Ratings and Reviews by Jacqueline A. Lott

This is a piece about "living under the Stalin era, in four parts." I'm going to be a touch spoilery here, but just a touch. After all, I played this several times, but never lasted more than thirty moves, so I can't possibly be spoiling your immersive experience that much.

(Spoiler - click to show)I died of starvation once, but then I started plowing potatoes and grain like a mad man so that I'd be ready when they came to collect my share for Mother Russia. No matter how industrious I was, though, I was always pinned to the ground, called an enemy of the collective, an enemy of the people, an enemy of Russia, and killed. I'm not sure if it was a bug or what, because I always had more grain and potatoes than the game said I needed, even after feeding my dying wife whom I couldn't bring myself to euthanize... because somehow, someway, I knew we would survive.

Yes, life in Stalinist Russia is horrible, but you get a sense of this about ten or fifteen moves into the piece and the rest of the game is not terribly interesting after that. I mean, I admire the premise, and the ambition of it, but I think it could have been done in a more engaging way. Bit more of a plot. Bit more promise that the misery to come would at least be interesting misery. More than four beta testers next time, Michelle.

This wasn't bad, per se, it just wasn't good. If you're going to take us back in time and show us how miserable a certain period was, you have to make it engaging enough that people will actually want to stay in the Hell you've (re)created for them.

And I didn't get far enough into this one to figure out where the title came from, which made me sort of sad. But they kept killing me!

I was very deeply conflicted, on a few levels, as to how to rate this game.

On one level, this game has a beauty, an allure... a sensuality running through it. A spell. I felt like I couldn't stop with it, and this is the first comp game in a long time where I remember going far in excess of the two hour mark. I wanted to find the end. I cared.

That said—and there's unintentional metaphor here—the critical ingredient of the spell that binds you tightly and draws you through the game? The bit that makes it possible to find its ultimate conclusion? The walkthrough. I honestly don't see how you could get through this game without it.

At first blush the game is silly and on rails, but then suddenly it grows sinister and seductive and opens up in such a vast way that the interactor has no clue where to go, what to do. I tried an attempt without the walkthrough—and got far!—but could never have found the end alone. I'm not sure how this could have been mitigated, either. On the one hand, I enjoyed the agency it gave me, but it gave too much, too quickly. I drowned.

I said I was deeply conflicted on a few levels, and I've only touched on a couple. I should move on with that.

There are other things this piece does really, really well. For example, it does a great job of show—don't tell—with accents. By the time I was half-way through, I was reading dialog in my head that dripped of humid Southern nights laced with cicadas. This was done exceptionally well, without misspelling everything to hit you over the head with it. Maybe I only picked up on this due to having spent a lot of my time in the South, though. I'd be interested to hear others' views on this point.

To continue with respect to the writing: it is this lovely mix of succinct matter-of-factness, evocative descriptions, and eloquent dialogue. This is what hooked me fairly early on, kept me going through my initial dismay, and teased me far enough along that I couldn't let go.

Also, we begin with this sense of being a slave, of being directed, and gaining volition... earning it. That was well done, though (as mentioned above) I think the author loosened the reins just a touch too quickly.

(Spoiler - click to show)I've been asked what I thought of the Voodoo. It is, at its core, the sensationalist sort of voodoo you get in horror novels and Hollywood. But that's what this is meant to be, despite the author's research. It's obvious he knows a bit about Voodoo, though if this is because he's spent time in New Orleans or just read a lot of articles on Wikipedia, I'm not sure. I'm completely unfamiliar with Louisiana Voodoo.

But I know enough of Voodoo from a trip I made to Haiti and books I've read since that trip and research into some of the artifacts I brought back with me that I understood a lot of the terminology used in this piece of fiction. It was interesting to compare and contrast what I knew of Voodoo to this. I'm not sure if the areas where things diverge are on account of Louisiana culture, or just the sensationalism.

It's a work of fiction. It's probably pretty offensive to some. But I took it as a work of fiction, and I enjoyed it.

I didn't realize (for some reason(!)) until after I'd completed the game, that there was a hint menu. Maybe that would have been enough. Maybe I could have gotten through without the walkthrough. Maybe I could have found my way without feeling led. That's really all that held me back on scoring this very, very well. But I rather doubt that to be the case. Some of the things in the walkthrough felt so. poorly. cued. I stand by my original statement: I don't see how you could have gotten through this game without the walkthrough. If you did, please leave a comment. I'd love to know.

I wanted this to be more. Really wanted it to be more.

I should probably give this a 3, but I enjoyed it too much, and thus gave this a 4. That is, admittedly, a bit of a gift.

It is not spoilery to tell you this first bit, because the game cuts to the chase on this with the first move and, let's face it, the title itself is spoilery. I won't go into the political particulars, but I'm on a space station, and there's been an explosion, and the systems are having trouble coming back on line, and I'm a tech. I gotta make things right.

I generally avoid science fiction at all costs, the two exceptions being when ClubFloyd is playing some scifi, the other exception being when a game comes up in my comp queue. So I heaved a heavy sigh as I began the game and the plot became clear. Then I started having a few traumatic Infocom Suspended flashbacks. Then I thought to myself, "I'll play a few turns, write it off as crap, then move on to something that hopefully involves an orc looking for a pig or someone trying to finish their dissertation."

But then Sokal had to be all polished and stuff, and I couldn't write it off as crap. I had to keep playing! Ultimately, the game is less about the science fiction and more about ethical choices, morality, politics, selfishness and selflessness, that sort of thing. It's not exactly terribly deep in those regards, but it's not a very long game and it's difficult to delve into such things in detail in a game of this length.

But I would nevertheless like to point out that it is still super swaddled in scifi gift-wrap with a giant scifi bow on top!

So if science fiction is your thang, you might like this. It is not my thang, but I feel bad holding that against the game. It's not Sokal's fault I really don't like scifi! So I added a point to my score to compensate for that.

Short and fairly easy to play, multiple endings. Seems like it could have benefitted from a WAIT FOR 6 TURNS command (or something similar), and a couple of other verbs that were suggested in the prose but not actually functional (REMOVE X from Y comes to mind), but it did anticipate some non-standard things that I tried to do. Only a couple of typographical flubs. It does a good job of backstory, character motivation, and is clever with its (optional) use of sound without being annoying (thank you, Sokal, for asking me if I had sound enabled... I took that as a warning; prior games by other people have just scared the poo out of me by not asking first, and I didn't really like that very much).

So, I gave this a 4 (it would have been a 3, but I bumped it up one to make up for my scifi allergy).

This one... failed to grab me.

I mean, I had some amusing moments, but they were accidental, such as this bit during the opening sequence, in which the PC is having a bit of a bad day on a very crowded train:

Two or more of your neighbors seem to be competing for the right to stand on top of your feet.

>KILL EVERYONE
You can't find anything relevant by that name.

If you are new to interactive fiction, you may like to try typing HELP.

The title made me suspect that this is Yet Another Apartment or House Game.

Then I thought that perhaps the author was playing a Deep Game. Perhaps the author was trying to lure me in. "Mwuhahahaha! I will make 'em all think this is a crappy apartment or house game when in fact it is anything BUT that!" cackled the anonymous author. Yes, perhaps I was just a pawn, falling into anonymous' trap...

What's this? (Spoiler - click to show)Then I started getting persistent and uncapitalized messages about how I really need to unlock my house before i wet my pants?

Yes, this author was playing a very Deep Game.

>unlock door with copper key
You unlock the front door.
gotta go! gotta go!

>pee self
That's not a verb I recognize.

>urinate
That's not a verb I recognize.

>relax
That's not a verb I recognize.

>release urinary sphincter
That's not a verb I recognize.

So, ultimately, this really is just a crappy apartment game, albeit with a twist.

It would really be great if people would stop entering coding exercises into the IF Comp.

My guess — and this is just a guess — is that this was written for a project for school under a time constraint and had no testing. I'm basing that entirely on the link to Vanderbilt and the fact that no testers are credited in the About/Credits text. If those two things are indeed true, this isn't too bad a release, and I do welcome more interactive fiction that tackles serious subject matter. However, I think the subject matter here would be better-served by a more solid game: immersion in this world is key to making the player really feel the visceral punch that the author is going for, and it's hard to become immersed in the game due to terse conversation and linear (and not-necessarily-intuitive) puzzle design.

We played this for ClubFloyd in March 2013, and there was a bit of interesting discussion afterward about whether this game needed to go entirely puzzleless or really embrace puzzles in order to make a bigger impact. Hard to say, but this middle-of-the-road approach didn't serve the story well.

All that having been said, and taking into account the valid points made by other reviewers, I nevertheless did feel this piece was successful in evoking emotions, and that was most likely a key goal for the author.

The writing is terse. The story starts with no real hook. There are misspelled words and mechanical errors.

Okay, I'll quit writing in the same choppy sentences of which this author seems to be so fond. Rereading that last paragraph that I wrote, I sound pretty picky, but here's the thing: while one of these things may be forgiveable (or even a feature, if done right), the triumverate seems a bit much. Here's the intro:

You wake up in a big hall made of stone. There is light coming from all directions.

You are in a big hall made of stone. The ceiling is really high from the ground. There is a deep silence in this room.

You can see some kind of glass room to the north.

My description is a somewhat jarring "Looking good," which feels like a shift in narrative voice (perhaps because it's two words, not the rhythmic flow of 7-11 word sentences I've already gotten used to. Taking inventory informs me that I have a mask, and examining it reveals that "All of you can see is it has two holes for your eyes and a big opening for your mouth.."

In the first minute of the game I've got no hook. That's fine by me, if the writing is evocative or the setting intriguing, or something. But the player has very little here of interest. Except wait, there's a glass room to the north, and that sounds kind of interesting, so I clicked on the little hyperlink for "glass room" (because there are convenient hyperlinks in this game), and find that the game has ended quite unexpectedly(!). Okay, so maybe that's the fault of the website, because I'm playing the game online, so I fire it up again to give the game one more chance.

> look at glass room
Nothing out of the ordinary.

And that's when I quit playing. There were twenty-eight games in the comp, limited time in which to play and review them, and this game needs a lot more meat to make it worthwhile.

Cons: I'm not into science fiction.
Pros: We like the moon. (Well, I like the real moon, not that song.)

Anyway, yeah, I'm not too into scifi, but I have always been particularly fond of the moon and am slightly sad that I was talked out of being an astronaut by someone I looked up to as a small child, so I decided to give the game a try.

This game has some strong things going for it, but a lot of issues.

What's really great about this piece from the start is that it has some humanity to it: I'm given a bit of a feel for who the player character is, first as a scientist and astronaut, then as a person who has lived a life. And the game also has some decent pacing: you're introduced to the setting, your role, the environment, your partner, and then you begin to wonder to yourself, "Gee, I wonder when there's going to be some crazy malfunction or other issue that suddenly breaks the tranquility of exploration and me settling into my new home on the moon base..." and then, sure enough, BAM! TURN 34! SOMETHING HAPPENS. The way it was all set up made me think this was going to be a really great game, but just about the time it gets rolling, issues start popping up.

I suppose that those issues can be summed up this way: the game has a really strong start, then you start to encounter things that should be implemented more fully — conversations that should be available given what's happened but aren't available to you, that sort of thing — then suddenly the game is on rails, and then it just flies completely off the rails into one great big long giant cut-scene. It's as if the author ran out of time before the deadline but decided to submit to the comp anyway, and found short-cuts to rush things along. This is rather too bad, because the game's got this quirky-endearing plot that feels like it came out of an old Edward Packard CYOA, something that really could have been explored in an IF Comp-sized game... but it instead comes off feeling like a quickly wrapped-up IntroComp entry: short, with all the attention on the front end.

For the author's benefit, I'd like to discuss some of the implementation issues that struck me pretty hard.

For starters, (Spoiler - click to show)you're unable to speak to your partner when you're in a different location than he is. You're on the moon, which is sort of remote as work environments go, and there's just two of you up there, yet if you're outside the base and he's inside the base you can't speak to anyone — not John, not 'the base', and not ground control. Seems like a bit of a safety issue. (So you'd better hope nothing happens to you while you're separated from John! Which of course promptly happens the second you're separated from him.) As I went along, I realized that this was probably an oversight on the part of the author, because some of the cut-scenes do involve John speaking to you through the headset in your helmet, and you're eventually nudged to speak to ground control from the lunar module. There are also some minor things like wearing and removing your space suit, and opening and closing airlocks, which are kinda sorta handled, but could be slightly more elegant (i.e. done for you, instead of getting in the way of the action or killing you because you skipped a routine step that has to happen every. single. time. you exit the base — and there's a lot of coming and going, far more than I think is realistic, given what a pain in the rear it'd be to keep donning and removing a space suit).

Conversation-wise, after you see a flash of light on the surface of the moon that takes you off-guard, there's no real way to investigate it, which is annoying, so then you then come back in to the base and it's not a conversation option you can discuss with John (who is from Germany, by the way, but maybe he's adopted the name 'John' because people have trouble pronouncing 'Johann' at the space agency, or perhaps the United States finally achieves world domination by 2050 and everyone adopts English first names... but I digress). The only really obvious thing I can do after having this startling experience alone outside on the moon is have a conversation with John in which he gets excited about his lab samples, but even that doesn't trigger a conversation option to speak to him about the experiment in more detail (which is too bad, since it ends up having an effect on the plot). Ultimately, despite this unsettling experience I had, I have no option but to suggest we turn in for the evening without discussing it or looking into it further. Because that's what you'd naturally do if you were on an otherwise uninhabited chunk of rock and saw something that might lead you to believe you're not alone.

When I wake up, things have turned worse, and there's this crazy light in the distance that's intriguing enough to make me hear about it every turn, but I can't do anything about it until the game decides I can — which, okay, fair enough, but then don't torment me with it until you're going to let me investigate it, or else give me a better reason why I can't go check it out. I also found it kind of funny that the map was so limited, which I understand from the author's perspective, but... c'mon... it's the moon! It's pretty wide-open in every direction but I can only go somewhere if the plot needs me to do so. Some of the nicest touches in the game were the detail of the surface, the joy I got from jumping, things like that... so if you're not going to let me explore (which is the number one reason I kept playing the game), then give me a good reason that I can't go anywhere, as opposed to just saying, "You can't go that way."

So anyway, yeah, I feel like this just got released before it was ready. Extra props, though, for the line, "Your lightning-quick reflex has left him lying limp on the floor, snoring." That I enjoyed a great deal.

I gotta say, the opening text was not promising. The opening text, excepted and self-summarized, reads roughly as Oh, crap! The deadline for the 2012 Interactive Fiction Competition is only ten minutes away! There's no chance in Hades that I'll finish my Twine magnum opus before it's pencils down! Well, I could finish it, but it's not something I want to rush, much like my loving.</td></tr></table></center>

In retrospect, there are two things that are interesting about that opening text.

First, it's obvious after you play the game that it was not thrown together in 10 minutes. That misused apostrophe aside, the game is fairly polished. I'm not saying that Ruderbager Doppelganger spent months on Last Minute or anything, but it was certainly more than ten minutes, and while the premise is a bit off-putting, it's a setup that works well for the intended schtick.

Second, the writing style is pretty much like that throughout. If you find yourself guiltily cracking a smile at the phrase, it's not something I want to rush, much like my loving, then you should probably play this. It won't take too long.

I mentioned that there was a schtick. Indeed there is. And the schtick is cute, but sadly it is not very deeply explored. I kind of wish that the author had taken this and really explored it, without recycling any more text than absolutely necessary. That would have really made it fun.

And I suppose I should mention that the game is a non-state-tracking CYOA with a seemingly broken 'rewind' button. I personally rather enjoy CYOA, even without state-tracking, though I know many people find it too old skool for their tastes. YMMV.

At any rate, the game is nothing heavy or profound, but it was fun and I enjoyed it.

A Killer Headache started out on the sort of note that made me want to quit immediately. "Not another You Are a Zombie! game," I thought to myself. But then I stuck with it, and found that the game strikes out into some new territory. While it is a game where the PC is a zombie, and while it does focus a lot on eating brains, it's a surprisingly serious game, and comes up with a creative justification for why we always see zombies shuffling about moaning on and on about braaaaiinssss. In fact, the best part of the game focuses in on this aspect in a way that I found pretty novel. If you haven't played this yet, I recommend that you stop reading this review now and go play the game, because it's worth it just to see Ciul's take on the genre.

That said, the game did a few things that fell pretty short for me. Just about the time I was getting the hang of things, it felt like Ciul was saying, "Welp, okay, I've shown you what I wanted to show you so there's not much more point to this so let's enter the denouement." Suddenly I found myself going from puzzles that were so transparent that they didn't feel like puzzles to puzzles that were hard and seemingly pointless except to be there for the sake of having puzzles. Because, y'know, that's what 8 out of 10 IF players allegedly crave. That switch changed the mood of the game considerably for me. I was enjoying the back story more than the puzzles, and was willing to jump through minor hoops to get more flashbacks, until the flashbacks became solidly interwoven with the puzzles and provided no real story, just means to an end.

And as for the ultimate finale, I found it really linear with weak reasons why I couldn't do certain things, and even the hints didn't get me to the ending of the game. Upon reading the hints to see what my ultimate goal was (because really, I felt like I was just solving puzzles because they were there, not because I was feeling motivation), I thought to myself, "Really? That's it? That's the goal, to find a peaceful death? When let's be honest, I have found many, many ways to painfully die but then I'm dead so the end result is the same and when I'm dead I'm supposed to care after the fact that it was painful?"

This is when I realized that I'd gone from a game I'd enjoyed to a game I really wasn't enjoying at all, and so I quit struggling for the last lousy (fourth) point and called it good.

Sad, because I think this could have been a larger work that explored some cool ideas.