after another, with no implementation of common synonyms and no suggestions for verbs that are close (something like, "the pen can't be clicked, but it can be opened" for that type of situation would be nice). There were other similar problems; repeatedly searching an area kept giving me the same message about discovering an item, and there was one item where it was clear what needed to be done with it, but the parser gave the same response every time with no hint of if I wasn't ready yet or if I hadn't guessed the verb. (Spoiler - click to show)Specifically, the lighter. I pushed in the nest and squeezed the bottle, but I cannot light, flick, open or burn the lighter, and cannot burn, ignite, or light the nest, pit or fluid. In fact, I cannot refer to the fluid in the pit at all. I know I may not have solved the puzzle, but it would make much more sense to say, "not yet", or, "we need to ... first" if that were the case.
Finally, the About command gave no help, and included a boilerplate intro to IF section that mentioned several things that were completely irrelevant in this game.
Short, goofy superhero Twine game with many endings, February 3, 2016This Shufflecomp game follows the adventures of a boy who loves comics and meets his heroes. The writing style is goofy and casual. The first time I played, I reached an ending pretty quickly, and I wasn't very impressed with the game. However, as I explored more of the branches, I realized how much more text there was that I missed, and found 6 or more endings.
Each single play through is not that great, but exploring all the branches gives you the same unreal feeling that dreams have. Playing the game a few times is just like the sleepy morning time when you drift in and out of sleep and your dreams weave together.
One of the most well-developed mystery games. A very strong style of writing., February 3, 2016This game has really grown on me. When I first played it, I found the atmosphere a bit depressing and the puzzles underclued. However, after revisiting it, I've realized that this game is a true classic. Especially when compared to other mystery games; this one really stands out.
The writing has a very strong style; for instance, we have the following:
"This room is long and thin, like a jailhouse corridor, from the doorway in the northeast corner to the large bay window opposite which stretches the length of the room, overlooking the street outside. The colours are your eyes on a Sunday; red like blood, red like the leather of the over-stuffed chair, which sits a cheap trophy by the main desk. A bookshelf fills the east wall."
The whole game is filled with a feeling of inevitable loss or failure; not of the game itself, but for life in general.
The puzzles are difficult to figure out. For more casual players like me, I recommend exploring until you feel you've seen everything; trying to solve every puzzle at least once; revisiting it after a day; then using a walkthrough. The ending surprised me twice, and even now, I don't really understand all of its implications. For me, this game only improves more and more with time.
Great speed-IF, so-so among all IF. Sassy fish game., February 3, 2016A Day for Fresh Sushi is a one-room Speed IF game set in a strange futuristic setting. It is very short and fairly easy, but it provides a strong background to a small game, and hints at a larger world.
The main attraction of the game is the sassy fish that comments on everything you do. Only a master of conversation like Short could implement an NPC this much in such a short time. It has much of the charm of Violet or similar games.
It's worth playing due to its shortness and the good NPC. You can get everything that's good out of the game in a half hour or less, then move on.
An exremely well-crafted game of extreme difficulty, February 3, 2016Christminster is set in a British University, where you are looking for your lost brother. You encounter a variety of obstacles and discover various ancient secrets.
This game has a host of well-crafted NPC's, timed events, and other difficult-to-implement concepts. The puzzles are logical, and exploring around for long enough is enough to get many of the puzzles. Several of the NPC's are quite funny, and there is a fun cryptographic puzzle.
Even though this game is well-crafted, it didn't really call out to me at first. I have realized that I am prejudiced against upper-class PC's, and against college-related games. I've had similar issues with Savoir-Faire, Violet, and the Lurking Horror. However, when I finally reached the end of the game with a walkthrough, I really enjoyed it.
This game was one of the most popular games in the mid 90's, along with Curses!, Jigsaw, and Theatre.
A silly one-action game based on two earlier games, February 3, 2016Pick up the Phone Booth and Aisle is mildly better than Pick up the Phone Booth and Die and not quite as good as Aisle. It is a parody game. Every action you perform results in some sort of ending.
Most of the endings are pretty funny. Some, though, like 'waylay', have some wildly inappropriate touches. This varied feel comes from the fact that it is a huge collaboration.
Only recommended if you enjoy parody games, such as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 games.
A game with thousands of possible items and many endings, February 3, 2016I revisited this game after five years. This time I was struck by the enjoyability of playing around with the transformation machines. Nothing is more fun than making an enormous wooden dress and destroying it, or making a spongy key. The total number of possible items you can make it immense.
Emily Short describes on her website that this game was developed in part because she was trying to implement different textures, sizes, etc. to make an extremely customizable game. Thus, like with many of her games, this game tries to push the boundaries of what IF can do, with a story wrapped up around it after the fact.
Other examples of this "new implementation or gameplay technique wrapped up in a story" are Counterfeit Monkey and Galatea. However, for me, story is my first concern with interactive fiction. That's why I love the intricate details of Curses!, Anchorhead, Worlds Apart, Theatre, etc. So this leads to an interesting effect when I play Short's "implementation" games; I have a blast at the time, and then generally forget the game afterwards. Metamorphoses is such a game; it's fun as a tool, but not very memorable as a story. The same is true of "Dreamhold" by Plotkin, which was designed as a tutorial.
As a final note, I love Short's story-heavy games like Glass. Remembering the "smell of blood" ending creeps me out...
A young man struggles with his identity and with self-loathing, February 3, 2016Rameses is like 'Ulysses' by Joyce; a well-known classic that is uncomfortable at times and neither of which I can really recommend as enjoyable.
Rameses is a young college student who is dealing with loneliness, loss, and ennui. The main idea of the game is that you cannot always, or even often, overcome your character's desires to accomplish your own.
The character is accurately portrayed a shallow young man of his age, leading to a lot of profanity but worse, to the player becoming a partner in small despicable acts. Not things like murder or assault, but petty and mean things that he feels are not his fault.
Within its sphere, the writing is good and the implementation is excellent. A mid length game.
A nice commercial clean-up of the MIT version, February 3, 2016Until last week, I had no idea that Infocom games were still available on current platforms. After downloading an iPad app, I had the pleasure of trying my first commercial game after 5 years of free interactive fiction.
The manual and feelies were great, and the parser was very smooth, with great runtime. I missed several of Inform's features, especially when killing enemies. Overall, the game felt thoroughly tested, and a large number of the annoying features of MIT Zork were removed. Examples include a better coal maze, some of the smug writing, and better correlation between exits and etrances of nearby rooms.
I thought at first it was silly to split up the game into three, but having started Zork II, I am really enjoying the expanded versions. Very few of the free games I have played rival this kind of polished game, with Curses! and Anchorhead as my main examples of great gameplay.
A one-action game with over a hundred endings, February 3, 2016Aisle is a well-known game with a strange mechanic; you are inside a grocery aisle shopping for food, and you only get one action before the game ends.
One-action games such as Rematch or Pick up the Phone Booth and Aisle started appearing soon after Aisle's publication. It became a mildly popular genre, and still is.
What makes Aisle successful? Part of its success is its specific details; you're not just in any aisle, you're by the gnocchi, and gnocchi remind you of your trip to Italy; the woman by you isn't just a stranger,or is she?
Another reason the game is fun is that the endings contradict each other; the story of who you are and what your past is actually changes based on your decision, so that your one action generates an entire past.
The third reason I think many people enjoy it is the wide variety of moods in the endings, from pathetic to hopeful to violent.
This is a game that everyone should play at least one time.
A silly but deep game. Humorous, but wears thin on replay, February 3, 2016I played Lost Pig five years ago when I started playing interactive fiction. I remember thinking that it was a wonderful, wonderful game. I loved the humor of the PC, the silly idea of chasing the pig, the contrast of me with the gnome, and the interesting color puzzles.
However, whenever I go to revisit it, I quickly lose interest. The puzzles were fun the first time, but I find little replay value in the game. If you strip away the narrative voice, the puzzles are only slightly above average.
I recommend this game for everyone to play through once, though. The gnome NPC is brilliant. The color puzzle is fun.
Overall, I found To Hell in a Hamper funnier, and the Rogue of the Multiverse. I think this is a great game, but I wouldn't call it the best of all time, as some have.
One of the few games to truly frighten me (because I thought it wouldn't), February 3, 2016Shade is a surreal game. It is an almost one-room game, where you are trying to leave your apartment, but encounter more and more difficulties.
Shade is one of the most well-written short horror games available on IFDB, and has been sold as an iOS game.
There were two points in the game that I wasn't expecting and deeply unsettled me. I won't list them here. Unfortunately, this whole review is a bit pointless, as nothing is scary if you are told it is scary. The scariest story I ever read was NES Godzilla, and it was only scary because it was such a ridiculously stupid story that when it actually got scary, it surprised me. On the other hand, I was told The Lurking Horror was one of the scariest games of all time, so when I actually played it, I was pretty disappointed.
So your best bet is to forget this and the other few reviews, wait a few months, think, "Oh, what game is this?" and then play it.
Most of the game, including the ending, was not that scary. Just a few moments stuck out for me, but they were big moments.
A unique take on wordplay and simile in a detective game, February 3, 2016Patanoir is a wordplay game with a unique game mechanic: you can take and place similes. If someone is cold as ice, for example, you can take the ice, leaving a warmer, friendlier person. You can then drop the ice somewhere else, making the atmosphere in a room cold as ice.
The story itself is frankly unimportant. It is shoehorned in simply because the detective genre uses a lot of similes. Seemingly tense conversations can be left and returned to hundreds of turns later with no problems.
The game is mid-length, requiring a few hours to play. I found it very enjoyable to walk around with pockets full of similes, looking for a place to drop them.
The only game really like it is Counterfeit Monkey or possibly Ad Verbum, but each is different enough from this game to make it unique.
Short and sweet shufflecomp game, February 3, 2016This Shufflecomp game has essentially one real puzzle but has another meta puzzle.
You explore a junkyard, thinking about your significant other. You are looking for something; this is the 'real' puzzle. But you, the reader, are trying to understand the relationship of the narrator with their significant other, and that, I feel, is a better puzzle.
Very short, but very good. Like all shufflecomp games, it was inspired by a song or songs randomly selected from a list, in this case, eight different songs! Finding out how each song is incorporated (in the author's notes) is as fun as the rest of the game.
A claustrophobic thriller game with great pacing., February 3, 2016Hunter, in Darkness has some of the best pacing of any IF game out there. You are hunting, in the darkness, and you must follow your prey through a cave. Things quickly go from bad to worse, and your injuries and fears come to the front.
In this game, you usually know exactly what you need to do, but may not know how to do it. The final big puzzle in particular took me a long time to get, but the writing was good enough that the game didn't feel stagnant while I was experimenting to solve it.
If you enjoyed Gun Mute or even Attack of the Robot Yeti Zombies, but wanted a more serious experience, this game is for you.
Good for a few hours of zombie fun. Good puzzles and story, mostly polished, February 3, 2016Divis Mortis is the best game of its genre (zombie survival) that I have played. Similar to Babel, you wake up in a medical building, not knowing who you are. Unlike Babel, there are many others in the building with you, and the building is a normal hospital. Or, it WAS a normal hospital.
This game does a good job of portraying the tense scenes associated with zombie survival movies; coming face to face with zombies, trying to find basic necessities, etc. The puzzles definitely feel like part of the game, and not just a bunch of silly exercises to run through.
The game isn't quite as well polished as the very best games on IFDB, but it is obviously well-tested and does a good job. It lasts for a few hours.I recommend it.
A short game about gender reversal with a few pages of Street Fighter 2 graphics, February 3, 2016Original review:
This game is just a short story with about 10 pages of screenshots from Street Fighter, where a couple of women comment on your (a man's) playing abilities, with some lewd references thrown in.
Not much to see here.
Edit:Christina Nordlander pointed out that this game actually reverses the the roles of male and female gamers, where female gamers experience criticism and harassment. The game works much better with this interpretation, but it's still short and childish (although the subject matter is childish people, so is this genius on the author's part? It's hard to know with Soda51.)
A mid-length Twine game that gives hints of a vast Miyazaki-like world, February 3, 2016This Shufflecomp Twine game feels like it's the first act of an enormous, sprawling game, but it takes less than half an hour with minimal puzzles.
The writing of the game is above average, with a feel similar to Spirited Away or Howl's moving castle (with more sci-fi than magic). It paints a picture of a fascinating, decaying world with bizarre customs.
The implementation is wonderful. The author uses Twine to simulate subway rides, blindness, etc.
The story has many loose ends, and stops abruptly. It would be interesting to see what a longer game with this theme would be.
I also appreciated the save game feature.
Brief, puzzle-less Inform game about exploring Atlantis, February 3, 2016This Inform game was an entry for ShuffleComp:Disc 2, where games are based off songs. It is a brief piece, taking less than 15 minutes to play. As the game states at the beginning, this is an exploratory game, requiring only basic commands like "take", "enter", "look", and directional commands.
The game builds up an interesting picture of Atlantis, with an emphasis on its mythology and pantheon. I found this part of the game to be very clever.
The game is well-polished technically. The writing is in third person, and had a small number of errors.
For some reason, the author has asked that you only play the game through once before discussing and reviewing. I played through twice, but I won't incorporate the second playthrough in this review. Perhaps the author expects and hopes for players to disregard this restriction, as much of the game focuses on oppressed individuals who yearn for freedom.
Read the author's statement, February 3, 2016This piece is inspired by John Cage's famous 4'33 composition, which consisted of three movements, each telling the orchestra to remain silent ("Tacet").
Essentially, the entire game consists of the author's statement (and perhaps the walkthrough).
A Ludum Dare (speed competition) Twine game about archaeology, February 3, 2016In this short Twine game, you take on the role of a young archaeologist a a dig site trying to get their big break. There are multiple endings depending on your actions.
The game is short and the writing doesn't hold up well in certain parts, but it was written in only 48 hours for a competition. If the author decided to revisit it in the future, it could be fleshed out and polished into a full and interesting story.
Short, medieval, edgy psychological thriller, February 3, 2016This is a game kind of like the stories Ethan Frome or the Yellow Wallpaper, where you have a kind of growing sick feeling in your gut, not from gore or sex or anything like that, but from a disturbing psychological predicament.
This game is set in medieval times, and deals with faeries and the fey. Or does it? It's hard to tell. You are outside gathering eggshells, and soon you discover what purpose they are for.
This game has stuck with me for a very long time. It creeped me out. I don't want to give away too much, so suffice to say that you can make strong moral choices.
Incredibly effective use of Twine as a horror story form, February 3, 2016My Father's Long, Long Legs is essentially a publishable short story, as good as Stephen King or Dean Koontz.
This doesn't mean that the Twine format feels too confining. The story branches and recombines at various points, and the illusion of choice increases the feeling of powerlessness.
Also, some of the more advanced techniques of Twine are used in the last scene to improve play experience.
I recommend it strongly to subtle horror fans.
A point-making biblical game with an interesting protagonist, February 3, 2016This is a short horror game in a biblical setting. Puzzles are interesting with some good variety.
The game is heavy-handed in its writing. The point seems to be that the author thinks that parts of Exodus are ridiculous and/or disturbing, and has written this game to show how horrifying and deeply wrong God's actions are in this book. This heavy-handedness comes out more in the commentary; the author admits that she toned down the actual game's writing in order to increase the frightening atmosphere.
I have very different beliefs from the author, and I believe that the events in Exodus are mostly historical, with some errors introduced in the manuscript over time; and that the God of Exodus was and is filled with justice and mercy. This obviously affected my enjoyment of the game. But as for puzzles and atmosphere, this game is very well designed.
A kind of patchy but well-written followup to the Enchanter series., February 3, 2016This is a mid-to-long game that follows long after the events in Spellbreaker, an Infocom game.
Graham Nelson is my favorite author, because of Curses! and Jigsaw, and for inventing Inform 7. However, I never really liked this game, partially because it takes so long to set it up. The first scene is totally linear, and the next takes a while to get going.
This is a fantasy game, and includes many Infocom themes, such as spell scrolls, complicated devices, etc. Most if not all the spells are spells mentioned in Infocom games.
The game is intricate and has well-developed puzzles, but it doesn't feel like a cohesive whole.
I haven't played this game for a few years, and I hadn't played any Infocom games when I did. If I replay it and enjoy it more with the references, I'll come back and revise my review.
Extremely but purposefully repetitive; interesting concept and execution, February 3, 2016The majority of this game consists of delivering newspapers. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.
That said, the game is enjoyable. There are somewhere around 8 or 9 NPC's of wildly different personalities, some of which don't pop up until later. You converse with everyone while delivering the newspapers.
There is a villain, but it's hard to know their plan. In fact, it's hard to know anything in the game, until the end.
I had trouble reading the newspapers when I played on Frotz on the iPad. The formatting was off. But most people shouldn't have that issue.
Note that the game lasts about a week in-game.
I don't strongly recommend the game, but it's interesting enough that you should check it out.
Intricate and difficult one-room time-travel puzzle, February 3, 2016If crazy time-travel puzzles and avoiding paradoxes are your cup of tea, then this is the game for you. You must use a time machine to do your homework, but this requires 8 or more copies of yourself.
The initial part of the game is very fun. Trying to figure out how the machine works is great; trying to figure out how to avoid a paradox is fun, in fact the whole first half is fun!
But by the time you get to the last two or three copies, it just gets very overwhelming. It's so hard to keep track of everything, and the very last 'you' is hard to figure out.
Some people may find the idea of such a complicated game very enticing; so for puzzle fiends out there, this is the game for you. For everyone else, you should at least try it until you've time traveled once or twice.
Good writing and clever concepts in a bizarre and crass game, February 3, 2016This is a highly unusual game. It is written about Jack Pudlo, an infamous troll on the r*if forums. I think the game hints that he is the author.
The game seems like a big trolling on one hand, while on the other hand, it is highly polished.
For the polish: the writing is smooth and clear, with really vivid images. The game borrows heavily and openly from Shakespeare. It delves deep into Jewish culture. There were no bugs that I noticed. The ending was very clever until the last bit. Overall, a game with a lot of polish.
On the other hand, it trolls you. It uses sensuality and profanity from time to time in crass ways (not to arouse or for art, just to be gross). The character has an odd relationship with God that is hard to describe. And the ending openly insults the player. The ABOUT text is bizarre.
Overall, a weird game. It's like a very nice cake flavored like mustard. I'd love to learn more about its background.
A sci-fi game in a city. Greater than the sum of its parts, February 3, 2016Resonance is a game that does okay in every area, but the it doesnt really shine in the main things you look for. The story includes gaping plotholes, the implementation has some bugs (like "you see a 5 guards here"), the puzzles include obscure riddles.
However, put together, it makes for a fun experience. The author has put together a simple navigation method that makes the game easier. The game leads you by your hand to a happy ending, but a much better ending lies hidden for adventurous souls.
In this game, you are a drunk who was once rich before losing you wealth and wife to an evil corporation bent on world domination. You have to stop them.
Recommended for fans of Nightfall or City of Secrets.
Mid-length identity horror Twine with illustrations , February 3, 2016This game was one of my favorite Ectocomp 2015 entries, and later was polished into a Sub Q magazine game.
In this game, you play a young woman in a post apocalyptic world where humans are hunted down by (Spoiler - click to show)things that mimic human appearance/voice and consume flesh and memories. You
This is effective, similar to the early mind manipulation episodes of Dr Who before it became ridiculous.
The Sub Q release has beautiful illustrations that contribute significantly to the feel of the game.
My favorite Sub Q game to this date. Strongly recommended.
A retelling of Orpheus and Euydice with a tinge of horror , February 3, 2016This is a mid length Twine game published in Sub-Q magazine. You play Orpheus, descending to the depths of he'll to retrieve Eurydice.
The beginning diverges sharply from the original narrative, owing more to Our Angelical Understanding than to the ancient poets. As the game continues, though, it draws nearer, until it reaches the same endless feeling of the original at the end.
The game includes some body horror, such as pre-modern-medicine surgery, deformed corpses, etc. It's roughly similar to the amount of horror in the film What Dreams May Come.
Overall, an effective piece.
An enjoyable moment at the end of the world for a dreamer, February 3, 2016I first saw this enjoyable shortish Twine game when another reviewer brought it to my attention. You visit your childhood village, where you explore the home of your own family and that of a childhood friend.
There is some kind of unspoken disaster about to occur, giving you a sense of urgency mixed with hopelessness. You discover that you and your friend had a highly unusual relationship.
The writing is evocative and breathless. The story is unfolded as you examine objects in burned-out shells of houses. I never really listen to music, but I had left the volume on as I played, and the music that came contributed significantly to the mood.
A careful rewriting and compilation of 10 Random IFDB games, February 3, 2016This is a technical tour de force. Joey Jones has taken a random list of 10 IFDB games, including games in obscure formats, games that don't exist anymore, games just recently uploaded, French and German games, and an AIF game.
He implements each game, and you go through them. The AIF game is fortunately cut short, as are the French and German games, while the others are all happily tiny.
The game is surprisingly deeply implemented; for instance, the entire source code is included for one game.
This game really does recreate the IFDB experience, and provides an interesting commentary on IF in general. Also, the author has provided some small interaction between the small games. Strongly recommended.
A short, interesting experiment on constraints, February 3, 2016In this game, you are in a room that seems incredibly detailed, with many NPCs. As you progress, there are interesting locations, exciting events, and complicated scenarios.
However, it is all for naught. The family curse has activated in you, so that any action besides GO NORTH will cause your death. Time and again, it seems like some other action is needed, but only GO NORTH is allowed.
This is amusing, and would not work nearly as well in a short story. This exact feeling of helplessness is unique to an interactive format, and it's a welcome effect.
Strongly recommended.
An adaptation of a GK Chesterton novel, February 3, 2016As I played this, I thought, "What on earth is the intended genre here?" Then I discovered it was an adaptation of a G.K. Chesterton novel.
In this comic and somewhat surreal game, you play a jovial old fellow who is cheering people up.
I couldn't get past 30 points because I couldn't figure out how to call everyone down to join the party. That, combined with a few guess the verb issues, left me frustrated.
This game won the Golden Banana of discord.
A short, easy game as a teenager with car trouble. , February 3, 2016I-0 is most famous for its adult content, and I put off playing through it. However, Cadres claimed that all adult content could be avoided, and he is right.
This game is easy and short. It has many distinct branches, none of which require adult actions. You try to make your way back home, encountering cops, taco shop employees, creepy and dangerous men, etc.
The NPCs can be fairly static, most notably the Junta girl. Overall, if the game didn't have juvenile sexual content, I would recommend it as a quick fun game. But I don't. However, I do recommend Narcolepsy, a game set in the same setting and also featuring Tracy. It also branches, and if you call your sister before doing anything else, you can avoid any sexual content and have a great game.
An intricate game about war and clairvoyance, February 3, 2016This game is divided into three parts, the first being least like the others.
You are in the army, and you are interested in your friend Simon. You have the opportunity to sneak more information about him, but it's not necessary, as you will have the chance to talk to him more later.
The game has a well-developed and smooth story, but it has oddly obscure puzzles. Most of these puzzles involve hunting around for objects, often finding them before yo know you'll need them. This is typical of a classic adventure, but odd for a story-driven one.
I found that the game frequently had trouble with alternate solutions to puzzles.
Overall, I would recommend this game, but it has some pretty heavy profanity in a scene or two. If that's not an issue, you should try it out. The first part is the most difficult, so I recommend a walkthrough to get through it.
A short detective story about a stolen coin, February 3, 2016In this short and simple detective game, you play Jack Mills, who is tasked with recovering a stolen rare coin.
The puzzles are fairly simple; the hardest ones were ones that have featured in a great deal of detective games (Spoiler - click to show)specifically searching the trash.
Despite the length and derivativeness, I enjoyed this game as a pleasant yarn. It was fun to see how the story unfolded, and I did feel like I was doing something good by solving the puzzles.
There are two ways of beating the game.
A sometimes unintuitive time travel game in a museum, February 3, 2016This is one of the earlier time travel games, being introduced in the first IFComp.
You are in a museum of time, trying to take its final treasure, a diamond ring. But its existence is not secure yet; you have to ensure it will be there when the time comes. So you travel back and forth between several time periods trying to create the diamond and glass cover and find the setting for the ring.
Some actions that you take don't seem like they'd actually work in real life. Other actions can be relatively straightforward.
Good for fans of puzzle time travel games.
A humorous copy of Indiana Jones exploring a nasty web of traps, February 3, 2016This game actually has a pretty consistent approach of its puzzles. You are an adventurer in a temple in the Everglades, seeking the water of life.
Each room has some sort of death trap. If you wait around too long, you die, but you often get hints right before you die. I only needed a hint for the very last room.
The setting made me smile on numerous occasions, such as the perfectly normal room.
Highly recommended.
A short old-school fantasy game with unusual score, February 3, 2016The idea of this game was to make a scoring system that could be incorporated naturally into the game. In this fantasy game, you play a guy in a village where everyone has had a body part changed into an animals body part. You left paw, a wolf's paw, becomes more human as you progress.
The game has several chances to lock yourself out of victory without too much notice. I found the puzzles quite difficult, and sometimes unintuitive. The concept and setting were clever.
I liked the last half better than the first half.
Overall, not my favorite Paul o Brian game. The Earth and Sky games were really very good, and I encourage everyone to check them out.
Like Thumbelina meets Redwall. Easy, shortish parser game., February 3, 2016Mite is by Sara Dee, author of the slice of life game Tough Beans. In this game, you play a green pixie boy who is trying to return a stolen gem to its owner, the fairy prince.
The game is easy to map and simple to play. The map is a V shape, where you start at the vertex and can go down either path (and eventually do both). The puzzles are really very cute (How can you get into an orange tulip? How can you rescue a ladybug in peril?).
I enjoyed this game. It lasted about 30 minutes, with no walkthrough, which is very rare for me.
An extensive Halloween Twine game with inventory , February 3, 2016This is the biggest exploratory Twine game I've seen since the Axolotl Project. Play as a spectre capable of shifting hosts who is seeking a black potion in the bowels of Castle Hallowmoor during a battle between witches and skeletons.
The game has 2-3 times the usual amount of links, with many of them descriptions only, so it is harder to cheat by clicking everything. There is an inventory button allowing you to dynamically use items throughout the game.
It took me about an hour, with some rather tricky pieces. Recommended for everyone.
A linear puzzle less game about domestic abuse, February 3, 2016Jane is a game that is openly influenced by Photopia, yet tells its own story, in this case about domestic abuse.
You play a variety of characters, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, but your main character is Jane, a victim of domestic abuse that blames herself and rationalizes her husband's actions.
The writing was good, and several actual abuse victims consulted with the author during the writing process.
Good for fans of alt-games (games that primarily tell the story of a minority or of someone with a particular condition or bad situation).
A slightly futuristic game about moral choices and terrorism, February 3, 2016In this game, you play an interrogator of a terrorism suspect. You can be quite cruel as an interrogator, leading to some interesting moral choices for the player (do you identify with the government, or the terrorists?). After this, the game opens up more into a type of spy thriller.
The version that I played was reasonably well-polished. There were no major bugs that I could find.
It has 9 different endings depending on how your moral choices play out. I only got one real ending and several death endings.
It has some memorable NPC's, and uses the ask/tell system of conversation.
A campy fantasy game with a colored magic system and a dragon, February 3, 2016This game has a mid-sized map and a good number of items and characters. It is not too hard, but it takes quite a bit of time compared to most IFComp games. You are trying to rescue a princess from a dragon, and you have to explore a forest.
You compete with other adventurers, and you have to use magic embodied by water-balloon like spheres that you toss at things. There are several items that you use over and over again.
The game has some sexual innuendos in it that creep up fairly often at the beginning and at the end.
Overall, a game for fans of Zork-style humor.
A collection of mini games and homages to Curses! and Trinity, February 3, 2016This game was entered in the very first IFComp in 1995. The competition was originally intended to give sample code for Inform authors. This game uses the z-machine to model games like tic tac toe, dots and boxes, towers of hanoi, etc. using ASCII graphics.
The puzzles are unfair, and you must cheat to beat about half of them.
The game is full of homages to Curses! and Trinity. Several puzzles require explicit knowledge of these two games. Even with this knowledge, some steps near the end are extremely difficult to guess.
This game is interesting as a sample game and for fans of puzzles as described above.
Destroy the 7 deadly sins in a shopping mall, February 3, 2016In this game, you are dared by the devil to get out of a mall with the seven deadly sins in it so you can go on a date with a beautiful young woman.
First, the annoying things. This game claims it is too easy to need a walkthrough; like most games with such a claim, it doesn't implement very many alternate solutions to puzzles (in faft, I think there is only one solution for each puzzle), as well as neglecting many synonyms. The goal of the game is to make a passive, desirable girl sleep with you as a reward. Finally, it has some unnecessarily gross parts, such as with Lust.
Beyond that, the setting has some creative touches, a gently vague in-game help system, and some creative depictions of the seven deadly sins.
A mid-length, early, serious alien abduction game, February 3, 2016This game was entered in the 1996 IFComp, where it took 9th place. In this game, you play a backwoods fellow who is convinced that aliens have been messing with his brain, just like they messed with his father.
You are abducted, and forced to pass a sequence of tests. They start abstract, and then become immersive. Some reviewers and I had to use hints frequently, but the story and setting are quite interesting.
The scenery is often unimplemented, which may be frustrating for those used to more recent games.
Interesting for those who'd like to see an alien abduction game.
A long, comic fantasy game with unusual item and room descriptions, February 3, 2016In this game, you play a reviewer for the Adventurer Consumers Guide. You are asked to review such things as a helmet that makes you a hero and an orb that traps anyone you hit it with. You are trying everything out on a treasure run; your goal is to get one very large treasure.
The game is not set in the Zorkian universe, but the humor and level of fantasy will be familiar to fans of those games. Goblins, monsters with huge teeth, and armadillo-headed people are among the NPCs you will meet. The game has a bit of gallows humor, with quite a bit of comic violence to yourself and those around you.
This game also reminded me a bit of Augmented Fourth, a comedy fantasy about a bad court musician.
This game is recommended for fans of Zorkian worlds and of puzzlefests.
Two sci-fi games in one; an escape game and a mystical game, February 3, 2016This game is actually quite long, but the provided walkthrough skips most of the material. This makes two different game experiences.
The walkthru steps you through a story of a young space cadet who is alone on a ship that is under attack by pirates. You have to solve a sequence of occasionally timed puzzles to avoid your capture.
The other part of the game involves a mystical religion discovered on an abandoned planet. The more you investigate, the deeper it goes. Bizarre space creatures and strange energies abound.
I've never completed this game with full points, but it really intrigues me. I'd love to finish it someday.
A well-developed and smooth game about paradox and oppresion, February 3, 2016Square Circle has many of the best parts of an Eric Eve game. Great NPCs and conversation, an expansive map that doesn't need too much mapping, a large number of items, and smooth writing.
The plot wasn't as compelling as other Eric Eve games, but it was still pretty good. You are put in prison, your memory erased, until you can make a 'square circle'.
The solution to this puzzle was unexpected to me, and I used a hint, but it was fun. What was much more fun, however, was the psychological drama that unfolded for the rest of the game.
This game was well-regarded for its puzzles, and I found them fun as well. I prefer Nightfall, Blighted Isle, and All Hope Abandone by Eve to this game, but it is still a very good game.
Recommended for everyone.
A mid-length conversation parser game that Agatha Christie fans can love, February 3, 2016I played the Android app of this game, which is the first parser app I've tried on a smartphone. I had some trouble at first getting used to the interface, but I worked it out eventually. It was nice that the author made the necessary commands quite short.
This game is perfect for Agatha Christie fans. You are a famous French detective, wrapping up your concluding speech after figuring out who the murderer is. Except you have no clue!
This is a conversation game with emphasis on details, much like Toby's Nose, Lime Ergot, or Out of the Study. You look at people, pick out details, and talk about it. This prompts people to spontaneously confess. The details that come out are classic Christie, slightly exaggerated.
The version I played had cartoon illustrations. There are about 6 or 7 NPCs, each with a unique personality.
I enjoyed this game as a Christie fan, right up until the end, when the real murderer confessed out of nowhere. I think it's because I had pressed them before, and forgotten about it, later completing the rest of the tasks. Even though I felt the last challenge was too easy, the steps leading up to it were marvellous.
A short-to-mid length murder mystery on a yacht, February 3, 2016This game was entered in the first IFComp ever, taking 4th place in the TADS division. This was the first year that Stephen Granade had ever written a game, and he is one of my favorite authors.
This game doesn't show the polish of his later games, but it is relatively sturdy. You are on a yacht, and a large variety of time events happen around you, like Deadline. You find locked compartments and safes, you see people walking around, a murder happens (!), you are given a series of commands to fulfill, and then you must discover and stop the murderer before even worse can happen.
The NPCs are the focus of the game, yet they are sparsely implemented. They have one-line responses to most comments, and don't react as much to items that they should react to (although this can be a hint).
Overall, good for fans of murder mysteries. Granada's technical ability and panache for storyline are already evident, but the puzzles and NPC interaction are not yet up to his later standard.
Visually beautiful and mobile-friendly game with enchanted letters, February 3, 2016This game is written in a custom platform that is visually beautiful and allows for text to be adapted on the fly by clicking on links.
This game centers around a mystical version of France where the nobility have access to magic. This magic system is developed further in the earlier games Savoir Faire and Damnatio Memoriae.
In this games, you write rough drafts of letters, clicking on parts of the texts to rewrite, erase, or expand on your meaning. Different choices presumably lead to different endings. I found the game to be slow to be slow at first and more exciting later.
This games takes about twenty to sixty minutes to play.
Wow! A hardcore fantasy CYOA with beautiful graphics and dnd module vibe, February 3, 2016I love this game. Travel through the city of Khare using a beautiful 3d map and posable figurine. This city is a den of thieves, traps, liars, sorcerors, the undead, and worse. A stew pot of evil where the weak are mercilessly worn down, you must find a way to leave the city, or to save it.
By far the longest CYOA I have played. Allows unlimited rewinds to undo any number of actions. Innovative combat and gambling systems. Spells that you cast with 3 letter combinations with available letters changing at different locations. God's to serve, people to kill or save.
High fantasy at its best. Very strongly recommended.
A darkly atmospheric fantasy game. Explore a well rumored to be cursed, February 3, 2016Baluthar is an interesting mix of a game. The opening makes it feel like an alt-game for depression, which is pretty well done. But then it takes a short detour through epic fantasy into a horror game similar to the Ravenwood setting of DnD. You search a well for your son, and encounter some frankly disturbing material down here. The gore level here is roughly equal to that of One Eye Open or the Walking Dead.
The puzzles are fairly simple at first, with generous nudges in the game. I used one line of one hint near the beginning, then another hint right at the end. The end is a bit harder, as the final puzzle abuses the IF setting a little bit.
The middle of the game is the strongest, while the finale is pretty weak.
Overall, a recommended game. The imagery in the middle is truly excellent.
A metaphorical game about body image and extreme surgery, February 3, 2016In this horror game, you play a woman who recently underwent radical surgery to improve their body image. In order to pay for the surgery, you must assist the doctor in other radical surgeries.
This game has a high amount of gore, and deals indirectly with issues such as anorexia and cutting.
There are multiple endings and you are essentially free to act as you wish in the game. You are given instructions throughout the game, and following them gives you the easiest ending.
Overall, it was a bit too gruesome for my tastes, but the writing was good. There were a few implementation errors, such as messages persisting after you left a room or two rules printing contradictory text at the same time.
A small slice of life game from 3 perspectives , February 3, 2016This game is a short 3-act play of sorts. You have to live through a single evening through the eyes of three people. I found this story to be compelling because it asked me to identify with people I usually would not have identified with.
In each subgame, the actions are relatively basic; I did not have to use hints or a walkthrough, which is unusual for me. Eventually, the game will hint at what you want to do.
Stephen Granade is one of my favorite authors, with the ultra-hard Losing Your Grip, the comedy Child's Play, and the mid-length escape game Fragile Shells.
A shortish ADRIFT game as a dinosaur that absorbs what it eats., February 3, 2016This is a fun little game where you play a voracious dinosaur that wants to eat everything. When you eat certain items or creatures, you gain new abilities.
It really was a lot of fun going around chomping on everything. It's easy and mindless at first. Then you have to use a bit of strategy to know what to eat first. Then there a few puzzles thrown in, which surprised me, but you are generally hinted in what you should do.
I found two endings, both of which were humorous.
Recommended for those looking for a short (30 min) bit of fun.
A long urban/western fantasy game where man has killed gods, February 3, 2016This game is the second in a series, but I have not played the first. You play a magic-wielding city employee searching for water in a desert, and struggling with an alien race know as the scorpionkind.
Like the best Choice of Games, you can strongly influence your identity, your relationships, and the world environment. It is a lot like the Sims or morality-based games like Fable or Black and White, where you can affect your stats.
As for content warnings, the game has some optional adult content, and violence.
It also has a great mystery subgame.
This game did a good job at making me make tough choices. I felt really invested in my character.
A highly melodramatic surreal game, February 3, 2016In this game, you explore the heart of your lover. It is an extremely melodramatic game, with every room causing you incredible anguish and suffering, or eternal bliss.
Here's a sample of the writing:
"Now it was my turn to weep. "But, why? Can't you see that I love you! You said that love is madness, and that is evidenced by mine! Am I not insane? I love you!" The last three words I uttered I screamed with tears falling down my face so loud that this heart's walls would certainly fall."
There are some basic puzzles. Some of them are poorly clued. There are a lot of text dumps, and it's hard to know what the message of the game really is.
A story-focused game about Christian-themed anguish, February 3, 2016This game, which won the Golden Banana of Discord in IFComp, is a story-focused game. Despite a few searching puzzles, most of the game consists of cutscenes. You go back and forth between two worlds, reenacting a horrible tragedy, and your guilt in it.
I found it to be heavy-handed; I feel like games such as Map and Euydice deal with similar feelings of regret in a more nuanced way.
Also, the Christian theme seems underutilized; the cross is heavily referenced, and a bit of guilt and repentance, but much of the atmosphere seems like a new synthesis of thought that doesn't mesh well with preexisting Christian themes.
Long, highly replayable game. Spend a lifetime working with robots., February 3, 2016Choice of Robots is a game that has received high accolades, such as an XYZZY nomination for Best Game, and very favorable reviews from the general video game community.
I loved it. A very long game, perhaps of novella or screenplay length, and that is just in one playthrough. You can take wildly different paths, from prison to riches to love to all sorts of things. You keep track of 10 relationships, 4 robot stats, personal stats and political stats.
You are a young robot researcher, developing robot technology, and you have the chance to guide the development of robots toward autonomy, acting like humans, giant tank missiles, or advanced surgeons.
The gameplay can either be free-flowing, answering each question as it comes, or you can develop intricate plans to minimax your characters stats.
Well worth the money; this was the first commercial game that I bought since I purchased the complete Infocom collection.
This is just as good as Creatures Such As We and Choice of the Dragon, but longer. The only hiccups I found were inconsistent branches; when someone I married quit my company, the game said I wouldn't see them for a long time, for instance, without mentioning our relationship.
A game with three distinct PCs who must work together. Unusual viewpoints., February 3, 2016Escape from Summerland is a highly unusual and innovative game that doesn't overstay it's welcome but could be a bit more.
In this game, you are trying to escape a damaged circus tent. You can switch between a ghost (a traditional PC but unable to interact with anything), a monkey (agile but weak and a bit dim), and a robot (strong, with a light source, but bulky and uninformative).
The monkeys responses all include an ASCII art picture of the monkey and it's emotions. The robots responses are all in the former of status updates.
The game works very well, as it seems overly complicated at first, but then gels together. It seemed a bit disappointingly small, but this makes sense for IFComp.
A game (in)famous for its main challenge: understanding a nonsense language, February 3, 2016The Gostak is one of those games that everyone hears about eventually. Some play it, some stay far away. I didn't get past the first room when I first played it, felt scared, and put it off for five years.
I finally completed it with the in-game hints and some of David Wellbourns dictionary.
So what is this game? It is based off of an old sentence a professor came up with, showing that you can guess a lot about words and their relationships just by their position in a sentence. That sentence was "The Gostak distims the doshes".
In this game, you are the Gostak, and you do have to distim the doshes. You have to learn how to navigate, to examine, to take and drop, and so forth. The help menu, also written in nonsense, is vital in understanding the language.
The hints were actually very helpful, although it might be possible to beat the game without them. The last hint is purposely vague.
The game has two npcs, one who is quite helpful, and one who is not. There are a variety of other objects, though.
After finally beating it, I love this game, but it sure was hard, even with all hints and a dictionary.
A quite effective horror story about a group of friends in a cabin., February 3, 2016This game won the first ever unrestrained section of Ectocomp, which was traditionally a speed-IF until 2015, when it was split into a speed-if section and an unconstrained section.
It is a sort of psychological thriller, when 6 friends (or former friends) visit a cabin to carry out the wishes of a dead friend. Everyone has something to hide. One of the highlights of the game is a drinking game about truth, where you decide how to play.
The game has violence and strong profanity, which is not something I generally recommend, but I enjoyed this story, and I have to admit it. It set a high bar for future Ectocomp games.
An odd Ectocomp Twine game with photos and CSS styling, February 3, 2016This game is styled fairly well for an Ectocomp game (I wonder if this is a second release?); there is green goo in the background and a spooky font.
The game's story was really odd and not too spooky. You travel around the city before a Halloween party, buying food or alcohol or cigarettes, and interacting with two different women, whom you can follow, talk to, buy stuff from, etc. You then go to a party where a variety of things can happen.
The language is off frequently; for instance, one line says "Here is Marianne, and Beatrice, but you are now too drunk the things like this." I thought it could be a deliberate choice to represent inebriation, but the text is like this throughout.
A one-move Lovecraftian game, February 3, 2016This game was part of the Apollo 18 Tribute album, which featured a lot of Fingertip games, one-move games inspired by the short tracks of the They Might Be Giants album.
You are a lounge singer who secretly works for an eldritch horror in the bowels of the earth.
I played about 10 times, until I killed the game (not with a bug, but by different means). It was a fun, quick game.
A short sequence of codes, February 3, 2016This is a pretty minimalist game. A cube appears with writing on it. Deciphering the writing gives you a command to use. This gives you new writing.
There are about 6 commands to puzzle out. Then the game is over. Every puzzle is based off of (Spoiler - click to show)taking one letter from each word.
Not much of a game, but interesting to word puzzle fans.
A short-to-mid-length sic fi game like a saturday morning cartoon of Star Wars, February 3, 2016Dutch Dapper IV is a false sequel; it's the first (and only, I think) Dutch Dapper game. It also has a nice walkthrough by David Welbourn.
This game is a lot like Star Wars or saturday morning cartoons. You have an intro in space which sets up your character and motivations.
After the intro, the game has two main parts and an epilogue. The first main part is in your house, which has a lot of red herrings (including a literal one). The second part is in a Mos Eisly-like alien town, with a casino, bar, pawn shop, etc. You can travel back and forth between these two parts.
The epilogue is exciting, like the prologue. The game promises a sequel, but in a way that seems to mimic the false prequels.
Overall, I recommend it.
A replay-often time travel game with customizable inventory, February 3, 2016I played this game because Adam Cadre cited it as one of his favorite games ever. You play as a time traveller who is investigating an old house.
Due to time travel limitations, you can only bring a limited amount of items with you. However, you need pretty much all of the items at one time or another to see the whole story. Thus, you have to replay it over and over to see more and more.
There's no real one big goal. It's a lot of fun to slowly unravel the story, though.
This game used some fancy window techniques, which didn't work for my game. So I just played without them.
I was discovering big, shocking things even on the fourth or fifth play through.
Excellent game.
A nature hike without puzzles. Very peaceful, February 3, 2016This game is a peaceful, calm exploration of nature, the way She's Got A Thing For A Spring or A Change In The Weather would have been without puzzles.
This game was a Landscape entry in the IF Art Show, so the emphasis here is on detail, setting, the five senses, and so on. I loved the nature feeling here.
There are multiple paths you can take, but I just played through once. There are some exciting random events, and some philosophy.
Recommended for everyone.
A mid-length game about a babied woman standing up for herself, February 3, 2016In this game, you play a young woman who has constantly been babied her whole life, and who is sick of it.
Your boyfriend leaves you a note in the morning with a job to take care of, but first you have to get dressed and out the door after some obstacles, including a hungry dog. Then you have to go to work, etc.
I liked the message of this game about standing up and not letting people keep you down. The puzzles weren't bad, with multiple solutions, but sometimes relied on extensively searching. Also, if people are visible from far away, then the description can change depending on where you are when you examine them.
Recommended.
An original fantasy world with beast, technology, and magic, February 3, 2016Varkana is a mid-length fantasy game that was entered in IFComp. It relies heavily on both conversation and searching for items.
Varkana is the name of a small, almost technophobic city-state in a world with both fantastical creatures and advanced technology. One of the advanced civilizations has sent ambassadors to Varkana, and your job is to investigate them.
The setting is quite good, but the implementation is a bit patchy. Apparently the readme text notes that there is a bug where conversation won't work unless you ask about a nonsense topic first.
Conversation plays a large role in this game. Much of the game depends on guessing the right keyword(s) to ASK someone about.
Overall, the setting was fun, but progression was frustrating. I ended up reading it like a novel as I walked through. I'd like to see more original fantasy worlds in IF.
A short game mimicking 19th century Russian style, February 3, 2016In this game, you play a Russian upper or middle class individual who is scheduled for a duel in the snow.
The game is in two or three parts; your house, the duel, and interludes (including the opening).
The interludes were entertaining and imaginative, but it was often hard to know what to do.
The house segment was the most fun to me, as you recall your history, explore, etc.
The duel segment was also a bit confusing, but the ending(s) were well-written, especially the losing ending.
Overall, not bad. I enjoy 19th century Russian literature, so this was a fun treat.
Very long fairytale based game with sometimes twisted humor, February 3, 2016This is an Adrift game that was ported to inform. You play a "foxy" version of Goldilocks, although there fortunately isn't any kind of sexual content.
The game map slowly grows as you play. You have to act out a large number of fairytales that aren't usually in IF games, such as Goldlilocks, the Frog Prince, and the Big Bad Wolf.
This is really a large and involved game. The Club Floyd Transcript is huge. You can play for hours without passing the halfway point.
The humor is a bit twisted at times, mainly in the underground area you find.
The hints are frankly unhelpful at points.
Recommended for those looking for a big, well-done game.
A Lovecraftian puzzlefest of medium length. Explore alien city, February 3, 2016This is the kind of game that I enjoy much more than most people would, as I am a big fan of Lovecraftian horror and of atmospheric puzzlefests.
This mid-length game has a bit of a bottleneck opening, followed by a non-linear map area. It's more of an old-school feel, with some actions that are not really fair but not too bad. Two or three of the puzzles are solved by returning to an old area.
You have a recurring nightmare, and this time you can't get out. You explore an abandoned city that is a mix of R'lyeh and of the fortress in Enchanter by Infocom. Ancient writing, mystical texts, haunting memories from a half-forgotten past, violent cultists, gibbering horrors, this hits up a lot of the best parts of Lovecraft.
The NPCs are a bit weak, as you can't talk about much.
A branching, surreal narrative about an anthropology class, February 3, 2016Myriad is classic Porpentine, though overshadowed by her later work. Bizarre, surreal scenes filled with bodily fluids, strong profanity, gender references, and insectoids.
The game is clever and daring. However, playing it right after IFComp 2015 gave me a new perspective on Porpentine. I had thought that the emotional effectiveness of many of her pieces DEPENDED on the disgusting, gritty, profaneness of it all.
But I feel like Summit achieved a similar effect with a more subdued approach. Birdland gives a compelling portrait of LGBTQ life. I feel like the Twine world is developing in new directions now.
(Note that Howling Dogs, while it's a few years old now, also manages to be incredibly compelling while differing strongly from her ealier work).
Shortish allegorical game with magic using little people, February 3, 2016This 1997 IfComp game is notable for several reasons. It was nominated for best PC and best NPC in the XYZZYs. It features a romance between two women and also a character of indeterminate gender, which is unusual for a 90's game. Finally, it is an allegory.
The game is set in a town of little people who love chatting, eating sweets, reading books, etc. Your character is a member of the secret service in this town, and has to investigate the disappearance of one of its members.
The puzzles generally lead you on bit by bit. There is one annoying thing in that you know you need a very specific kind of help from someone, but only one person in the game can actually do it, and you have very few clues who.
Bizarrely, the game is an allegory for the conflict between home brew video game programmers and the Big Consoles. The names of characters and places in this game are anagrams for Usenet groups and for programmers.
Give a dog a bone. Short, cute game, February 3, 2016This game was nominated for an XYZZY for best individual NPC.
You are a dog named Ralph wandering around the yard with a cat and a boy name Christopher Robin, after the Pooh stories. You have to find your bone.
This game is cute and short, with only three puzzles. I did use hints.
An early surreal game with a ferret sidekick and nonsensical puzzles, February 3, 2016This game was entered in one of earlier IFComps. You play a treasure hunter with a furry sidekick. You explore 5 or 6 different rooms with a variety of people and objects.
There is really no rhyme or reason to the game at all, but your pal Leo will give you hints. You explore moose lodges, ancient temples, and the end of the world, while collecting crayons.
Fun for fans of nonsense-surreality, or of good npcs.
A slapstick version of the three kings story. Many sidequests, February 3, 2016This game is a sequel to the first Bible Retold game. In it, you play as one of the three kings as you travel west, finding gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and visiting Jesus.
The game's take on the Bible is sort of a slapstick comedy. You have to impersonate priests, steal, dupe guards, etc.
The puzzles are varied and odd, and I had some trouble with the parser sometimes, especially during an complicated math problem involving an astrolabe and latitude calculations.
An uneven retelling of the Loaves and Fishes with a buffoonish God, February 3, 2016Biblical games are always interesting in how they play out. Tenth Plague, about the plagues in Egypt, takes a dark and bitter look at God; Cana according to Micah takes a thoughtful approach; and this game takes a goofy and buffoonish look at God.
You are Jesus, and you have to feed the 5 thousand. To get the 5 loaves and two fish in the story, you have to collect them yourself. Throughout the game, God will accidentally hurt people, send you text-like messages, joke about sex, etc.
The puzzles are a bit uneven. At first, they are mostly standard adventure puzzles, but then they enter a weird mathematical-ish realm where you have to use arithmetic progressions to find houses corresponding to verses in the Bible.
An amusing, vegetable-based trip to Hell, February 3, 2016In this game, you a farmer whose crops are destroyed by the devil. With a trusty puppy and an armful of veggies, you descend into hell to retrieve your bird dog.
Most puzzles have food or vegetable-related solutions. Many of them were clear, but some (including an early puzzle) seemed obscure to me. However, trying every vegetable can help.
The writing is great, and the game overall has high quality. There is a bit of adult content with a succubus, but nothing crazy.
Recommended for everyone.
A short puzzle game about a ghost that mimics your actions, February 3, 2016In this short ectocomop game, you are trying to enter a tomb and lay a spirit to rest. However, the spirit copies everything you do, performing your actions two turns later.
This causes a lot of trouble, as the puzzles include latches that you can push open and push close, so he pushes stuff closed as you push it open.
I had fun with this. However, out of the three puzzles, I twice thought I had the right solution and failed; both times, it was because I didn't realize that the ghost goes first in simultaneous actions.
There are just 3 puzzles. Fun for puzzle fans.
A puzzly Twine game about escaping a psycho in a laboratory, February 3, 2016This Ectocomp game was a speed-IF, but it turned out really well. An abusive boyfriend chases you into a laboratory, where you have to run around in the darkness, hiding, distracting, and trying to get out.
The writing is compelling and creepy, and the puzzle of surviving was good enough to get it nominated for an XYZZY for Best Individual Puzzle.
Overall, great for horror/stalker fans.
A Ludum Dare Twine game about a confrontation in the west, February 3, 2016This is a speedcomp game (entered in Ludum Dare) about an old west cowboy who is being pursued by a mysterious figure. You can remember advice, choose something to help you, and choose where to hide.
Every page has 8-bit style graphics, which reminded me a lot of Oregon Trail.
The game invites you to replay it several times. I went through three rounds of playing through the game.
The twist is not really my cup of tea, but overall, this is a strong game.
Excellent mid-length game about Christ at Cana. Many NPCs, February 3, 2016As a believer in Christ, it's nice to see a game based on the Bible that isn't satire, isn't preachy, and is very well done. In this game, you are a guest at the famous wedding at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine.
The author has made a good slice-of-life game here that is enjoyable. The focus is on what people are really like.
The game has numerous NPCs, tight implementation, and a good progressiev hint menu.
Basically, the wine is gone and you have to find it. You encounter a variety of characters, including Jesus, multiple Marys, Martha, Lazarus, John, Zechariah, etc. The story also incorporates the parable of the ten virgins, as well as an epilogue from another part of the scriptures.
The author has done a great job here. Recommended for everyone.
A mid-length and mean-spirited comedy game about inheritance, February 3, 2016In this mid-length parser game written entirely in Java, you are a petulant British man whose rich aunt is visiting, and you have to take a large number of actions to get her wealth. These include some pretty horrible actions, including killing off numerous people, but it's all presented as comedy.
The parser seemed pretty good. The writing was based a bit on Wodehouse's writing. The puzzles are a mixed bag, with a lot of guessing what the author was thinking; however, each area is so small so that you can just try everything and eventually get it right. The last half of the game involves visiting 8 time periods to obtain enough articles of clothing to enter a certain building.
The game is notable for a mysterious butler figure that attends you and acts at first as an automatic warning system, and then as a summonable help system. He is dry and witty. He was nominated for Best Individual NPC in the XYZZY's, and the game was nominated for Best NPC's.
A cute, short, easy game about a bulldog who wants a snack, February 3, 2016This game might be a great game for people new to interactive fiction, and is a fun change for experienced players.
It's a game with 4 little puzzles to solve. You are a hungry bulldog who is trying to get your owner to make you some food. Like the much bigger and more difficult A Day for Soft Food (about a cat with the same goal), you have to wander around, influencing your owner in an order to get the food you need.
I beat it in 15 minutes without hints. The writing is from the dog's perspective, with a dog's description of a sofa, a toilet, a fridge, etc.
Recommended for it's short, fun nature.
Big, messy, complicated fairy/dragon/dnd game, February 3, 2016In this game, you play a tall, slim, handsome man (who is truly a fairy), hanging out with other attractive men and women adventurers with the attempt to keep them from your treasure.
The game is vast, and only the things the author thought up themselves are implemented (i.e. if you don't do exactly what they want, then nothing happens). You can 'summon' or 'create' just about anything, and shapechange.
There are a lot of NPCs, and extensive conversations/textdumps, but the game is buggy.
Fun to play around with, but not fun to try to beat.
An often illogical detective game with ferret and cat, February 3, 2016This game didn't really grab me. You are a cat who is a detective with a ferret partner (everyone else seems to be human). You drive around a geographically accurate (I assume) San Francisco, trying to solve a crime.
The game is bizarre and zany, making some puzzles completely out there. It's like a cartoon; lost your car? don't worry, some film character falling out of the sky will help you 5 scenes later.
It's main interesting feature is your partner, whom you can take and drop and throw, and who has good dialog.
Mid-to-long parser game about a woman in a country club saving face, February 3, 2016This game has some strong sexual content early on, which forms the theme of the rest of the game. You are a WASP (a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) who is cheating on their husband in the country club closet, and someone photographs you. You need to keep it secret to save your marriage.
There is a cast of characters you have to deal with. After playing similar games like Varicella and Broken Legs, I decided to go with the walkthrough first, then play through a bit again afterwards to see what is going on.
Unlike those first two games, where you have a collection of rivals that must be eliminated in parallel, there is really only one or two people you are out to get here: those behind the picture. Everyone else who falls by your hand is just a pawn you move, usually to obtain access to new areas or information.
The game roots for the protagonist, but they are rather despicable. Like Varicella, Broken Legs, and the author's Vespers, the only reason anyone roots for you is that everyone else is horrible too.
I don't plan on playing again. It is well-crafted, and polished.
A car ride, handcuffed to a man in a black suit. Primarily conversation, February 3, 2016This is one of those games where winning is just one goal. A minimal walkthrough is fairly boring. A thorough playthrough is intriguing and fun.
You are in a car, handcuffed to a mysterious man in black. The vast majority of this one-room game is talking to the one NPC, using ASK (or A) and TELL (or T).
The one puzzle in this game is a bit unfair, as it depends on knowing what your character is capable of doing.
What this game does is sketch out a sense of a vast and frightening/interesting world.
I recommend it.
Highly interactive Undum game about a play and sexism, February 3, 2016This is CYOA at it's best: incredible writing powered by a long sequence of choices whose effects multiply so rapidly that lawnmowering (repeatedly trying every option) becomes or seems difficult.
This game presents two stories; the first is a play that is being rehearsed, while the second is the mental dialog of the director. There are three actors and a stage manager you work with, and you keep track of their moods.
I avoided this game for some time because it seemed really long and complicated, but each playthrough has just the right amount of choice (about 8-12 big options). Your choices are usually to help the play or help the performers, but it's more nuanced than that.
All of the paths include discussion of sexism. Several of the paths feature it very prominently, and develop a big backstory for the protagonist.
I loved this game. Amomg the best of CYOA, and of IF in general.
A grungy slice-of-life game about trying to show how punk you are, February 3, 2016In this game, you are in a strict Catholic school, and you have to show how much you can rebel.
It's a sort of grungy, pimple-popping feel, sort of the way I've heard Odysseus and Catcher in the Rye described. The f*** word is sprinkled throughout, as well as a few other profanities, some teenage drinking, etc.
Basically, you have some punk friends, and you want to show everyone how punk you are by mouthing off, wearing crazy stuff, swiping things, etc.
I stopped playing partway through, because it's not my sort of thing.
A nonlinear exploration game as a cat in a cabin in the wood, February 3, 2016This game is a classic-style adventure game where you play as a cat. Your goal is to eat some soft food, after having had hard food for a while.
You explore your cabin and the surrounding woods, and everything is from the point of view of a feline. Cars, tv's, sofas, etc. are described from her point of view.
The game was nominated for an XYZZY for best NPC's. The NPC's include your Provider, your Rival, and a child.
Overall, recommended for fans of nonlinear exploration games with a score.
A mid-length blend of sci-fi and fantasy, with two paths, February 3, 2016This game has two parts. The first part is a smallish sci-fi area, with 2 sets of 4 rooms, each set arranged in a square, and a few simple machines.
There is then a fantasy type area, which has puzzles with multiple solutions, depending on the personality of the player.
Overall, the feel is simple but not trivial puzzles. The conversation system uses menus, and worked well for me. I didn't encounter any bugs or typos.
The game is not always innovative, but it's a solid addition to the canon. Recommended for fans of surreal games or of moral choices.
A somewhat confusing slice-of-life game in a Parisian cafe, February 3, 2016Jim Aikin is one of my favorite authors, so I was looking forward to this game. But it turned out to be a bit odd.
You play an american tourist trying to get some food at a Cafe in Paris. As you wander about the cafe, it is clear that there are some things you might try to get the waiter's attention. As you do them, the game progresses. However, the game increasingly has you do odd things that you wouldn't really think of in real life, without motivation.
The setting, a 2x3 rectangle in a cafe, is charming, with some fun NPC's (the game was nominated for an XYZZY for Best NPC's). It's really just an atmospheric game.
Recommended for fans of Paris or of restaurant games (like Gourmet or Dinner with Andre).
A long, enjoyable unofficial sequel to the Enchanter trilogy., February 3, 2016Scroll Thief was an Introcomp game that was received well and is now finished. In this game, you are a student who is trying to steal some magic as you deal with the events occurring in the game Spellbreaker.
The game is split into two parts, Act I and Act II. In Act I, you are searching a magical library for enough spells to make it worth your while. As you do so, you begin to get the sense of a larger storyline, and Act II ties into this.
Act I plays out almost like a large escape-the-room puzzle, like Suveh Nux. You are mostly on your own, investigating a variety of enchantments and magical objects, and tinkering with them until you are ready to leave.
I preferred Act II, which reminded me more of the original Enchanter games. You are tasked with discovering more about a mysterious and threatening situation, and you enter some darker and more dangerous regions. It is a bit shorter than Act I, which keeps the game from dragging.
Overall, the game is well-polished, with many testers listed and no errors I found. I had trouble finding topics to discuss with the NPCs, but I may just have tried the wrong topics. The game has implemented some unusual things with difficult-to-code objects and situations (involving long-distance communication and rope, among other things).
The game references Enchanter a lot, but you should be able to play without any previous knowledge of Enchanter (I recall that I was able to play Balances, a small game in the same world, without having played Enchanter). The author also includes references to his testers and Club Floyd players, which I think is nice.
The hints are progressive-style, and purposely don't tell you everything. So even with the hints, you have to make some small leaps of intuition. I enjoyed that, as I play most games with the walkthrough from the get-go, and it was nice to experience those jumps again.
Overall, I recommend it, and strongly recommend it to fans of the Enchanter trilogy.
An odd Frenetic Five game with Adventure references, February 3, 2016The Frenetic Five games are a series of games involving superheros with mundane powers and usually a lot of guess-what-the-author-is-thinking puzzles. This one is no different, although it is odd in that it involves more excitement and a maze-like area.
You are Improv, with the power to make use ordinary objects in unusual ways. Your team has similar powers. You have to make your way through a series of tasks such as getting out of a house while drunk, until you get to a mine.
The mine is very different from previous Frenetic Five games. It is a homage to Zork and Adventure, with a lantern, elvish sword, trapdoor, underground maze, a dam, etc. The actions you have to take in here are so improbable as to defy belief. Also, the ending is confusing and a bit anti-climactic.
There is more real life action in this game than the previous games. The game was nominated for Best NPCs in the XYZZY's.
A short retelling of several nursery rhymes in a kid-friendly atmosphere, February 3, 2016Mother Loose is a shortish retelling of several nursery rhymes in a parser format. You encounter Mary and her Lamb, Humpty Dumpty, etc.
The game isn't that long. I played around for a while, getting some points, and having fun, and then peeked at the walkthrough. It turned out that I was only one puzzle away from the end, so the game is pretty short.
It also seems that there are multiple ways of solving many of the puzzles. Some of the puzzles relied on knowledge of nursery rhymes. One puzzle's solution in the walkthrough I thought was unfair, but then I looked at the hints and realized that there is a more logical alternate solution.
Recommended for those looking for PG games.
A goofy, mid-length superhero game with clever writing and odd puzzles, February 3, 2016This is one of the most well-known examples of a superhero game, due to the fact that there were 3 of these games in a series (the same is true of the slightly-better-known Earth and Sky series).
You are part of a team of 5 mismatched superheros with odd powers (like one knowing the definition of every word in every language). You have to stop two villains named Sturm and Drang.
About a third of the game is getting out of your apartment, a third is getting to the villains, and a third is the climax. Each ability is used once, although I'm still not sure what the main character's ability is.
The puzzles are just an odd mismatch, and not really coherent. It's probably better to use a walkthrough and see the whole thing.
An immersive detective game with detailed NPCs and okay puzzles, February 3, 2016In this mid-length game, you play a detective investigating the murder of a movies star.
Most of the game involves driving to various locations, getting out, looking around, and talking to people. It's generally pretty clear what to talk about for the first half. In the last half, you have to start solving puzzles, and it gets down into 'guess what the author is thinking' territory.
The NPCs have a variety of topics, and some can follow you, and they can lie, bluff, react to various things, etc.
Recommended for detective story fans.
A crude game about losing your points in a Zork-like adventure, February 3, 2016This game started out relatively well, as your mother encourages you to return everything you've stolen and lose all the points you've won in an adventure.
Unfortunately, the game becomes fairly crude, with: (spoilers)(Spoiler - click to show)
1. A BDSM sex scene
2. An NPC that violently murders everyone he sees
3. two friendly NPCs that you have to murder yourself.
These things were pretty strongly offputting; I'm not sure who the target audience is here.
Not recommended.
A fun and silly 4-area puzzlefest with cat aliens and a lost dog, February 3, 2016This game is just a silly puzzle adventure with four separate areas, each with their own solution, which sometimes combine.
The puzzles are fun. As discussed on IFwiki, the first puzzle (which was too hard for me, but cool) is taken from a D&D module. There is also a classic math puzzle, and a riddle taken from The Hobbit.
There are also some other clever features. I enjoyed the bowling game, where you bowl 20 times (it can get tedious, but it's also fun). The descriptions were beautiful. Some of the capabilities of the game and its NPCs weren't made clear, but if you ask everyone about each other, it should help.
There are three endings, depending on how many optional quests you did.
Fun for puzzle fans.
A fun mid-length game about a series of mishaps in the kitchen , February 3, 2016Gourmet is a fairly well-known game that succeeds in slapstick comedy while having some pretty hard puzzles.
You are a chef having a disaster of a night as a well-known critic comes to your restaurant. You have to pass a linear sequence cell of challenges to have a good review.
The game felt uncomfortably complicated when I started, but then I realized that you should just follow directions at first and not stress about all the stuff. As you go, the game teaches you more about you restaurant and the system.
Then it dumps you into one very hard puzzle that includes a lot of talking and psychological work on both humans and a crustacean. This puzzle is very difficult.
I enjoyed the game. I could not finish, due to the game having a weird error with serving the final course, but I would put this game in the top 20% of all games.
Difficult, haunting Sci fi game about fixing a mechanical temple, February 3, 2016Kathleen Fischer is one of my favorite writers, with the conversation game Redemption and the romance game Masquerade.
The game is a departure for her, consisting of one huge mechanical puzzle. However, it still includes her trademark writing and memory system.
You are alone on a world whose people you saw die 20 years earlier. You roam about, remembering the tragedy, and solving puzzles to get your tool to repair your ship.
The puzzles is fiendish, even on easy mode. Hard mode is well night impossible.
There is no walkthrough, but I found some hints on googles archives of the old rec.games.intfiction site.
I recommend it for fans of big puzzles or haunting atmosphere.
Utterly bizarre surreal game with word manipulation and talking items, February 3, 2016This is one of the weirdest games I have yet played. You are thrust into a room where every single object speaks. After talking to them, you are placed in a puzzle where you can physically manipulate the words in the room description. After that, you enter a bizarre world with doll-like humans you can move around, undress, and interact with. Then a bizarre maze, and finally a nonsensical last world with bizarre symbology.
I honestly have no idea what was going on here, but the puzzles are more or less pretty fun.
Recommended for fans of the bizarre and weird.
An enjoyable Zork-based game with six mini-worlds, February 3, 2016Frobozz Magic Support is a game that emulates Infocom's Spellbreaker, as well as Zork; you use a white cube to travel to six different locations, where you deal with a pot of gold over a rainbow, a dark room with grues, battery-powered lanterns, scrolls, etc.
It was an enjoyable game. The NPCs are a bit outdated, but the puzzles are fresh and fun.
Zork-based games are not as popular now, though they still come out (Scroll Thief came out in 2015), but as a fan of the Enchanter series, I enjoyed this game.
Contains a hard cryptogram.
Escape a parade by scrounging up some help, February 3, 2016Everybody Loves a Parade is a mid-length puzzle game in which you are stopped by a parade. You have to explore and scrounge up a variety of items to be able to escape.
The puzzles are old-school flavor; find items by searching or carefully reading room description, use them in unintuitive ways, and do some unmotivated actions. However, it is pretty fun, and I solved a few puzzles without the walkthrough.
The game is implemented well, with a lot of background character.
Many reviews at the time this came out mentioned a big surprise late in the game. The years since this game came out have significantly softened the surprise here (I thought it was going to be the standard 'this was all a dream' surprise, but it wasn't). This gives an interesting commentary on the changes in interactive fiction in the last couple of decades.
There are some lewd parts (a pornographic magazine, some dirty-minded individuals), but overall mild.
An ALAN one-room game with many, many levels of detail, February 3, 2016This game reminds me of a mix of Lime Ergot and Lord Bellwater's Secret. As in Lime Ergot, you investigate an object, then examine something in its description, then so on for many levels, discovering information.
Otherwise, the game is a close relative of Lord Bellwater's Secret. In both games, you explore a study looking for secrets. You examine a variety of objects in order to find a code, open a safe, and get out. You have to find every single part of the code, in a tedious affair. I used a walkthrough and never looked back.
This game has a few issues. For instance, other reviewers noted that you can't use the adjective of an object to refer to it, or just the noun if there is a disambiguation; you must use both. Some objects are never mentioned; you just have to assume they are there. You have to look behind stuff in the oddest locations, and interact with objects in unusual ways.
I recommend this only to those who love games like Lime Ergot with incredible levels of detail. The game is very rewarding in this way.
A shortish game with four paths through each puzzle, February 3, 2016In this game, you're being tested to see if you belong to warriors (who use force), artisans (who use mechanical skills), alchemists (who alter the chemical nature of things), or seers (who look at and think about everything).
You are given four puzzles, each of which can be solved in any of the four ways. At the end, you are given one of 6 possible endings, depending on which route you picked.
I enjoyed this game; I tried the seers route first, and got through all the puzzles without a walkthrough.
I then tried the warrior path, but had to use a walkthrough.
Overall, a fun short game. If you are interested in this kind of personality-test-via-choices, as I was, you will like this game.
An enjoyable mid-length sci-fi game with hostile aliens in a base, February 3, 2016The Duel That Spanned the Ages is a fun mid-length sci-fi adventure about exploring an asteroid with a base and engaging with mechanical aliens.
Some people seemed not to like the infodump story at the beginning and end, but I enjoyed it. It was envisioned as the first story in a sequel, and I think people don't like being able to complete stories. But I've found that your imagination is often better than any actual sequels, and so the unfinished business was fine for me.
I couldn't figure out at first why this game was nominated for a best puzzle xyzzy when the first few scenes were completely linear. But when I reached the base, the game opened up and became really enjoyable. You have to figure out how to use a variety of equipment, including a giant mecha suit of armor, machine guns and rocket launchers, and medical equipment.
The game was not too long, and the provided map was very helpful. I strongly recommend this game.
A unique take on wordplay and hidden features, February 3, 2016Goose, Egg, Badger is a charming mid-sized game about fixing things on your exotic animal farm after an intruder enters your farm. You are Hope Lee, a farmer/repairer/etc., and you have to put your badger, ape, yak, and duck back in their pens while cleaning up your house.
The puzzles are a bit spotty, as the actions you have to perform are often unmotivated, or require you to try something out on every animal before discovering the right combination.
Now, below all of this is another layer, an entirely different game. This extra layer was inspired by a quote from an imaginary review from an earlier competition: (Spoiler - click to show)“I
didn’t even notice that every noun was also a verb until my second time
through.”
The author took this quote and ran with it, and it is possible to complete the entire game using only such commands. This is clever, and very fun to play with.
Recommended for fans of goofy slice-of-life or wordplay.
A well-developed Adrift rescue game with brain-or-brawn solutions, February 3, 2016This game by David Whyld has 52 rooms, 5 npcs, and a ton of puzzles. These puzzles were hard and confusing to me, except for one thing: you can skip most of them. You are assigned a etc number of hit points, and each time you reach an enemy guard or a cliff, you can just rush through and get hurt, or be clever.
Even the real solutions usually have multiple options. However, I ended up being frustrated a lot. One thing to know is that if you know a password, you just type the pazsword, not SAY or anything like that.
You are a commando type guy rescuing a princess from a Nazi-style fortress. There are some intriguing locations.
Overall, this is off the beaten path of IF, but I didn't regret playing.
Mid-length difficult wordplay game; very hard for me, February 3, 2016Early Grey is a game about wordplay and puzzles; you have the ability to remove letters from words and put them back in. By doing so, you change the environment around you.
I found this game extraordinarily difficult. Of the two dozen or so puzzles in the game, I figured out maybe 2-3 on my own, which is the worst I've done in any wordplay game (Ad Verbum, Counterfeit Monkey, Shuffling Around, Threediopolis).
However, someone else could definitely have more luck. The world building in the game is fun, and the dialogue and characters you meet are truly interesting. However, I had no idea what was going on in the ending.
Overall, I was left frustrated and confused. But I feel that another player may have much more fun.
A large game about philosophical conundrums and philosophers, February 3, 2016This longish game has a pretty big map, after a bottlenecking first room. You explore a world where philosophical thought experiments are given life (Plato's cave, Zeno's paradox, etc.) Philosophers are also there: Marx, Plato, Rand, and others.
The game was generally fun, but before I get to the good, I had three bones to pick:
1. The game insults those who look for a walkthrough. To me, this implies that the authors strongly believe that their game is coded well enough that someone who knows the solution to a puzzle will be able to type in the correct answer without a problem. This brings me to the second point:
2. The implementation is spotty; you must (Spoiler - click to show)LIGHT LANTERN WITH LIGHTER, not LIGHT LANTERN, and this is typical of several other parts of the game. When poor implementation abounds, it is frequently necessary to seek help.
3. The game has a condescending tone. The player is an educated atheistic male. The game has some issues with 'male gaze' (although see the comment below by Sobol), includes female philosophers but has little interaction with them, and has the same tone towards religion as reddit's atheism board: "Aren't we so glad that we are superior to those silly peasants with their moral fables?" In fact, the game bashes on religion as much as it can.
I normally don't point out flaws in the works I play, but I can't stand this much smugness.
Outside of that, the game itself is enjoyable, and the puzzles are fun. Quite a few of the puzzles depend on examining things twice (once to see something interesting, then again to see what you need). The in-game help system was well-done, and the images and writing were imaginative.
Recommended for puzzle fiends and those interested in philosophy.
An enjoyable mid-length escape game with multiple solutions and a demon, February 3, 2016Escapade! did well in the one-room competition in 2008. In this game, you are captured by screaming communists and placed in a cell with a dark and mysterious figure who turns out to be of some use.
The idea is that you have to repeatedly escape from the room using a variety of methods. Some things that I didn't know beforehand that were helpful are that you only have to find a fraction of the escapes (a little more than half) to win, and that some escapes are no longer possible after a while.
This is a funny game, and the humor was dry and situational (Except for the guard's voice), making it pretty funny to me. I enjoyed the puzzles; they were of the same style as Enlightenment or To Hell in a Hamper, where you take a bunch of items and run with them. If you enjoyed those two games, you should really enjoy this one.
A word puzzle game that relies heavily on anagrams, February 3, 2016This game is mid-to-long parser game involving a lot of word puzzles in the form of anagrams. You travel through a wide variety of bizarre spaces whose description is written with as many anagrams as possible (like a 'scantier canister') to overcome a vague and threatening bad guy named Red Bull Burdell.
The presence of so many anagrams in the text makes it very rich, requiring slow and careful reading. It can be difficult to piece together what's going on. In general, it seems that you are a special chosen one, prophesied to bring an end to Burdell's reign through your ability to change objects and locations.
You change things by typing in anagrams of objects and locations in the room. It's fun trying to find anagrams of everything, although sometimes it's difficult to know if adjectives are supposed to be included or not.
It is of course interesting to compare this game to Counterfeit Monkey and Ad Verbum. Shuffling Around leans closer to the 'pure puzzle' style of Ad Verbum, but it has a fairly large map and storyline, like 'Counterfeit Monkey' (but a bit smaller). In contrast to both games, all the rooms'
descriptions are filled with wordplay.
A must-play for fans of word puzzles.
An enjoyable shortish escape game in space, February 3, 2016Stephen Granade is the author of Losing Your Grip, one of my favorite games. So I was excited to try this one.
This was entered in the Jay is Games casual gameplay competition, which produced another favorite game, Plotkin's Dual Transform. In Fragile Shells, you play an astronaut with a concussion in a piece of a space station that is heavily damaged. You have to figure out a way to get out.
The game was fun; there are 8 points to win, and each is a relatively simple task, but requires some lateral thinking. I was able to get about 5-6 points on my own. However, I had some trouble when I knew what I needed to do, but didn't know about certain capabilities of the equipment. (For instance, I didn't know with the panel that you could (Spoiler - click to show)connect two wires together<\spoiiler>).
Overall, a fun, fairly short game. Good for fans of science fiction.
A short-to-mid length silly communism game, February 3, 2016In this game, you are Commissar of the communist party in a capitalist town. You are given a series of tasks to accomplish to promote the cause of the communist party.
The game has several clever puzzles, and the puzzles have multiple solutions, which is fun. However, some of the puzzles seemed unintuitive.
The game is written from the viewpoint of a strongly anti-capitalist communist man, and the reactions to things like Starbucks is pretty amusing.
I didn't find this game as funny as some of the other reviewers did, although the confusion between Karl Marx and Groucho Marx was fun, as was the endgame.
Overall, I recommend that you try the first part; it's a very good representative of the rest of the game, and that way you'll know if you like it.
Excellent Choicescript game similar to amazing race with good puzzles, February 3, 2016This is a very good choicescript game where you start a team and then race against 8 other teams. The losing team at each stage is booted out.
I really enjoyed this game, though I only got 1 out of 15 accomplishments when I won. It really feels like a gameshow, and it's always nervewracking trying the puzzles, because you know someone's competing against you.
Puzzles include searching for clues, remembering directions, typing in answers to cryptography, etc.
There is a hidden plotline which I didn't find out enough about.
Would play again, and strongly recommend.
An amusing game based entirely on puns with some juvenile humor, February 3, 2016This game made me smile. You crashland on the island of Calembour and have to explore it to find Handsome and give him a bag.
The whole place is full of puns and silly jokes. For instance, you can walk into a bar (ouch!) or talk to a brick wall. The solution to many puzzles made me laugh or groan. When I finally found out what to do with magic marker, I shook my head and giggled.
There is a lot of dumb juvenile humor, with perhaps too many double entendres, especially about breasts. It reminds me of my friends when I was a fourteen year old boy, so that could be a turn off.
Only recommended for fans of puns.
A pure word puzzle game with interesting mechanics, February 3, 2016This game is by Andrew Schultz, a noted author of puzzle and wordplay games. You go around a three dimensional city with a list of tasks and addresses to complete them at.
Part of the game is just figuring out what is going on, which I didn't experience, as I already knew the premise.
The puzzles in this game are challenging but fun. Andrew has made it easier by not requiring you to solve every puzzle to beat the game.
A must-play for fans of wordplay.
Mid-length well-polished parser game about infamous baseball play., February 3, 2016Bonehead is an enjoyable game based on real life. You play Fred Merkle, a player for the Giants in 1908, who was famous for a mistake he made that year.
You are taught about baseball in the game, including how to catch and how to hit the ball.
There is a lot of simulation-based information in the game (they tell you exactly what to do for different types of pitches), and so I thought that most of the puzzles would be simulation-based. However, at least two of the puzzles are traditional parser puzzles.
I enjoyed the writing and graphics, and it made the game come alive to me. The chatter of the crowd, the words of the people around you, really transport you to the past.
Great for fans of baseball, history, simulation games, or a good story.
Enjoyable, repeatable optimization minigame, February 3, 2016This game would work great as a text adventure (which it is), a point-and-click, a sidescroller, and frankly just about anything.
You are stuck with a rat captain and have to get out of sinking ship as fast as possible, grabbing whatever treasure you can. There are some mild puzzles (and probably some harder ones I couldn't figure out), but mostly you just try to figure out what's worth saving.
This is pretty fun. I enjoyed spending a ton of turns trying to get an obscure object only to discover it was completely worthless. Sometimes things are not what they seem (diamonds in the rough) and sometimes they are what they seem (dirt clods in the rough).
Lots of fun, and super short (to maximize replay value). I recommend a few playthroughs for fun.
Alien nature game with multiple protagonists and curious mechanic, February 3, 2016Changes is a fairly long game, about as long as, say, Spider and Web. It is set on an alien planet with a variety of animals that move about and act independently. There are ten or twenty locations, and not that many items.
The game has a very curious mechanic, which I didn't really figure out without resorting to the walkthrough: (Spoiler - click to show)You have to kill other animals in order to become them. This mechanic means that your abilities are constantly changing, and you have to reevaluate the environment that you are in and what it can do. The ability to see the same environment from multiple perspectives is a real treat, similar to Heroes.
As some have said, the puzzles are fairly frustrating. I didn't complete any protagonist's quest without hints, although I knew exactly what I needed to do for the second one.
The writing is beautiful and evocative. Some have compared it to Avatar, and that is fairly accurate. It is also very similar to the Ender's Game series (specifically, the pequeninos), and uses some of the same terminology.
The game includes cut scenes after every major success. I loved them; they were wonderful. The ending left me wanting a bit more; it felt abrupt and unsatisfying.
Overall, a fun game. Not likely to be completed without a walkthrough; like most such games, the walkthrough tells you shouldn't use it. Authors frequently overestimate readers' abilities to complete games without hints. I recommend this game, with hints, after exploration.
A review-your-life-from-the-afterlife game about mercy deaths, February 3, 2016Doctor M is perhaps most famous for being part of the 4-game 'hat puzzle' (involving 3 other games from the IFComp). However, it stands well on its own.
There is a subgenre of IF consisting of games where you reflect on a life through flashbacks, and have to decide if you did the right thing or not. Tapestry, Photograph, and Map are examples.
Doctor M takes this on with panache. You have to revisit the death of three victims of you, a mercy-killing doctor. You then can choose your interpretation of the events.
There are some mild puzzles, including hunt-the-scenery and read-the -descriptions-carefully puzzles. There is one or two problems requiring a leap of intuition.
The writing was good. I believe some people said they didn't like the heavy-handedness of the moral dilemma presented in the game, but it's what's needed for this type of work.
The game has a literal angel and devil, and has 3 endings.
I enjoyed this game. I recommend it for fans of the afterlife genre.
Excellent after-death story with strong opening and some obscure puzzles, February 3, 2016FIrst and foremost, this story is (in my opinion) in the top tier of all interaction fiction stories. The author has done an excellent job of painting a world, people, and a mystical system that draws you in.
Some of the fun in the game is figuring out what is going on, so I won't go into too many details. Suffice it to say that this game uses a setting that is rare in interactive fiction, and seems to be based off of extensive research.
I played without a walkthrough through the opening section, which most reviewers agree is an incredible part of any game. Then the game opens up and dumps you in the middle of nowhere. I had fun exploring for a while, and picked up a few tricks. I tried over the course of a couple days to see how far I could get, then turned to the walkthrough.
I'm glad I tried on my own first. The walkthrough works, but is confusing if you haven't tried the game on your own first (some actions get hinted later on).
The NPCs are amazing. Those taken from the author's research are vibrant and rich, with striking imagery. I will probably play this game again just for fun. Recommended, with a walkthrough, after an attempt.
A parser experiment in constraint, surrealness, and linear stoytelling, February 3, 2016Deadline Enchanter was one of the first IF games I played, 5 years ago. I remember that it's bizarre atmosphere and self-awareness really attracted me to IF in general because it showed me what was possible.
You play someone in a magical city that has appeared in Detroit. You've been given a message from the Folk, a magical race, and the message is a parser game. This game has a walkthrough. So you walkthrough.
The beauty of this game is seeing the story unfold and seeing the guts and edges of the parser. The world it paints is beautiful. When it came out, it was very controversial, but since the Twine revolution, I believe this game can be better appreciated. In facta, the author has moved on to Twine, making great games like Solarium.
Like I said, this is one of the games that drew me into IF and established my perceptions of the whole genre, together with Curses! and Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina.
Humorous game about grim reaper; nonlinear with multiple solutions, February 3, 2016This is an entertaining ADRIFT game which I played on Gargoyle on Windows. You play as the grim reaper, getting your daily list of souls to reap. You can complete your tasks in any order, and every puzzle has multiple solutions.
As you complete your tasks, you get page-long textdumps of truly entertaining material about your targets. There is a timer, but it is very generous. I usually use walkthroughs extensively, but I only required one hint in this game.
The humor is similar to Terry Pratchett or even Douglas Adams, just dry situational comedy more than slapstick. Some unusual settings for English-language IF (Himalayas, France, etc.).
Once a highly anticipated game for years, now forgotten. Arthurian fantasy, February 3, 2016I discovered Once and Future when looking at old XYZZY awards. The author of this game worked on it for 5 years in the 90's, frequently posting on forums about it, building everyone up to a huge excitement. It was released as the first big commercial game in years, and a whole issue of SPAG magazine was dedicated to it.
How does it fare? It is a fun, well-polished Arthurian game. An American soldier dies in Vietnam, and is taken to Avalon, being charged with a mission by Arthur to stop a terrible event in America's history.
Many reviewers noted that the writing is uneven, with the author having written it over 5 years and improving it in that time. Parts of it, like those with the (Spoiler - click to show)Straw King, are stirring and powerful. Others just seem like the author gave up; for instance, at one point your character openly complains about the endless scavenger hunts, and it is just laughed off.
This is a puzzle-heavy game, with two exceptionally hard puzzles. Fans of Mulldoon Legacy will get a kick out of this.
It is very long; following the walkthrough, I beat it in 1338 turns.
I believe I actually prefer Eric Eve's Arthurian epic, Blighted Isle, to this game. Eric Eve has more and better NPC's, more optional quests, lighter puzzles, and a better (though similar) backstory. My only quibble with Blighted Isle was its treatment of women, but Once and Future suffers from similar issues at times. However, Once and Future is more poetic/trippy than the prosaic Blighted Isle.
This all sounds negative, but I recommend this game to everyone. There is scattered strong profanity (mostly by soldiers in life-or-death situations), as well as a few mild sexual references.
Like a mix of Planetfall and Starcross; explore abandoned station, February 3, 2016Stationfall was interesting; in some ways, I liked it better than Planetfall, although it might just be that there was so much hype about Planetfall that I found it disappointing.
Stationfall has you flying with Floyd to a space station to pick up some forms. When you arrive, the station is deserted... mostly.
The map is interesting. There is a main sphere with 8 or 9 levels. The top and bottom levels are one room each, while the middle level has fifteen or so. In addition, there are three sub-modules attached to the middle level, two of which are joined together in a big space village.
This all reminded me a lot of Starcross with its huge cylindrical map and space village. But Stationfall's map had more flavor, I feel. Meretzky has plenty of references to Planetfall, including leaving bedistors and other computer equipment laying about, as well as similarities in recorded equipment about. There is an alien code whose solution reminds me a bit of HitchHikers' Guide to the Galaxy, which is explicitly mentioned several times in the game through footnotes.
The story starts slowly, but picks up. I really enjoyed the ending sequence, and felt it provided a little more closure than most Infocom endings.
The hunger/thirst and sleep timers seemed a little easier than in the original Planetfall, although many have mentioned the tight time constraints in the game.
One of the best trippy journey-through the soul games, now forgotten, February 3, 2016Like So Far, All Hope Abandon, and a large number of other games, Losing Your Grip is a trip through the subconscious.
The game is filled with beautiful and crazy imagery. For instance, the opening scene consists of (Spoiler - click to show)you standing in the mud next to someone buried up to their neck who resignedly chides you.
I tried this game without hints, and it was very hard. I explored every room in the first main area, tried everything I could think of, and I only got 2 points out of 100.
The game was previously shareware (i.e. you got a limited version, then pay for more), but now the author has released it for free (well, over a decade ago). It comes with well-written feelies, and ifdb has a walkthrough or two.
I cannot say how much I enjoyed playing through this game.
Varicella-like game about 7 ultra-competitive girls competing at auditions. , February 3, 2016This game is known for 3 things:
1. Doing a good job of recreating the vibe of Varicella, where numerous NPCs are on strict timetables and can be manipulated.
2. Having a strong narrative voice of a competitive kid with a stage mom.
3. Being very, very (perhaps unfairly) hard.
I played through with the walkthrough and really enjoyed it. I don't know anyone who solved more than 1 or 2 of the puzzles on their own. In such games, I like to play through once with the walkthrough, and then play it again a month or two later so that it's still a challenge, but you know what you generally have to do.
This is a frankly fantastic game, and it should have more recognition.
Great, long, puzzly game for lovers of history, NYC, and A Mind Forever Voyaging, February 3, 2016This well-researched difficult game takes characters on a tour through the history of New York, much like A Mind Forever Voyaging took players through a fictional city's history.
Unlike Voyaging,this is a very hard puzzle game. I've been playing many early XYZZY awards, and this is a classic late 90's game. Excellent writing, clever puzzles, but no way on earth you'll get them. Multi-object puzzles involving creative uses of items from every area of the game, bizarre required actions, etc. This is not bad, it's just the period's ideal. I used a walkthrough the whole time.
I loved the writing, and the obvious love of the author for New York and its history. The various ranks you get correspond to real historical New York mayors.
A one-room, one-puzzle time travel game, February 3, 2016This time travel game has been compared to many other such games, including ones before it (like Sorceror's and Spellbreaker's puzzles) and those after it (such as Fifteen Minutes). It works, and it is simpler than many, but the story is a bit weak.
You are a member of the Galactic Marines investigating a lab. The rest of the review is in spoilers, though it doesn't give away more than the first ten or twenty turns.
(Spoiler - click to show)You soon find yourself stuck in a time loop, where a critical event sends you back in time every few turns. You see the previous version of yourself, performing your last set of actions. You have to figure out how to stop the explosions, and how to interact with you doppleganger, and the interactions can occur in strange ways.
I recommend it, but not for everyone. Mostly those who enjoy puzzles.
A two-person conversation game about old dreams, loss, and life, February 3, 2016Best of Three is a menu-driven conversation game by Emily Short set entirely in the real world.
The game is a vast labyrinth of twisting conversation and topics. The characters are classic Short characters; young, independent, world-wise woman and slightly older, cynical and slightly dissipated man.
The game has a grey and 'ending' feeling. I have only played to one ending so far, and I assume there is a better one, but no matter what, there is no black-and-white happy ending in this game. But I still enjoyed it.
I put off this game for a long time because of the profanity in the opening scene; often. Once I started it, I was pleased to see that it had disappeared.
One playthrough took around 15 minutes.
The best exploration/inventory Twine game I've seen. Creature sci fi, February 3, 2016Axolotl is a fantastic sci fi Twine game with a large map, big inventory, multiple NPC's with menu-driven conversation, and so on.
You play a researcher of alien salamanders on the moon. The corporation you are working for is breathing down your neck, and things start to go wrong. A mystery develops, a surprisingly deep mystery, that I found extremely satisfying.
Also, this is a surprisingly fresh Twine game, as it avoids many of the overused Twine tropes: world-weariness, body horror, and psychological metaphor are all avoided for a better sci fi story.
One of the best Twine games ever.
Very, very long, linear sci fi game. Overly difficult puzzles, fun story, February 3, 2016This is my first Andy Phillips game. It felt longer than any other game I have played, but it was about 200 turns shorter than Once and Future, and I suppose that Blue Lacuna or Worlds Apart might be longer.
The game is absolutely linear, consisting of 40 or more scenes. In each scene, you must do exactly the right things in a small number of turns or die horribly. You often have to grab items long before you need them, and manipulate them in unexpected ways.
The story and writing is actually quite interesting, but it seems to decay over time. The writing becomes less fresh and more repetitive in the middle (like others have said, everything is described as 'evil' for 20 or more scenes), and typos creep up in the last third.
I only recommend this with a walkthrough. The difficulty is frequently just from poor puzzle design, and not from hard puzzles.
Fun sci-fi Infocom game, but too many red herrings and empty rooms for me, February 3, 2016Planetfall is many people's favorite IF of all time, so I knew it would be hard for it to live up to the hype. However, I think I just don't like Meretzky's style (e.g. Sorceror, the puzzles in Hitchhiker's Guide, etc.). He tends to favor big, mostly-empty complexes with many useless items thrown in to make it hard to find the real puzzles.
This worked for me in A Mind Forever Voyaging, but in Planetfall, I felt like I was just walking through an abandoned warehouse. I much prefer Moriarity's tightly-interlocking puzzle style, or Lebling and Blank's rich puzzle variety.
In planetfall, you play a lowly ensign in space who crash lands on a deserted planet, meeting a friendly robot named Floyd and trying to discover what happened. The resolution of the puzzles and storyline is satisfying, and the writing has several high points.
I recommend this game, but not as high as the Enchanter trilogy, Moriarity's games, or even Ballyhoo, which I loved.
Short and sweet scifi shipwreck story with some user constraints, February 3, 2016I played this Hugo game on Gargoyle. This game was nominated for a Best Game XYZZY award in 2005. You play a woman who just crashed on a strange planet and must survive. It feels like a shipwreck story, in a good way.
The game is very constrained. WAIT is disabled as a command! There are only ten locations, and only 4 of them have anything interesting; out of those four, two have exactly one item and one action you need to do.
I didn't like this game at first, for those reasons, but after I played it, the story stuck in my mind. The writing is descriptive and evocative, the items are well-described and creative. It is a game much better than the sum of its parts.
Excellent mid-length conversation game. Shakespearean plot in modern terms, February 3, 2016This is one of Emily Short's best plots, which is saying a lot. You are a daring member of a secret group infiltrating a party, with a vibe like the Scarlet Pimpernel and plot with pleasant similarities to Shakespeare (masked figures, cross dressing women, court intrigue, etc.)
The game features a menu-driven conversation system where you can change the topic using 'TOPIC [SOMETHING]'.
I found the many characters interesting and intriguing. It took me a while to warm up to Short's typical character types in her games, but it's hard not to be a fan when you play so many very-high-quality games by the author.
Everyone mentioned some hiccups. I had to peek at a walkthrough once to get through a confusing area. But I find that highly polished, perfect games are often less enjoyable than the raw games where an author pushed boundaries (like this game) or poured out their heart (like Worlds Apart). Not that these aren't polished, but they contain some flaws. Great literature is similar; the long, boring setup in an Agatha Christie novel is what sets up the great conclusion, and often the boring part is where the best conversations and set pieces are.
Intricate, beautiful, a bit unfair. Infocom's first mystery and realistic game, February 3, 2016I loved Deadline. I didn't get too far on my own in solving the mystery, but I spent a long time exploring and having fun.
This is a mystery game, where a man has been found dead, and you have to investigate the house and people in it. Everyone walks around, has scripted events, etc. I asked everyone about everyone else, examined the crime scene, etc.
I missed an important verb which is listed in the manual, and which you are supposed to know from the beginning; typing ANALYZE or ANALYZE [SOMETHING] FOR [SOMETHING] sends someone to analyze stuff for you.
Now so many other games make sense. For instance, Jon Ingold's Make It Good really borrows a lot from this game, and now I realize it must have been an intentional homage, meant to help and mislead the experienced gamer (which I wasn't when I played it).
Deadline was an early experiment in timed and scripted events, as well as extensive conversation.. Games like Varicella or Pytho's Mask may not have existed without this one.
It' s also very hard, in unfair ways. I recommend eventually settling on a walkthrough. Like the great novels of the 1600's-1800's, it was designed to last for a long period of time in the absence of other material.
A weaker detective story from Infocom, still polished, February 3, 2016Having just played Deadline for the first time, Witness was not as good, but still very polished. As others have noted, the solution to whodunnit isn't that hard. How they did it is harder.
Again, Sergeant Duffy is here to analyze everything for you . Again, there is a death you must investigate, and a (this time smaller) cast of characters you can interrogate.
You witness the death of a man, and you must uncover the mystery behind his death (thus the name of the game).
This was Infocom's second mystery game, and (I believe) the only one by Stu Galley.
Infocom's first scifi; big map, Star Trek feel. Little comedy, lots of wonder, February 3, 2016Star cross was fun to try on my own without a walkthrough, at first. You are a miner in space, looking for an asteroid, when you encounter an unusual object.
This game plays out on a large cylindrical map, with dynamics similar to those described in Ender's Game. You encounter a wide variety of creatures. The map eventually overwhelmed me; it is a huge map, and hard to draw out yourself (just look at the official maps!).
I used a lot of hints, eventually (including one near the beginning).
The main gameplay mechanic is a lock-and-key type puzzle, where you find about a dozen color-coded objects and corresponding places to put them.
I actually preferred this to Planetfall; that game's 4 timers (hunger, sleep, (Spoiler - click to show)disease, flood), combined with an empty map and red herrings, left me frustrated (Enchanter's three similar timers were compensated for by a simple map and dense useful object placement). Star cross was fun, even though I mostly used a walkthrough. The deaths were all fun, too.
Short, atmospheric game with new lingo, tight plot, and good writing, February 3, 2016This game was written as part of a competition to extend the universe of Andromeda Awakening and Andromeda Apocalypse, two of the best sci fi games out there.
This game plays with constraints in a very effective way. As the game opens, you are strapped into a bunk, unable to move. The setting will make much more sense for those who have played the first Andromeda game.
The game is mostly conversation based. It has a Gostak or For a Change feel, where you have to try and decipher what other people are saying. This part was a lot of fun, developing a new slang.
The game is quite short; I finished without a walkthrough in less than twenty minutes. However, it is very well crafted. There are supposedly many endings, but I have only reached one, and it was a good one,
This possibly has the highest fun-to-time ratio of any game I have played, so I recommend it to everyone..
Cyber-future Porpentine game about identity , February 3, 2016This Porpentine game was published in Sub-Q magazine, which is filling the void many people have felt for a venue for IF publication.
Neon Haze is about someone in the future who is going through a rehab program for (Spoiler - click to show)Vessel Syndrome, which makes you feel like you are just a vessel for others, and have no identity.
You have very little interaction with other beings, and you like it that way. There is one main NPC and a few others.
Like all Porpentine games, this game is highly symbolic. The clickable words are made to look like neon lights, and there is a bright neon background. I found both of these things distracting.
Overall, this was not my favorite Porpentine game; there was a good storyline, but the visuals were highly distracting. It's worth a try, though.
Contains some strong language, violence, sexual references, etc. Nothing is very graphic, however; much less than Cyberqueen, a little more than With Those We Love Alive.
Mid-length Twine game about a machine predicting how you will die, February 3, 2016I really enjoyed this game. It starts in a mall with a few stores and the Death Machine, and later branches into three possible narratives.
The message seems to be about fate and free will. The big idea is that there is a machine that prints out how you will die, and most people have tried it.
The genius of this game is that the author has thought through how the world would react to this development to a very high degree, so that the game is rich and believable.
Short but fun. Very infrequent strong profanity.
Great hallucinatory speed IF. Examine things that you then examine, etc., February 3, 2016I've heard many people talk about Lime Ergot, but I had no idea what it was about. It was an EctoComp 2014 game, so it had to be written in 3 hours, although it has since been updated.
The main thrust of the game is that you are standing with a general near a city, trying to make a Green Skull drink. Everything is vague and surreal. You 'move' by examining things, then examining more and examining more.
I had trouble getting started, but once I got started, it got easier and easier.
Strongly recommended for its fun-to-time ratio.
Clockpunk game of Anchorhead-like length and quality, February 3, 2016What an enjoyable game! My heart was racing in chapter 12. This is a quite long game set in a world dominated by clockwork; the religion, the city, the people's mindset, everything is based on clockwork (a funny moment was seeing that pagans worshipped non-mechanical timekeeping devices like water clocks or sundials).
You play an assistant clock keeper who must investigate a future robbery. The game is a very long example of what I call the linear thriller type of game. You encounter a more or less linear sequence of challenges where you are given a good amount of hints on what to do, there is always a sense of urgency, and everything you do is the right thing in just the nick of time.
This game is what I wish the illustrated book Hugo had been from its cover; you jump and leap and fall all through a giant clock early on, you use an early calculating machine like a computer, etc.
The writing is as good as Anchorhead, in my mind, and the implementation is smooth. The story wasn't as compelling to me at first, but the last few chapters really got me into it.
The game has probably not received very much attention because it was a commercial game for a while. But everyone should try it now.
A mid-length parser game with a lot going on, and not what you think it is, February 3, 2016This IFComp 2015 game starts off as a time-management baking game that I at first found very difficult to keep track of, and several non-standard inventory items.
Eventually things start to happen. The game gets much more interesting. However, micromanagment still abounds. Things can get frequently lost; things have to be replaced. A dozen or more NPC's of various types come and go, doing what they please, and it is difficult to keep track of everything.
I played through this game twice, a couple of weeks apart, and it was still hard to juggle everything the second time, knowing exactly what I needed to do. However, I understood the game much better the second time, and I appreciated it more. Some of the meta techniques are incredibly clever.
A very hard, non-intuitive old-school game about VR, February 3, 2016This game's imagery reminded me a bit of Tron. You are enclosed in a cube with a grid of lines as a virtual fence around you. Only your mind is imprisoned, in a VR environment. Someone is trying to get you out, and you must follow their directions.
The game requires many unusual leaps of logic, as well as a few difficult guessing problems. The story was fun, the map was easy to navigate, and the puzzle solutions often make sense after the fact.
Having played many of the old school games, I feel like the story of this one is better than most (I preferred it over Uncle Zebulons Will), but it's difficult puzzles combined with its strict linearity is a problem. A more open puzzle plan would have helped.
A complicated optimization Infocom game set in the future, February 3, 2016Suspended is a very unusual Infocom game. You take control of six robots, each with their strengths and issues (only one can see, but it's broken; another can feel things, but it talks in riddles; one is mainly useful if you're closer to dying, etc.)
The idea is that each one can see its environment in different ways. The first few playthroughs might just consist of exploring each room in the (provided) map, and understanding what needs to happen. Then later playthroughs would consist of trying over and over again to survive, and then trying to do it quickly.
I just played around for 15 minutes, and then used the walkthrough. I'd like to revisit this in the future. The robots have clever commentary.
It's mentioned in Planetfall that multipurpose robots like Floyd eliminated the need for these specialized robots.
An influential early game about moral choices, February 3, 2016Tapestry is a game that came up quite a bit in early IF discussions due to its unusual storytelling strategy. It remains fairly well-known.
Tapestry is a story about the afterlife, where a man is confronted with his 3 most despicable moments in life, and a chance to revisit each. You can deny each memory and fight against it, you can accept the memory and your shame, or you can accept the memory and deny your shame.
It is well-known for its moral choices, and for having several distinct paths, one of which is almost puzzle-free (the one where nothing changes), while one is puzzle-intensive (fighting your fate).
The first time I played it, months ago, I didn't really like it, and I stopped after the second panel. But this time, I used the walkthrough, and I read the story more, and I really liked it, and even found it emotionally satisfying.
The game gives an entire recap story at the end (about 2 pages), showing what life you really led.
An interesting, fascinating game. I recommend it (and don't feel bad about using a walkthrough, as many of the puzzles are just busywork). I do regret using the walkthrough at the very end in the 'accepting your fate' lines.
A game based on Looney tunes; short, fun, sometimes unintuitive, February 3, 2016This game came in 2nd in the TADS division of the very first IFComp. Unlike today, when works based on copyrighted material are rare, this game was based on Looney Tunes, with a few name changes.
The game relies on classic cartoon tropes. This isn't actually in the game, but an example would be finding a hole in the ground, and picking up the hole and putting it in your pocket.
It only has about ten points, and is pretty short. With most games from the 90's, I just use a walkthrough, as there were typically fewer synonyms implemented then and puzzles often require more guessing.
I actually really enjoyed this game. Very unusual.
A family-written Undum story about a kid who changes overnight, February 3, 2016Switcheroo is part of a family-friendly series of stories about a witch who runs a foster home. All parts of the story involve a certain writing style, where the narrator is a magic book that coughs up 'pageballs' from time to time.
In this tale, the focus is on Derik, who goes to sleep as a boy in a wheelchair and wakes up as a girl.
Later, some good things start happening in their life due to the switch. And they have to decide whether to keep their new body and identity, or go back to their old.
This game has affected a lot of different people in different ways. There is an obvious interest from the transgender community to see how this story is represented, and those who have experience adoption have responded to it as well. My family includes some who are permanently disable and use wheelchairs, so it was very interesting for me to think about this game.
Overall, I had fun playing through the first time, but I didn't look forward to replaying this game for the review. I would recommend this game to those looking for a family-friendly game or for a game that examines social issues in detail.
A very long surreal Twine game about identity, purpose, and journey, February 3, 2016This excellent IFComp 2015 game is a bizarre, surreal journey. You choose one of several 'origin stories' in a sense; for instance, once my father carved miniature cathedrals that played music, and once I lived in the swamp and sold frog skin.
The game consists of a journey towards a distant summit. You reach many places in between, in almost a surreal(er) Gulliver's Travels.
As you travel, you deal with an odd thing called a fishstomach, whose details I leave to the game.
Overall, I found the game emotionally satisfying, especially near the end. Well-chosen graphics help the game.
Occasional profanity and some body horror, but milder than Porpentine's games in general.
Choice-of-games style pirate fiction, February 3, 2016This is an interesting pirate world, where magic is prevalent and women have a much stronger place in the world.
This is a choice-of-games style game, which means that it's a CYOA, with choices affecting different 'stats' you have (like magic ability, gun ability, drunkenness, sneakiness, etc.) You have to build up different stats for different challenges.
Overall, a very fun game. I really enjoyed it, first as a beta tester, then playing it in the comp. The story is fast-paced and exciting.
A dark fantasy about stealth and finding secrets. Best to take your time., February 3, 2016I enjoyed Sub Rosa, and rank it in the top 5 of IFComp. It's world-building is marvellous; you explore a strange house in a strange world consisting of different 'planes' (in the Dungeons and Dragon's sense, and in the mathematical sense, and in the geographical sense).
The house and the backstory are weird and interesting, like a 1001 Arabian Nights written by Steven Moffat and David Eddings.
As your find out very early on, your goal is to find 7 secrets to destroy someone. Your secondary goal is not to get caught or noticed.
The game is enjoyable, and the puzzles are great, but it suffers from a bit of hunt-for-clues, like Where's Waldo. There is a library with 101 books, some of which are obviously important, and others which are necessary for winning but not clearly marked out.
As another example of the hunt-for-clues issue, there is one puzzle you solve by examining a background item not usually implemented, interacting with it in an unusual way, using that to interact with another important thing in an unusual way, and then examining two things in succession.
Thus, this game is best-suited for the meticulous. Fortunately, its rich backstory makes such meticulousness very rewarding.
An alt-game about OCD and managing your life, February 3, 2016This IFComp 2015 game centers on understanding and experiencing OCD. It has a nice visual feel, with a fixed-letter-spacing font and some purposely grainy photos/images.
You are diagnosed with OCD, and you learn that it's not what people think it is. You experience OCD as you struggle with how to spend your day and struggle with intrusive thoughts presented in an interesting way.
Overall, a mid-length game. You get a summary at the end describing how you're doing and what your future might be like.
If you are interested in OCD, definitely check this game out.
A homebrew parser with great interface; a catburglar story, February 3, 2016Second Story features a web-based parser that is, in my opinion, a quite nice visual improvement over several other parsers.
The story is about a catburglar who has changed their life, but has to go back to work to save their brother.
Gameplay is straightforward, taking, opening, and dropping things, but the story drives the game forward. It's fast and fun. I especially liked the twist at the end.
I recommend this game to those interested in developments in parser technology, and for those into crime-based stories (it reminded me a bit of the story of PataNoir, stripped from its mechanic).
A very short, fun surreal game exploring a metaphorical place, February 3, 2016This game is almost ritualistic in nature, and I enjoyed it. The gameplay consists almost entirely of reading messages placed in each of about 12 rooms. Doing this unlocks the final step.
Everything is dreamlike in nature, a bit like Plotkin's Dreamhold, but on a smaller scale. You wake up with no voice in front of a locked door In a dark structure with symbolic rooms, some made of glass, others of iron, etc.
I'm always into this kind of game, so I had fun. However, this game is really only for fans of the genre. Intentionally few puzzles, and the story is mostly about cool atmosphere.
A mid-length homebrew parser game with DnD-type quests, February 3, 2016This game resembles to me a Dungeons and Dragons type quest without leveling or classes. You play Questor, on a quest to help everyone. You have to save a man from poisoning by finding an antidote, defeat a witch, gather things in the forest, engage in combat, answer riddles, and do a few more intense Kerkerkruip-like combat segments where you choose whether to attack or defend and what to attack.
I would not classify this as an 'old-school game', but more as a 'faux-ld school game', a game that recreates what people think early parser games were like.
If you enjoy DnD type games (like Eye of the Beholder), this could be a fun mid-length game for you.
A randomized chase through an underground city, February 3, 2016This IFComp 2015 game places you in a preset underground map that is vaguely maze-like, and sets a monster chasing after you.
Although the map is preset, there are many doors that are locked, and the keys randomly distributed. Also randomly distributed are items to set traps with to kill a monster that is chasing you.
It is a fun game, with good atmosphere, but over pretty quickly. It would be fun to see the author add a version with multiple monsters, where you have to work harder to evade them and need to set multiple traps.
An alchemical IFComp game with innovative movement system, February 3, 2016Pilgrimage is a deeply symbolic game. The author has based the game around several symbolic progressions, including a progression of colors, the stages of grief, and more.
It is set in a pastiche of the medieval world, and it includes almost the entire world. Typing E will not take you one room east, it sets you off on a journey of months or years, to Russia or China.
You travel around trying to gain alchemical knowledge, and acheive a kind of transcendence. You seem to worship a dark Babylonian God, because Blessings of Babylon of disputable benefit are given to several people.
The IFComp release was a bit buggy, but I hope the author will do a postcomp release fixing the bugs discovered in the comp. This would result in a great game that people could discuss for a long time to come.
An alchemy RPG with many stats and fun story line, February 3, 2016Onaar is different than most games out there. It is an RPG with heavy amounts of grinding, but can still be completed relatively quickly.
You are a young person who crashes on an island with a community on it. You become an alchemist's apprentice. The game has a real economy with things you need to buy and sell, a variety of stats, a mild hunger daemon (with plenty of free food items regenerating all over), and many potions you make by gathering alchemical ingredients.
It was fun. It is not like other parser games; if you are looking for a traditional puzzler, you should go somewhere else. Traditional puzzles are here, but the RPG/alchemy system is the real star. You can make yourself incorporeal, stronger, a teleporter, etc.
Great for fans of classic RPGS.
A classic-style parser game about a darkly humorous vampire, February 3, 2016This mid-length IFComp 2015 game is an old-school game that is surprisingly forgiving. While you need to decipher passwords and complex machinery and examine each item and location, it has an internal consistency that makes it easier. Also, on two occasions when I was wandering around stuck, the game openly said "You remember that you..." and gave me the answer.
You are a vampire that seems like he would be played by a comedic actor in a darker film (kind of like a Buffy the Vampire take on an ancient Vampire). The game gets morbid but jokes as it does so (you remember torturing people a lot, for instance, but it' s played as an enjoyable hobby. I thought it was too much at a few points, but this game is unlikely to seriously offend anyone.
If you like puzzley games, you will love this one.
A two-part apartment parser game with an unusal premise, February 3, 20165 Minutes to Burn Something is a short-to-mid length IFComp 2015 game. It is about a woman who needs to set something in her apartment on fire so she won't be fined for a false alarm.
The game is set into two parts; first, you try and set the fire. Then, you (Spoiler - click to show)have to frame your ex-boyfriend so you don't get arrested for arson.
The puzzles are clever and imaginative, but due to the detailed scope of the game, some implementation got left behind. Many reasonable synonyms of things are not implemented, or reasonable alternative to in-game solutions; for instance, as a fictional example, you might have a jar with a lid, where LOOK IN JAR says 'you see nothing', while OPEN LID will tell you 'You find a cookie and pick it up'.
I think theses issues will be fixed in a post-comp release. I really enjoyed the first part of the game, although the second part seemed a bit creepy.
Recommended for puzzle fans.
An engaging Twine story about interning at a magical publishing company, February 3, 2016Dalmady brings their characteristic charm and structure to a mid-length Twine game about interning for a company with actual magic.
The company uses rune/sigil-based magic, but the character is mostly familiar with magic through a Harry Potter-like series of fictional books.
As others have pointed out, the strength of the game is the contrast between the exciting world of magic and the sheer drudgery of intern work (making copies, getting coffee, etc.) I reached all three endings, and enjoyed the variety as well as the mechanisms by which the character achieves the 'good' endings (in my opinion).
There is a single instance of strong profanity, but otherwise no violence and profanity. The horrible reality of a boring office life (with low pay) may be too much for children and most adults, however (How many copies do I have to make!!!!!).
A branching fantasy story with strange and interesting takes on old concepts, February 3, 2016This mid-length, fairly difficult parser game took second place in IFComp the year it was entered. You play a voyager who stops to investigate a goblin cave that a peddler wants looted.
The game allows you to make a variety of choices; for instance, you find various pieces of loot that you can trade for magical equipment. Every choice of equipment leads to a different way of beating the game.
The game has a different take on a lot of things; for instance, most characters can choose their gender over time, including a neutral gender. This makes for interesting politics in the gameworld. Also, there is a lot of magic affecting (Spoiler - click to show)memory.
Like many great parser games that are now neglected, I believe that this wonderful game is not noticed now because it is hard, and because the walkthrough only gives you one path, leaving most of the game unexplored, and, because of the difficulty level, perhaps unexplorable.
I recommend this game for everyone, with the walkthrough after a short time (even the hints are not enough for me and some IFComp reviewers).
A 4-part surreal amnesia Twine game in the distant future, February 3, 2016This IFComp 2014 Twine game is mid-to-long in length. You wake up with amnesia in a judgment center reminiscent of the Cube movies. You choose to experience four challenges in an order of your choice.
Interestingly, each has its own genre. One is a locked room, one is related to a classic game theory scenario, one revolves around NPC interaction, and the last one ended before I really saw it.
The game has a bit of a prologue and an epilogue, as well.
I don't think it is possible to enter an unwinnable state.
A thrilling dynamic short story about two sisters fleeing for their lives, February 3, 2016I found this game strangely engrossing, perhaps because I'm a fan of Mary Higgins Clark. I say strangely, because I'm usually not a fan of games with limited interactivity, walls of text, and strong profanity, all of which this game contains. However, Orisney's strong storytelling makes this game very memorable.
The game is quite long, and I couldn't find any way to save, so I recommend playing it all in one sitting. It's divided into a prologue and 3 or 4 chapters.
The story is about two sisters lost in the woods who discover increasingly disturbing things in the snow.
The style of the game is a dynamic short story, where you get about a page's worth of story at a time, then a single 'continue' link or a small number of small choices.
One interesting thing in this game is that quite a bit seems to indicate that your sister has her own playable story, yet this never materializes. I wonder if the author intended to add this feature, but never finished it.
The game includes strong violence.
I'm glad I played it, and I recommend it to fans of CSI or Higgins Clark.
A long, animated and voice-acted superhero story, February 3, 2016Future Boy! was a commercial game from 2004. A large game (it took me about 4 and a half hours, using hints 27 times), it has illustrations with gif-like animations for every room and character, as well as voice-acting for all dialogue.
The game is split into two parts, one with the parser, and one with little windows with graphics, usually one for the room itself, one for each character present, one for the compass rose, and one for effects like rain.
The game starts out fairly linearly, with a succession of challenges that set up the story. I found some of the early puzzles fairly difficult, which is unusual for commercial IF. I resorted to the hints as early as the second scenario.
After the first few scenes, the game opens up considerably. It ends up being reminiscent of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a cast of crazy characters and a variety of random locations that you can visit.
One of the highlights of the game is an unusually well developed (Spoiler - click to show)computer system. It's like a miniature game within a game, and gave me fond memories of the 90's.
My winning game was ~1500 turns long.
The plot is fairly intricate. Overall, I enjoyed this game. If it were an iPad app, I would price it at around $5-$10.
I came into possession of the game by contacting the creators using the email on the Future Boy! website.
A tight, well-written spoof of 50's sci-fi with comic-style graphics, February 3, 2016This game was my predicted winner of IFComp 2015. This game is well-written, has great pacing (especially in the first half), a strong narrative voice, and excellent graphics. It is easy enough for people to get into with little IF experience, but provides enough of a challenge later on to be interesting.
You play a teenage girl whose town is overrun by the eponymous Brain Guzzlers. You have a cast of creatively-described friends and acquaintances who help you out. Conversation is menu-based, which allows Cherrywell to express the real flavor of the PC's world (with a lot of 'Jeepers!').
The game has some very creative puzzles, and some more straightforward. Each character of the game (besides yourself) comes with one or more high-quality graphics that show up when talking to them.
Game play is 2-3 hours long, I estimate. I recommend this to everyone; I feel like it will be played for years to come.
A steampunk game in pseudo-historic Australia with metal magic, February 3, 2016Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of Banks' games, and I received an advance copy of this game when I told her I wanted to review it.
Clockwork Army is a Choicescript game set in historic Australia, with bits in Britain. The game uses a magic system that the author has developed for some time, including in her gamebook 'It Started When the Flag Fell'. This system is a metal system, a bit reminiscent of the Mistborn system. Different metals have different properties; lead enhances emotions, while the ultra-rare aluminum enhances agility.
The setting is in colonial Australia, with the Australians building up to a revolt against the redcoats. However, this Australia is heavily mechanized in a steampunk fashion. Metal corsets that grant abilities, hybrid animal-machines, and even cloud harvesters abound.
The story revolves around a family that has been scattered across the earth, who are trying to get back together. Like most Choicescript games, you have a choice of gender, name/ethnicity, and romantic interests.
The only other review I've seen of the game so far is on an app store and says it's the worst choice of games game they've ever seen. I suspect that they've only tried the first two (free) chapters, because these mostly consist of setting up the backstory and the magic system. The convolutedness of the magic system ends up requiring a lot of 'As you know...' exposition at the beginning.
But the later chapters are where things really take off. Having just finished The Shadow in The Cathedral by Jon Ingold and Ian Finley, I was hungry for more steampunk/clockwork creatures, and I wasn't disappointed. (Actually, thinking about it now, this game has the same kind of story that I was hoping for in the never-finished sequel to that game).
Anyways, things get heated, and the clockwork creations grow more and more complicated. I think it's impossible to really lose (in the sense of not getting a complete ending), but I did not achieve my character's original goals.
That was one area that I had trouble with: roleplaying the character. I had a sort of pacifist in mind that would always prefer thinking and spying over direct combat, but I found that the game penalized this behavior a few times. Also, my preferred love interest turned out to be taken, but I quickly mended my broken heart and moved on.
The last thing I should mention is that this game and Banks' gamebook contain a great deal of detail about historic Australia. Some people are turned off by this, but I enjoyed it.
Anyways, if you want to get a feel for the game before buying, try the first two chapters, but also see her gamebook I mentioned above to get more of a taste of this setting and magic system.
A home-brew horror maze with a timer and atmospheric room descriptions., February 3, 2016D.B.T has written 42 games since August of 2014; only one of these has a real review on IFDB, and most have one or fewer ratings. They are written in QBasic, I believe, although some are available as downloadable executable files.
I decided to try one of these games. When I started up the game, I was entertained to see two skulls made with ascii art. The game has a countdown timer of 8 or 9 minutes, and I finished it in 5 or 6.
The game is a maze with two items you can pick up. HELP lists all verbs that you need.
The one real review of a DBT game is pretty harsh; and I have to admit, by the standards of the type of parser games most popular right now, it is not well put together.
However, the game isn't TRYING to be a current, modern parser game or even a throwback to classic games. It is trying to be it's own thing. The game cites Maniac Mansion, Darkseed (which I haven't played), and Scott Adams. In a way that I really can't explain, it reminded me of early versions of Oregon Trail.
Most of the game consists of just wandering around an easily navigable maze absorbing atmospheric room descriptions in green text on black background. The material is over the top, but it's meant to be that way. You are exploring a dreamscape, and trying to find the source of the evil in the dreamscape. Note that you have to refer to items by their full name to use them or pick them up.
All in all, it reminded me of my creepypasta reading phase. Stuff like Jeff the Killer or anything involving Herobrine. Or like Sci-Fi channel movies. I can see how someone could get into D.B.T.'s games and look forward to each release.
So, for standard IF games, this is not that great. But in it's own category, it is enjoyable.
A modern-day fairytale in West Africa with some sexual content, February 3, 2016This is a Sub-Q magazine game, and the high production values show. Excellent use of images and imagery abound.
The setting is unique among IF that I have played: a west african city, where legends still exist.
Your character (written in the first person) is a person of unknown abilities whose job is to 'fix' cheating husbands.
It was an interesting story. I'm not a big fan of explicit content, and there were some fairly explicit sexual references, but violence and profanity were low.
The culture was very interesting.
A short demo of a Twine game in an alternate world, February 3, 2016This game needs to be downloaded from dropbox before being played, and won't let you save. However, saving is not necessary for this game, because it's a relatively short demo of a Twine game, with many endings, all reachable in 2-5 choices.
The story is set in an alternate world, where the biggest change from our world is a kind of fire-knife thing carried by the protagonist. The main story is only a bit sketched in, but it's a kind of dystopian world like the beginning of Cape.
The author has done extensive styling of the game. There is a textured grayish-black background, as well as light gray text. When you run the cursor over a letter, it gets bright white, then slowly dims.
For me, the gray-on-gray was a bit difficult to read. It might work better to brighten up the text while preserving the hover-over-makes-a-halo effect.
Tasteless, very short shock horror, February 3, 2016I'm sure this review will drive some people to see if the game is as bad as I say it is; these people will then post, too and say "He was right! Don't play this game, it's awful!"
This game just tries to describe rape, murder, body horror, butchery, etc in as explicit terms as possible, with no capitalization and rushed spelling. It ends up not being frightening because it is so over the top, but it is gross. Perhaps I am feeding into the author's wishes too much by doing a review, but I think it's useful to record what the game is about.
Enjoyable mid-length creepy Twine game with some significant choices, February 3, 2016This is a mid-length creepy Twine game about someone returning to the scene of a childhood tragedy. The mild horror which slowly builds up is one of my favorite genres, and the writing was well-paced.
I reached two bad endings by reversing all significant choices. I wonder if the good ending (if any) is hidden in some way. Also, there were some changes between versions that I didn't quite understand, specifically in the occupation of the main NPC.
Fun for fans of creepy stories.
A twiny jam game contrasting two cultures and their common problems., February 3, 2016This is a Twiny Jam game, requiring that the game be 300 words or less.
It uses the limited space effectively to comment on social injustice and the blindness of public media.
It' shard to discuss the game more without spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)You watch a show about water struggles in faraway places, but you have troubles of your own. With a child at home, you have no water, but you can get a small trickle whenever your neighbor uses their shower. I ended up collecting it in a bucket and dumping it over me, fully clothed.
It made me think about the problems that still exist in developed countries due to income inequality.
Wonderful, intricate, intimidating story and puzzles. Better than Sorceror., February 3, 2016I rushed through Ballyhoo, but even so the story was marvelous and stunning. This is a mystery game set in a dreary circus. The feel is a lot like Not Just and Ordinary Ballerina. You investigate the disappearance of the owner's daughter after hours.
This game could have been played without hints for a month. The puzzle solutions are intricate and the world is detailed.
I relied on hints out of fear that there was way too much I could do wrong. In fact, almost everything is reversible, once you reach an area, you get unlimited chances to return. If not, you don't need to return. The game was shockingly forgiving.
Unfortunately, the walkthrough may have been necessary simply because of guess-the-verb problems, especially with conversations.
The much-feared dream sequence is very easy to map and overcome (the lines situation was harder for me).
This is a fantastic game, the name and blurb really turned me off, but this game was more fun than the Lurking Horror or Sorceror.
**Edit:** I've been asked to clarify what I mean by better than Sorceror (or Lurking Horror). As I considered why I used that comparison, I realized that there are many parallels between Ballyhoo and Sorceror: both contain a dark carnival, both are centered on searching for a missing person, both have a pair of gatekeeper puzzles, many wild animals etc. In both, you slowly develop into an expert in the skills that surround you (magic or circus abilities), and the humor and writing are similar.
Why do I prefer Ballyhoo? It condenses the map of Sorceror, and has far more NPCs and interesting, scripted events, as well as far less red herrings. It has more feeling, too. In Ballyhoo, when you are in (Spoiler - click to show)Eddie's trailer and he realises you aren't a clown, I felt real anxiety for my character, and when (Spoiler - click to show)you break through Tina's shell and she solemnly shakes your hand, I felt a tug on my heartstrings. Contrast this to Sorceror's over the top 'scary moments' like (Spoiler - click to show)burning in flame forever or its few moments of pathos (Spoiler - click to show)which I can't even think of; perhaps giving up your spellbook?.
As for lurking horror, I'm just still mad about the Chinese food puzzle. It's actually a great game.
A puzzle-less game in the 'shocking confessional' style of fiction, February 3, 2016This game has no puzzles whatsoever, which is not necessarily a drawback. Games like Galatea and Aisle have shown that such things can be done effectively.
The game consists of an art gallery where four different characters can view 12 different paintings. Each person has a different take on the painting, and often you can discover the 'true meaning' of a painting from one character and not the other.
The game shows how art is partly the author and partly the viewer, and how the viewer creates art as it observes it. In this respect, it reminds me a lot of "Creatures such as we" by Lynnea Glasser.
I didn't enjoy the genre of the tale, though. It has the breathy, shocking, Schadenfreude feeling that's so popular. Books like the Kite Runner or Mudbound or other books where the characters have horrible or depressing secrets and it all comes together to a kind of gritty 'determination to live despite all' don't entice me. The story did not move me, which I found disappointing, considering that I'm a big fan of Ian Finley's work.
Mid-length superhero game; more developed but more repetitive than first game, February 3, 2016I played Earth and Sky and this game, its sequel, this morning.
This game was enjoyable, and I enjoyed the varied environments and the fun use of powers.
This game features the superhero Earth, who can break things and jump very far. You navigate a small set of areas (I think six), each with an inside and an outside.
At first, and at the end, I really enjoyed playing around with the powers and learning about abilities. But I found the middle game repetitive, especially because you have to travel the map repeatedly and exits aren't undoable in the normal way (i.e. going east and west doesn't return you to where you started).
Overall, a good game, but I preferred the first one.
An early hit that was later forgotten. Huge lab/lighthouse exploration game., February 3, 2016This long sci-fi game was nominated for the very first XYZZY award for Best Game in 1996. It is a sequel to former games, as far as I can tell.
This game seems to have been forgotten, with only 3 ratings and no reviews on IFDB. It is a very large game, about as long as Spellbreaker.
The plot concerns a young apprentice scientist who isn't doing as good as they should working on scientific research working in a slightly different universe (with a sort of C. E. J. Pacian feel). Many things show up here before other games; you explore a complicated set of labs the year before Babel came out, and you explore a creepy lighthouse two years before Anchorhead.
The tone is mildly dark and mildly humorous. Some parts of the game near the end are pretty silly. I still don't understand (Spoiler - click to show)the transvestite squid and the yellow submarine full of blue rodents. I have no idea why the tone changed so much there.
This is an old-school game, where they were still incorporating Infocom tricks like search-everywhere puzzles and hidden timers that were only designed to increase the length of small-size games. In a large game like this, it is frankly unfair. Many of the puzzles have difficult solutions, and many items are under-implemented.
I loved the story, as much as I understood it. I just took a walkthrough and ran with it.
A Calvin-and-Hobbes-esque adventure with three paths through all puzzles, February 3, 2016Delphina's House uses one of my favorite gameplay mechanics, parallel worlds where actions in one world affect the other.
In this short ParserComp game, you play a young girl who is moving, and who wants to explore her worlds one last time with here transporter box (like Calvin's cardboard boxes in Calvin and Hobbes). There are three main puzzles, but each puzzle can be solved in any of the three possible worlds available to you. This gives the game high replay value; you can play through 3 different times and solve completely new puzzles every time.
There are two sound-based puzzles, but they are not bad, and (like all other puzzles) they can be bypassed by doing other puzzles.
If you liked this game, you might like the author's other game, Molly and the Butter Thieves.
Great hide-and-seek game with ingenious puzzles. Uses sound and graphics, February 3, 2016Before I played it, Six was recommended by many, many people. It was nominated for Best Game in the XYZZY awards, it did very well in IFComp, reviewers said it was the best game ever. But I wasn't very interested.
Having tried it, I see now why all the hype was there. This is a very fun game. You have to play hide and seek tag/tip with your six friends in a park. The game uses children, but the writing isn't childish. Each friend presents a unique challenge in catching them. After winning the game, you can unlock additional material.
The game features a wide assortment of sounds, which were never necessary except for one part of the additional material. The graphics are also fun but unnecessary (the map can be helpful, but the layout of the park is not hard).
This game is not very difficult. I use hints/walkthroughs on just about every game I play, but I manage to work my way through this one relying on in-game nudges only. Great game.
Interesting faux-work-from-home-site about subversives, February 3, 2016This game seemed huge at first, so I was worried, but it got fastee over time. Altogether about 2 hours play time at most.
You 'sign up' to work with a company who investigates subversives. Yojreadreports and make recommendations. Weird stuff creeps in.
My ending was funny and enjoyable. The game is a good satire of office life.
Replay value seems low, as you can't save anywhere, so you have to replay a lot.
I enjoyed this game.
Like an interactive web-comic. A short French Revolution Cinderella game., February 3, 2016This short choice game has lavish and beautiful drawings for each room/scenario, but the navigation system is classic CYOA style, plus a compass rose.
The story is a version of Cinderella as a secret spy. Cinderella is an action-hungry operative who clashes with the advice of the more level-headed Godmother, providing for some of the best moments in the game.
Overall, I enjoyed it. It felt like an interactive webcomic. Because classic comic strips were some of my favorite reading material as a kid, I enjoy the idea of interactive web-comic as a form of IF, and would like to see more of this in the future.
A massive fantasy/dreamlike Twine game reminiscent of Howl's Moving Castle, February 3, 2016Beautiful Dreamer is one of the best Twine games to come out so far this year. In this fantasy game, you try to sleep at night during a windstorm.
You slowly realize that the game's world is not the same as your own. The world has a strong internal consistency, and you begin to learn more of its rules and nature.
The game is quite large. I was quite thrilled to discover (Spoiler - click to show)a classic CYOA gamebook near the beginning of the game. I thought the game was quite big already, but when I finished it and read the credits, I discovered that I had missed thousands of words' worth of text, which I went back and read.
The tone is a lot like Howl's Moving Castle (both the book and the movie), with archetypal characters, much talk of dreams, surreal magic, etc.
I also felt there were many similarities with Eidolon: (Spoiler - click to show)exploring a dark and shadowy bedroom, dream-type worlds, and a moth motif.
I strongly recommend this game.
A mid-length sci-fi game from an alien perspective, February 3, 2016Coloratura is one of the greatest sci-fi IF of all time. In this game, you play as a being utterly different from us that encounters a situation it has never experienced before.
The game has all of the usual commands, plus some new commands, the most interesting of which are color-based commands. Different colors signify different moods or ideas.
The puzzles are extremely rewarding, and fit into the plot exactly. The NPC's are well-implemented, and the nature of the game makes you feel as if the parser is not limiting conversation at all, only the world itself is.
I didn't really need a map for this game. It took a couple of hours to play. The game's biggest strength is its ability to put you in the shoes of someone completely different from you, to make you really feel like you are them.
I only wish the game had lasted a bit longer. But this may have made the puzzles less cohesive.
A parody of a 12-year old's detective game written with his blessing, February 3, 2016"Detective" was an early game (written before the first IFComp) written by a 12-year old, who actually did a pretty good job for their age. However, many people judged it in reference to games by older, more experienced authors, and the game pales in comparison.
The authors of the MST3K version decided to make a parody where they play through with their commentary during the game. Usually, I would feel that it is pretty mean-spirited, but the game includes an interview with the author where he says that he's fine with this version of the game, and that he's a fan of Mystery Science Theatre.
The game is mostly fun because of its unusual format. It only really needs one playthrough; after that, you just hear the same comments over and over again, so there's not much replay value.
A comedy game with intense chase scenes and romance, February 3, 2016I have never seen Being John Malkovich, but this game is loosely based on it. In this game, you gain access to Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf), author of games such as Shade, So Far, Spider and Web, and a million others. You play several characters, including Zarf and a couple of young lovebirds.
The game is relatively short, taking less than an hour. The humor is mostly absurd humor, with numerous references to Zarf's fiction. I had only played a few games at the time; it is probably worth it to work through a lot of Plotkin's games (like So Far and A Change in the Weather) before playing this game, or afterwards. Unfortunately, these games are extremely hard, so if you're not a puzzle fiend, consider a walkthrough.
Great writing, mostly good puzzles, and a fun setting. I recommend it for everyone.
Enchanter's nightmarish older brother, February 3, 2016Sorcerer is the "middle child" of the Enchanter trilogy, and like many middle installments, it tries to go beyond the old game into new territory while developing some aspects.
This game is still focused on scrolls, but it adds potions and many more Zorkian pick-up-and-carry-around items. Many items are items from MIT Zork which have been repurposed.
The writing is, in fact, nightmarish. There is a nightmare early in the game, and don't try sleeping in the first area! You later visit some particularly horrible places, where there are countless ways to die. The game is filled with subtly creepy locations, like (Spoiler - click to show)an underground carnival. And losing is particularly unpleasant.
This game has many red herrings, and one notorious unwinnable state (you must obtain a certain item in the first 25 turns of the game. The game doesn't tell you that).
The game is famous for (Spoiler - click to show)its glass maze, and for its time-travel puzzle. Unfortunately, I had heard about both before, and so I wasn't as impressed by them.
I got up to 205 points before using a walkthrough. I played this game on iOS's Lost Treasures of Infocom.
An odd, short horror/fantasy game where all locations are present at once, February 3, 2016This game is intended for beginners, and seems almost like a demo of a new system, but only in the way that Galatea was the demo for a new system (I.e. It is still well-polished).
The new system is interesting. You can instantly return to any of the dozen or so locations by typing X [LOCATION]. You can talk to anyone, anywhere, or take any item, without traveling there first.
The plot itself is just vaguely sketched out. There are hints about who you are, some big hints about the red prince, very little history. The game is short.
Basically, you are an adventurer and scholar who is trying to stop the Red Prince who lives in a castle above a village.
Overall, though, it was a fun experience, and a nice change from Lovecraftian horror.
Like Jurassic Park with nicer dinosaurs, set in Maori culture. Well-polished, February 3, 2016Aotearoa won first place both in the 2010 IFComp and later the XYZZY Awards, where it swept Best Game, Best Setting, Best Puzzles, Best NPCs, Best Individual Puzzle, Best Implementation, Best Use of Innovation.
Given all the awards, to me, it was just a very well-thought out mid-length scenario. It was a fun diversion, that gives the feel of a massive world but really being a ride-on-the-rails for the most part. It gives you the feel of having solved a very difficult puzzle on your own.
As you are immediately told, the game is set in an alternate world where dinosaurs survived in New Zealand and were instrumental in New Zealand resisting the British conquest. You are a young visitor to the island, and must explore it while working with and against others. There are numerous NPCs.
To me, the game is excellent, and would make a good introduction for someone new to IF or a good , well-crafted diversion for an experienced player.
But it doesn't have lasting power, in my opinion. For instance, it was voted in the 2012 Best IF of all Time, but not in the 2015. To me, the most memorable part is the exposure to Maori language and culture (although I don't know how much is real and how much is story, but it's beautiful in any case).
Great supernatural, thoughtful fiction. Twine with haunting graphics., February 3, 2016Solarium gives Twine a good name. This well-crafted game is adult ficion, not as in sexuality, but as in dealing with thoughtful and meaningful concepts. It involves alchemy and an alternative ending to the cold war, decades ago.
The narrative has a branching structure, with each branch requiring a key in the form of an alchemical substance. By obtaining more substances, you unlock more areas.
The game includes several striking images, including scans of real government documents.
I strongly recommend this game.
Pick up The Phone Booth and Die mixed with Porpentine Pizza, February 3, 2016This game is interesting; I recently read Porpentine saying that they made parser games at first, and people didn't like them, so she moved to Twine.
I think that Twine is a better format for these stories; this story is fun, but I love the complete refreshing of the screen, the colored text and background, and the pacing of Twine as elements of Porpentine's stories. This story is good, and it works, but I think that Twine was a smart move.
In this game, you have a shovel, and you have to dig. The game can be won in 15 moves or less. In its implementation and feel, it felt like Pick up the Phone Booth and Die.
Fun sci-if base infiltration gem. Shortish game with some under clued puzzles, February 3, 2016I enjoyed Scavenger, and will probably revisit it. You play a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic society who has a lead on a big find. You have to find and search a base. There are no big surprises here, but plenty of fun puzzles.
Some of the puzzles, though fun, were a bit under clued. At least four puzzles depend on you searching or moving objects that are not obviously searchable, or that are similar to earlier immobile/unsearchable objects, or which you are explicitly told have nothing in them. This draws back from the fun.
The games NPCs have a lot of character, especially in their descriptions and responses.
It may seem as if I didn't like this game, but it has that elusive 'it'-ness that makes a game enjoyable and with it. Perhaps this is the reason it was nominated for a Best Game XYZZY.
Semi-graphical teenager romp, February 3, 2016This enjoyable game is more story than puzzle, although it uses a parser. You play a teenager with access to an online community. Actions are strongly limited, mostly TAKE, LOOK, and SHOW. You investigate an abandoned house, and have to entice others to come with you.
What made this game work for me was the contrast between your friends online personas and their real-life selves, including yourself. Chris and Maximus gave especially funny contrasts.
The game in the end works as a slice-of-life story. There is one significant choice, and unfortunately it comes at the very end of the game, with no opportunity to save, which prevents lawn-mowering (i.e. trying every branch).
A comical nothing-is-what-you expect story about a petty criminal, February 3, 2016Taco Fiction is fun. It is a bit shorter than I would like; I paused the game partway through, expecting that half of the game was left, and when I came back, there was only about 30 turns left in the game.
You play a petty criminal who needs cash. The game gives you explicit directions on what to do at first. I love ignoring directions in parser games; in some games, like Bronze, the game just doesn't move forward at all if you ignore the directions. In this game, ignoring the directions gives you a lot of different, fun results.
I admit, I enjoyed the first part of the game, before the reveal, because it wasn't like anything else I had seen before. In this sense, it was a lot like Afflicted, although the actual reveal was wildly different in the two games.
The conversation system seemed at first incredible, and then very annoying, especially with the main favorable NPC. You have a lot to say, but 95% of it is completely irrelevant.
A good, short game. Is it one of the best games of all time? It certainly has one of the best openings of all time. So play it for ten minutes, and then decide if you want to keep going or not.
A philosophical twine game with two choices at each stage, February 3, 2016In this game, you are repeatedly asked questions, and each questions has two answers you can click on.
The questions are philosophical (What does it mean for movement to be an illusion?, for instance). This is the whole game. The only ending I reached was one that told me I was asking the wrong questions, aftef I asked what enlightenment was.
This philosophical work works better as Twine than it would as static fiction, but it was not the type of thing I look for when finding games.
A silly but well-known game, February 3, 2016Pick up the phone booth and die has one idea: try picking up the phone booth. Then die. Exactly one related action will win the game instead.
I had always heard of this game, and played it once or twice. After deciding to write this review, I investigated its history. It seems it was nominated for an XYZZY award for Best Puzzle in 1997. It was simultaneously released with a demo for Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die, part 2, which is still available as a demo on ifdb.
Most of the praise the game receives is due to its minimalism.You might as well try it because it is so short.
It inspired the much better game, Pick Up The Phone Booth and Aisle, which parodies both this game and Aisle (where every action ends the game in a different ending).
An introductory fantasy game with a haunting atmosphere that doesn't quite gel, February 3, 2016I played Dreamhold years ago, one of the first games I've played, and it's never been quite my favorite. It is intended as being accessible for beginners but still fun for older players. It is a mid-length fantasy game, where you play as a wizard trying to reconstruct his memories in a tower.
The puzzles are of course top-notch, especially with the berries and the stars. However, the plot was never really compelling to me. The protagonist is not an underdog, and everyone likes to root for the under dog.
Actually, I know exactly how to describe this game. This is Citizen Kane for interactive fiction. Reviewing the life of an old, powerful man and seeing how he got there. If you liked Citizen Kane, you will like Dreamhold. If you don't really go for those kinds of characters, you still might like the puzzles quite a bit. For me, it's the kind of game that I love while playing, then forget when I'm done.
Wonderful, exciting Infocom pirate game with sporadic romance elements., February 3, 2016This Infocom game nails the pacing. The game always felt exciting. You play a young woman searching for her father who is abducted by pirates. You carry out increasingly bold tasks throughout the game, and, as a player, I felt excited at my ability to be part of the action instead of being helpless on the side.
The game has two main areas: a ship, and a house. Events are tightly scripted and well-thought-out to keep the action flowing. The tight pacing may require frequent saving.
I found the game slightly easier than usual for Infocom; however, I was stumped twice in the middle (around points 16-19). It took about a week or a bit less of playing on and off to finish it (total time around 4-5 hours).
Be warned that this game uses Infocom's piracy protection, so you need access to the 'feelies' to solve key puzzles in the game. I used the Lost Treasures of Infocom app, which has the feelies included as images.
The romance novel aspects were infrequent, mostly resorting to ardent glasses, although right around the 16-19 point range where I got stuck, things got a bit heated as I was losing, but the game avoids anything explicit.
Overall, one of my favorite Infocom games, probably due to the great writing and simpler (but rewarding) puzzles.
An extensive RPG with parodies of D and D and a lot of adult scenarios, February 3, 2016Up front, I will say that I stopped playing halfway through when I had to go through a sex scene to advance the plot for the third or fourth time. It was just too much.
In this game, you explorea large rectangular world with pirates, an arena, and a giant, as well as robots and rockets. You level up by defeating weak enemies. The game comes bundled with a mock RPG gamebook.
The game is pretty fun, but it just grates on me when every woman js hypersexualizes and sex is the only way forward, even if it is a parody. Other may disagree.
A horror game in a monastery with extremely disturbing imagery, February 3, 2016This is a game that very acvurately portrays a horrible situation, and thus left me feeling uncomfortable. Its not the kind of game I enjoy playing.
You play the abbot of a monastery that has been afflicted with plague, and you have to take control of the situation while everyone goes crazier and crazier.
The game features many npcs and strong moral choices. You can choose to do truly horrible things, including (Spoiler - click to show)rape, murder, eating corpses,etc., and egen if you choose the best paths, people around you (Spoiler - click to show)crucify others, violently commit suicide, etc.
I'm not proud that I completed this game. I came back to it years later, like scratching a scab you know you shouldn't.
A tightly-timed game with many NPCs, where you watch and commit disturbing acts, February 3, 2016I avoided this game for some time, as I knew it had some disturbing content, but I was curious, so I went in and played through it. I feel, looking back, that I didn't really need to do so.
The gameplay is intricate, with six or more NPCs taking actions every turn. You play one of many possible regents to a young prince who must battle for supremacy. The game is mostly set in a blend of medieval, modern, and slightly futuristic technology.
Each enemy is deeply flawed. Some are motivated by greed, others by lust. The game deals with pedophilia, repeated rape, murder, alcoholism, misogyny, etc. These topics don't make a game bad, if they are handled well; but the game has a worldview that makes you squirm, where you are implicit in violence and death, and where human happiness is impossible.
Other people may not have the same reaction. Heck, I played it for quitea bit, before usinv a walkthrough to the end, making me hypocritical. But I can't recommend it in general.
Mid-length cyberpunkish Twine game about a robopsychologist. Many endings., February 3, 2016Entropy Cage is one of those games where I thought the app I had downloaded onto my old nook had glitched, because within seconds of starting, some numerical address said it needed to be reseeded. I thought the android app's random number generator was glitching.
Welcome to Entropy Cage. The game involves you, a robopsychologist who must diagnose issues with AI's that are supposed to be running the world.
The game gets more interesting the further you progress, and some reviewers have noted the game's ability to avoid common cliches. However, it gets monotonous at points, as you diagnose dozens of robot clients in rapid succession (each with a single click).
This game was well-received in the 2014 IFComp, coming in 14th out of 40 something in a competition that traditionally favors parser games (which require text input). I'd look forward to another game by this author.
A big fantasy city with many npcs, and epic storyline. Mid-to-long game, February 3, 2016I only recently played this game, and it quickly became my favorite Emily Short game. I have seen in her notes that she often works ideas that she has into games as a proof of concept; for instance, Metamorphoses and Galatea were both intended as trial-of-concepts for ideas for a massive game that never took off.
I wonder if this game was a proof-of-concept for the city and npcs in Counterfeit Monkey. The idea of a sidebar, a map, numerous npcs with complicated conversation systems, and a large city seem very familiar between the two games.
This game is about a balance between two forces, but it is difficult to categorize the two. This is more of a story game than a puzzle game. There are some puzzles that are oddly difficult to solve, so I occasionally resorted to Victor Gisjber's hints. However, the game has many ways of hinting things to you if you look for them.
Like Counterfeit Monkey, this was a laggy game. Gargoyle had trouble with both of them, as have every other system I have used. I believe the refreshing graphics causes it.
Wonderful storyline and worldbuilding. Loved the final sequences, especially.
Short and intentionally dumb. For fans of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die., February 3, 2016You are a chef! is a short and purposely dumb game. The game has bad spelling and grammar, poorly defined locations, and mainly consists of picking up ingredients falling from the sky.
The humor is that of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die: make a minimalist game with dumb puzzles. Some people don't like it; I admit, I chuckled the first time I played it.
I came up with an interesting hypothesis as I played the game. Everytime you put an item in the pot, the game says:
"Good work Chef!!! But you must find more!! Ingrredients!!"
This game came out in 2000. Savoir-Faire came out in 2002. I suspect Emily Short found this message amusing and incorporated it into her game, as the cooking device in that game says almost the same thing with similar punctuation. In fact, I have to wonder if a lot of the food puzzle in Savoir-Faire was somehow born out of an attempt to make this game into something with more substance, in which case, she succeeded. It is also possible that they are both referencing something earlier; I don't know.
Short keyword-driven IF where you change a room description, February 3, 2016This game was part of an experiment in IF inspired by a challenge to create a work of art with the title "The space under the window". In this game, you see a window, but you can't do anything to it directly. Instead, you type nouns or adjectives you see, and it changes the world to something different, related to that noun or adjective.
I found this game to be pretty short; altogether I think there were less than 40 keywords I could type. Many obvious words were not implemented, but this makes sense for an experimental game.
This kind of concept, whether inspired by this game or not, was further developed by Aisle and then Galatea, both games where the gameplay focuses on typing keywords in a room or a conversation, and text adapts around the words you type. I distinguish this from games like Blue Lacuna, where typing keywords just has you interact with the object.
A gigantic epic with intensely hard puzzles. One of Infocom's hardest games, February 3, 2016Spellbreaker must have been the inspiration for games like Mulldoon Legacy, Lydia's Heart, Jigsaw, and other intensely long puzzle fests (I feel like Curses! is slightly easier). This is Infocom's last game of the Enchanter trilogy, which follows the Zork Trilogy.
This game is incredibly long and difficult. I played to about 150 points out of 600 before turning to a walkthrough (eristic's), and most of those points I got because I had played Balances by Graham Nelson, which copied many items from Spellbreaker (to show that Inform could achieve the same results). The game is purposely murderously hard; I suggest that everyone use a walkthrough after reaching a predetermined number of points.
Magic is failing, and you must chase a mysterious figure to learn why. The game is pretty disjointed, but purposely so, much like Jigsaw, where you enter and exit various areas miraculously. It has a very different feel from Sorcerer, and especially from Enchanter, which was very easy to map and simple in its presentation.
Many people have talked about the time travel puzzle in Sorcerer, which I enjoyed, but felt a little down because there was so much hype. Unfortunately, I am now hyping the last big puzzle of Spellbreaker to you. What a puzzle; to me, it was great because it completely ties in with the game's theme of loss and ending. It is a puzzle integrated with the plot.
As a final note, I should really emphasize that this is a LONG game, 2 or 3 times as long as any other Zork or Enchanter game. When using a walkthrough, I finished each of those games in a total recorded time (not counting my numerous restarts) of about 16 minutes; this game, including several restarts to shave off the starting time, took 1 hour and 22 minutes.
I played this game on iOS's Lost Treasures of Infocom.
A short sci-fi game about wonder with some interesting choices, February 3, 2016This game exemplifies the original feel of Star Trek. To explore the universe, to travel through the worlds, to understand the un-understandable.
The game is much shorter than I expected, given the other reviews. This is not really a drawback; the game has a fast pace and feels like an adventure. You explore various planets and stellar objects, with almost all motion achieved by manipulating "sails".
The gameplay diverges from Plotkin's usual games in that it is not very hard, and the focus is on fun over puzzles. The most similar game of his that I can think of is Dual Transform, which I also really enjoyed.
I recommend this game to absolutely everyone, as the enjoyment-to-time-requirement ratio is so very high.
An extremely large Lovecraftian horror game with Shakespearean influence, February 3, 2016This ultra-long game will appeal to three kinds of people: Shakespeare fans, Lovecraft horror fans, and realistic simulation fans. The amount in which the game succeeds will vary depending on the audience.
As a fan of Shakespeare, this game was wonderful. I was skeptical of someone trying to write dialogue for Shakespeare, but this game succeeded fairly well. Shakespeare didn't necessarily talk in as flowered language as he writes, so it works out. The game contains several references to plays William is considering writing (a story about an island in the New World, a story about witches written, etc.). It contains numerous quotations, mainly from Hamlet, and your character (Spoiler - click to show)attends the premier of Hamlet. Other people involved in the game include Christopher Marlowe and John Dee. If you are a fan of Shakespeare or Elizabethean times, you will love this game.
As a Lovecraft game, this game must stand under the fierce gaze of its predecessors, including The Lurking Horror, Theatre, Lydia's Heart, and of course the almost-genre-killer Anchorhead. This game acknowledges its roots; at one point in the game, you can view scenes from many of these previous games, starting with Anchorhead. The King of Shreds and patches offers nothing much new in this area; it has a little bit more gore than some of the other games, but only in one or two scenes (the rest of the game is fairly clean). The main nemesis has more character than most Lovecraftian foes. The obligatory elements (cult, language, mist, visions, etc.) are well-crafted. The game does drag in the middle a bit, but it's huge. I think, overall, it is one of the best of its genre.
Finally, the game contains several simulations of Elizabethean technology. Fans of simulations (such as flying the Ghost Plane in Jigsaw) will really enjoy this game. Others can consult the numerous hints to bypass these segments.
Overall, I resorted to the hints 2 or 3 times, generally finding out that I had missed some text. I highly recommend this game.
Like the statue with feet of clay and iron, February 3, 2016There is an old story about a man who dreamed of a giant statue with feet made of clay mingled with iron, symbolizing strength mixed with weakness. This game really made me think of that image.
First, the iron: It is a mid-length game with three large portions to explore (though you can always return to a previous area). The implementation is good, and the story is pretty fun; I was excited when I first began to plan because I enjoy a good action game.
The puzzles seem overwhelming at first, but experimentation soon shows that the gameworld is more limited than it seems, which makes it easier to solve the puzzles.
The puzzles include a variety that I have never really seen in other games, especially in the introductory section.
Second, the clay: The game falls short in several areas. One is in length and size; the game feels unnecessarily small in the last two big areas. You almost expect an area about the size of Babel, but you end up with something a lot smaller.
As others have noted, the NPC implementation feels sparse after playing more modern games. Compared to Infocom games, this game does pretty good; however, having a travelling companion that has about one line for every 50-100 moves gets discouraging after a while.
I was stuck near the end, and used the walkthrough to make sure I had done everything up to that point, but somehow couldn't trigger a cutscene. I had to manually enter the walkthrough using the @ sign to get to the ending, which may have soured my reaction.
Thus, overall, I can only partially recommend this game. The first half made me ready to recommend this is another great hidden treasure, but the second half left me wondering.
A detective/sci fi/romance game by the author of Gun Mute, February 3, 2016This is a short, fun thriller-type detective game by the author of Gun Mute and Rogue of the Multiverse.
Like those games, this game has a delightful romance. The game is linear, with only a few different decisions at different times. You can play as multiple characters, but which character you play is dictated by the scene.
There are a few scenarios where it is easy to miss a clue on what to do. If you just want to move forward, type 'hint' to get a fairly easy hint on what to do.
If you liked this game, check out Pacian's other excellent games.
A game that attempts to use real words in the strangest ways, February 3, 2016For a Change is an interesting short fantasy game that plays around with the English language to make you feel like you probably know what's going on, even if you aren't sure.
The author intentionally uses unusual word choices and assigns personality traits to objects (for instance, you read that "A stone has been insinuated into your hand"; if you check you inventory, you see that the stone is "humble and true").
This was one of the first IF games I ever played (it was packaged with iPad Frotz), and I thought it was much better suited for beginners than other games in the bundle. It's just a small pick-up-item use-item game, but the way you use items is just bizarre.
Good for anyone interested in surreal or dreamlike games, or who enjoy experiments with the English language.
Unique and 'magical' opening, well-implemented but standard middle and finale, February 3, 2016This game is set in old London. The first act is amazing; you play a magician in the middle of an act. The level of detail in the opening is astonishing, and is a must-play for every IF fan.
Sadly, the game goes downhill from there. It is still a very good game, but nothing can compare to the opening. You spend the rest of the game trying to understand more of your background and visiting various mundane or mysterious locales.
The game takes less than an hour to play. Some of the puzzles are very hard, and getting the 'best' solution requires that you bring some objects with you from one area to another, with no chance to backtrack if you missed them.
An intricate and beautiful story with its hardest puzzle at the beginning, February 3, 2016I've recently replayed many of Jon Ingold's games, and I am very impressed with his writing. This game is probably his best story. There are some puzzles, but you are generally held by the hand and walked through them (except at the beginning, but the game basically gives up and lets you through if you don't get it).
The real puzzle in this game is trying to figure out what is really going on. Ingold knows exactly how much to say to make something cool and how little to say to keep your imagination interested.
This is a fantasy (and possibly sci-fi) game following an assassin who is trying to escape his hanging. Not only do you the player not know what is going on at first, your character doesn't either! Your mutual journey of discovery makes the game exciting.
If you get stuck on the first puzzle, don't sweat it. This is a story, and the puzzles are just side thoughts. If you prefer puzzles but enjoy his writing, Jon Ingold's Muldoon Legacy is a huge puzzle fest, much bigger than Curses! or MIT Zork.
A mid-length game with outstanding concept but some difficulty guessing verbs, February 3, 2016In The Edifice, you parallel the history of humanity by going through important events in the history of mankind (such as discovering weapons).
The game is perhaps best known for its very well-done language puzzle, where you have to communicate with another person to learn their language.
Unfortunately, the solution to this and many other puzzles is obscure. The author assumes that you will use many items in ways that are not normal in interactive fiction, but which make sense in the game world. This seems like a good thing, however, there are a vast number of things that would make sense to do in the real world, and an author can only implement so many of those things.
I played this game on three different occasions over the years; the first time, I got stuck on the first door, go frustrated, and quit. Years later, I tried again, used a walkthrough on the first part, and tried the second part. I loved it, but go stuck, frustrated, and lost interest. Today, I just used a walkthrough through the whole thing. It's a great game, but my experience wasn't as enjoyable as it could be.
One of Infocom's best; the first game where you memorize and cast spells, February 3, 2016Possibly inspired by the Wizard of Frobozz in Zork II,and originally intended to be Zork IV, Enchanter was my favorite Infocom game up to this point. You play an apprentice enchanter who is chosen to defeat the Warlock Krill, due to your not being a big enough threat for him to notice (like Lord of the Rings).
The main idea of Enchanter, and the entire focus of the game, is the spells. Unlike the wand in Zork II (which is described as unreliable and old-fashioned here), scrolls are copied into your spell book, and then can be cast over and over again.
There are well over a dozen spells. It was designed to give you a feel of more power than in Zork. The things you can do feel amazing.
I got up to about 150 points before consulting a walkthrough. I couldn't solve two key puzzles. One I knew what to do, but wasn't clever enough to figure it how. The other came out of left field, although I later realized that your dreams are a clue to the puzzle.
Which brings me to the one point that may be most divisive: your player's bodily needs. You constantly have to satisfy hunger, thirst, and sleep! You have a replenishable water supply, but you're toast when your food is gone.
I recommend reading the manual on NPC conversations, or one puzzle will be far too difficult.
I played this game on the iOS Lost Treasures of Infocom App.
Futuristic/surreal twine game with unusual animals, February 3, 2016I had heard about this game for a year before playing it. Because of the hyper, I was mildly disappointed when playing it. The writing and concept of the game are similar to a variety of horror/surreal games out there, such as Porpentine's games, Ecdysis, parts of Frog Fractions. Who came first, I don't know. The idea seems to be to present something that is vaguely sketched out, with all details being slightly incompatible with each other and reality, borrowing ideas from deep-sea creatures and insects/parasites.
Beyond that specific genre, this game is part of a larger genre of text where the author experiences gut-wrenching, horrible things, turning the readers stomach in fear or revulsion. This includes books like The Kite Runner, Mudbound, A Separate Peace. A lot of these stories have been highly praised, and I even joy some of them (including Horsemaster), but in the end, I feel like true substance is more difficult to find.
The main pull of the game is your connection with your horse. A lot of things can happen between the two of you. You almost have the relationship of manipulative mother and her daughter.
The gameplay is perfectly tuned to contribute to the atmosphere.
Overall, most people will enjoy the game. I am glad that I played it. But it didn't change my life (not that anyone said it would, of course).
Enchanting word-play game that starts very strong and peters out, February 3, 2016Ad Verbum was one of the first IF games I played, and still a favorite. In this mid-length, story-lite game, you must collect and throw away various items by using constrained commands (commands that don't use certain letters, commands that only use the top row of the keyboard, repetitive commands, etc.)
The most enjoyable rooms are the rooms where you must use only words starting with a certain letter. The hardest part is trying to leave! How do you exit a room to the north if you have to start all of your commands with s?
The top few levels and the backyard are not quite as fun. And there are some puzzles that are just weird "guess which random object has the random property you need" puzzles.
A funny one-room game. Under-implemented, but great for a firsttime author, February 3, 2016Conan Kill Everything was intended to be dumb humor. The author chose the name from a competition for dumbest IF games. In this game, you must kill everything. When you do, you win.
The puzzles are actually pretty fun, but the game feels a bit underimplemented at times. Descriptions of objects and characters are sparse. It fits in with the game's setting, though.
Honestly, the game plays like a combination of Pick Up the Phonebooth and Die with Suveh Nux. If you liked those two games, you'll like this. If you liked just one, you might or might not like this.
An escape game mixed with a language puzzle, February 3, 2016Suveh Nux is a great game. It is a mid-length one-room fantasy game where you have to learn a magical language to escape a vault. You have to learn the grammer, the vocabulary, and some numbers.
One things that makes this game fun that I didn't appreciate when I first played IF is that EVERYTHING is implemented. Anything you think you could do with the spells, you can do. You can destroy everything in the room. There are 5 or more subpuzzles that you can completely miss without the author's note at the end.
I haven't gone back to revisit the game in years, because learning the language is much of the attraction, and it wouldn't be as hard this time. But I definitely recommend the game to everyone.
One of the first great conversation games, February 3, 2016Galatea is set in an artificial intelligence exhibit. Galatea, a stone woman brought to life, has mistakenly (or purposefully) been placed here.
You are a journalist, interviewing her to determine how good her "artificial intelligence" is. The answers can lead to anger, romance, supernatural effects, and a host of other possibilities.
It is a fun game to play through a few times. The conversation system is just asking her about more and more things, but the variety is endless.
This game was groundbreaking when it was first released, although later innovations have improved on it (such as the major NPC in Blue Lacuna). This game remains an enjoyable classic, because it isn't just technically impressive, it's enjoyable.
A fun short speed-IF with multiple endings, February 3, 2016This speed IF came from a competition where participants where given 'blurbs' about their game, which they had to incorporate.
The game contains a few yes/no questions, and then the ending, where you can take various actions. This determines one of many endings.
The game has plenty of blood, some arrogant characters, and some crazy fantasy sections. As a real game, it's not much. As speed IF, it is well written and complex.
A mixed bag. A twine game with two subgames., February 3, 2016Tonight Dies the Moon has two games, one you play from the earth, and one from the moon.
The moon game is a purposely unfair farming simulator, where you try to grow crops and struggle in the mud. I don't know if I've reached an ending in Moon mode.
The earth game is an interesting mix of office work with satire about television and an arcade game with real implications.
I had mixed feelings about the game. It is technically exquisite, but I didn't really feel caught up in it. The writing isn't bad; I enjoyed the bits about TV. I just felt like I was looking at another world through a window, instead of really being there. Those who like Frog Fractions would like this game.
How Lewis Carrol learned to love the bomb, February 3, 2016Trinity surprised me by being a fantasy game about nuclear weapons. I expected the game to have a sci-if feel like Jigsaw or Babel, but this game was very similar to the feel of Moriarty's other Infocom game, Wishbringer. In both games, you travel from an opening, normal world to a parallel world, where helpful animals, witches, cemeteries and grim birds await.
I loved exploring the main area of Trinity, and accessing several of the mini-areas. Brian is stunningly creative; I didn't realize until recently that he also wrote Loom, one of my favorite graphical games of all time. The sheer ingenuity of it all is wonderful.
I began running out of steam forward after visiting four of the sub areas. I went to a walkthrough, and discovered that I had forgotten to revisit some area with new equipment, and hadn't searched some scenery items that I didn't know we're searchable. This opened up two more mini areas, which I explored a little bit more before using a walkthrough the rest of the game.
The final area was a beast, although everything is fairly well hinted at. Or not... In any case, I loved this game. I can't help but enjoy this author's worldview.
A short fun choice game that can be a bit overwhelming, February 3, 2016Bigger Than You Think is what you get when a master of parser fiction writes a Twine game. The result is a Twine game with an interesting, complicated map; large inventory system; and interesting narrative. It's a sort of hybrid between traditional games and modern twine games.
Does it work? It's certainly fun to get started. For me, because I didn't draw a map, it felt more or less overwhelming; you are basically searching through a binary tree repeatedly until you have exhausted all options. After a few runs, I just used a walkthrough to see the end.
The repetitiveness comes from the fact that you have to repeatedly restart the game.
The inventory system is fun. It's more merciful than I had supposed; I used up a one-shot item in one run, and was worried that I had lost my chance. However, the item was still used at the critical moment; once it is used, it is always used.
A game that evokes strong emotions, February 3, 2016This game is a literary masterpiece, just as The Scream is a art masterpiece. Also like the Scream, it conveys strong negative emotions and unease.
The game contains many dark themes, including abuse, death, self-abuse, etc. The game includes strong profanity at key moments to convey depth of emotion.
The game is fascinating to play. Many of Porpentine's game give you the same visceral feel, but the amount of carnage and sexual violence varies, from Cyberqueen on the bad end to Howling Dogs and With Those We Love Alive on the other. This game falls in the middle, more towards the less gruesome side.
A story that will stick with you. Also, good implementation of special text effects, player input, exploration and inventory management, and multiple, endings involving moral choices.
Not a happy game, but a meaningful game.
Short, sad, and to the point., February 3, 2016This game is very short, contains some profanity which develops the story, and can be played in less than 10 minutes.
Most such games I'm not that interested in. But this game seems to be pretty accurate in its depiction.
Only recommended for people into altgames.
A memorable mid-length fairy-tale game with sparse implementation, February 3, 2016Moon-shaped is one of those odd games that is a little bit lacking in most categories but somehow pulls together to be more enjoyable than many more polished games. It has that elusive quality that makes you remember it and want to play it again.
Moon-shaped begins as a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, and branches out from there. Puzzles are enjoyable, with a nice flashback system. But the game is somewhat sparse. The world feels empty, with short descriptions.
Perhaps I enjoy this game most because of the great storytelling in the flashbacks. The multiple endings involving big moral choices are also good.
I recommend this game to everyone.
A short twine rpg with economy and randomized battle, February 3, 2016This game is very short, but it's not bad while it lasts. You have a chance to purchase a variety of equipment, and then you must face a dragon. There isn't really that much here, but then again, randomized combat is hard to find in IF games. I can only think of 3-4 games off the top of my head that have any randomized combat, including Zork, Adventure, Kerkerkruip and RPG-ish (another twine game written using constraints).
So I have to give Tim Samoff credit for implementing this.
A very short parser game that no longer seems to exist, February 3, 2016When this game existed, it was a short game where you are in a car and need to get out of it and try to repair it. You had to make sure the battery was turned off before opening the hood, etc. I do not know why the author took it down.
A giant, nonlinear, story heavy game that is almost too much to handle, February 3, 2016Unlike most games I review, I have never finished Blue Lacuna. The reason I am writing this review anyways is that I don't think I ever will.
I've tried finishing it a few times, and I haven't been stumped by puzzles (especially since I chose story mode). Instead, I just feel overwhelmed by the game every time I play. It just seems that there are so many options; by making the game more open and free, it has moved in the opposite direction of traditional IF, where the parser was restrictive.
I've always thought a more realistic game would be better, but I think in a way I prefer the restrictiveness of traditional IF; I prefer a straighter path or paths, where you have to try and figure out the right step forward.
Blue Lacuna operates as a traditional parser, but also has a keyword system allowing objects, people, and conversational topics to be pursued in depth. It is one of the most non-linear games I have seen, and is large and well-written.
If I finish the game, I will return to add more comments.
*******
I have now finished the game, and boy, was it huge!! I used a walkthrough and it still took me 3-4 days to play through.
The most tedious part was obtaining all of seven certain cutscenes.
The game gives you hints if you get lost or seem bored.
The game lasts forever, and includes four total worlds
I enjoyed the last half much more than the first half.
This is the biggest game I have every played, except possibly for worlds apart.
A fantasy game full of symbolism and creepiness, February 3, 2016I really enjoyed Madam Spider's Web. It is one of those games like Theatre where the writing is a bit more sparse and the game feels just slightly unfinished, but they both have an emotional appeal to them that keeps you playing and sticks in your mind. When I saw the title of this game, it brought up a very evocative picture I've always had of Madam Spider in her room.
This game is short to mid length, with a variety of puzzles. The game feels almost like a Grimm's fairy tale at first, until you start piecing everything together. I think this game was nominated for Best Puzzle not only because of the puzzles solution but because of its deeper meaning.
This is not a long game, and has some very interesting material, so I would recommend that everyone play through it. Good bang for your buck (or for your time, I suppose).
A mid-length sci-if puzzle game with two outstanding ideas, February 3, 2016Spider and Web is one of the most famous interactive fiction games, appearing at or near the top of several lists of Best IF. While I personally have enjoyed some other games more, Spider and Web is still in my top 10. I believe that part of its fame is its ability to draw in every kind of gamer; the story is interesting, the puzzles are hard but get easier with each failure, and those that don't know what to do after the transition mentioned in the game's ABOUT text can still feel great about their accomplishments.
In this science fiction game, you encounter a wide variety of technological devices. You must learn how they work. It' shard to be more specific without giving away plot details.
The game has two brilliant innovations. One is the puzzle it is most famous for, which causes the big transition I mentioned above. Most walkthrough said refuse to give the solution to this puzzle, as a gift to first time players. It took me a day to get over the shock of solving it.
The second innovation is the narrative structure. It frames the game in a way that no one had done as successfully before, and provides an interesting mechanic for hints.
Everyone should play it at least once. I played it the first week I started IF five years ago, and I played it last month, and it was great both times.
A hilarious and difficult game for Zork/Adventure/Enchanter fans, February 3, 2016In this one-room, complicated game that upends IF conventions, you must extinguish all of your many lightsources to let a grue eat the troll blocking your way.
Adventurers may recognize the lantern from Adventure and Infocom games, the elvish sword from the Zork games, and the amulet from Spellbreaker. There are several other lightsources to deal with. Other items from Infocom games include the stock certificate from Zork III (I think), the grue repellent from Zork II, Zork III, and Sorcerer; the screwdriver from Zork I; and many others.
This game is hard. Like many others, I played for over a half hour without extinguishing a single light source. But once you start to get a feel for the game, it gets better and better. Because of an early experiment, I got the wrong idea about one item and never solved one of the harder puzzles on my own.
I recommed trying to get half of the points before using a walkthrough.
Long, trippy journey through a surreal landscape, February 3, 2016Blue Chairs is (literally) trippy. After an interesting transaction at a college party, you take a surreal journey through this world and variants of it. Something like an adaptation of Dante's Inferno by James Joyce.
The game contains drug references and strong profanity.
The puzzles are mostly reasonable, although I needed a walkthrough in the convenience store.
As a literary work, it is well written and well done. As a game, the puzzles are interesting and well-connected with the story.
However, I don't really recommend the game. I didn't like the atmosphere and feeling of the game. Everyone's tastes are different, and many people will enjoy this game, but I felt uncomfortable with parts of it.
A sci-fi imprisonment game showing the power of Twine, February 3, 2016Porpentine is currently the best writer of Twine fiction out there. Howling dogs is perhaps her best work. This branching, non-linear long game is a far cry from most twine games, and in fact better than most parser games.
In howling dogs, you are imprisoned in some sort of futuristic cell. You alternate between boring, daily life and brief trips in a VR machine. The trips become more and more complex, and have deep underriding themes about inevitability and restraint.
I only got the bad ending at first; I didn't realize there was a good ending until I read the reviews. To get the ending:(Spoiler - click to show)On the page with tons of links, one link will give you the good ending. It isn't random, but plot related.
I recommend this game for everyone.
A variety of genres rolled into a cohesive story. An influential IF game., February 3, 2016Photopia is often cited as the best interactive fiction of all time. It has won numerous awards, inspired a shift to story-centered Interactive Fiction, and so on.
It really is a great game. Despite all the hype, sitting down and playing through it is fun. The meta-puzzle of trying to understand what's going on keeps you going through different scenes. The different scenes give you the impression that you're playing a hard puzzle game while actually simplifying things without you knowing.
The colors are a good part of the game; if your interpreter doesn't support or if you are unable to distinguish between colors, you should use your imagination.
Is this really the best IF of all time? I honestly would have to say that nothing is really better than it. I don't replay it because it makes me sad. I like to stick to puzzle games or big crazy worlds. But this game has substance and meaning.
A detective/otherwordly game with good plot but sparse implementation, February 3, 2016Beyond struck a good chord with me. In this game, you play a sort of spirit that is aiding a detective to investigate the death of someone close to you.
The game is completable in one day. It is divided into 3 or 4 acts, usually with a spirit part and a real-world part.
This game has great puzzles; in fact, it won an award for best puzzle of the year. The plotline is interesting and exciting as well.
However, although the game has several interesting NPC's, scripted events, and other well-done factors, the game feels sparse. Rooms have small descriptions and few items in them. It gives the game a kind of minimalist feel.
I enjoyed the game. There are some PG-13 parts, with both violence and unwanted sensuality, but both are portrayed as negative things.
A notoriously difficult short game with a real-life setting, February 3, 2016This game was one of the two winners of the very first IF Comp. It is well known for being one of Plotkin's most difficult games, and one of the most difficult well-known games in general.
You play a loner who leaves a picnic/party to look around a secluded woodland area. Puzzles are hard due to:
1. Not knowing what your goal is;
2. Being able to put the game in an unwinnable state without knowing it;
3. Fast-paced timing.
Despite, or possibly because of the difficulty, this has remained a very popular game. Perhaps this is because the game has an inspirational feel. It is easy to identify with the protagonist, and the games understated writing gives you a sense of wonder.
The game was intended to be completed in 2 hours. You will certainly reach an ending within two hours.
A maze involving time instead of space. A notebook is recommended., February 3, 2016I first played All Things Devours 5 years ago as one of my first pieces of interactive fiction, and was very confused and felt it was impossible.
All Things Devours is a time travel game, where you must work together with past or future selfs to navigate several puzzles, subject to certain restrictions.
This game can be solved much more easily if you keep a detailed list of where you are and what you are doing at each turn. That way, you'll know where (or when) to be with other incarnations of yourself.
Fortunately, it's not necessary to jump around too much. A similar game called Fifteen minutes involves 8 or more copies of yourself in the same room, and it gets very tedious by that point.
All Things Devours is a classic.
A randomized murder mystery with good implementation and weak story, February 3, 2016This is one of the best murder mystery games; you interview a variety of very vocal NPC's with different personalities, you pick up clues, look through a house, then deduce a murderer and then arrest them.
The NPC's are vibrant and active, moving about the house, talking about each other and their actions. It must have been an enormous amount of effort to implement these NPC's.
The story itself is necessarily somewhat weak. As the murderer can change every time, everyone's backstory and alibi have to be flexible enough to account for the changes, and there is no sense of urgency in the game.
A must-play for murder mystery fans.
A short Asian-themed "atmosphere" game like Dreamhold, February 3, 2016In the Moonlit Tower, you explore a small 3-story tower to help remember who you are and your past. Like Dreamhold, the key to your memory seems to be masks, but much of the game, you don't know what to do with the mask.
The setting is dreamlike and very poetic. It is the game most likely to find its way into a book of poems or an art gallery. The author borrowed its imagery and story from several cultures, including Mongolia and China.
The puzzles are mostly the examine/pick-up-object type until you progress very far, and then they get a bit more difficult. There are multiple endings, some of which are hard to find.
Extremely well polished college game with a great innovation; didn't gel for me, February 3, 2016In this game, you must write your dissertation while overcoming many distractions. You must use various items in the room to block out sound, sight, itchiness, etc.
The main innovation here is that the parser is actually your girlfriend Violet. All of the responses are hers and she comments on everything.
The implementation, writing, and puzzles are top notch. But the game didn't gel for me. One reason may be that I recently finished my PhD, and it hit too close to home. Another reason is that the parser is very, very pushy. It makes the exploration necessary for the game stressful. And the relationship with the narrator seems unhealthy, like many of the superficial romances that develop in college.
So if you want a game that very accurately depicts a college scenario, this is it. Most people won't have the same negative reactions I had, but will share all of my positive reactions.
Infocom game for beginnners with a light world/dark world concept, February 3, 2016This Infocom game is directed towards younger players but is appropriate for adults; in fact, the game is still very challenging. The fantasy elements are charming and fun (and sometimes pretty creepy): an army of boots, a witch who steals cats, ghosts who murder you...
All the puzzles can be solved with sufficient exploration and minor logic; I missed a few areas and items in my exploring, though, because the world is rich and beautiful.
As far as I can tell, the game is for beginners because there are only the n,e,s,w directions (no ne, se, nw, or sw); most puzzles have multiple solutions; most items are easily visible (except for the most important one); and death won't come unless you have been repeatedly warned.
The game is split into two sections; one where the player explores a quaint village with minor annoyances (such as locked gates and a poodle); and a second section where the village has turned dark and evil (with murderous ghosts and a hellhound).
As many have stated, this is a memorable game, more so than most of the Infocom games I have played, or interactive fiction in general. As usual, I played this game on the Lost Treasures of Infocom app on the iPad.
Explore a simulation of a giant city 10, 20, 30 and more years into the future, February 3, 2016In this Infocom game, you play PRISM, a sentient computer who has been designed to simulate the future for planning purposes.
This game has no real puzzles until the end. You simply explore. First, you explore your interface, which is very large (having 30+ distinct files you can open). Then you explore the actual simulation, which is a large downtown city, with what felt like 30-50 locations. Once you explore it long enough, the simulation accumulates enough data to simulate another decade into the future.
You must record interesting events and places in the future to bring back for planning purposes. I somehow missed out on a simple mechanic, and got very stalled in the game. (This is not a spoiler, because it is not a puzzle or a surprise, more of a guess-the-verb): To present your recordings, you must tell people "look at recording".
The developer has stated that the game was intended as a criticism of Reagan's policy.
The game is fun. You need to explore; don't just rush through, trying to do what they say. You need to record a lot of each decade to win, so try and get a mental map of the game.
I played this game on the iPad's Lost Treasures of Infocom app, which provides most of Infocom's games (except Nord and Bert, and the already-free Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
A one-room, one-item, one-container, one-creature game with logical puzzles, February 3, 2016Dual Transform, by Andrew Plotkin, is one game that I think would be great for beginners without being condescending or annoying; it is also great for experienced players.
In this game, you control a console that alters the environment. You stay in the same room with the same item, but the room and item change appearance.
Once you figure out the logic of the game, it is mostly one straightforward move after another, with a couple of little sticking points that provide more satisfaction.
The writing and setting are top-notch, making this a memorable game. Having recently played "So Far", it seems that the author took some ideas from that game and concentrated/refined them into this game.
A short, one-room fairy-tale game where you cannot act, February 3, 2016This is one of my two favorite Emily Short games (the other being Floatpoint). In this game, a re-telling of Cinderella, you play an observer in the trying-on-of-shoes portion of the story. You can take no actions, but you can introduce topics in the conversation to steer you to one of six possible endings.
This game has some memorable moments and strong dialogue. It is fun to replay over and over again, and does not feel tedious in doing so.
Short has provided the source code for this game, which is entertaining in and of itself. If you haven't seen Inform code before, it consists of mostly whole sentences, and is much more understandable than C++, Python, Perl, etc. So even if you are not a programmer, you can understand a lot of it.
A short fantasy game about anthropomorphic insects that defies IF conventions, February 3, 2016Dead Like Ants is indeed about ants. You play an ant in red overalls sent by the queen to appease 5 creatures located on your tree.
The game uses non-standard directions (such as "widdershins") and it provides other surprises that toy with your expectations of interactive fiction.
The numerous NPC's were surprisingly charming. The writer derived inspiration from Hans Christen Andersen, Lewis Carroll, and the musical "Into the woods". The game has an overall fairy-tale feel.
Once you pass the initial surprises, the games puzzles are not very difficult. This is a game to be finished in less than half an hour. I recommend it to everybody, because it has a great effect and doesn't take long to play.
Puzzle-heavy surreal game. Like Porpentine before Porpentine, February 3, 2016I played "So far" years ago, made it to the bird-animal farm, and never got any further. It was just overwhelming. I don't like games that are so extremely open-ended that you have no idea if what you are doing is helpful or game ending. That's not to say that I dislike non-linear games; a lot of non-linear games have items that suggest what you need to do, and then you find a way to do it.
In "So Far", you are utterly clueless most of the time. So I just gave in after a few years, grabbed a walkthrough, and checked out the game. The worlds I found were fascinating and alien, like many of Porpentine's games.
I was surprised that many of the worlds were connected with abstraction and metaphor; the first two worlds put me off by making me think they would all be well-established alien worlds without any explanation.
Having gone through with a walkthrough once, I plan on playing again, relying on my memory of the last attempt but not referring to the walkthrough. Hopefully, this will let me explore more, and have fun with some puzzles whose solution I didn't understand or can't remember.
For those who want a taste of the abstract worlds, there is a world where (Spoiler - click to show)everything is dark and everything is sound.
A one-room, one-action game with more than meets the eye, February 3, 2016I had heard of this game years before I played it. I didn't have a TADS interpreter, and I was only using mobile, so I just read the walkthrough and felt I understood the game.
So when I finally got an interpreter and played the game, I was in the odd position of having known the solution for years but not knowing the game.
The game is much more than its solution.
The variety in the game comes from two sources: the players choice of actions, and a surprising variety of random "reshuffling" of the environment with every restart.
The environmental cues make the games complicated parser much easier to understand. The NPC's will say "so and so said ....", which tells you things you can say, and so on. You discover new characters as you try different directions and options. There is a lot to discover, if you don't focus on just playing the game. There is also a large "amusing" list at the end.
Mid-length vacation game with great text and game world interrupted by puzzles, February 3, 2016Sunset over Savannah is a relaxing, enjoyable read. You are a vacationer contemplating quitting their job, and looking for a sign or signs that there is more to life.
The writing is sweet and touching. As someone contemplating a career change, this
The game world is small but packed with interactivity. You can do so many things in every area that it is very surprising. It was fun to just play around.
However, this world's interactivity means that it is hard to know what to do with some puzzles. It can be figured out with persistence and logic, but the game is so fun to explore and the text is so fun to read that it felt like a shame to turn off my "reading" brain and turn on my "puzzle" brain. I ended up using a walkthrough, and loved what I found. Will probably play again to read it all again.
The author of "Worlds Apart" cites this as one of her favorite games, which led me to it.
A haunting and evocative finale to the Zork series., February 3, 2016The finale in the Zork series is a big change from the first two games. The game is smaller as to puzzles and map, but much bigger on ambiance. This game feels like a refining purgatory, with a chance to demonstrate your courage, mercy, trust, and bravery. The setting is dreamlike and thoughtful. The puzzles are very difficult. For all of them, it is easy to try to solve them, get part way through, and have no idea if you succeeded or failed. Almost all of them are time-based, requiring you to wait, do several actions in succession, or to return frequently to a given place. Some places (like the land of shadow or the viewing table) will stay in my mind for a long time.
The Royal Puzzle breaks up the gameplay a bit, but I loved it. I first solved it in MIT Zork; as a mathematician that is terrible at most IF puzzles, it was fun to have a puzzle that I could finally solve on my own. I literally used a walkthrough on every other puzzle in this game.
A game that crosses the line for me, but may not for others, February 3, 2016I enjoy horror games quite a bit, but I like to stick to "white-hat" games, where you overcome evil or learn about yourself, and the final feeling is generally uplifting. This is not one of those games. While you can choose your actions, it is a lot like Vespers, where rushing along will lead you down a path that leaves you feeling uncomfortable and unhappy.
Otherwise, the game is well-made. I just can't recommend it to others; for a game with a similar feel and less squick, I recommend the Twine game Eidolon.
Mostly linear Twine game about being a mayor with a secret, February 3, 2016This Shufflecomp game is about a mayor who encounters a linear sequence of obstacles. Each obstacle has the exact same set of options to use when encountering it. The game's three endings don't depend on any one of the obstacles; instead, the ending you get depends on your overall pattern of choices.
The writing is silly at times (the first few pages include Buttsville and Poop Lake), but this is justified in-game, and in fact the silliness is an inherent part of the games plot.
The scenarios the mayor faces were actually compelling, and on the first play through I really though about the effect it would have on the city. There was a surprising number of scenarios to go through as well. This helps keep the game from getting monotonous, as opposed to The House at the end of Rosewood Street, where a similar list of repetitive tasks was extremely tedious.
Mid-length supernatural Twine game with time-based challenges, February 3, 2016False Mavis is based on an old, creepy song and has managed to keep the same feel. Reading the song after you reach an ending can be helpful. The game has some pretty gruesome parts.
This game allows backing up and has multiple save slots. The game feels pretty wide-open, but can be completed in less than 45 minutes. The number of options you have at first can be overwhelming, until you start to understand your purpose.
One great idea the game had is time-based challenges, signaled by a banging sound. Your multiple options start fading away when this happens, often with bad results. It was exciting.
There are multiple endings; none of them seemed that great for the PC, so I'm wondering if I missed one or if the game is just a downer.
Like Savoir-Faire mixed with Harry Potter's herbology classes, February 3, 2016This mid-length, well-polished Inform game is dense with puzzles and background flavor. It was an entry in Shufflecomp 2.0.
The PC is an animate doll in a garden of magical plants (such as cherry trees with chimes in the fruit or a lawn that maintains itself). Your goal is to help your masters.
The number of puzzles was surprising for a Shufflecomp game. The puzzles were mostly very fair, where you know what you need to do even if you don't know how. The imagery is fun and beautiful, and everything seems well-implemented.
There was one area I felt could be done better; different areas of the gardens suggest memories, which I didn't know what to do with until I saw the walkthrough (after solving all other puzzles and getting the "bad" ending). Apparently, what you do with the memories is (Spoiler - click to show)examine them. I couldn't find one memory listed in the hints ((Spoiler - click to show) the ghost hunt.
A fantasy Twine game where every branch point can be changed at any time, February 3, 2016This well-written shufflecomp game was certainly unusual in its setting, though not unique (it reminds me of Failsafe). This game centers around communication with a certain NPC who was enormously irritating but in a good way (similar to the way Rameses is irritating).
The game encourages you to reconsider choices by listing all branch points, allowing you to go back and change a point at any time. The game even trains you to do this in a fun way.
I'm going to have to play the game a few more times to understand the plot. I found all listed endings in less than half an hour.
Is this game enjoyable? It's like trying sushi for the first time. It tastes great, but you spend just as much trying to process the sensations as you do enjoying the flavors.
That said, I strongly recommend that everhone play this game just to see what it is like.
A short-to-mid length Twine game with a reputation system and many endings, February 3, 2016This Twine game centers on a woman with a special ability who visits a town. She has many choices regarding the use of this ability and the flow of her conversations, which results in a large number of endings.
The writing is well thought-out and supplemented by several graphics, but it never really drew me in. Therre is a content warning on the site about a graphic sex scene which is easy to avoid; there is a similar violent scene. I decided to check them out and regretted it immediately, skipping through quickly. Next time, I will listen to warnings.
I played through it twice to try some variations on the reputation system. As I said, I did not find the story compelling, but it was based on some song lyrics as part of a competition, and did well in bringing them to life.
First part is like a Rubik's cube; second part like a creative writing workshop, February 3, 2016The first part of the game is a completely technical puzzle. No moves can hurt you, and there are no characters or items. As a mathematician, I found this part of the game deeply enjoyable. Like a Rubik's cube, I realized that each element can be manipulated by a little "dance". These are the important "dances":
(Spoiler - click to show)Going n, e, s, w from the kitchen lowers the floor.
Going e, n, w, s, w from the kitchen raises the floor.
Going in a similar circle around the dining room changes the direction of the bridge. If the foyer is closed, go up twice through the kitchen first.
To go down or up, do a kitchen dance and approach the moving floor from w or e, respectively.
As for the second part, the idea was fun, and the implementation was fun, but the subject matter was not my cup of tea. I found it fun to explore everything, but used a walkthrough once I tried every item.
A humorous pair of CYOA games that lets you back up at any point, February 3, 2016This is a pair of hilarious games which claim to be translations of old Russian CYOA games. This leads to some of the funniest writing I have ever seen in an Interactive Fiction game. The game is enormous, with a large number of branches, some of which converge again later.
What really makes this game stand out to me is the option to undo any number of your choices and explore more branches. So many Twine games have interesting options that you cannot explore without redoing large portions of the game. This alone made You Will Select a Decision stand out.
There was strong profanity at one point, but as you are penalized for using it, it wasn't especially disruptive.
A bizarre anthology of three point-making philosophical games, February 3, 2016This is a game of mini-games. As the author says, each of the three short games are unrelated except by concept. Each game strives to make a philosophical point by putting constraints on the user.
The games vary in enjoy ability. One of the games was actually quite enjoyable, with dynamic constraints. The other two were not very exciting.
The writing is melodramatic; it really reminded me of what you might expect if you told a university English class to "write something deep". It's hard to tell, though, if the author is doing this purposely or not, which is a point in the game's favor.
There is unnecessary profanity in the first game, a strange departure from the tone of the rest of the game.
For those who have played through all three games and read all of the author's additional notes and material:
(Spoiler - click to show)There is a fourth "endgame" which, I believe, is what the author refers to when he says part of the game is inspired by House of Leaves. At first, I really enjoyed this game, but then I began to realize that the game seems to place the new staircase only when a large percentage of the map has been explored, and then places it in the unexplored spot closest to the entryway. Because of the House of Leaves reference, I do not believe this puzzle is intended to be solved.
Solid parody of a horror game, February 3, 2016This is a very well implemented game with an engaging plotline and not-to-hard puzzles. The genre is humor/horror.
This game takes only an hour to play, but every location is well-implemented, and the puzzles mostly make sense (although one, I thought, was vaguely unfair, but it was probably just me not reading descriptions well).
The only drawback is the short game length. Pretty much a perfect game otherwise.
Medium-sized Quest game with wonderful game mechanic and some parser problems, February 3, 2016This is my first Quest game; as such, it includes a map that you fill out as you explore, and lists all important objects in a room as well as your inventory at all times.
Besides the usual inventory, the game has a great additional mechanic that gives you an additional way to solve puzzles. This was fantastic, and I wanted to keep playing just to explore the mechanic.
The story was fun, but not especially motivating. The parser was terrible; so many obvious synonyms were not implemented that the game became a frustrating guess-the-verb game too frequently. However, the new mechanic was so fun that I kept playing anyway.
Short non-linear Twine game with goofy atmosphere, February 3, 2016This Twine game takes place in a forest as you try to scrounge up enough change to catch a bus. The game takes about 30 minutes to play.
Unlike many Twine games, there are a few actual puzzles here, but each one is not that hard (one was just hard enough to be fun). The writing is choppy at times, but it fits into the game's "hey, let's be goofy and have fun" atmosphere.
Short Twine game with Shakespearean influence, February 3, 2016This is a Twine game in which you play as the character of young Arthur from the Shakespearean play King John. The game is very short, but provides an interesting take on the character. It is helpful to read the play before or after the game for complete understanding, but not necessary.
Big, puzzle-filled game with deep backstory somewhat spoiled by bottlenecks, February 3, 2016Muldoon Legacy is an enormous game, one of the largest I have ever seen. It has a wide variety of interesting puzzles, with a sci-if/fantasy backstory.
I fully expected to deeply enjoy this game, having loved Curses and Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, and having just come off the similar game Theatre. However, I just couldn't get into the game.
I played without a walkthrough for a few days, getting only around 11 points. I am not the greatest puzzle solver, and I don't mind using walkthroughs when I'm stuck, but the game gets stuck too frequently.
Case in point: after the intro (which required some, to me, unintuitive commands), you begin at the museum's steps. As you are immediately told, getting in requires not one, but two keys. And the second key requires (Spoiler - click to show)a seemingly random sequence of button presses on a keypad). There is virtually nothing to do while waiting to solve this puzzle.
Compare this to other games with early bottlenecks, like Zork. There, if you can't get in the house, you can always explore the forest. And if you do stay to solve the puzzle, putting yourself in the mindset of the character gives you the answer almost immediately. (Spoiler - click to show) Door locked? Try the window . The beginnings of other games such as Curses, Ballerina, and Theatre all give you more options or a more gentle beginning, and giving you a pile of smaller puzzles that aren't that hard to work through while digesting the big ones.
One bottleneck would be fine, but they occur over and over again. It is as if ALL puzzles require "two keys" (for instance, another early puzzle requires (Spoiler - click to show) lighting a match with a brick you had to search for outside, then using the match to light a branch you found in another room. And the brick can't be found by using "examine"). This is compounded by my least favorite way of creating fake difficulty, which is giving rooms exits that are not in the description (although you are given hints in other areas about these exits).
I suppose that this game resembles Jigsaw more than anything else, with similar fake difficulty and bottlenecks. Both games, however, are still fun to play through, but don't expect to get far without a walkthrough.
As a final note, Jon Ingold writes some great games. I especially enjoyed the short game "Failsafe", and many people have enjoyed "All Roads".
Revised comments:
I decided to at least see the rest of the game. The nozzle room was one of the best things I had seen in all of interactive fiction. But I stand bh my original review. What makes this game not click if it has great puzzles and enormous amounts of locations, and a developed plot?
Pacing.
J.R.R. Tolkien had the same issue. He developed a massive world, and coalesced it into the Silmarillion, which had great, well-written, detailed stories. It flopped. I like it, but it flopped. He then learned to trim his work down and focus on likable characters, a well-developed plotline and beautiful location descriptions.
This work is like the Silmarillion. It is 2-4 times the length od the massive curses, which Graham Nelson wisely trimmed down in size from his first draft. Puzzles are dense, and detailed. People say they like hard puzzles, but what they really want are puzzles that make them feel smart for solving them, but can be solved after a reasonable time. And, like the Silmarillion, no characters are especially likable. Everyone seems somewhat elitist. One finak issue is the prevalence of guews-the-verb issues.
I would recommend glancing at a walkthrough after each area to see if you did everything necessary. This game is enjoyable, but don't stress out about getting hints.
A steampunk multiplayer game with a rich interface, February 3, 2016This is a Seltani game. Seltani is a hyperlink-based multiplayer format. While I was not able to try the multiplayer options (due to lack of multiple players), the single player mode was enjoyable to explore.
There are three sources of information: a dynamic room description with hyperlinks, in-game pop-up windows with information and choices, and a sort of running commentary on the bottom.
The game allows the choice of three different steampunk characters with customizable motivations. Each character sees and understands the world differently. As far as I played, the world was a 3x3x3 grid navigated by an airship. Every item was well-implemented.
Characters are in the service of an unusual queen, and are tasked with "taking care of" ancient ruins. I enjoyed the ability to interact with a large number of animals.
Worth checking out, especially if you are interested in multiplayer IF.
An academic exercise in archaeological interactive fiction , February 3, 2016This is a Twine-based game that consists of a set-up phase where you personalize your character, followed by a standard Twine game where you choose from a variety of sequences to achieve one of numerous endings.
It is a medium-sized, puzzle less game that is meant to be a sort of academic essay. It was submitted as a dissertation, I believe, and parts of it read like one, but it is not completely dry, and manages to have some fun.
The authors seem unaware of the field of interactive fiction. They describe this as a proof-of-concept of "ergodic fiction", which is defined by the 1996 book Cybertext as fiction that requires human participation and choices to shape the experience. It is clear from the book's definition that almost all of interactive fiction is ergodic fiction, and in fact most interactive fiction is "cybertext", which is ergodic literature requiring calculation.
Very short hyperlink game about a boy and his dog, February 3, 2016Short game with a few branching options but only one ending.
Seems like a fun little game a parent and child put together as a family project. No puzzles, inventory, or exploration.
Much better than anything I did as a seven year old. If you are reading this, I laughed, I liked the pictures, I cared about the dog, and only I wish it had lasted longer...
Fun take on the play-die-repeat idea with great hint system, February 3, 2016There are at least three camps in the IF world: those who hate using hints; those who rely strongly on walkthroughs; and (the largest group) those who like to play as long as possible without getting hints, and then use just enough to get them through.
This game appeals to all three groups; on one hand, the game world is fairly open and completely forgiving, allowing explorers to try other areas when they are stuck on a given puzzle.
On the other hand, the hint system is embodied in a large group of NPCs with fun personalities. Even better, some of the hints are wrong, as the NPCs have imperfect knowledge of the world.
The gameplay is most similar to Heroes, with a magic system and a lot of find-item-use-item puzzles.
The one annoying part was having to repeat the same basic commands over and over again. The "record" command is very helpful, although I won without it.
Unlike many similar games, the endgame was very rewarding.
Too difficult for most without a walkthrough, little to do when you get stuck., February 3, 2016This is a game with a huge world. The writing is excellent, with interesting historic tidbits and a fun NPC.
However, the game is full of hard puzzles that leave little room to do anything elseif you are stuck. Unlike other games with huge worlds (Zork, Curses, etc.), this game is pretty linear.
Another issue is that many of the puzzles are simply unfair. As other reviewers noted, you are required to look in places you are never told you can look. I got stuck for hours at a time two or three times, and each time was due to an invisible exit I didn't know I could use.
A difficult, highly nonlinear swords and sorcery game with days of content, January 17, 2016It is rare to find a CYOA text game that combines a hundreds of thousands of words, extreme branching, a complex inventory and spell collection, 3d graphics, and orchestral music. The fact that it features a compelling narrative, unique gameplay mechanics, and at least a hundred npcs and monsters just makes it better.
Sorcery! 3 is part 3 in a series, but it is definitely not necessary to play the other games first. In fact, the game is easier if you play it alone.
You are a sorceror, who casts spells by combining lettered stars that differ from location to location. For instance, to command unintelligent creatures, you must stand where the stars allow you to spell L-A-W. Some spells also require certain inventory items, such as a gold-backed mirror.
You also can engage with creatures using a variety of swords and other weapons, as well as gambling with dice. Combat requires strategy, as you want to hit hard when the enemy leaves themselves open without expending your energy.
The game includes both ink illustrations and 3d maps. You move a figurine about a gorgeous 3d map from checkpoint to checkpoint. This could all be handled by hyperlinks, but the movement provides more variety. The game includes special beacons which have a unique mechanic with a gorgeous 3d effect.
You play a sorceror from Analand who must hunt down 7 serpents who seek to expose you to the Archmage, a powerful enemy. The serpents range from the relatively weak to the gut-wrenchig Serpent of Time. Few text game can give you that feeling of total despair that you can have meeting a boss, but this one succeeds.
In your quest, you will meet several sorcerors, magicians, thieves, tribes, and monsters. Conversations are difficult to lawnmower, which is a plus. You can negotiate, threaten, help, and so on.
The game is extremely nonlinear and branches strongly. There is one event at the fissure in the first area that I have tried to recreate over and over again and never succeeded. Whole quests, relationships, even a marriage to an NPC can be skipped or missed. Most serpents can be destroyed in two or more ways.
It took me most of a week playing 2-3 hours a day to beat. I restarted 3 or 4 times once I got a hang of it. There are some basic ideas that if you miss can make the game much more difficult.
I plan on nominating this game for the XYZZY for Best Game of 2015.
Mid-length Twine with a tense story and great use of color, January 10, 2016Thanksgiving was my first Hannah Powell-Smith game, but I'm going to play her other games now. Before I talk about the story, I have to mention my favorite part of this game: the use of color on links. I think everyone should copy this: cycling text is one color, expanding text is another, and branching text is a third. This makes it so much easier to know how to explore. I really support this.
As for the story, it was one I haven't seen done before. As you go to Thanksgiving with your boyfriend, you come under pressure due to your hidden past. It's hard to say more without spoilers, but this game made me nervous in a good way.
Excellent longish fantasy choicescript game about being a ferocious dragon, December 14, 2015This choicescript game was recommended to me, and I really enjoyed it. It is free, unlike many "Choice of" games, and well-developed. You are a dragon, and like other Choice of games, you have a variety of stats (honor/cunning, finesse/brutality, etc.)
The story was written well, with a good swords and sorcery vibe that I've really missed among IF games. Dragons, wizards, paladins, demons, goblins, all behaving like a D&D game instead of the usual introspective deconstructions popular in IF.
I really enjoyed crafting a cunning finesse dragon, although I died once and got my butt kicked another time. The delayed effect of the choices makes the puzzles significant. I had heard it was hard to get a mate, and indeed I was not able to.
I enjoyed the goblin NPC. If Choice of Games had been more well-known in the IF community in 2010, I feel this would have been nominated for some awards.
An incredible, forgotten game. Explore an asylum as the tripped-out director., November 15, 2015This is a hidden gem. This game was nominated for 4 xyzzy awards, including Best Game. The author also wrote two other Best Game nominees, Distress and Tales of the Travelling Swordsman.
This game is not played often because it is a homebrew parser game, written in QBasic, only playable in a DOS emulator. It was not hard for me at all to get this, though, as described below.
(The following discussion describes how to play the game. It is under spoilers to save space):(Spoiler - click to show)
Lunatix can only be played on a DOS emulator, as far as I can tell. Several people recommended I use DOSbox, which is a well-known, easy to use emulator. The game played great! I followed instructions by Juhana
type the following commands once DOSbox is started:
"mount c path/to/" (where path/to/ is the directory on your computer where you unzipped the game. For instance, I had it in a folder called temporary, so I typed "mount c C:\temporary")
"c:" (this changes the current folder to the one you defined as c: earlier)
"lunatix" (this runs the game. I recommend doing "lunatix /t /m" to play in pure text mode without it locking your mouse. The game has great graphics, but I'm used to just text. I loved the picture of the squid, though)
The game is about exploring a large asylum as the director, one who has lost control of the asylum to the insane, who force you to take a drug trip.
The game is pretty humorous, like a less-profane version of Blue Chairs with slightly more reality. The building is like the hospital in One Eye Open without any gore.
The puzzles include a mix of searching (the hidden locations follow patterns, so once you get used to hit, you can find everything), and passwords/codes, which also aren't too hard. It's definitely a 90's game, with some puzzles just for the sake of puzzles. I really enjoy games from this era.
The setting is great; the inmates have their own language, money, economy, etc.
The parser is not as bad as I was led to believe; however, I had a walkthrough, so I knew when to guess the verb and when not to. I would rate it above Infocom and below a customized set of Inform responses.
The game is mid-length.
Almost as long as Blue Lacuna; full of pop culture; smooth implementation, October 28, 2015Here is some of the pop culture referenced in this game:
(Spoiler - click to show)Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Song of the South, Peter Pan, Waiting For Godot, the play Rhinoceros, a knot theory joke, the ten-inch pianist joke, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Star Trek: Voyager, Zen koans (is that pop culture)?, famous mathematicians like Archimedes and Fibonacci, Duck Tales, etc.
And that's just the ones I could remember off the top of my head!
This game joins the list of ultra-long games such as Blue Lacuna, King of Shreds and Patches, Mulldoon Legacy, and Time: All Things Come to an End.
In gameplay, it resembles Mulldoon Legacy a lot; both are supersized versions of Curses!. You explore a huge structure, manipulating a variety of magical or technological systems, with a variety of hint systems.
Finding Martin has smooth implementation, including several very long time travel sequences interacting with multiple copies of yourself. This forms the last third of the game, and is the most technically competent time travel I have seen. Imagine All Things Devours as a subgame, 4 times.
Finding Martin has a tendency for very long text dumps. As I enjoy reading, this wasn't an issue, but there are probably 20+ cutscenes of 2-4 pages of text each.
As others have noted, Finding Martin is spottiest when it comes to hints. Some things are hinted well; in particular, there are several systems of providing hints, and if you get further in some puzzles, you'll unlock long cutscenes containing hints for other puzzles.
However, so many puzzles require leaps of intuition that you are bound to fail multiple times. For this, a walkthrough is essential. I've tried to upload a walkthrough to IFWiki that I found on web.archive.org, but it didn't seem to go through. The link is https://web.archive.org/web/20080516223332/http://www.qrivy.net/~gayla/fm_walk.txt
This game, as with Mulldoon Legacy, should be more played and more discussed. However, both games suffer from information overload. I get stressed playing Blue Lacuna, which can be played puzzlelessly, and even Counterfeit Monkey, where puzzles are well-clued. These games (Mulldoon and Martin) are just too darn hard to be solved by anyone without clues.
However, my strategy for such games is to play through with a walkthrough, then come back months or years later and try to play without a walkthrough. I've done Curses! 3 times now this way, and I hope to do it without a walkthrough. I hope to replay Finding Martin one day.
One of the largest games out there, with very hard puzzles and great plot, August 26, 2015Lydia's Heart is a game in the class of Anchorhead, Mulldoon Legacy, Curses!, and Worlds Apart in terms of size and story. To see the size of the game, check out the provided map, and realize that 90% of the rooms have their own detailed puzzle.
First, the story. You play a young girl at a southern motel who is entrapped in the mysterious plottings of a cult. You must find a way to escape their clutches. There are twelve or more NPC's, each of which can be asked numerous questions. The twelve NPCS's are mostly static, but later they move about a bit. The workings of the cult are explored in great detail, both at the motel and other locations.
As for puzzles, they are very, very difficult. This is the same author as Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, which had very difficult puzzles as well. As an example, there are several locks in the game, which are opened in three or four different ways, two of which are almost never done in IF games. Items must be gathered from far away and assembled into one whole. Characters must be encouraged to move. And some just completely improbable actions must be taken.
However, I took a simple approach; I would just go as far as I could without getting frustrated, then start consulting the hints. The hint system is AMAZING. Just get as many hints as you need. Don't feel bad about it! The author intended this game as more of a story than just a puzzle fest; by consulting the first few hints for each puzzle, you're just making the level of difficulty low enough that the puzzles are still fun, but the story can still progress.
Several reviewers complained about mazes, but they don't realize that sometimes mazes are fun. The author allows you to bypass them with magic words, but then people feel mad about missing 100% completion. I subscribe to a different view; I love stories and settings, and I would rather skip all puzzles in a game to get a good story. Puzzles are fun, but they aren't the reason I play IF (except for Ad Verbum and Praser 5).
Best Eric Eve game out there; real-life setting, huge map, good flow, August 22, 2015This is my favorite Eric Eve game. It has all the things he does so well: gripping storyline, interesting but not-too-hard puzzles, incredible help system and 'go to' commands, massive map, huge inventory, and good gameplay flow.
It also has less of my least favorite aspect of his games, a focus on a male protagonist that has his pick of women. The woman definitely has the upper hand in this game.
You play a character in a city that is being evacuated due to a threat by an unknown Enemy. You stay behind to search for a woman you care for. An enormous relationship with this woman unfolds through flashbacks, which you can "REMEMBER" at any time.
I loved this game. Five stars. Some may not like it as much, and it's not in my top ten favorite,but it was a good show.
Mid-length sci-fi game with multiple points of view and a dog, August 7, 2015Rover's Day Out is centered on a brilliant idea, which you discover the instant you start playing. Ostensibly, this game is about a morning routine and a cute dog called Rover. However, you soon learn more about what is really going on.
I finished playing this game on parchment, which caused problems with the status bar (which adds a lot of information). Also on parchment, I had a bug where an essential item (Spoiler - click to show)(dog food) disappeared, rendering the game unwinnable. The bug did not appear again when I played through the second time, some months later.
It can be a little hard at times to figure out what is going on, but that is part of the appeal of the game. The game gets progressively more intense, with the later game being especially intense. Plenty of surprises occur as the game progresses.
This game has been ranked in the Top 50 IF of all time, and it deserves its place.
An amusing one-room food game, August 6, 2015In this short one-room game, you reverse the roles of Pavlov and his dogs by being the subject of experiments by dogs.
Your goal is to correctly find all of the food in the room. This requires varying amounts of ingenuity. Some of the puzzles are 'leap of intuition' puzzles.
As others have noted, the writing is the strongest point of the game. The strange mix of obedience and resentment makes for a funny game with a sad undertone.
The game has enough easy puzzles mixed in with the hard to let beginners get pretty far without consulting a guide.
Very complex Twiny Jam game, August 6, 2015Twiny Jam is a competition requiring entries to have 300 words or less in the code. Many of these games are pretty spare. This game is one of the richest and complex I've seen within this word limit. It is a one-room escape game with numerous puzzles.
As a non-Twiny Jam game, it is only a short bit of fun. But as an example of what you can do in a constrained format, it is excellent.
A clever game with a sci-fi setting, August 6, 2015Fail-Safe is my absolute favorite Jon Ingold game. The game has an unusual plot device which you discover quickly. I won't talk about it in this review, because the game is strong enough without it.
The game is set in a damaged spacecraft that must be explored. The difficulty and fun lies in trying to figure out how the spacecraft actually worked.
The game has some timed events (which are fun but hard) and some hard-to-find exits (which is annoying but fun if you can find them).
This game can be played enjoyably multiple times and has a several, interesting endings.
A game of negotiation and understanding in a scifi setting, August 6, 2015This is my favorite Short game. This game is set in the future, when a colony from earth has developed gene-altering technology. The setting is not really important, however. What is important is the negotiation and the recording features.
Negotiation: The main purpose of the game is to work out what will happen between earth and the planet. Your job is to communicate this, but you have to understand the symbolism of the settlers. The bulk of the game is focused on figuring out what to say and how to say it.
Recording: This is actually not even necessary to the completion of the game, so some players have missed it. There are several recordings in the game which can be 'processed' to one of several different modes, such as a cartoon mode, a scientific mode, etc. It was hilariously fun, and unique among games I have played.
One of the great sci-fi games.
A funny one-room game with an intense situation and comedic tension, August 6, 2015In the TADS game To Hell in a Hamper, you play a man in a hot-air balloon headed for immediate danger. Your only hope is to lighten your load, but you are hindered by your companion, Mr. Booby, who is a skillful hoarder.
The puzzles in this game are creative and enjoyable. I laughed out loud several times and showed it to my family. The humor works because it plays off the urgency and the tension between you and Booby.
I do believe it's impossible to get to an unwinning state without dying, but it can make the puzzles much much harder. It can be worth it to restart if you realize you need something, as the game is relatively short.
The only well-polished number-based RPG I've seen on IFDB, August 6, 2015Kerkerkruip is a randomized dungeon RPG game. You fight through a crowd of enemies using different tactics and absorbing the powers of the defeated. You pick up treasure and magic spells along the way.
The randomization allows for immense replay value. Also, the game has an adaptive difficulty setting, so the better you do, the harder each replay is.
You have many options, like attacking, 'focusing', dodging, etc. This is the only IF game with such a well-developed system as of now (2015), as far as I can tell.
The game is relatively squick-less (no gross blood or other similar things). You face a variety of human and monster enemies. Each session can be completed relatively quickly (less than an hour).
A short game to demonstrate Inform's abilities. Based on the Enchanter series., August 6, 2015'Balances' is a short game based on Infocom's celebrated Enchanter series. In fact, the opening area is directly based on the sample walkthrough in the manual of the original Enchanter game.
This game demonstrates some of Inform's best abilities: indistinguishable objects, games involving large numbers, magical spells that interact with each other, a balance that weighs different objects, etc.
The game is relatively fun, but short and without a coherent plot. It can be a good introduction to the Enchanter series for those who aren't sure about Infocom games.
Graham Nelson wrote a longer game with similar elements: The meteor, the stone, and a long glass of sherbet. Those who like this game should definitely try the longer Meteor game.
Adventure, power, wealth, and romance, July 16, 2015If not for its recent creation and platform choice, this would probably be one of the most popular games on all of IFDB. It is part sim game and part thriller game. It reminds me of the best parts of "Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies", "You will select a decision", "Jigsaw", and the hologram sequence in "Mulldoon Legacy".
You play a test subject under the supervision of the evil Dr. Sliss, a lizard-human. You begin in a mini-base that you explore non-linearly with no real puzzles to speak of, and continue on to a second half of the game that is completely linear and a real thrill ride.
I can't express how much I enjoyed this game. But everyone has a different sense of what they are looking for in a game. This game is for people who like memorable characters, heart-racing action scenes, romance, and over-the-top humor.
P.S. As Danielle noted, there is a completely unnecessary F-bomb.
Another good game by Astrid Dalmady, July 11, 2015That sinister self is a great, linear, short-to-mid length twine game dealing with body image. Like Astrid's other stories, I found my heart racing a bit.
There are multiple endings and some mild language.
The game incorporates some special effects which lend it much of its appeal.
Cute, short sci-fi game with great NPC and setting, July 2, 2015This game was very enjoyable, chiefly because it took a very different direction than I thought it would. It is a short sci-fi puzzle with some moderately difficult puzzles. It took less than 45 minutes to complete.
As others describe in their reviews, I had some guess-the-verb trouble and got stuck on one puzzle because I was too impatient.
This game has an NPC that I found much more emotionally interesting than just about any other NPC in a game. I found that the Club Floyd transcript had a few helpful comments from the game's author that clarified the ending. Wonderful game.
Perfectly-paced science fiction game, July 2, 2015Having recently downloaded a TADS interpreter for the first time, I decided to try out the most popular games. This was the highest on the list. In this game, you play as an amnesiac in a frozen underground base.
While this game had above-average plot, puzzles, and writing, it really shines in its pacing. From the very beginning, the game gave an impression of vast complexity (three bulkheads with three very different locks), but it always left you with a couple of new things to try. Every time, the couple of new things led to another part of the game, and so on. The game is, in fact, complex (look at the map!), but it's arranged so neatly that I never needed to use the map.
Very few games have the great feel that this gives you. I completed it in less than 2 hours.
A hard game that gets more fun the further you get, July 1, 2015Zork is the most famous adventure game, although it was not the first. This version contains much of the three Infocom Zork games which were developed later.
Zork is a large puzzle-heavy exploration game. It has inventory limits, a timer of sorts (the light in your lamp), and it has several unfair puzzles (depending on the version you play, some important in-game clues can be omitted). The exits in the rooms work in a non-symmetric way, so going north and then south might bring you back to the wrong place.
I found that mapping out the entire game myself was very helpful. Instead of drawing a map, I just made a numbered list in the notes section of Frotz of all the rooms and their exits. That alone let me get much farther than I did 5 years ago.
I used walkthroughs after getting about half of the points, but the version on IFDB contained a fatal bug preventing me from completing the endgame. I found another version online that ran slower but which allowed me to complete the ending.
The game gets better the further you get. The 'hidden' areas are really fun, and I was surprised how huge this game really is. It makes sense that it was split into 5 games later.
An under-appreciated classic, July 1, 2015Building is a real gem. I enjoyed playing this game on and off over the course of a few months. It is a medium-large size adventure game like Zork or Curses!, but set in a sort of post-apocalyptic office building.
The game has enormous attention to detail; the game's vocabulary is about 2000 words, and the number of in game messages is about 2000 as well.
This attention to detail becomes a bit too much at times, with descriptions that are over packed with words. Many of the puzzles depend on clues hidden in the middle of large paragraphs.
The game contains more red herrings than any other game I have seen.
In the end, after seeing some of the author's reviews here and his blog (the author is AmberShards), I wonder if the game is partially autobiographical. The author and the PC hate conformity, and fight against perceived oppression.
Excellent microgame, May 11, 2015I learned that this is an entry for a micro-writing contest, where all entries must be 300 words or less. Given that my only issue was the length, I am giving this five stars for the format that it is intended for.
**Original review**
This is not so much a game as it is a way of presenting a short, scary story. It is very-well crafted while it lasts, but there are only one or two real choices in the game, and they don't make a large difference.
I want to be clear that the game is exceptionally well developed and put together--but I expect that most people playing interactive fiction are looking for something much longer than this.
Twine game with unusual format and interesting use of Twitter, May 10, 2015This game contains excellent writing, but that is easy, because more than half of the text comes from the writings of Lord Dunsany, a fantasy writer predating Tolkien and Lovecraft. The writings chosen are about the world wars; it may have been picked as something "dry", but I was actually very interested in the text.
The material surrounding the text is somewhat less well written, relying on some stock ideas common in the 2010's. The visual format is very interesting, trying to mimic a folder of html files (well, I guess it really is a folder of html files; isn't everything?), and then incorporating more and more material.
There are some parts where it is difficult to read due to (Spoiler - click to show)every letter being turned around. It was a little frustrating.
The game incorporates twitter in a fun way; unfortunately, I did not want to use my twitter account (due to it being very public), and I did not want to start a new account, so I didn't get to try it out.
Surprisingly heartwarming Twine game with a message (and graphics), May 7, 2015I was skeptical of this game at first, as I am not into games that push a particular viewpoint. But the conversation style, graphics, and options really spoke to me. To try and get the best ending, I put myself in Hana's shoes, thinking, "What would I need to hear right now"? I especially enjoyed trying to think like Ernie.
I got what I assume is the best ending, but I have no desire to try and find the worst ending, because the author really helped me empathize with the character.
For those who know what the topic of the game is: (Spoiler - click to show) I am usually wary of people writing about cutting, as so many people glorify it, saying for instance that all cutters are heros and their scars are from struggling with demons. I was taken aback by this games approach, which emphasizedthat cutters are just ordinary people with an unhealthy habit, just like drinking or gambling. I've overcome some unhealthy habits in my life, and this game was very close to my real-life experience. It really touched me.
Surprisingly large and non-linear for a twine game; vivid, haunting writing, May 1, 2015This is a very large Twine game that starts out mostly linear, branches a little, and then branches a lot. It includes a large area with a variety of rooms, including a clever means of transportation (Spoiler - click to show)the curious door/button combo. The genre is subtle horror/mystery, and the writing is evocative and sticks with you.
The lack of a save feature is annoying; as a casual gamer, I can't finish the game in one sitting, and it's difficult to juggle tabs to keep the game open throughout the day. This is one game I would like to finish.
A joke game that is well-put together, April 19, 2015This is essentially a good, though short, "creepy" game with purposefully silly descriptions. The puzzles are hard enough to be fun and easy enough to not ruin the goofy atmosphere. Puzzles are essentially "collect everything and try it all one by one in each room".
I supposed the reason I most enjoyed the game was the pacing. There is always something to do to move the game forward. I used hints on the very last puzzle, but I didn't really need to.
Game can be finished in under a hour. One or two simple mazes with no tricks (people who hate mazes might even like these mazes).
The help system is the most enjoyable part of this entertaining game., April 5, 2015This game follows a small group of young adults as they investigate mysterious occurences for the school newspaper.
The hint system is supplied in the form of notes, assembled by a young man on behalf of the female narratot. I STRONGLY recommend reading as many of the hints as possible, as they pai t a fascinating picture of the young man, the narrator, and their environment.
There is a second, subtle hint system that soon becomes apparent to anyone getting stuck in the game.
I would recommend this to newcomers based on the two help systems and for experienced IF players based on the rich storyline (including the hidden scene detailed in the Author's notes).
Insanely, unfairly difficult; but fun, April 5, 2015By far the hardest interactive fiction I have ever played. It is just a series of puzzles, represented by characters. Puzzles include Euclidean geometry, wordplay (similar to cryptic crosswords), and a maze.
Some of the puzzles are bewilderingly difficult (such as the name of the Mark of Water). I don't think that it was ever intended to be solved without cheating. Using a decompiler gave a few answers that I could not otherwise get.
This is a pure mental-exercise game with no plot. I've brought up some of the puzzles on Stackexchange and Reddit, and it provoked some good discussion, so this is a good game to mine for interesting puzzles.
The quintessential interactive fiction game, April 5, 2015Curses is the first game I think of when I think of interactive fiction, together with Anchorhead. Sprawling, light-hearted, with a compelling backstory and cast of supporting characters.
For me, the beauty of the game is in the development of the plot, with a continually increasing sense of wonder. Another wonderful aspect is the open sandbox feel; this is a very non-linear game.
Although the game is very difficult (I've played through it three times, and had to resort to a walkthrough every time), there are so many puzzles that you will still solve quite a few on your own. Many puzzles have multiple solutions, or can be bypassed completely.
*Amusing things: There are three characters that have interesting reactions to all ten of the (Spoiler - click to show)rods. Those characters are (Spoiler - click to show)yourself, the knight, and Austin.
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