Ratings and Reviews by Dan Fabulich
View this member's profile
Be sure to play the Vorple version on the author's website, which includes fun font stuff and color changes.
This game was developed under time crunch as part of the IronCHIF competition. The prompt was "a scroll that alters the world around it." This game has that! And a ton of puzzles to solve. Puzzles interwoven on top of other puzzles.
My only complaint is the mechanic at the end game.
(Spoiler - click to show)Near the end of the game, you have to solve a bunch of puzzles via a sliding tiles puzzle. The game asks you to line up certain specific tiles all in a row, and it is an enormous pain in the butt to do it. There are tricks to solving it, but it's kinda like the Towers of Hanoi, where you have to count very carefully; if you mess it up, you'll ruin your own hard work.
It's a "kinetic novel," where you don't make any choices. (You can click "auto" to make the game autoplay, revealing the text without human interaction.)
That's fine, but the art feels like it's stuff pulled off of Google image search, and blurred so it wouldn't be obviously out of place in this game.
In a kinetic novel, the art needs to support the text, and I feel like the art is just there because the author felt like "there ought to be art here."
It's a fresh take on vampires, which is impressive in its own right.
It has no plot choices, but it still relies on interactivity, with cycling links that affect your viewpoint of the story, and a bunch of optional links to explore side notes. It feels like you're driving, even if the story is on rails.
This game credits no author or artist. According to my browser devtools, the AI chatbot conversation is happening with an actual live LLM (Grok 4.1, from xAI / Elon Musk), but I don't think that was necessary at all for the trivial interactions you have with the bot.
I believe the art is AI generated as well, but, with no credits, I can't prove it.
The game includes one actual choice, but there's no real difference in the three endings. If you crack down on the politician, does he go to jail? Does he make us suffer? It all ends in same scene on the couch in your apartment, which makes the choice feel less important.
This is a game where winning the game requires examining objects in the scenery that may not seem very notable at first.
Once you finish examining and searching everything, the puzzles are fun and fair, and the game is written well.
Good music, solid story.
I quite enjoyed this game. The writing is cute, and the puzzles are fun.
I have some spoilerific feedback for the author.
(Spoiler - click to show)I got stuck pretty hard on the oojamaflip puzzle. The game repeatedly pointed out with a parenthetical that the oojamaflip was relevant, but the encouraging words from Trala made it seem like a victorious status effect, rather than a puzzle to actively solve. And the solution, to use the gizmo, felt unclued. For most of the other inventory items, there's at least one other way to use it that gives you some clue about what it's for, but not the gizmo. The gizmo only works on the oojamaflip; only the gizmo does anything with the oojamaflip. Even after replaying, I have no clear idea how I was supposed to guess that. The gizmo and the oojamaflip seem to have nothing in particular in common; neither of them have any defined shape. I had to pray to get the hint to use the gizmo, which I then lawnmowered to solve the oojamaflip puzzle. I think the gizmo should do something somewhere else, to give me some kind of hint on what it could be good for, and/or one of the other items should do something with the oojamaflip, pointing me in the direction of the gizmo.
I also got stuck on the very last puzzle in the treasure room. I didn't realize that the "gold and jewels" were "gold" and "jewels," separably examinable. I'm not at all sure that this was a puzzle worth having. Making "treasure," "gold," and "jewels" synonymous would have let me just pick a treasure and move on.
More broadly, I think this game would benefit from bolding stuff that you can fly towards, and it would benefit from an HTML version that you could click on or tap on on mobile phones. (Dialog is great for that sort of thing!) For example, if the treasure description had said, "The platform is heaped with gold and jewels," I would have understood what to do.
1–10 of 137 | Next | Show All
