Ratings and Reviews by Wade Clarke

I would describe take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die as a linear, emotionally heavy, romantic (in the oldest tradition) semi-animated comic book. In black and white. It draws strongly on comic book aesthetics for its effects and is dynamic about it, pulling reader’s eyes through the word-emphasising visuals and punctuating them with sound effects, all via a simple eight or sixteen-bit look.

The experience opens with the deliberately-vaguely-depicted narrating character looking over a lake at night. Stars twinkle as she relates the finding of the drowned corpse of Elizabeth, a girl who wrote poetry and whom she seems to have been obsessed with. But obsessed with how? Up close, from a distance or in some other way? The speculating prose has a few abstracting moves up its sleeves as it goes on.

As each frame of image and thought-square of monologue appears, the mechanic is to click to continue, however the click has to be placed on the current speech bubble or latest ellipses to register. I found this requirement distracting. The small target moves in almost every frame, often just two centimetres down the screen. I was relieved to learn after playing that it's possible to just hit the space bar instead.

The dynamics of the heroine’s monologue, and also of her later dialogue with Elizabeth’s ghost or echo, are really well executed. For me, the whole was still a little unsatisfying because my taste is that emotion-based stories like this one work with specifics rather than archetypes. This story’s characters and ideas revolve around binaries and twinning; love, hate, free, trapped, creation (writing poetry), destruction (suicide), the narrator, the drowned girl. The name of the eponymous lake (Dioscuri) alludes to the Roman twins Castor and Pollux. And poets, of course, are famous for being suicidal, thought the real situation that created the stereotype - the rise of the romantic tradition and novels like Goethe’s The Sorrows Of Young Werther (1774) - is obviously far more detailed than the content of the lakes. the lakes takes that end point of the concept of romantic suicide as a symbol without complexity. Still, I feel a churl complaining about the arcehtypal style of a story that pretty much declares, through its allusion to the Dioscuri, that it could be about archetypes. It’s short, establishes a clear visual and editing style during its stay, and is an entirely sound construction of its ideas.

Garry Francis's A Taste Of Terror (TOT) is a classically-styled horror text adventure with an exotic provenance. Francis completed it based on translated almost-forty-year-old design notes for an Italian adventure which was to have been released on the cover tape of Viking Magazine issue 12, circa 1987. The magazine was cancelled, the game never completed and the original designer's identity remains unknown; fuller details are available in the game's ABOUT.

I found these details added a pleasing aura of horror timelessness to the experience. These trapdoors and attics, concealing curtains, consultable books, chapels with pews, openable coffins, mystery-concealing locked doors - and your aunt's hairpin - they all could have been in the original game, they're in the new game, and many are staples of horror IF, and some of all IF.

The PC is ten-year-old, judogi-wearing chess champion Sean. He's visiting the farm of his beloved aunt Clarissa for a break from his apparently intense chessing life. The game begins with Sean waking up to find his aunt missing and his back hurting. The mystery is wide open, as is the map. On my first play I wandered out into the countryside, my back pain increasing until I dropped dead. The time limit imposed by the initial problem is both suspenseful and helpful, as it gives a range limit and a focus.

With sixty-ish locations, mapping is essential. The game's open style means you'll ultimately need to apprehend most or all of its contents at once to solve the puzzles. As there are several ways to die and an eventual level of physical grisliness (manipulating severed bodyparts) which some might find extreme if it weren't tempered by the chilled and sometimes humourous tone, the game feels dangerous for the player but mostly ranks as Polite on the cruelty scale, occasionally Tough. I'd say it takes a minimum of two hours to complete.

There's a mixture of modern niceties and old-schoolness in the tech. Sean has a respectable inventory limit, and a holdall can be found to increase that, but there are still more items to be found than the player could ever hold at once. The PunyInform engine used to create the game hasn't the space for much automation, so expect to handle a lot of keys and doors manually, to take extra steps off things stood on, etc. The game's contents, however, are precise. They are precisely described, placed, and fit well into a design. There's one barn location with numerous tools, and TOT is the kind of game that will distinguish between the uses for a screwdriver, a pair of pliers and a hammer in a stimulating way while allowing for red herrings.

The story develops in stages with different goals, an interesting design for such an open game. The goals escalate from the mundane to the spectacular via a shock-horror moment which demarcates what might be considered the first act. Yet once you've solved your back pain problem, you have access to almost all the map, except the locked door silos. Story development is controlled by a few major encounters and conversations. The final act is the classic IF puzzle game where you have to find all the parts, identify the puzzles, solve them and win.

There's a tone to the game's writing that's recognisable. It leans more to traditional IF description than to horror, occasionally making a joke at the PC's expense or going glib on the violence. Pared back, it might have read as fairytale, but it sits in the place where practicality has to win. After all, the player is eventually going to be carting around bodyparts to solve puzzles. This particular tone has its own charms, and given the amount of puzzle-solving that has to get done in this game, it's probably the right place. There are definitely some really good shocks and creep-outs, often just by surprise.

I found A Taste of Terror to be thoroughly engrossing. It opens in the tradition of horror stories about kids having to face off with adult levels of mystery and supernatural horror, then becomes a big, enjoyable mapping and puzzle-solving game.

Infocom released more than thirty Interactive Fiction titles in their time, setting a standard for sophisticated text adventure game parsers in the process, but only one of these games declared itself as belonging to the horror genre. That one was 1987's The Lurking Horror (TLH). In this adventure you assume the role of a student at the fictional GUE Tech whose essay on the topic of 'Modern analogues of Xenophon's Anabasis' is due tomorrow. The game begins with you sweating away at your essay late one night in the campus computer lab. A blizzard is raging outside and your only company is a geeky hacker whom you're told you recognise, though whom you really don't.

TLH initially suggests that completing your assignment might be your goal, but almost immediately does some thwarting stuff which makes you feel you're unlikely to achieve this goal any time soon. If you've read the back of the box and taken note of the game's title, you'll be expecting to run into bad supernatural stuff at some point, but it's hard to anticipate how or where or why. If you venture beyond the terminal room, you'll find there's a fair bit of campus to wander but that most of it seems empty. If you try to go outside, you will be driven back inside by the extreme weather. And if you're as thick as I can be when playing an Infocom game, you may fail to trigger the crucial dream sequence in the first location which would have obviated all of this noodling and given you a concrete goal – to locate GUE's Alchemy Department.

The onset of creepiness can be slow in TLH if you don't do the right things right off the bat. I thought that the hacker was there to help me kickstart proceedings with my recalcitrant computer, so I fetched some Chinese food for him from the nearby kitchen to try to grease his wheels a bit towards this end. I also had to microwave the food, entering explicit commands to press each relevant button on the microwave to set the timer and power levels correctly. This might have been my idea of gaming torture if I hadn't fluked acceptable settings on my first attempt.

After all my efforts, the hacker seemed momentarily pleased to have been fed, but then lapsed back into his regular oblivious character, and I was no wiser as to what I should ASK HACKER ABOUT...

Thus I found the opening of TLH to err on the unhelpful side in terms of getting the story going. Nevertheless, I began to explore the campus more thoroughly, expecting that my purpose would become clear. What was weird was that I found myself trying to overcome some of the obstacles I encountered in the heavy-handed manner by which I might expect them to be overcome in a horror film, only because the game's packaging and title told me that the genre was horror. I had not encountered such weirdness or scares in the game prior to these moments which would otherwise have caused me to act this way.

For instance, I found my passage along the campus's so-called Infinite Corridor blocked by a passively aggressive maintenance man driving a floor waxer. Whenever I tried to pass him he would manoeuvre into my way. This was the most untoward thing that had happened in the game up to this point, yet I found myself taking to the man and his machine with a fire axe extracted from a nearby emergency cabinet. It was an unprovoked act of extremity I felt a bit silly about trying, but when the maintenance man responded by pulling the axe out of his chest and attacking me in turn, this was the first time the game had donged me over the head enough to say I was definitely in some kind of supernatural horror story.

Whenever and however you crash through into this realm, the events and threats from that point approach Lovecraftian expectation. You will find yourself investigating the suicide of another student, catching glimpses of some slimy horror which thrashes around in the snow, digging severed body parts up out of a garden and fending off things which live in the sewer. The cloistered atmosphere of the snowed-in night time campus is evoked through the finely written location descriptions, and as always in an Infocom game, atmosphere is a huge part of the overall effect.

The dynamics of TLH's puzzles play equally to a long-term view and to the here and now. There are obstacles in the game which you might come back to at any time after you have found an appropriate object with which to deal with them, but there are also sequences where you must improvise exactly the right moves in the right order and at the right time. The combination of the two approaches and the game's moderate overall difficulty (Infocom's own difficulty assessment for this game was Standard) make TLH a decent starting point for a newcomer to Infocom games.

The game's map layout is clear and logical and the puzzles are more practical than abstract, but inventory management is difficult. Your inventory space is limited in a realistic and un-fun manner, and you can't just temporarily drop things wherever you like because a roving basement urchin will pick them up. This can result in some tedious plodding back and forth to cart objects about. It's also easy to lose or destroy crucial items (monsters will eat them, or jerky professors or urchins will relieve you of them) so it is important to save often, but this is probably relevant advice when playing any Infocom game.

One flourish which I didn't get to experience as intended is that the original package sometimes came with a creepy toy bug. The bug's presence wasn't announced on the box, so the idea was that you would open up your software and flinch in shock as something gross fell out.

Apart from the dynamic mistake of it being possible to get some way into the game before the horror strikes – and I assume that if it happened to me, it probably happened to someone else – TLH is a fine all-rounder in Infocom's adventure library. It is solid, atmospheric, varied and creepy, and without some of the weirder idiosyncrasies that can make Infocom titles too vexing.

Ring Sculptors is a sci-fi / cyberpunk gamebook IF released for Nintendo Switch in 2024. It's an adaptation of a Polish gamebook by Tomasz Kołodziejczak, an author and game designer of some renown in his country. The title rings are those around planets, and in this game, the player selects a character from a roster of various hacker and mercernary types, then becomes a pawn in the machinations of rival space guilds, the Ring Sculptors amongst them.

The lore of this world seems juicy and interesting. Aesthetically, the game is attractive, with AI artwork that already looks typical but effective, and which works because very few scenes ever have to be shown more than once. The broody and glitchy audio soundscape also works. However, mechanically, the game makes no affordances for the kind of gamebook it seems to be when translating those mechanics into playability in videogame format, resulting in high frustration and repetition.

Ring Sculptors's core style is of a hard Fighting Fantasy gamebook, though without all the physical combat. What this means is high danger, lots of ways to lose, lots of die roll stat tests, lots of high stakes choices, lots of unpredictable consequences for actions. This can all be great perilous fun in an actual gamebook where you can cheat or reroll or keep your thumb in the last page as much or as little as you like, but Ring Sculptors the videogame misses all this.

There's no UNDO or RESTORE. Each death means a total restart, including going through the big linear passage at the beginning that precedes even the character selection stage. The stat check moments present as metaphorical black boxes, short bars which fill up before reporting POSITIVE or NEGATIVE. POSITIVE means you succeeded, which has a counterintuitive duality in that when you're being tested for things in life, POSITIVE is usually bad. And what die was rolled versus your character's MIND, BODY or EGO scores? The game hides this. I couldn't get any sense of the probabilities involved, and therefore of the worth of increasing any stat by, say, just one point. And this is a game with die-roll bottlenecks that can basically pass or fail your entire session.

This world of warring guilds and neuroimplanted weirdos seems really interesting, and the story could get away with leaving most of it mysterious, but given that the player's mission comes down to one typical exploration of an abandoned outpost on one planet, the lore is being wasted.

There's also a time pressure mechanic in the planet section, but whenever I was asked to choose how much Oxygen to spend on a particular activity, I couldn't work out what happened. Either I didn't understand the interface, or it's bugged, or it's not actually a choice but an automatic drain of your stat in accordance with the duration assigned to the activity, in which case the amount involved should have been declared along with the choice (and probably was in the book version). The prose is also careless at such moments, referring to wasted time in a way that really makes it feel like it's the player's fault.

I can't compare the game to the Polish source material, but as a gamebook videogame, Ring Sculptors is a big miss which doesn't avail itself of any of the wiser choices made by previous gamebook to videogame translations. This is a shame because the Switch seems a good venue for this type of game. It was attractive enough to hold me for a few plays, then I realised I wasn't prepared to try again with so much pointless repetition and bottleneck randomness.

(This is an edited version of a review that first appeared in my IF blog during IFComp 2024.)

My clinical-sounding and admittedly cynical summation of House Of Wolves by Shruti Deo might be, "Depression Quest but shorter and with you forced to suffer at others' hands as well." I had predicted what kind of experience was ahead when the first choice I picked of three basically said, "You can't do that yet, pick a different choice." Then the second choice I picked said, "You can't do that either, pick a different choice."

This is a Twine piece with an unclear metaphor that could be about being completely depressed, broken and non-functional, hiding these facts from the world, and also being in an environment of zero care or flexibility, and where you are forced to go against your own wishes in terms of what you want to do, or when, or even what to eat. This manifests as having a round of chores to do each day, forced eating supervised by an unspecified They at night, and the visiting of three other storylets on the way.

The storylets were the best parts, I thought, because they offered specificity. They approached character and situation. Learning, friends, college, those kinds of things. Returning to the House Of Wolves at night returns the prose to a pained but too generic dirge of hopelessness. That is what I most disliked about this piece in the end, its non-specific version of all-out hopelessness. I have made this same criticism of many other works of this type over time.

I don't understand the wolf metaphor of the title. It would be disingenuous of me to say I have no idea what it could be about. The trouble is it, and the work, could be about almost anything. Conformity. Vegetarianism. Mental illness. Abusive families. Society. Hunting (wolves hunt). Pack mentality. Metaphorical realism. Symbolic fantasy. What is actually going on with the protagonist? I found no motivation or evidence to throw down in any particular direction. Specifics can suggest forms and forms can suggest specifics. House of Wolves is in the grey zone of this relationship.

I was glad (in a broad way) that it ended on a note of hope, but really, it didn't feel like it should. There's not much hope on the way, so the end feels like a deus ex.

This piece gives Trigger warnings. They are exhaustive for its short length, and really do it no favours. Too long, too much detail, robbing the piece of surprise, overstimulating the listed effects before they've even been attempted to be executed by art.

There is also a paradox with warnings that encompass the whole of something of this size that they amount to a message saying, 'If you relate to any of this (the entire listed content of the game), maybe you shouldn't play this game.' Which is taking the target audience and turning them away.

House Of Wolves is plainly not my cup of tea, but it does have a simple grace of execution and presentation on its own terms.

(This is an edited version of a review that first appeared in my IF blog during IFComp 2024.)

The Killings in Wasacona (KIW) by Steve Kollmansberger is a thoroughly involving and suspenseful police procedural murder-mystery game in which the player, a fresh FBI graduate, is tasked with unravelling the reasons behind an abruptly rising bodycount in the eponymous town. It comes as a choice-clicking Twine with some minor graphical embellishment in the form of maps. It also utilises a skill mechanics system. Whenever the agent's skills are challenged, the skill test is delivered transparently as a die roll, with the modifiers and results announced. The player can pick from various classes at the start to decide where they'd like their skill emphases to be.

In my experience, games where you have to solve crimes by producing solutions are challenging to beat. They're probably as difficult to create. Players will perceive all kinds of patterns in everything, assuming they get much of the everything – it's often part of the game design that just getting the information is half the challenge – and they can divine wild solutions that are rarely what the game wants when it's piper-paying time. Often these solutions can't even be inputted, leading to frustration or disappointment.

KIW pretty much avoids all these problems. It has tight mechanics that focus the player on the clue-gathering, prose that summarises what the clues might mean in relation to clues already gathered, and it offers an ultimate refresher on gathered evidence.

The game's writing mode has a Visual Novel kind of feel. I don't refer to graphics. I mean that the characters are perhaps a little overlit. They speak with a touch too many exclamation marks, a touch too much exposition and too many gestures. This isn't my preferred mode, but by the end, I realised I probably actually needed this extra illumination in order to have been able to take in the amount of info the game was dispensing. The prose is efficient, at times perceptive:

"The house is clearly lived in, but with the deferred maintenance one might expect from a single person trying to keep up with the demands of life and inflation."

KIW follows a cycle where turns usually take up an hour of the day, and there are on average five locations or people available to visit on any turn. The player can choose from amongst all the necessary tasks for the investigation: Visiting crime scenes, the morgue, the local college, interviewing other officers, interviewing townies, following hunches, even just driving around at random to see what hits. (Remember that Ted Bundy was twice caught red-handed by randomly patrolling officers in cars, just because they thought he was acting suspiciously, so don't neglect this option.)

KIW emphasises efficient use of the player's time, and a clock up in the corner creates a pleasurable suspense and urgency, even though technically, the game is generous in allowing you to get a lot done. The amount of apparently cross-referenced knowledge of the player's progress, used to cue developments in the prose, is also impressive. The game state looks to be complex but the game knows its state, and the player's. (Don't get me started on games that don't know their own state.)

Perhaps the only incident I found too unrealistic, and disconnected from other events, was when I was given the opportunity to accuse only the second officer I spoke to on the case of actually murdering the apparent drug overdose victim whose corpse she'd found – just because this officer displayed a prejudicial attitude towards drug dealers. With great bloody-mindedness, I took the game up on this offer. I admit I only did this because I'd yet to realise that the presentation of the skill-testing options (the first one had gone great! I'd had +3 on my roll) seemed to endorse them. Big font, imperative mode. I then realised all the choices appear this way. Lesson learnt, I botched this accusational die roll with a -6 modifier and thoroughly pissed off officer Amanda. However, I don't think Clarice Starling would have entertained this option in the first place.

There's finite time to solve the crimes, and when that time is up, the player chooses their solutions from an incredibly detailed menu of possibilities, considering the gathered evidence for each case in handy point form. Perhaps this has been done before, but I've not seen it, and it seemed a great compromise of all the systems involved. It helps the player a lot, but also doesn't make it at all easy to just guess solutions if one's not on the right track.

The results screen is also fun, showing how the player's outcomes fare against everyone else who's played the game. I felt very positive during my investigation that I was handling KIW at an above average skill level for me re: this genre, but my outcomes were all those shared by the majority of players to date, probably indicating my averageness. I didn't feel bad about this. The Killings in Wasacona is a game with a lot of details, but which makes those details accessible. It made me feel the pressure of the investigation, the opening of possibilities, of mysteries, the thrill of discovery, the possibility of solution – and still give that final reminder that yes, solving crimes is hard. I think future crime-solving games could take leafs from this one.

(This is an edited version of a review that first appeared in my IF blog during IFComp 2024.)

In spite of being the buggiest game I played during IFComp 2024 (caveat - I played fewer than ten of sixty-seven ) The Triskelion Affair still held my interest and/or pulled me through. This parser adventure posits the player as a "medieval detective" tasked with finding a magical item hidden in a church. The blurb says the game is "Inspired by the classic dungeon-crawl adventures of yore." This reins in a range of the game's content and approaches, which could otherwise be described as being all over the place. They still coalesce into a setting of some atmosphere and focus in the last third of the game, which takes place in an eerie abandoned chapel.

The parser voice is a mixture of straight reverent description, replete with details of the different architectural features of churches such as the apse and narthex, and personalised snark of the kind parser games have refined over the years but which is going out of style unless you label your game Old School. A rewrite of core parser cues, like asking the player "What do you do?" every turn, and the inclusion of numerous gags, like wacky doggerel for tombstone epitaphs, or erecting mausoleums to Crowther and Woods of Adventure fame, give the sense of the author's presence. I don't know that the two voices are at war with each other, but they certainly comprise a tonal switch that is thrown rapidly and repeatedly between settings A and B during the course of the game. There's also the odd personal exhortation; typing GET ALL produces: "That’s too much burden for one person, and there’s stuff you don’t want to deal with. Try examining the thing first. Explore! Otherwise, what’s the fun?"

This particular message was a handy cue for me to poke at things for poking's enjoyment and sake, which was the correct attitude to take in retrospect. Much of the game's contents and geographical presentation remind me of a MUD's, which aren't usually designed for single players, or for puzzle-solving. The room description of each of a large graveyard's sections consists of a brief note about which sector the player is in, followed by the same general graveyard description. A game warden's hut is chock-full of takeable described stuff that is ultimately of no use for the player's quest. Having taken it all, I ended up leaving it strewn all over the donjon because there's also an inventory limit, albeit a generous one.

I found the chapel part of the game particularly involving. There's a sense in this game that there's no overt threat, and that the environment shouldn't be hostile, but that there is and it is, anyway. Everyone's left or died. Broken furniture barricades hint at scary troubles. The church is full of ritualistic paraphernalia, the volume of it suggesting numerous stressful prop-based puzzles are ahead (What am I going to do with an explodable canister? With the northern lantern? The southern lantern? The third lantern whose direction I forget? The stack of parchment? The highly suspicious blank parchment? The multiple candleholders? etc.) yet that's not the case. Somehow all of these elements apply an overhead weight, an idea of a past and of a world and kingdom outside, all the better to make you feel stuck in this weird holy place picking at some minor mystery like it's a cog in something bigger.

There's also a lone RPG fight with a zombie, easily won, but just make sure you pick up and wear again anything the zombie tore off you during the melee!

As my opening declared, I found the game buggy. Increasingly so towards its conclusion. All the way through, there's usually just one frictionless way to do a thing. Every other way is troubled, missing, leads in disambiguation circles, or suffers from spelling errors or no synonyms. I've experienced hundreds of games in this state by now in my gaming and reviewing career. These games just needed testing, as does/did this one.

Triskelion also opens with a tutorial. It feels funny and friendly, but already shows many of the implementation omissions. The second command demanded in the whole game seems to be SALUTE. This immediately returns, "What do you want to salute?" Come on, game. The guy who just saluted me. It's also off-target in emphasising a lot of eating, which is unimportant for this game, and a decent amount of communication by the dreaded ASK/TELL system, which is also, mercifully, completely unimportant for this game beyond the tutorial.

The Triskelion Affair feels like a lot of buggy, parser-loving parser games I've played before, but it comes on friendly, even if the tutorial's off piste, and the church section ultimately pulls together to menace with atmosphere. Whether you will get that far in spite of all the bugginess is not a prediction I can make in general.