Reviews by Dan Fabulich

This game does actually contain a hidden Nazi mode. (Apparently it took quite a few years to figure this out.) You can follow David Welbourn's walkthrough to find how to unlock it.

None of the reviews here explicitly mentioned that, so I wanted to make sure someone did.

The game is sort of a practical joke. FormerlyHiddenNaziMode.zip contains a deceptive PDF, Hidden Nazi Mode: Anatomy of a Failure, falsely claiming that the author has removed the Nazi stuff, and providing an incorrect command to activate Nazi mode. The zip also contains deceptive source code, which does not contain a hidden mode. (That source code is not the real source code used to build the zblorb file in the zip.)

You visit some locations, spin some text options to your preferred option, then "seal" your choices to commit to them. I think the order of locations and the spin text has effect on the poetry.

Everything was so surreal and metaphorical that I don't think I really got a message from this game. But the language was lovely enough that I could enjoy the feeling of the poetry washing over me, uncomprehended.

The game includes a lot of wise, well-regarded remarks on how to get through a breakup, and attempts to simulate the effect of a friend or therapist to help a you to feel seen and heard. It didn't do much for me, but it could help someone else.

I think the achievements were mostly distracting. They cluttered up the screen, forcing me to click on all of them to dismiss them and continue. There are so many, it felt like a parody of achievements, but, if it was a joke, I didn't find it funny, and if not, I'm not sure what the point of them was.

(One thing the game didn't consider: I'm still friends with the person I imagined for the purposes of this game.)

If you dally too long in this game, a seagull poops on your jacket, and you lose. Why?

Eventually, you walk. You move an average of 100 steps per walk. You start with around 7,000 steps in your score, and you have to get to 10,000 steps. After you walk five times, you have to do something besides walking (breathe or just wait) or you'll immediately lose.

You might find this game more efficient to play using periods to run multiple commands in one step: walk. walk. walk. walk. walk. breathe. Then use up arrow to do it again.

At the end, there's a trivial puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show)A red object on the beach, which you have to take in order to examine it. If you don't take it, you'll lose. When you go west, you meet a crying child. You win if you give the child the car, and you lose immediately if you leave without doing so.

What was the point of this story? The walking is boring. Is that the point? That exercise in old age is tedious? The puzzle is trivial, and the auto-lose feature of the game is frustrating. Is it the point that old age is pretty frustrating?

The game even has the cruelty to forbid undo, even when it'll kill you dead just for walking the wrong way at the ending, forcing you to redo the entire hike if you didn't think to save. Why??

Interactivity makes this short story more powerful.

Online, I've heard some commenters ask, mostly in bad faith, why Palestinians who had the option to move wouldn't simply move. These commenters seem not to be able to imagine what could be worth staying for. Playing the role of something worth staying for makes this point elegantly.

You can probably get to the end just guessing water/leaves until you reach your current season's goal, but there's also an interesting randomized optimization puzzle here, too. (I got lucky once and generated more than 30 lbs of olives.)

A bug report: At the end, it gives you a standard menu, "Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT or UNDO the last command?" But if you try to undo, it says that "undo" is forbidden. But save/restore work, so I'm not sure it's meaningful to forbid undo. Might as well just allow undo, IMO, or block save/restore also, if you insist.

There's not a lot to this game as yet. I think it would have been a decent entry into IntroComp.

You click around, escape your bedroom, meet a mysterious NPC, and… that's the end of part 1, five minutes later.

Still, the dystopian setting is decently depicted. If this were an IntroComp entry, I would have voted for it to win. As an IFComp entry, well, there's just not enough here to get excited about.

Last time, I gave Uninteractive Fiction 4 stars. It was a joke game, funny, worth the ten seconds it took to play.

Jokes have to be surprising but inevitable in hindsight to be funny. Last time, UF pleasantly surprised me (especially the sound track).

This time, it wasn't surprising. I don't think it'll be funny at all if there's a next time.

You and an appointed "dark-skinned" English crew member are appointed to explore the Island of Rhynin. (Spoiler - click to show)At the end, you get to decide whether to kill him or not.

It's pretty easy to get to the ending. Despite the blurb's claim, none of the choices I made seemed to have any effect on the plot. My choices just increased/decreased my stats, which had no effect on the game.

And then, the ending, which is where the colonialism really kicks in.

What was the point of this story? None of my earlier choices had any effect. The ending choice means nothing to me. The plot is nothing but a regurgitation of colonialist propaganda.

I think this would be a two-star game if it weren't for the dehumanizing colonialism. Instead, I'm giving it one star.

As the description explains, this is a game about a growing addiction to asking AI for assistance. The horror begins as you (Spoiler - click to show)try to delete the AI, but it refuses to allow you to delete it.

But, just as soon as that conflict arises, the game ends. It left me wanting more, but, in a bad way.

The #1 guideline on IFComp's Guidelines for IFComp authors is to playtest your game and credit your testers. This game credits no testers; it seems pretty clear that it didn't have any.

Here's what would have been my beta feedback:

• The space is divided up into four locations, "middle of the bed," "Top of bed," "Bottom of the bed" and "out of the bed". But the game provides approximately no affordances to discover how to get there, nothing except the "HELP" command that suggests "There are four directions, move with the GO (north, south, east or west) command."

  Instead, I suggest describing location exits in every room description. "The top of the bed is south. The bottom of the bed is north. You can get out of the bed to the east."

• In "middle of the bed," it says "You can see a basket here." By convention, "here" implies that the basket is in the current location with you, in the middle of the bed. But if you try to "get basket" from "middle of the bed," it says, "You can’t possibly reach that basket from the middle of the bed." Because the basket isn't here, it's in the "out of the bed" location to the east.

  Ideally you'd write some code that would tell the player where the basket and/or baby is, wherever they may be. "The baby is in the basket outside the bed to the east." "The baby is at the top of the bed. The basket is at the bottom of the bed."

  Barring that, you could just not mention the basket at all in the "middle of the bed." Inform will describe it automatically when the player gets out of the bed.

• (Spoiler - click to show)`READ BOOK` didn't make it clear enough that I was reading the book silently, that I wasn't reading the book _aloud_. The winning move is to `READ BOOK TO BABY`, which I couldn't figure out on my own; I had to decompile the game with mrifk https://github.com/wertercatt/mrifk/ to figure it out.
• The room description for "Top of the bed" says, "You look at your phone, but no new messages. You take a sip of water from your glass." But if you pick up your phone and water and drop them elsewhere, it still says that. Instead, I think it should say that your "nightstand" is here. It should tell you that there are no new messages if you look at your phone, wherever you are.
• DRINK WATER says "there's nothing suitable to drink here," even if you're at the top of the bed with the water.
• "out of the bed" says "An empty basket lies on the floor next to your bed." But, by default, the baby is in the basket, so that's not true.
• (Spoiler - click to show)`READ BOOK TO BABY` prints out a parenthetical "(the end)", but instead it should end the game saying "The End."
• FEED BABY assumes you mean "(to yourself)" and says "You can't feed the baby to yourself. That is obviously not what I meant! Instead, it should print a message that it's not feeding time yet.
• All of the plot comes across in the last move, as you (Spoiler - click to show)READ BOOK TO BABY. But I think it would make sense to move some of that information to any of the various COMFORT BABY, KISS BABY, etc. commands so it's not such a huge wall of text at the end.