Reviews by JJ McC
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How JJMcC Shook his Preconceptions, March 31, 2024If, through some strange quirk of the hyperlink-chain that got you here, my words are the first you are reading about this game know this: Quisborne is a mammoth game. It took me over 37 hours, 2 full weeks, start to finish. I laughingly said at start "This may take me longer than Spiderman 2." It didn't, BUT IT COULDA. With a game of such epic scale, my normal review approaches strain and buckle. Would you want to read a five hour summary? A three hour thematic deconstruction and post-mortem? Heck, a forty-five minute riff on prose style and craftsmanship? Of course you don't. You wanna know if it's worth your time, and since I probably shocked and awed you I'll just flat say: It definitely is.
Charged with mentoring a young, sheltered Prince, the player pursues an epic quest to fulfill the youthful monarch-to-be's dreams of making himself worthy of his legacy and love interest. Yeah, it involves solving puzzles. So many puzzles. If at this point you are starting to think, "Oh ok, I have the measure of this game," I promise you do not. Every image you have in your head of a puzzle-driven IF fantasy quest is technically accurate. It's just laughably inadequate - like a grainy, faded, off-center and out-of-focus Polaroid of the ACTUAL Quisborne.
Actual Quisborne is a wide-screen, technicolor, surround-sound experience of deep world building, epic scale, vivid characters, challenging logistical and mechanical puzzles, and sweet charm. And wordplay. So many jokes, puns and poems. It's like the man said, "If you didn't laugh at that one, don't worry, three hundred more are coming right behind it."
From the jump it pulls you into its thrall with its graphical presentation. (do use QTADS as your interpreter. You only hurt yourself by not) The graphical flourishes and music are evocative, disciplined and delightful, and marry with the PDF map to create the perfect fantasy-road-novel vibe.
Quisborne is also probably the most tightly crafted parser you will ever play, certainly the tightest one I've played. For all its scope and depth, there is exacting precision in its player experience. Great thought has been put into Quality of Play features, designed to reduce or eliminate player frictions. A frankly deranged amount of time has been devoted to incidental dialogue, atmosphere, scenes and vignettes that suggest a wild, vibrant world around you. NPCs have arcs, memories and call backs, situational awareness and so, so many stories. A staggering amount of unique responses to player actions give a near conversational feel that defies IF repetition fatigue better than any game I've seen. So many, that I suspect even the most leisurely playthrough may experience less than 50% of the text in the game. Is it flawless? No. At its size, statistically it CAN'T be. I found a few bugs (since fixed), you probably will too. I can say, as a percentage of its runtime, the bug impact is in insignificant digits.
On the topic of gameplay engineering, its multi-tiered hint system is amazing. From subtle, unsolicited "by the ways" from your companion, to a pre-hint NUDGE command, to task lists, memories and a top-tier progressive HINT function, your vast problem space may feel overwhelming, but the game provides whatever level of lifeline you prefer.
There are accommodations to make with the game for sure, even beyond its raw scale. The first is its prose. Springing from a tradition of tiny, memory constrained machines, classic IF leans to the terse side of description. Bringing that expectation here is a mistake. Quisborne will inundate you with words - I once uncharitably described it as Class IV torrents of words. They're pretty great words, but man are there a lot of them. They very much do the work of establishing the lore and atmosphere of the world but you will need to adjust to their pace.
These words also weave a finely detailed tapestry. At one point, I had cause to compare it Where's Waldo. There are SO many fine details, picking out important ones becomes a puzzle of its own. Quisborne demands and rewards your attention to detail. It is easy to lose sight of that amidst the heroic scope of the thing but DO NOT FORGET. It is a cold, uncaring fantasy world, it is not your friend. WATCH IT CLOSELY.
The next accommodation is its breadth of puzzle play. You are going to be served a delightful buffet of varied puzzles: (modest) mazey mapping, logic posers, hide and seek, crafting, bizarre logic jumps, creative misuse of objects, so many more. Inevitably, some will hit your brain's precise chemical cocktail better than others. While there are masterful setpieces everyone will clap with glee at, likely there will be a few that chafe more than delight. HINT your way past those is my advice. There's 300 great ones right behind it. I mean by the time you get to the Witch's House... ahhh, no. I want to but I can't.
So, I haven't talked much about the story all this is in service of yet. Y'know how some stories are thrill-ride, twist-a-minute shockers that gut punch with surprise after surprise? This is not that. This is a road novel in IF form, building character and story through a series of idiosyncratic vignettes around a tight thematic core. It is slower, sweeter, and richer for it. The ending it builds towards is just about perfect, thick with deeply earned emotion. When finally finishing, you will get the same mix of satisfaction and regret as from a great novel.
It's very funny. It's EPIC. It's challenging. It's a lot. It's expertly crafted. It's DEEP. It's rewarding. 37 hours well spent.
Played: 3/12-26/24
Playtime: 37.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging in the moment, Transcendent in realized scope, Mostly Seamless
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
And Now I Have a Nemesis, January 6, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
During IFCOMP judging, I consider myself pretty disciplined about embargoing spoilers or opinions of other reviewers prior to publishing my own. Towards the end I gradually, then increasingly frenzied, read reviews of entries I’ve already published. I’m pretty good at glazing my eyes when I detect titles I haven’t played/reviewed yet. Certainly, I don’t read WORDS. LINKS though… those damn light blue bastards cut through my self-imposed fog quicker than I can back-link away.
Damn you to a fiery hell of a thousand suns @EJoyce !!! In a review of this game, WHY OH WHY did you cite Detective: A Modern Crime Boardgame??? WHY DID YOU HIGHLIGHT IT IN GLOWING NEON BLUE??? Which you did deliberately, don’t play coy! I had forgotten I glimpsed it, which reviewer I was catching up on, but as soon as AnC4 fired up I KNEWKNEWKNEW a) that I had in fact seen it; b) that it almost certainly had to be in a review of this game; and c) I WOULD BE ABLE TO THINK OF NOTHING ELSE ITS ENTIRE RUNTIME. Obviously, I have since tracked you down, @EJoyce, before you can escape judgement for your crime! You may face justice, but I have to live FOREVER with the stain on my integrity.
Damn you even further @EJoyce because you are RIGHT to invoke it.
For the uninitiated (which @EJoyce probably already brought you up to speed, but Imma do it just in case), D:MCB is a card-driven, cooperative mystery game, where you play your investigation over several game days. It owes big parts of its gameplay to the prior boardgame Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective. You select clue cards that provide leads, interviews, forensics (and red herrings), and that take a variable number of hours from your timer. At the end, you answer a questionnaire whether you think you’ve solved it or not! I don’t know if it was an inspiration for AnC4, but they sure share DNA. And why not? It is great DNA! My family and I play a scenario most holidays and have great fun putting up mind map boards with yellow stickies and colored yarn. Our hit rate is pretty good, but far from perfect. Our favorite was the LA Crimes scenarios - they were fun mysteries but also tied into a kind of fun-bonkers overarching plot.
I digress. When I first fired this game up, AFTER MY CRISIS OF INTEGRITY, I nearly shut it down thinking, ‘this would be great to play one weekend with my remote son!’ Sadly he was unavailable through the span of IFCOMP23 judging so with great reluctance I solo play/dual screened it. This is very much NOT the best way to enjoy this game. I mean, its fine? It’s just, the table talk/wild speculation/jockeying for pet theories and lines of inquiry, that’s part of the fun. Not covered in this review.
The dual screen conceit had its charms though. From my god’s eye view, I could see the text was slightly different between the two. It appeared to be flavor, appropriate to the character but not carrying different mystery information? Or even questioning options? That was cool, but would have been better if it had different info/options too! I was also hoping there would be opportunity to ‘split up’ and cover more ground, though did not seem to. Both of those would have been a nice tweak of the formula (though the latter could def lead to some post-game finger pointing! “What do you mean you forgot to mention the FINGERPRINTS??”)
The mystery itself was nicely broad - a wide array of suspects and possible motives. Some concrete clues to follow up on. The writing was clean and effective - it carried a bit of character for our dual protagonists, their Girl Friday, and most of the suspects themselves had distinct voices. Motives and opportunity were ably planned and believably trickle-revealed through interviews. As predisposed as I was to this PARTICULAR flavor of gameplay, I devoured it for sure. I didn’t do a great job establishing a strong theory, but I was missing my co-detectives. These things are kind of review proof in one sense anyway. Between probably chasing bad leads and insufficient cleverness, there are so many ways it could be my fault, I’ll likely never know if the mystery was ill-constructed. Sure didn’t feel like it!
I wish I could report that I got as far as the final poll then shut off, saving the spoiler to play again later with family. I was simply too Engaged to think of it until too late, and now that is lost to me. @EJoyce, somehow you are responsible for that too! It was a Seamless implementation of this mystery system, one I am deeply predisposed to.
The only off note for me was - why all the famous names and this bizarre Antiquity/Historical/Golden Age of Hollywood mashup? No, that’s not the question. The setting is delightful. The question is why not USE this inspired setting to advantage? D:MCB gives you shell characters, but with slightly different skills that may not encourage deep role playing, but at least give everyone something unique to bring to the mystery. Our protagonists here were mostly interchangeable, despite having a leg up name recognition wise to their boardgame counterparts! As it was, we could as easily have been sharing a single screen for game planning and execution. The protagonists are surrounded by an idiosyncratic cast of characters, but none of them (excepting perhaps Rasputin) evokes any fun connection to their namesakes. The mashup setting kind of faded into the background as the plot went on. Yeah I was talking to James Dean, but had little sense it was THAT James Dean. Were the famous names just mnemonics? That felt like an unconscionable missed opportunity to elevate the material in a fun way.
What? I already told you I was in the bag for this thing, I can’t ask for just a little more? Don’t answer that @EJoyce. You’ve done enough.
—
Aaand now I’ve read @Ejoyce’s review and it is a really insightful dive into the nuts and bolts of this game. A much deeper and more clear-eyed evaluation than my “Hey this reminds me of that thing I like!” take. Y’know what though? I DID really like it. But that review gives you more to chew on. Stinkin’ @EJoyce. Yeah, the irony of linking to it is not lost on me.
Played: 11/9/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished, accused innocent person
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaged, Seamless, penalty point for not fully leveraging fun setting
Would Play After Comp?: Well, I can’t now, can I? CAN I @EJOYCE???
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
There is a roadside attraction in Nebraska called Carhenge. You can probably imagine what it is, just from its name. It is a loving, painstaking scale replica of Stonehenge, created from sculptures made of automobile hulks. Objectively, it is a baffling artifact. Yes, Stonehenge is cool and has some cultural cache. But the work required to execute Carhenge was mammoth, relative to the modest means of its creator. It is kind of a funhouse mirror reflection, rendered on a scale that while reduced is STILL humbling to observe. The result is a work that has the general shape of its inspiration but its towering weirdness is all its own. Its impact becomes less about ‘does it look like Stonehenge?’ and more about ‘who would do this and why?’ Even if the result of the effort doesn’t objectively appeal to you, the baffling passion of its creator is magnetic.
'Kay you can probably guess Stonehenge is 80’s RPG text games and Carhenge is Hawkstone.
When you fire up Hawkstone, a file cheekily named Adventure.exe, you get a welcome screen that homages a TRS-80, complete with directory structure and auto-typed (with typo!) start game command. It is a powerful start! It evokes its inspiration and immediately puts the player in place, before a keyboard in 1980, firing up the latest fantasy-inspired text adventure. This one with RPG-like stats and character progression!
It has wry humor to it - killing a worm confers treasures, though using them is mostly not possible. You find weird artifacts throughout the landscape like live fish, specifically branded matches, valuables lying in random places. There are anachronistic jokes - you can find Online Shopping and maybe my favorite Crypt Currency. And you just explore without clear purpose beyond maybe LEVELING UP!!1! The leveling system is pretty arbitrary, comedically so, and I was never sure whether it actually was used in gameplay. I actually really liked the hint system - it cost gold to use, and since you could not be sure if and when you would get more acted as a soft back pressure to consulting it.
Between the quasi-useful items you can collect and barely-motivated obtuse puzzles to solve, it is a decidedly off-kilter vibe, keeping the player off balance and never quite sure what is coming next or even what needed doing. After some initial, fairly straightforward ‘go-find-use’ puzzles it rockets into a ‘read author’s mind’ exercise without warning. My best advice, which the game did give to me but I didn’t understand at the time, is to lean on the >USE and >GO commands when stuck. Doesn’t matter if it seems logical or not, like Frank’s RedHot, put that sh*t on EVERYTHING. At one point you need to (Spoiler - click to show)>GO ORB. That’ll get you maybe 60% of the way there. After that, you’re on your own. Quite literally. The game is no help cluing what weird thing it wants you to do next, what verb you would never think to employ.
I consulted the Walkthrough a lot. Overwhelmingly, when I did my takeaway was ‘Hnh. I, ah… hnh.’ It was like the author was implementing a psychedelic dream logic acid trip that only made sense because they lived it, with no thought or accommodation for those that had not. For me, the unhinged weirdness of it was not leavened with enough humor to be compelling. If it had let me play along with narrative nudging or clues to point me in its non-Euclidian directions maybe I could have embraced it better. Instead, it practically screamed ‘this is for me, not you, player!’ and I became preoccupied with the question ‘who would build this and why?’ Because it is quite an achievement - the Walkthrough is LONG. Eventually, I stopped playing and just skimmed the walkthrough to see what kinds of things needed doing, and realized I never had a chance of getting on this thing’s frequency. It was deeply arbitrary and opaque with almost no in-game cluing of any kind and presumably scratching a singular itch.
As a gameplay experience it was Mechanical and Intrusively opaque. As time went on there was less and less me testing, experimenting and exploring and more ‘sigh, what am I supposed to do next, Walkthrough?’ But I can’t help but marvel at the passion and investment of the author in bringing this ungainly, baffling, towering thing to life.
"We admire these things not because they needed doing..."
Played: 11/8/23
Playtime: 1.5hr, not finished, eventually laid down my cards and pushed away from the table
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Intrusive opacity
Would Play After Comp?: No, Experience feels complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Action Librarian!, January 6, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
It took me twice the time to find a version of ADRIFT I could install and run as it did to play this game. That seem right to you? It’s fine, it kind of felt like a prelude puzzle of sorts, clicking and typing commands, getting feedback why it wasn’t working, consulting walkthroughs and hints from intfiction.org, finally being greeted with that lovely, lovely victory prompt: “Type B to begin…”
My executable quest had everything - stakes (it is threatening my table run!), puzzles (how do I trick my virus detection software…?), comedy (my wife’s double take at seemingly random profanity), a dramatic arc cresting in victory. Such an epic quest, all setting the table for… (Spoiler - click to show)making tea and shuttling a scroll up a few flights of stairs?
This is an episode of an ongoing fantasy series - one with kings and dukes fighting invading lizard men and questing for an axe of legend. My role in this sprawling tapestry? Look up some stuff in the library! It’s almost unfair for the game to have to compete with its own lore AND my epic Installation Quest. Low stakes are not inherently a problem, in fact they can be quite fun. The contrast of low stakes and high difficulty is inherently funny, and easily escalated with witty characters, plot turns and compounding absurdities. Without those things though… they’re just low stakes.
The work was crisp and mostly friction free, it definitely had that going for it. The gameplay was parser based, guided by a list of ten tasks to complete, most in service of getting the King his genealogy information. These kinds of task lists are not a bad choice, they ensure the player is clear on the goal at any given point in time, and gets a quick charge of GOT IT! when one is struck from the list. As I was working the list, I found myself tracking the tasks on three axes - stakes (how compelling was what needed doing), difficulty (how engaging was the puzzle challenge to do it) and enjoyment (how funny/satisfied was doing them). The fact that I felt compelled to do this at all was an early warning sign - usually I try to do that kind of analysis in reflection.
For me, the stakes were really low, like pick up my keys off the table low. Again, not a problem per se, but not compelling enough to drive engagement on its own. The puzzles I found to be surprisingly on rails. The game would actively block off map areas not needed to solve the current task, effectively shepherding you to right area. Sometimes the tasks were multi-step, but I don’t think any required even half a dozen. In one that was perversely amusing, the task was (paraphrasing here) (Spoiler - click to show)trace the king’s lineage. You might think that would be a puzzle involving finding specific scrolls or books, making logical connections between births/deaths and cross linkages with family names or notable traits. What you might not think to try is (Spoiler - click to show)>TRACE LINEAGE Literally just type the goal in as a command and satisfy the task! When the most involved puzzle is making tea, but it is EXACTLY the steps you would take in your house, is it really a puzzle? Other puzzles only required that you show up in the right room, and the game then completes tasks for you!
So, low stakes, low intellectual demand, humor would have to carry the day! Here too, bare bones. Some wry lines here and there but mostly clear, economical transitionary text then ready for the next command. It was functional, it had a good heart, but it wasn’t trying to make you laugh, just convey the next event.
I wouldn’t say this was a BAD time, it was zippy enough, certainly I was never stymied. But it all came so easily I only half felt like I was doing the work. The charge of ‘completed task’ was muted by lack of meaningful thought or input on my part, and lack of giggling on the way.
I finished with 9/10 tasks complete, the end result of which was, yup, confirming what the story gave me every reason to believe had to be true. I had assumed I could complete the last task out of order, but the game’s guardrails did not in fact allow me to return to the remaining puzzle sites when completing other tasks. Without stakes, narrative twist, puzzle or humor providing any Sparks it was ultimately a pleasant enough but Mechanical experience with Notable Bugs (and narrative rails) to overlook.
I will say, the stories told in background lore DID sound very interesting. Rest of the series might be worth checking out. I really liked the apparently deep episode count of shared-world games listed at the end. It had a nifty “pulp paperback series” feel to it, with evocative pulp fantasy titles. Probably with Frazetta covers! And now I am wondering what a Frazetta cover of muscled fantasy heroes and buxom damsels making tea would look like. If anything would tempt me to flirt with AI, that might be it.
Played: 11/8/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notable bugs and rails
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Calorie Conscious Questing, January 6, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
During IFCOMP22, this author’s work snuck up on me. Last year, I was treated to a homebrew parser implementation that wowed me. It’s the backbone for this game too! No more element of surprise, I’m on to you this year, game!
I wish I could say that history repeated itself, but that was not to be my experience. My issues come down to two: Interaction and Fiction. Ok, that was inexcusably glib, I’ll explain. It seems inevitable that at some point I’ll end up comparing this to last year’s too, but I’ll hold off as long as I can.
On the Fiction side, the premise is tissue thin - retrieve a fantasy orb from a cottage and its surroundings. There is really nothing to latch on to here, no interesting world building, environment engineering or character work. No motivating impulse. Understood game, it’s a puzzle-fest, nothing wrong with that. Don’t sugar coat it for me. Nevermind that SUGAR IS DELICIOUS, I’ll just go straight to the medicine. Here’s the thing though. A fictional setting and framework, particularly fantastical ones, can be more than just sugar. They economically let you define ‘rules of the world’ that can inform a player’s actions and crucially give you chrome to mask the barriers. Without leveraging that, you are reduced to “You just don’t feel it is the right time…” “There is a barrier to progress, maybe you need to do something unrelated?..” “Something (the author) is telling you no…” It lays bare what we all know to be true - that IF puzzle solving is guessing the author’s intent. I know to be true that my parents are fully anatomically correct homo sapiens. Let me infer it, please dear GOD don’t make me SEE IT.
On the Interactive side, the puzzle design is rife with remote-effect knobs and switches with so much virtual real estate between them deduction is nearly impossible. You may pull a lever and ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD something interesting happens? Is this Butterfly Effect, the game? Even some clues are fixed remote from the puzzles they are cluing. There are red herring objects that look and feel like puzzles, but since they’re not they become huge wastes of time that you’re never quite sure WON’T be needed for some remote effect. Some game objects spawn new objects in old areas without hint, meaning if you don’t RE-examine old things you’ll never see them. And if you do, you will have no idea what it was you did that made it show up. Arbitrary barriers vanish when you get the right object, without clue that they’ve done so or why. All this makes for an opaque world with unpredictable behaviors and attendant lack of perceived player agency.
Perhaps most egregiously, the puzzle design was often actively at war with its interface, which was its biggest strength. This homebrew parser implementation POPS ya’ll. It is speedy and tight, and very capable. Why then are puzzles not leveraging this super impressive strength? Instead, they seem to steer directly into the cracks. Using spells requires a laborious spellbook paging exercise to relearn EVERY TIME. (The fact that spells are so infrequently useful actually makes that WORSE.) There is a maze that while clued, requires two commands for every step, and it’s not short. And you may need to navigate it several times. Another maze you don’t even get to interact with. Instead you are led through in a chafingly pointless and extended timed text sequence. Other puzzles require pressing buttons to set a code one increment at a time instead of dialing it in directly. Between the obscure design of the puzzles, and the punishing interaction needed to experiment with them, it feels like no thought was given to how it would PLAY only how to connect the desired clockwork of successful moves. I don’t believe it was engineered to maximize player frustration, but I see where that conclusion could be reached.
Ultimately, I consulted HINTS often here, somewhat sheepishly given its Spartan layout. I was almost always rewarded with ‘ok, but how was I supposed to know to do that?’ The answer is an implied ‘explore and experiment,’ which ok I guess? Then why make experimenting so painfully frictiony?
At this point I can no longer resist invoking last year’s game as contrast. It was almost a mirror image. It had a light Fictional setting that did SO much lifting in justifying the puzzles and cluing the cause-effect of the place. And was fun in its own right! The puzzle design leveraged its poppy engine for really engaging gameplay and satisfying puzzles. More of that please, author! This was a Mechanical exercise for me, puzzle design Intrusively anti-gameplay.
Credit where due though, there was one (Spoiler - click to show)spelling puzzle that I found to be a really clever and fun tweak of form. There is cool stuff in there!
Played: 11/7/23
Playtime: 2hr 160/350, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Intrusive remote and slow puzzle design
Would Play After Comp?: No, not my puzzle style
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Making Virtue a Vice, January 6, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Historically, the British have a lot to answer for, no doubt. They may not have invented colonization, but they sure perfected it. They turned class warfare into a national past time and a global preoccupation. They pulled the levers of racism to throw European economy into chaos. They plundered historical legacy from cultures around the globe. Don’t even get me started on their culinary corpus. But you know what they DON’T need to apologize for? London Dry Gin.
London Dry Gin took Dutch Genever, a full-mouthed almost-whiskey, and/or too-sweet-by-half Old Tom and said “rawther, pip pip, we’ll just sharpen this up, old bean, distill away the sugars, layer in botanical complexity for a crisp, clean dram that is best chased with more of itself, what ho?” Y’know, cause that’s how they talk. London Dry Gin single-handedly turned the Martini into the most popular cocktail in the world for the latter half of the 20th century, before the Martini got corrupted by the complete nothing Vodka and the Old Fashioned justifiably stole the crown. Gin pairs so sublimely with Tonic and lime that its name is synonymous with ‘refreshing.’ In the Negroni, the Italians showed that Gin can rescue even the unappealingly bitter Campari. If you’ve never had a London Dry-based Corpse Reviver #2, you have chosen a life of privation and self-denial that disrespects your brief time on this mortal coil.
London Dry Gin doesn’t deserve Virtue’s scorn.
This is a fiction with almost no interactivity. There are less than a handful of choices to make, and only one seems weirdly impactful. Most of the time clicking is purely to advance the text. The story itself is a character study of an unpleasant, unfulfilled housewife with suppressed trauma transferring her desperate dissatisfactions into social outrage. That outrage takes on its own life, ignoring or eliminating anything that doesn’t feed it (like family relationships or the simple truths right in front of her), and exacerbating things that do, like casual racism. No lies detected, tell me more!
While that is a very timely phenomenon to showcase, and not just in England, the story makes some choices that undermine its impact. For one, the work puts us squarely in this protagonist’s pov - we only have access to the story through her. She is off-puttingly one note. I think the story introduces her trauma as a way to generate sympathy but it is so downplayed it becomes incidental. Don’t get me wrong, foregrounding trauma is probably NOT desirable as that would carry all kinds of unwanted subtext. Rather, before the plot turn, all we get is trauma and repressed anger and a side of mild othering. The story makes no other attempt to make her complex. Even before things escalate she is unpleasant to be stuck with. I think the work might be better served to show more fullness to this character, some positive aspects the reader might want to share. Or even go all in on flaws that are more fun to gawk at. Cruella De Ville is not sympathetic but she is a tremendous hang! Elphaba is deeply (ok maybe somewhat manipulatively) sympathetic and her descent is engaging to watch. Instead we are stuck with someone kind of awful to start with, then we just watch her curdle.
Another defeating choice is how clumsily the story hammers the obvious truth at her. Her daughter flat out spells it out for her (yet despite disapproving of her mother’s arc, doesn’t take any other action?). An MP, presumably not local, knows the truth. That HAS to imply that at least some locals are well aware of it too - where else is he getting his info? Her outrage is portrayed as so magnetic it has become a local political movement. While a bit ham-fisted, I can get on board with self-delusion overtaking reason here. It beggars credulity though that 1) EVERYONE is willing to overlook this glaring, embarrassing fact and 2) that it would not be used by political enemies at a minimum. With a more compellingly rendered protagonist we might forgive this conceit. Certainly conservative party willingness to fan flames for political advantage is not a stretch. Worse, it doesn’t need that political detail to get its message of gross hypocrisy across! It could have stayed a family secret and political disinterest in the truth could be just as damning without straining credulity!
The work is billed as a satire, but the whole thing is pretty humorless. Maybe with a more firm hand on tone, these things would be sold better? As is, the protag seems more grounded than caricature, and the plot developments more illogical than satirical. [sidebar: I hope we all know we are living in a post-satire world anyway, yes? As a species we have lost the ability to detect insincere rhetorical exaggeration.]
While the story may be unconvincing, the interactivity on the other hand was just flat confounding. The only impactful choice to make is (Spoiler - click to show)what beverage to share with an opportunistic politician. Of three choices, two lead to an abrupt, unsatisfying end of (Spoiler - click to show)‘welp she made her own choices.’ It resolves nothing in plot or character, it just ends. Maybe this is the satire? If so, the end screen needs to do a LOT more work to land it.
Regardless, if she chooses the GIN at that last choice we (Spoiler - click to show)mint yet another awful politician! With THAT choice?!?!? I found no thematic or satirical resonance. I don’t think alcohol is even mentioned prior to this. Maybe it’s a metaphorical choice to embrace the most extreme option, drinking the cool-aid as it were? Ok, but there is no clue to the player that that is what we’re doing until it’s done. Also, it feels like the protag had committed to ‘extreme’ WELL prior to this point.
I really feel I need to defend London Dry here, even in satire. The narrative is timely, its theme could not be more spot on. I just found as a story it didn’t spark for me, and satirical elements were too underplayed to land. A Mechanical, Mostly Seamless exercise of page turning. (Shy of Seamless due to confusing ending use of interactivity.)
Classic Martini: Anywhere from 5-2 to 5-1 ratio London Dry Gin to Dry Vermouth (less vermouth is a pose. More vermouth appropriate to other gins, not London Dry), dash orange bitters, stir with ice. Strain into chilled glass, garnish with olive (no brine) or better squeezed lemon twist.
Classic G&T: 2 oz London Dry Gin over lots of ice in a Highball glass, top with Tonic, garnish with slice of lime, and sprig of spanked mint if feeling saucy. Give lime a light squeeze before drinking.
Negroni: equal parts London Dry Gin, Campari, Italian Sweet Vermouth. Stir in a rocks glass with ice, squeeze and garnish with wide twist of orange.
Corpse Reviver #2: equal parts London Dry Gin, lemon juice, Contreau, and Lillet Blanc (or the historically closer Kina l’Aero d’Or), shake with ice, strain into a chilled coup glass, swirled with absinthe. Garnish with cocktail cherry, not maraschino.
Gin is not the villain here.
Played: 11/5/23
Playtime: 45min, 3 cycles, 2 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but would definitely have a cocktail after IFCOMP23. Or during!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Can't Hear No Buzzers and Spells, January 6, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Part five of the review sub-series “Twinesformers: Parsers in disguise.” The latest reviewed work to derive gameplay from parser traditions, but bend Twine to the task. In gameplay, I found this to be on the rough side of the spectrum. There is a main story pane, which has links to interesting objects inside location descriptions, and a side pane which contains command buttons (Explore, Go, Action, Talk, Cast). You bounce back and forth between location pane and command pane, often needing two or three clicks to get anything done. In my head, this seemed like an interesting paradigm to maybe apply to Texture, building on what All Hands showed us was possible. Here, not only was it clumsy, it was also… visually unappealing? New links could spring in above the text in a disruptive and laundry-listy way.
The spell system has a nice idea behind it, but similarly suffers inelegant UI. You learn spells throughout the game, eventually discovering (Spoiler - click to show)prefix/suffix combos can be recombined to do new things! That is a really cool mechanism, narratively well timed! It is undermined a bit by text choice. You get SO many of them, it is almost impossible to keep them all in your head, so casting becomes a (Spoiler - click to show)lawnmower of combining sub-words until you get the effect you want. The prefixes at least have some kind of mnemonic juice to them, the suffixes felt totally, unintuitively random. The puzzles are mostly straightforward, more pushing at the interface model than brain burning, but there is a nifty time loop one.
In isolation, these gameplay challenges kind of straddle the Notable/Intrusive boundary. Against a bland narrative they would be the dominant takeaway and tip Intrusive. Boy oh boy is this narrative not bland!
It throws a lot of things against the wall, without having any idea how to unify them. The main narrative tone is light bro-comedy, a fraternity of wizards literally called BRO engaged in a low stakes paintball game. It is twisting Potter lore for comedy, but also background, and can’t decide which it wants more. Sometimes Potter lore is fictional, sometimes real depending on the needs of the scene. It is also an allegory for persecution and prejudice, diving into dissonantly serious flashbacks of disturbing magic-user abuse by not-even-thinly-misnamed Muggles. It kind of inverts the whole Potter engagement with these topics without a lot of thought or control or comment on the inspiration’s takes. It also feels a bit off. The wizards in question are uniformly white dudes. Casting them as an oppressed minority has kind of a squicky, coopted ‘no, I’m the victim here’ vibe that doesn’t sit right. Or it wouldn’t EXCEPT…
It is ALSO, and this is my favorite, weirdly homo-erotic! There are almost no females in the game, barring one whom the protagonist showed complete ambivalence toward in the face of her clear romantic interest. The frat bros are super emotionally supportive of each other, a tack not typically associated with sexist Animal House vintage comedies. And OH those wand descriptions. Yeah, wands. Y’know sometimes wands are just cigars. Deeehfinitely not here though. Paintball attacks are openly, gleefully ejaculatory. The spell to paint an opponent is SPLORT. One character’s wand is, and I’m spoilering this not because it’s not great, but because you’ll laugh more if you find it while playing, (Spoiler - click to show)TURGID. It is sold I think by the completely deadpan delivery. It’s not QUITE clear the narrative knows what it’s doing here, even though it definitely does. This playful comedy subtext lends deniability to the ‘poor, persecuted white dudes’ angle. Not a lot, but maybe just enough.
So I guess it’s a gay Potter prejudice-trauma bro-comedy? Well now that I see it written out, there’s almost certainly slashfic of this out there. Despite its loose stitching and contradictions, I kinda love it for that? I think the tone saves it - even its most dire parts focus on the puzzle in play, backgrounding the worst excesses in shadow. Kind of. Usually. Also, isolating the harder themes to flashback provides a narrative break from the lighter, subtext-oblivious paintball sections. You can see I’m bending over backwards to try to justify this strange, strange melange. I’ll tell you one thing, with all this going on, for sure the UI paradigm was NOT my main focus as I was playing!
Just too internally dissonant for Engaging, but raging, bouncing Sparks of Joy showering the place, just splattering all over a Notably intrusive UI.
I am so, so sorry for that. I am an adolescent.
Played: 11/5/23
Playtime: 2hr, not finished, 4/5 foes, 4 medallions
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notable kludgy interface, bonus point for unhinged narrative stew
Would Play After Comp?: Yeah, I kinda think I have to… (oh no, I just, I have no excuse…) …finish.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
How I learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Zarf, January 6, 2024Here is my history with this very beloved property. I was introduced waay back in high school by a friend who had acquired cassette tapes of the original radio show. I DEVOURED them, instantly obsessed. Then I read the books, including Fish and later Harmless. Some time after that, I watched the BBC miniseries on PBS with the laughably endearing special effects. Then the big budget movie whose cast was insanely awesome, but the story suffered lack of breathing room. [sidebar: that is still the order I would rank the works in.] Is that all of it? Did I miss anything? Nope, I think that completely covers…
Uh, the game.
Due to an accident of history my interest in computer games had waned temporarily during the crucial window, and I somehow never got around to playing it. Years later (extending to present day) it was its reputation as an idiosyncratic brain burner that convinced me I needed to somehow steel myself for the experience and never quite got there. So for me, the timelines have just never lined up. Why not just jump into a fan-created sequel? asks IFCOMP23.
Douglas Adams brought an off-kilter, hyper logical, left field sensibility to his work. It’s like fractal humor. From the High Concept premises (many of which are just window dressing) down to the word-by-word phrasing all of it is of a piece - delighting with its insane, unique connections yet clicking together like precision engineering. So, a singular voice, a beloved property, a highly regarded milestone of IF. What an act to presume and follow! “Hold My Beer” doesn’t begin to cover it!
So how did the DICK MCBUTTS scale testicles fare in this effort? Better than you might expect. This game comes from the cruel design school, presumably aligned with its predecessor. That is decidedly not my favored slice of the spectrum, but I agreed to embrace and play the game on its terms.
The game opens with some Adams-tribute text and acquitted itself pretty ok. RE Marvin: “something bad to happen to himself, which it always does.” RE the Heart of Gold: “(which seems like quite an unlikely occurrence, considering the ship you are currently in is very likely to do unlikely things)”. I might eliminate the words “to himself” in the first one, but in the zone. I’m already on its side. Might’ve been worth an offhand mention that we are traveling with Arthur but I assumed. Let’s start exploring!
In early going, I died four times in 65 moves, topping out at a score of 5! This opening, I think, is kind of ingenious. I understood it was going to be cruel, but by opening with so many random deaths it really drove expectations home and kind of neutered whatever objections I might have. Undo/Save/Restore would be constant companions, understood game. No further questions.
Puzzle design, divorced from the mythology trappings, did not enthrall me in their inherent elegance. Buried details, arbitrary timer puzzles with incomplete UNDOs, unsolvable states (thankfully highlighted by the game, though letting you run on for some time before informing you of it). I kind of did enjoy the nonsensical maze that changed with every runthrough, mocking my map. I not even mad, game! (Spoiler - click to show)When hiding behind the Great Device, going one way seems to be soft fail of endless waiting, while the other does what lore had me expecting. In two hours I completed 3 puzzles - two via consulting walkthrough for nudges and one via my prior knowledge of the property and was maybe on my way to #4. (To be fair, at this point who is going to engage Milliways without some prior exposure?) 3 puzzles in two hours is low, like shockingly low.
Still not mad! Getting the opportunity to play in this familiar space, maybe a little diluted but unmistakably echoing Adams’ style, was just fun. Dying, resetting, retrying over and over - this is not a gameplay flavor I seek out but here it felt kinda smooth. Other games have failed to convince me of the value of this cruelty level but somehow Milliways did. Puzzles didn’t quite click together crisply enough to call it Engaging, but Sparks for sure.
It was with real disappointment I hit what appears to be a game breaking bug. In Milliways itself I could not reenter the kitchen without hanging the window. The third time I hit this bug my score had topped out at 80/400 at the 1:55 mark. Too late to consult the walkthrough for a workaround. I am given to understand that maybe this is fixed in subsequent releases, and since this SO impacted my enjoyment, am not including my rating in the average.
Somehow Milliways dodged all the obvious ways to fail. It respectfully honored its inspirations. It ably paid tribute to Adams’ prose. It improbably got me to ENJOY its cruelty and embrace its puzzles. Passing all those daunting challenges, it feels heartbreaking and deeply unfair that it was brought down by something as mundane as a technical bug. A big, brutal, blocking technical bug. For sure worth revisiting once fixed.
Played: 11/5/23
Playtime: 1hr, 55min, hung for last time, score 80/400
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Unplayable
Would Play After Comp?: Once fixed, yeah, I think I will. After finally playing Hitchhikers
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Those Low Down Dirty Soul Repossession Blues, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
The last entry in the IFCOMP23 Texture work review sub-series “Playing with Matches” This is a riff on the Robert Johnson/artist deal with devil mythology. It is aided by tremendous cover art, maybe my favorite of the COMP. The myth has staying power because of what it implies: that there is something so compelling about music (despite being an endeavor honestly tangential to our survival as a species) that even our immortal soul is a fair trade. Yes, all of Art is kind of included but really, MUSIC SPECIFICALLY has this primal pull that we are tempted to believe… maybe worth it? I mean we GET the tradeoff even if unwilling to make it ourselves.
It’s been a while, let me recap Texture (again). Lots of possibilities in drag and drop UI, deep presentation challenges thanks to the chaos twins Font Dancing and Text Hunting, keep it on a super short leash. I am happy to report that the twins are all but neutered here, to the piece’s credit. It exerts tight control on page size, both adroitly shifting to a new page before shrinking and providing limited space for new text to hide. This is far and away the Most Important thing to control in Texture, well done game. It is less successful leveraging the the drag and drop interface (with one exception) to do anything a Twiney choice-select couldn’t accomplish.
The exception was a choice to (Spoiler - click to show)tell the truth or lie. At first, I thought it was a bug that the game wouldn’t accept one of the choices. It got a wry grin when I realized, no, the protag is INCAPABLE of (Spoiler - click to show)telling the truth here. It was a nice use of interface to catalyze a narrative escalation.
The text had a different problem which interestingly only manifested SOME times. Depending on the order of your command selection, sometimes the paragraphs jarred with bad transitions. But sometimes the paragraphs worked regardless of order! I love that! The fact that it EVER worked seems to suggest the author paid attention to this, but was unable to make it work every time. I really appreciated the effort. (I actually wonder if Texture makes this harder than it should be. Can an author not define new text ordering tightly? Must it be at the whims of the player only? That is a high degree of difficulty!)
The opening quote felt right for the piece: “No amount of talent trumps hard work.” I been telling my kids the same thing for years! From the jump, we are positioned to disdain the protag and his easy short cuts. Which honestly is no surprise, given the setup telegraphed in the title, art, blurb and protag’s whole attitude. That’s fine, it is clearly not intended to be a surprise.
Unfortunately, given how much we see of the work’s cards, there isn’t really ANY surprise in how it plays out. I got three endings which seemed to be the entire space. Died twice, had my talent repossessed and humiliated myself on stage once. None of those endings gave even the slightest tweak to what I expected when I first connected PLAY to STORY. Regardless of the work’s other merits, that made for a Mechanical exercise. Props for reigning in the Texture pitfalls, but more consistently managing dynamic text ordering, and more considered use of the drag and drop (and text bubbles!) would be needed to elevate this thing. Also, not leaning hard into the mythical MUSIC side of this felt like another missed opportunity. Here, the protag seemed more concerned with the trappings of success than making music. This might just as easily have been “trade soul for good at chess.” Robert Johnson’s myth is so compelling because of the MUSIC, not the Art of the Deal. (sorry)
Played: 11/5/23
Playtime: 20min, three endings - two deaths, one walk of shame
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, Experience feels complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Where Am I Peeing??, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
The setup is: you are an elf (right? Those guys again…) whose goal is to prepare dinner for their friends. You need some missing ingredients, find 'em! ‘Save the world’ is overrated as a plot motivation, no?
This is a translated work, and there are some glitches to be sure. I took it on myself to note them in my transcript, but started second guessing myself halfway through. Where is the line between ‘robotic adherence to Funk and Wagnalls’ and ‘interesting new language rhythms’? I’m sure not the one to pinpoint that inflection point, but this work actively made me question it.
You know those guys that play doctors on TV, then proceed to give medical advice? My stolen authority is, I’m married to an amateur baker and I’m going to give a baking metaphor. One that will convince you ‘this guy has no idea what baking even is. Maybe should be restrained from entering a kitchen.’
As a game it feels weirdly underBAKED (ah? ah? yah, I did that) with spots of ‘baked to perfection’ inside. Normal cakes bake and the outside firms up first, but you need a toothpick test to determine if the inside is done. Well, this is like a cake that somehow bakes itself inside out! The outside framework is still a bit gooey and loose, but inside there are pockets of firm, fluffy resolution. You wake up in a lab and explore your way through a pretty empty house until finding the kitchen… where the game begins. (In my case 40 MINUTES INTO GAMEPLAY.) So many unimplemented nouns and a slow build setting. The first object I could even examine closely was a toilet pot, and lemme tell you the mental dance my character did on approach was UN. SETTLING. It was a half hour before it was clear I was in a fantasy setting! (Longer before I realized I was an ELF ptoo, ptoo.) You can imagine when one of the first details was ‘I sometimes pee in my backyard,’ how weird THAT came off! Honestly I’m not sure it got any better once I was an elf.
Then, you eventually stumble into the library and a whole tapestry of setting and backstory unfolds before you, liberally peppered with ‘gonna throw fantasy words at you and you’re just gonna have to context your way through.’ I actually really like that approach. In IF, without some careful mood setting, it always strikes me a bit off when the characters explain something they already know for the benefit of the player. Here it comes across as tantalizing world building we don’t completely understand. This is how tantalizing works! If we understood it we’d have a different response: admiration or disappointment. It seems this background is part of a shared world the author intends to flesh out in subsequent works. The glimpses here make a convincing case to keep watching. The world building was the most firm part of this weird, inside-out cake I’m describing, and where most of the text is devoted.
The gooey outside is the gameplay. I mentioned the unimplemented nouns, that are practically ubiquitous. Weirdly ‘UP’ is listed as an exit in every location, but the messaging says, ‘no, don’t try that.’ I can only assume there was a levitation mechanism at play early on that got cut? At least one outdoor location mentions a roof when it rejects you, but maybe the whole thing just should have been trimmed. The puzzles are pretty unchallenging ‘find the stuff,’ most of it laying around or minimal-step sub-questable. One item needs to be marinated in a pond, but the game rejects (Spoiler - click to show) >PUT or >DROP and only accepts (Spoiler - click to show) >THROW . As you go, you get occasional tantalizing backstory details - NPCs you don’t really interact with but have rich things to say; descriptions of the town. Still some baked nuggets in the goo!
So far, flashes of engaging background in a pretty Mechanical experience, right? Well, I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite touch in this game. The HELP system doubles as the author’s DVD-like location-bound commentary track. I resisted initially because I didn’t want spoilers. When it became clear I was walking through a minimally implemented set of rooms, I broke the seal. The author’s voice here is frank and engaging and shot through with the uncertain grasping of a creator struggling with details in service of a goal. That was charming and irresistible, not least of which because it so precisely captured the creative tradeoff process with all its uncertainty, dread and regret. I mean, I’ve felt all of those things in projects of my own ALL THE TIME. In some ways the commentary was more compelling than the underlying game!
What do I do with this physically impossible cake? Between the commentary and the tantalizing background it generated Sparks. Yeah, when cakes are generating sparks I have lost all control over the metaphor. Intrusively under-implemented. Stealth launchpad for the game to follow!
Played: 11/4/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Intrusively under-implemented
Would Play After Comp?: No, but I look forward to seeing the next game in this universe. Which maybe was the point of the thing?
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
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