Reviews by Dan Fabulich

As I write this, The Shack is the top-rated Quest game on textadventures.co.uk. It's 50 rooms, with dozens of puzzles. Every room comes with some open-license pixel art, and many rooms come with background sound effects, like wind rushing and birds chirping.

Winning the game requires meticulously examining everything, which I found to be a mostly frustrating experience. Most rooms have a "You can see" paragraph, but many, many objects that are meant to be examined aren't mentioned in "You can see," so you have to try examining everything mentioned in the room description.

IMO, if the author wants to require that, then everything that is mentioned in the room description should be examinable, and have an interesting, rewarding description when you do it. But the game frequently mentions stuff that can't be examined in the room description, giving you a generic "I can't see that" error message. Getting that error message makes it no fun at all to explore this game.

Also, I did encounter a few parser issues:

• You often have to CUT X WITH Y instead of USE Y ON X.
• Sometimes you have to USE KEY ON X instead of UNLOCK X.
• You have to USE BATTERY ON X rather than USE BATTERY IN X.
• The game has a torch (a flashlight), but you can't just turn it on; as you enter a dark space, you have to USE TORCH ON X to turn it on and enter.
• Sometimes you have to PULL X or PUSH X when the game doesn't allow you to MOVE X.

Parser issues like these can give the player a misleading sense of "no, that's not the right answer," rather than "you almost got it, keep going."

Once you've finished examining everything, and once you get past the parser issues, the game flows pretty smoothly from there. I like puzzle solutions to be surprising but inevitable in hindsight, and I'm not really sure any of these puzzles did that for me, but the puzzles at least felt fair and reasonable, once I'd finished the examine-a-thon. The puzzles felt like the sort of puzzles that the authors thought are "supposed" to be in a text adventure. It feels like an all-you-can-eat buffet with food that's decent, but nothing to write home about.

The Shack implies a mysterious sci-fi plot, but it's hardly a spoiler to say that this plot is never explained in the game, which ends on a cliffhanger. The end promises a "Part 2" that AFAIK was never implemented.

I couldn't solve this game without running a Z-Code disassembler to figure out what to do next. Progressing the game feels like a game of guessing what the author was thinking. (Luckily, wait often works, but not at the beginning, or at the end.)

But the words of the game are poetic. The vibes are strong with this one.

It's a four-room game, and it's buggy. You'll go downstairs to kill an orc, but once you kill the orc, the room contains "an orc and a dead orc."

(It's cool that the game was co-developed with a child, but entering it in the IFComp makes it a subject of judgment from adults. My feedback below is directed toward Clyde, and not Alana.)

No playtesters are credited; I think there may not have been any testers for this game. Playtesting your game and crediting your testers is the #1 guideline for IFComp authors.

Furthermore, as I write this, the authors have incorrectly listed their game as "Browser based" on the IFComp site, instead of "Glulx, using Inform's 'Release with a website' feature" which is what the authors actually made. That's a bummer, because it means that IFComp won't send transcripts to the authors, which might help them find bugs.

When you find the orc, he's in a cage, but, for some reason, you can't attack him while he's in the cage, even though you have a sword. You have to unlock the cage, allowing him to attack you, in order to attack him.

When you do attack him, the game includes an RPG-like combat system, in which you type attack orc over and over until he dies. In my opinion, combat systems should give the player some tactical options, or there's no point in having them. Let the player make some risk/reward tradeoffs at least.

There's no alternative to fighting the orc; the orc attacks you mindlessly. (Orcs as monsters reflect an uncritical attitude to the idea that there are "evil races". Another monster, one that isn't steeped in a history of racism, would have been a better choice.)

In my opinion, the solution to leave the East Basement is unfair. (Spoiler - click to show)When you enter the East Basement, the stairs retract into the ceiling. To bring them back, you have to examine stairs, even though the stairs are no longer described in the room. When you examine stairs, the game says, "There are no stairs here. There is a small keyhole beside where the staircase once was." Everything that the player needs to examine should be described in the room's description, or revealed by examining objects in the room's description. I had to use glulx-strings to even figure this out.

Other than the fight with the orc, the game is nothing more than opening containers, taking keys of various colors, and unlocking things with those keys.

In my opinion, games with puzzles need to be surprising, but inevitable in hindsight. None of the puzzles in this game rise to meet that bar, not even for other children, in my opinion.

Overall, the game seems to have been developed with a sense of "this is just what would/should happen in a traditional dungeon crawl."

To add some depth, (perhaps in your next game,) ask Alana what's happening in the game and why.

• Why is there an orc in this game?
• What's fun about fighting games, and how can you put that fun in your game?
• Who made this dungeon? Who put these keys and these locks and these chests here? (Who put a golden key around the neck of a caged orc? Why did they do that?)
• How do you want players to feel as they're playing the game?

It's a portal fantasy about following your dreams. It seemed pretty complete to me, not really an "intro" at all, but it's hard to criticize it for that.

I first got Ending B, a "mixed" ending. Getting Ending A only took another 5 minutes or so. (Spoiler - click to show)There's a secret ending you can unlock by exploring the library and using the book.

The game includes a lot of right/wrong choices, where if you do something "reasonable" like listen to your doctors, the game immediately ends, and you have to go back and pick the other option. I feel like the game wants to create the feeling of interactivity, while minimizing any actual forking.

I think it's better to do as the game did early on, where you can choose a bunch of options, some of which would appear to avoid the plot, but they all lead back to the same chokepoint.

Like, maybe instead of insta-dying in the hospital after weeks of treatment, include a scene where you realize you have to escape the hospital.

Also! If you're going to have multiple endings, the game needs a "Restart" button. (I had to clear my cookies to restart the game.)

This is a maze-like Twine, where you're meant to explore all the endings. But one of the endings, the ending that seems most likely to lead to a decent-ish outcome for the main character, ends in a Twine error message:

There isn't a temp variable named _E in this place.
Temp variables only exist inside the same passage, hook, or lambda in which they're created.

As for what's here, the main character is often confused, and writes/thinks in a confusing way, making it unclear when big gaps of time are elapsing, what's happening right now in play vs. what's already happened, or what's at stake for the main character. (In many of the endings, you select the option to do nothing and die, because the main character's life is meaningless.)

I can't tell whether the author intended this to be confusing (the error message inspires little confidence).

Maybe with that bug fixed I'd have a better sense of what the author intended.

You click the "Receive next signal" button and you get a short little poem in the format of a status update. You click "Receive next signal" 40 times to access all 40 "signals."

You can, at any time, click "Attempt time transfer," to archive(?) up to 10 times. But archiving signals doesn't seem to do anything that I can identify; it doesn't seem to matter when/whether you click the button.

I do at times really enjoy short kinetic poetry, but this didn't really connect with me; I don't think it sustain my attention if it were, like, 400 signals or 4,000 signals. There would need to be something else to do.

The UI looks cool, anyway!

(Be sure to press the "Restart" button as the game starts, so you can hear the background music.)

This intro is approximately five minutes long. It's a censorship simulator, kinda like The Westport Independent.

The core gameplay loop is picking True (approved) or False (censored), where each option has a certain percentage chance of "success." But you only get to make one example True/False decision, and one real one, before the game ends.

Right at the end, it implies that getting more "successes" will unlock higher access levels, but you never get a chance to actually level up, or even to directly see what's at stake if you do/don't level up.

The author is Yoon Ha Lee. I'm a fan of his Machineries of Empires series of sci-fi novels, in which adherence to a calendar system (supported by violent rituals called "rememberences") unlocks magic-tech powers. In this setting, maintaining the calendar requires ideological control, which is constantly under threat from "calendrical heresy."

A censorship simulator in Machineries of Empires sounds pretty cool! But none of that is actually here in the intro we have.

Indeed, there's so little here that it's hard to evaluate it at all. Will it work as a game? Does it need a lot more gameplay than just the True/False censorship game loop? There's just not enough here to prove the concept.

This game is full of surrealism. It's an open question from the start of the game to the end of the game whether the whole thing is a hallucination. Stuff is minimally described, leaving a lot to my imagination.

I have very minimal understanding of who/what the player character is, but I have a pretty strong sense of how they feel, which is certainly something, but I'm struggling to connect with the character under the circumstances.

Lots of unskippable timed text, which I don't usually love. The timed text is synchronized with background sound effects and music, which is cool. Still, I'm not sure that timed text was needed for that.

(And it doesn't help that the game often leaves it ambiguous whether I'm waiting for timed text or whether I'm supposed to press a key to continue.)

The game's default behavior in response to invalid commands is to print a blank line, with no error message, which sucks a lot. Error messages are the perfect time to provide clues to the player. Like when (Spoiler - click to show)I entered the wrong ID number, because I needed to omit leading zeroes, it could have told me "invalid ID number" or something.

(I played the game on a Mac in Quest Viva.)

It's a small maze to figure out how to sell all of your cookies. The back button helps.

The writing is charming, but if it's the start of something bigger, I can't see what it could be. The story seems to be entirely tied up.

It's a nice little database search game. Decent puzzles in a nostalgic format. I never got too stuck for long.

It's a bummer that it only works on Windows and Linux. (I'm pretty sure Godot can export to HTML.) I played the game in a Windows emulator.