Ratings and 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
Choose-Your-Own- - - Treatment?, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
It’s not that CYOA and Twiney choice-select have ever been that far apart. The multi-pane user interface and coding hooks of the link paradigm certainly enable creative variations way beyond physical media which muddy the water a bit. But at its unadorned, most vanilla core, choice-select is CYOA with automated page turning. This PDF work really connects those dots explicitly, not the least of which with its bare “Go to page X” in-text links. It’s an IF missing link - like if Lucy also had carpal tunnel and was found with her wrist-brace.
EYP is a work with super appealing, light, cartoony illustrations in service of very serious themes and situations. That contrast is tried and true (like in Maus!). It serves to smooth reader identification and provide some punch when suddenly confronted with protagonist strapped to a bed! Some choices are seductively amusing. Who WOULDN’T want to solve the ‘formula of the world’?? Other choices capture a broad array of defeating and empowering actions, running the gamut from ‘try to stay with treatment’ to ‘run afoul of official intervention’. The looping nature of the story is deliberate… no matter how hopeful or dire a cycle is, there’s always more behind.
Between the wildly disparate places your choices can lead (not gonna lie the wanna make some money? path sent my heart into palpitations) and the wonderfully evocative illustrations, EYP had constant Sparks.
It is super short. Its message is clear through a few sadly amusing loops and then you are invited to end the game embracing the fact of the loop and mitigations. Made sense! Kind of. Because you get there after a ‘have you cycled three times?’ question, it seems to imply you will naturally get there after ‘sufficient’ spins. I think it would have worked better with an indeterminate ‘are you ready?’ or ‘had enough?’ player initiative kind of question. For me anyway. Ok, let’s wrap up… wait, there’s more?
One more to be precise, a second possible ending. If you go a certain path, you are invited to run away from everything. This ending confounded me a bit. How do I interpret this? A single ending I understand. Author has a tight narrative, player settle in to receive it. A branching narrative requires more work - all of its possible branches should be equally satisfying to a player that hunts them out. Equally true to the narrative. Because there are only two paths (discounting a literally endless loop which rings sadly kind of true, but is impractical for me to attempt.)… because of that this ending takes on a near equal footing as the first. But that can’t be right can it? It seems to imply dropping out ‘solves’ the mental issues but missing family is the downside, and to get them back you need to re-engage your mental troubles. I’m not a doctor, but that can’t be right can it? Wouldn’t you just have the same mental challenges in a new place, eventually? This time without your safety net? I’m kind of unsure of myself here, because the author definitely seems to know what they’re on about, but is that right? If it is, the work should hold the hand of the uninitiated a bit more to get us there.
Its brevity is to its credit. It knows what it wants to say, says it and gets out. Sparks for sure, a great mix of sad, funny, and no-nonsense with endearing illustrations. Mostly seamless other than that one bug. Penalty point for 50% of the endings that did not land for me.
Played: 11/4/23
Playtime: 10min, both endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless, penalty point for seeming uncontrolled message
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
Blue Lives Matter!!!1!, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
So Ink is the platform that in my head has become synonymous with “Attractive, High quality presentation.” This piece initially leverages Ink’s graphical power, but doesn’t fully capitalize. On the one hand, the font and color scheme are very appealing. On the other, they don’t really reflect or resonate with the work on offer. This was the first time I felt the platform’s presentation strengths were not adequately utilized. There was also a notable typo density.
These were notable, but not fatal to the narrative. Much more fatal, to me, was the bizarre narrative/plot dissonance. The protagonist is introduced as an uber-competent police officer, at least in their own mind. They are called on to resolve a bank/hostage situation. The protag has SUPER strong negative opinions about Wall Street, reporters and other cops, confidently expressed to create an air of cynical cool. However, the protag’s actions, as reflected in choices they might make, are laughably amateur hour. If they seize the microphone to dress down a Nosy Newsman, they are immediately reduced to a flustering mess and need rescued. Despite having the final say on tactical approaches, they can take choices that other police question, justifiably, as silly. Including an option to, per the text of the piece, ‘Die Hard’ it. Why are those options even available? In one egregious section, you cannot avoid making an OBVIOUSLY CATASTROPHIC comment to the kidnappers unless you tried to take a smoke break earlier? A smoke break minutes into a crisis situation??? Who is this clown?
It’s not helped by narrative dissonances all around the character. An NPC is furious at him (though also a subordinate?) then friendly with only a single click between those mood swings. That same NPC is professionally composed in description and action, but then referred to as ‘twitchy.’ The street officers are referred to as Grays, when NYPD famously wear black uniforms. Early on, I was wondering if this was an Alternate, Fascist Timeline ™, but no.
There are bugs: a choice to select a basement entry replays an upper floor exploration - up instead of down. A side entrance seems to hang the game completely. Since you’re looping replays anyway, not catastrophic but off for sure.
I played through 7 times, exploring the space. I killed 5 assault teams, victims of a supernaturally effective terrorist plot. I lost hostages to an obviously bad choice that should never have been on offer, and I knew it when I made it. I ‘rescued’ the hostages, only to discover the robbers had just left under my nose. Running out of patience and things to explore I started to feel a turn in my head.
Maybe I wasn’t meant to succeed? Maybe this game is a next level critique of Copaganda by offering that cops are actually self-important bumbling idiots in love with their own mythology? Whose fragile victim mindset curdles into adversarial relationship with those they serve? Whose belief of their own unassailable Rightness makes them a menace to themselves and society? I love that read! As soon as it occurred to me, I stopped playing because it would fall apart if I stumbled into a ‘winning’ scenario.
I actually don’t think this is the case. The disjoint narrative, typos and careless character and phrasing work don’t suggest this kind of tight control. The face value game Bounced me hard - what it seemed to be trying pushed at my sensibilities, and the clumsy narrative undermined even that. But I kind of love how it played out for me, and the conclusions it let me draw. I think I have to rate the game on what it presents as, not what I made it. This is not easy though, because I SO love my read… no, stick to my guns.
Woof, unfortunate turn of phrase there.
Played: 11/4/23
Playtime: 45min,5 dead cop endings, 1 dead hostage ending, 1 getaway ending
Artistic/Technical ratings:Bouncy, Intrusive bugs and language
Would Play After Comp?: No, I so WANT it to be left here.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Can't See a Thing Wihout..., January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
With a title like that, and a first screen where your default name is VELMA… you have set some expectations let me tell you. You wake up in Literature Club sans glasses, talk to 3 suspects maybe romance, maybe fight, rinse and repeat to see all the permutations!
Collect-all-the-endings games are relatively new to me. I think I encountered my first last year. That said, in that short year I’ve seen a LOT of them. The ones that work for me are the ones that branch out into bonkers disconnected end states, that startle me with just how far they are willing to diverge. I think they kind of have to? Ok, that’s ridiculous, I don’t make the rules for these things. But if they DON’T they have to justify repetitive gameplay and diminishing returns on comedy text some OTHER way. Generally the shorter the return trip and the sooner the branches become available the better. The deeper the branch point and narrower the divergence, the less it feels justified without some other kind of spice.
I think I need more than what Help! is set up to provide. For one, despite the premise, the lack of clear vision is often DESCRIBED, but does not seem to affect gameplay in any interesting way. Why call me Velma if I can’t grope blindly for a while!!! For another, aside from the choice of what your glasses look like, there is a LOT of linear clicking at the beginning before you get to divergent choice points. Certainly the consequences and plot turns those later choices produce have little connection to the paths you clicked making it essentially a ‘blind binary search simulator,’ where your agency in determining path is effectively zero. This is not unheard of in this genre, but puts all the weight on the endstate. Until you get there, your eyes glaze a lot over repeated text screens. I’m not sure how many loops I did… 8? 10? The endstates I found were unique, but didn’t stray far from each other in particulars or vibe. I found less than half the listed achievements, but I did eventually find my glasses (though achievements did not note this?). After the first pass the sly humor could not hold up, the endstate diversity did not dazzle, and it quickly became a purely Mechanical exercise.
Now that I think about it though, there is a kind of subversive read on this. My repetitive looping, then arbitrary clicking… confusing things all around me I can barely make out let alone navigate… that is kind of a META groping in the dark! Each loop, words flashing past as a barely acknowledged blur. Slapping my hand down with no idea what I’m hitting, how it will play out, just hoping against hope I somehow come up with glasses this time? Maybe this was a better blind search simulator than I gave it credit for! Doesn’t change my score, but I think this read on it is making me just a little happier. We good, Help!, we good.
Played: 11/2/23
Playtime: 30min, score 70/200, 4 achievements, found glasses, no achievement?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, got the gist.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
But Dr., AM Famous Clown Pagliacci, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Thanks to the 2hr time limit, there are a few behaviors I find myself repeating when judging IFCOMP. For long games, it is not uncommon for me to be surprised by the timer expiration and just cold stop, a really frustrating experience for all. If I notice it ticking down, I may try to get to what I perceive to be a clean break spot, perhaps short of 2hrs. For shorter pieces I almost always replay a few times to get the breadth of a work, except for works that have been so frustratingly or perfectly rendered that a single playthrough feels like the right way to capture my experience. All these cases are typically orthogonal to hint/walkthrough consultation,which is instead driven by a frustration trigger.
Honk! is the first work where I felt the puzzles were great fun to play with on my own (I mean, it is in the title!), but I went to the hints anyway. I realized the final step of one puzzle wasn’t going to let me finish by the time limit and had a mini puzzle of my own to solve: what is worse, losing a full solve opportunity, or not reviewing the full game? I made the right choice, I consulted the hint system and finished at 2hrs. That decision’s difficulty feels like a compliment! [sidebar: strong hint system implementation!]
This is a save-the-circus piece. Clown protagonist must prevent the Phantom from sabotaging three acts and so preserve audience goodwill and stop the unfeeling hands of progress. It had a few things stacked against it from the start: #1, preserve noble, quaint entertainment against Cold Capitalism has kind of run its course with me? No that’s wrong. Unnuanced ‘Cold Capitalism’ I mean. I don’t line up with Corporate interests, I’m not a monster, but how many times can I be expected to engage this plot, basically the same way? #2, if you’re going to invoke as bland a villain as a Phantom at the circus, I can forgive not referencing Tobe Hooper’s Funhouse, but not referencing the seminal formative text Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park just feels intellectually dishonest. #3, YOU MADE ME BE A CLOWN, GAME. Why do those things even exist, let alone get turned loose on CHILDREN???
I am happy to report, the sweet humor and light tone of the piece almost instantly made me forget all of those objections. No, not true. Made me forget TWO of those, and periodically forget the third. The prose and jokes are not laugh out loud funny, but just universally winning in creating a jolly, bubbly mood. Yeah, it’s people’s livelihood’s and the death of a quirky, dated institution, but it doesn’t have to be DOUR, sez game. I agree! The tone of the piece is its primary strength and it is rock solid start to finish. I grabbed some fun lines as I played, but quickly realized in isolation they suffer a bit. It’s really the riffing they do within the holistic mood of the piece that is so pleasant. So you just have to read them for yourselves! I will note that some puzzles actually trade on the mood of the piece in a natural and satisfying way, which is also fun. Though this line did seem unintentionally, humorously cruel:
"Freda fills the poky camper like how custard fills a pie dish,"
LOL, Is that what you meant to say game?
Implementation wise it was robust, with notable gaps. There are a LOT of things you might try that have funny ‘no, not this’ responses, more than there needed to be which is always appreciated. That made the gaps maybe jar a little more? Gaps like stock text about wandering through a crowd appearing while you are on a roof. Balloons floating away while in a cage that explicitly noted the presence of a gridded top. Dialogue presuming things not yet revealed if you hadn’t >X SPEAKER before hand. As robust as it was otherwise, I also spent a good amount of time trying to solve puzzles reasonable ways and getting rebuffed, and without the humor I might have expected. In particular, I would have hoped using the ladder for the rabbit, making noises with balloons and/or breathing helium, or trying to get helium balloons to lighten the Phantom would be some easily anticipated alternate solutions deserving of humorous rebuttal.
Those are all easily forgiven in the face of some left field puzzles with fun ‘real’ solutions, fair play cluing, and terrific mood. It was the kind of a game where I was repeatedly rebuffed, had to take a break for unrelated reasons during which alternate possible solutions flowed like rivers. Some even ended up being right! That’s a special kind of Engaging for sure. The anxious race for the finish against my timer was also a thing I only experienced once before during IFCOMP23 and speaks well of the piece.
Notwithstanding the shambling horror I was forced to inhabit for two solid hours, it was a fully Engaging work of fun puzzles and sweet humor. I particularly liked the completely subversive tweaking of the ‘what a surprising reveal about this prominent NPC!’ unmasking trope. And a ROCK SOLID updog implementation. Enough glitches and unanticipated puzzle paths to make it Notable, but barely so. Totally justified itself against concern #1. There is no possible justification for #2 and #3.
Played: 11/3/23
Playtime: 2hrs, finished with one hint to make time
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable gaps given robust overall implementation
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
Rose Glasses Off, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This was a work I super strongly WANTED to like. The cover art just sang off a specific set of neurons, so perfect in its capture of getting a new game back in the day. Now I was never a Commodore guy, so it wasn’t a specific yearning. That made it even MORE enticing I think, like inviting me into a subculture that shares a common language but with an evocative and appealing accent.
It kind of needed that charge, because there was prework: installing VICE on my Linux machine, figuring out how to work it!, a lengthy cycle of manual and feelies to consume all before starting. Despite chafing to GET STARTED, the material was attractively composed and fun to read.
The emulator experience was a quick shot of ‘coool,’ followed by a long, slow deflation of ‘oh no, its actually not that cool.’ I suspect this was an artifact of maybe full hardware emulation? I actually kind of hope it was, because the alternative is that the emulator coders lovingly recreated THE INSANELY SLOW LAG of early computing platforms. This would be like lovingly crafting fully detailed restagings of childhood bullying episodes. That is totally NOT the nostalgia experience I ever want! Verisimilitude is a LIABILITY there. I would have thought my modern, high powered machine could have managed that better. Towards the end I started ‘one-one thousand’ counting lag between command and response. The record was 11 - 11 simulated seconds. Rarely was it less than 2. And the lag didn’t limit itself to output - if I typed too fast, it would miss letters, requiring a backspace, then slower retry. WAS THAT WHAT IT WAS LIKE? Viva la progress!
I subsequently learned there are emulator hooks to ameliorate this. If you intend to play, I strongly recommend consulting this thread first.
Is it fair to penalize a work for its platform? No OTHER IF work I've played took me on this specific journey. Certainly, embracing this ancient platform is the most obvious thing about the work. I think yeah, it owns this.
The story itself is a murder mystery: fulfill the post-mortem contract of an art dealer convinced he would be killed, and yup! Spot on! He is! The style of thing is very much of its time, and precisely so. A mappable location (or two), no nouns except those called out in contents lists, short descriptions, limited dialogue, often reused between characters. Rudimentary manipulation puzzles. The promise of the game was deduction, and the means/motive/opportunity tracking looked like an elegant way about this, a mechanic I was eager to engage. I willingly shrugged away modern expectations to embrace it as was. Over time I think my resolve wavered because only being able to ask characters about nouns I had physically touched, and often hearing word for word identical responses inevitably brought me back to ‘well, thank goodness we fixed that at least!’ There were quite a few implementation holes: I used a flashlight before I had one, yet things were still “too dark.” Buttons disappeared yet were still present when examined. The Gallery navigation was complicated by N connections in one direction, but W instead of south to return. I uncharitably started to think, ‘ok, par for the course back then, but if you’re making me be super slow, couldn’t we quietly clean these up?’
For all its supplemental material, and there was a lot and it was cool, it somehow STILL fell short. The manual notes that X should alias to EXAMINE but it does not, and the full word must be typed EVERY TIME. This is not even a modern innovation, yet somehow missed! The command card does not document PULL, begging the question what other verbs did I not know were available? (And if not exhaustive, what was its purpose anyway?) Conversely, ANALYZE - a custom capability of the game - is never mentioned EXCEPT on the card, and unclear what it meant. That is forgivable certainly, but given the deep instructions felt like an out of place omission. There are feelie items outside the Feelie package, intended to be read only when uncovered in gameplay. There is no mention of these anywhere, and only after a vexing search through the download hierarchy was it clear what to do.
It is possible the above paragraph was addressed in a subsequent release, presence of PULL in the feelie might be a clue.
As you can see, I was powering through! Maybe at a snail’s pace but doing it! I’m the hero here! The one that really got me was a puzzle (maybe?) (Spoiler - click to show)Knowing I needed to "] DRIVE TO GALLERY" I could tell the ACT was possible from the command card, but nowhere else in gameplay or feelies could I detect any hint that this was not a one location game. Here I needed to add a specific noun and unlike ANALYZE, the game was no help cluing what that might be. Sure, given the background I could infer it existed, but I could infer a LOT of things existed that weren’t implemented! I had been trained to only try nouns explicitly mentioned! Consulting the walkthrough provided the answer, and it was not a joyous moment of epiphany, it was an ‘oh c’mon.’
I had like 15 minutes after that and thanks to the protracted command loop, my timer expired not close to finishing. I really WANTED to like this. I still really love that it exists, that so much effort was poured into this loving recreation. I hope it provides joy to those who remember their Commodore days fondly. For me, it was more a ‘rose-colored glasses off’ experience that made me grateful for modernity. I know. That’s not so fashionable these days.
Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 2hrs, for maybe an hour of progress
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Intrusive emulation and gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, a glut in Nostalgia content available these days, will look elsewhere
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Hemlock, the Unlikley Aphrodisiac, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This is a character piece, speculating on a conjugal visit between Socrates and Xanthippe (his 2nd wife) the night before the infamous hemlock cocktail. The player is given the goal “get your husband to have sex with you!” but that is kind of a wonderful trick. It ensures the player is aligned with the protagonist (clearly X is the protag. I hope we don’t need to argue about that.) in creating an initially awkward, and kind of misguided, series of advances on a man with understandable distractions. That one little gamesmanship trick allows the author to execute sleight of hand, have Socrates’ response generate interpersonal drama, and at that point, we are fully at the piece’s mercy.
It is first and foremost a character study collaboration between player and story. I am not sure how much branching is actually possible in the narrative, but that does not appear to be the goal of the piece anyway. In the forward the author lays his cards on the table - the piece is about giving X a more robust afterlife than history could be bothered with. We are clearly not building HER character, history has ensured that is not possible. But we are building a nuanced, vital character whose complexity represents and pays tribute to the real, complex, full woman she actually was.
It is kind of a touching and depressing observation - death takes the breadth of a person, and reduces it to the ever-dimming memories of others and if lucky, artifacts that live on. Or in Socrates’ case, completely superimposes a mythology instead. Flattering or unflattering, whatever remains cannot conjure or preserve the fullness of who we were. The thought of us becomes a distorted echo, maybe retaining a sliver of us, but maybe not. Maybe including things we never were. This work offers the kind of beautiful idea that if we can’t remember the full complexity of a person, the least we can do is acknowledge that there WAS complexity. What a gift of empathy for someone history has ignored or abused.
What, am I getting too maudlin for you? Am I, you cold, unfeeling husk? YOU’RE the outlier here, not me and this wonderful work. Check your heart, you emotionally shut down robot. You probably won’t even kiss your dad, will you? Or do you prefer to call him “Father”? Fine, I’ll get back to your “game” “review.”
The interactivity here is navigating a series of conversations exploring prickly personality conflicts, long-standing frictions and affections, shared emotion and history, sexual playfulness and tension, common intellectual passions and shared pet name in-jokes. In short, an amazing tour of a full, adult relationship that honors the specifics of historical Socrates as a jumping off point for emotional extrapolation. The interactivity comes from the player defining X’s character (within an author-set series of ranges, obviously, it is choice select). Right out of the gate, is she the kind of woman who calls her husband “Honey” or “Big Man”? Will she apologize, or double, triple, quadruple down? Is she demure or bawdy, or just a filthy, filthy animal? Is she sad, bemused or betrayed by infidelity? There are so many many options the author has offered through some setpiece conversations about mortality, Socrates’ choices, their relationships, making CAKES … and you are collaborating to put a specific HER into all those conversations. The author has gone out of his way to make a breathtaking span of options available. How much affects narrative thread? Maybe none? Doesn’t matter, it is the character building that matters here. The text is so very deft to not dishonor your choices that it feels natural and rewarding.
This game snuck up on me. I fell for the initial trick, got irritated S wouldn’t play, then got mesmerized by the option to keep quadrupling down on the cow conversation way beyond S’s patience… and before I knew it I was just Engaged. About halfway in, I realized the trick played on me, silently tipped my hat to the author, then X and I just dove back in. I really appreciated the cheekiness of inventing Plato’s famous Cave as a goofing conversation between the two, the implication being Plato totally stole that from Xanthippe later. Relax, Plato can take the driveby.
Stepping back, how impossible is what I just described? Collaborate with the player to create a fully three-dimensional person, through the medium of choice-select options during wide ranging conversations? Do you see how DIFFICULT that is? You have to create a conversation flow that spans light-hearted joking, deep drama, personal history, fear of death, horniness… and you have to create dialogue options at every step that give character building latitude but don’t derail the narrative or later contradict itself? Not only did it hold together, it didn’t even CRACK. Slow clap, author.
Ultimately, it ended the way it had to. But yeah, we totally banged him.
Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 35min, finished. 35 min? Holy crap I spent twice that WRITING about it.
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: I don’t know. I’m always afraid experiences this sublime suffer on revisiting.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Pet Dog, Solve Crime, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This is an Ink piece where you are Osiris solving the mystery of your mortal life’s murder. Presentation-wise it is attractive - nicely curated palette, page layout, music and illustrations. Don’t know if Ink lends itself to strong presentation, or it attracts authors with strong skills, but it’s getting a rep in my head.
The prose style is an often amusing mix of stilted old-timey patter and modern turns of phrase for spice. It Sparks more than not, but does make for some probably unwanted artifacts like this:
"I run my fingers down the pipe, to where the hot embers are, and let it burn my bandaged fingers. Just to see if it hurts. It does, but I seem to recover instantly, with no long term ill effects. Good to know that I can still feel something."
Without the mixed tone, this might not have come across as jarringly emo as it does. Later, a full on sex scene introduces yet another dissonant tone, however well written it was for these types of things. (I should highlight it is later (Spoiler - click to show)narratively justified, though I sat with the awkwardness of it for a long time.)
There were a lot of Sparks of Joy in this, I particularly enjoyed the ability to pet Anubis, which I did at every opportunity. (This was privately hilarious to me, as thanks to my annual Halloween bad-horror movie binge, I had recently watched The Pyramid which features a decidedly… different… Anubis.)
This is a choice-select piece which I am coming to believe is the more challenging mystery-solving paradigm. For an author I mean. Part of the charge of mystery solving is filling in the vast space of possibility through a series of logical conclusions until you can derive the solution. By its nature, choice-select, just the mechanism of it, seems to do more of it than the player. If presented with an option “Confront X on their flimsy alibi,” if the player wasn't actually suspicious, the space is filling in and mystery solving itself without them. To me, this piece did not successfully navigate that challenge, though I do appreciate that presenting expended dialogue options as “Ask about X (Again)” is a nifty way to both red herring and clue an evolving understanding.
As I exhausted the clue space, I was presented with one option of suspect to accuse. It is possible, I suppose, that I blundered past other clues that might have opened more to me. I am at a loss to see what I left unclicked though. In any case, real or not, it FELT like the game was steering me to a specific accusation and absent other options I took it. (Interestingly, it gave me an “Are you sure?” question, which No, I was not! Felt like a frameup! Sadly that did not change anything.)
(Spoiler - click to show)Sure enough, frameup. The real killer was dutifully revealed without any need for me the player to get involved. This really took the wind out of my sails. The entire game I was led to believe my efforts would solve the case, when in the end the game just did it all. It overpoweringly felt like the game was always on rails, and I only had the ILLUSION of mystery solving. Since I WAS the protagonist, the Epilogue sting in particular fell really flat for me because of this.
Between the occasional awkward text moments and the bait and switch “YOU solve it! LOLNVM I got this.” it could not breach into Engaging. Definite Sparks though. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? aNUBis is… aNUBis is, yes he is!”
Played: 11/1/23
Playtime: 50min,finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks, Notable headfaked player agency
Would Play After Comp?: No, mystery solved!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Leo DGAF, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
“sigh Another standard-format Twine entry, front loaded with typos,” said I on firing it up. “I know where this is going…”
“No. No you most certainly do NOT,” said the game, appropriately pointedly.
Ten minutes later, after exploring I think the entire breadth of it I just laughed and laughed at the unhinged stream-of-consciousness audacity of it. I kinda don’t want to say anything about it. Experiencing it cold, LIKE REVENGE, is the best way to experience it. Whatever you think you’re prepared for here you are NOT. It’s only ten minutes, go play it, then read the rest of this.
Right? (Spoiler - click to show)Memes, Videos, ChatGPT screenshots, lightly researched historical context, JUMPING OUT OF THE GAME ENTIRELY TO A WEBSITE ON HOW TO RAISE A LION CUB. What is this, post-modern? Post-narrative? Post-stuffy old fuddy-duddiness? In the middle of a full month binge of exactingly crafted, tightly engineered IFCOMP entries, what a delight this manic garbage pile was.
To do a deep explication, withering analysis, or self-important metaphorical model all miss the point of its anarchic, throw it all out, ‘can’t be bothered to see if it sticks, got more throwing to do’ vibe. I do wonder, and by wondering kind of know the answer, whether it plays this successfully in isolation, or whether the CONTEXT of methodical IFCOMP play is crucial to its success. Not a lick on it at all, just wondering. Even without that context, it is hard to imagine begrudging its extremely tight playtime.
I’m going to stand on what I’ve said so far, and finish my review in a precisely assembled, thematically appropriate series of links:
Initial Review Insights
Subsequent Deeper Analysis
Overall Thematic Synthesis
Critical Conclusion and Summary
Played: 10/31/23
Playtime: 12min, fully explored?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Like a sparkler, once lit, constant Sparks of Joy. Seamless implementation of its shaggy UI and presentation.
Would Play After Comp?: No, best appreciated for its singularity, in the moment.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Pachyderm Ponderings, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Hey, can you see me? Can you hear me? There’s this giant elephant just sitting here, happily trumpeting away. I wanna review a really interesting IFCOMP23 entry, can you hear me ok? This thing not in the way? It is? How about if I stand over her… no? Here? No. Maybe if I TALK LOUDER… Can we try to work around “TRRUUUUMMPETT.”
Ok fine. Let’s talk about the elephant first.
This work boldly engages one of IF’s most troubled conventions, the dreaded
Timed
…
…
Te…
…
…xt
I get why this is often problematic - it presumes to render a dramatic intonation and pacing that plays off an actor’s (or narrator’s) line delivery and stage business. The problem is SO MUCH of a performance goes into those things, and in text, the reader supplies most of it. The odds that a reader will have the EXACT same mental performance as the author is extremely small and requires a writing talent that few, so very, very few, are capable of generating, let alone sustaining. And when it misses, hoo boy, it can be borderline offensive in its abuse of the reader’s time.
This is a work about a day in the life of a person struggling with her stutter. It shows its cards almost immediately with a dream sequence featuring timed text. My heart sunk a little as I struggled with the wading-through-jello pacing only to be delighted when the dream was revealed! Yeah, that felt like a slo-mo struggling dream! Then to be deflated again when I realized, no, waking world behaved that way too… kind of.
When applied to the protagonist and their difficult attempts at communication I thought the delayed text worked like gangbusters, especially when infrequently paired with quavering font for extra spice. Just a super strong thematic use of the technology - I was right there with the protag, feeling their frustrated discomfort! Where the timed text did not work was when applied to anything outside the protagonist, ESPECIALLY NPC dialogue or actions. If I had one suggestion it would be this: trust the reader to block ‘normal’ (boy do I regret that word) dialogue and events in their mind without the delay crutch. Including the protag’s mental process, there is no reason for that to be slow either. Eliminate all instances of timed text EXCEPT where reflecting the protagonist’s communication struggles. Not only is it perfect there, it would even further contrast her struggle with the world around her. And maybe keep it for that opening dream sequence too. Also the typing effect during flashbacks was pretty good. Really, just be more judicious and intentful about it.
There, have we dispensed with the elephant? Get outta here Jumbo. Wait, before it lumbers off I want to clarify, notwithstanding some NPC drag, on balance I found the delayed text upside far outweighed the downside. Clear? Ok, off you go big guy. No wait! I also want to say… no, now I’m just trolling you. Silly elephant. Buh-bye.
So how about the rest of it? Low key excellent. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t trade in High Drama. It builds its drama through mundane tasks and activities, complicated by the protag’s stutter. Crucially, it is not an endless slog of failure and misery. It is a series of minor victories and defeats that just build into an affecting portrait of CONSTANT low burn struggle. The use of colored text to indicate options that were going to be more difficult was really powerful. As the day went on, I got a small charge of angst whenever red text showed up. The prose did that! The work smoothly and effectively laid the groundwork!
I also appreciated the use of text-entry boxes, which can be a point of friction for me. When asked to name the protag, which was before I really had the measure of the piece, I did my usual “roll fist on keyboard” and delivered “Mkhcgd.” Jeebus I really did her no favors there. Later I applied my new favorite expletive “Hoobidy” and documented my love of Pie and well known antipathy for Broccoli. It’s not on the game that the protagonist is meant to struggle with the former, but sail through the latter… which is kind of hilariously counter-narrative. None of these I considered game breaking, rather, the sad humor shone through maybe more clearly because of my inadvertently adversarial choices. And I got to be periodically delighted with outbursts of ‘Hoobidy’.
Sad Humor is really a great phrase for this piece. Gimme a sec to just pat my back. When ordering a card game gift, I cry-laughed at the title “Tricky Troubling Trivia.” Noooo world, why you do that to us??
I didn’t even realize how warmly this game had crept up on me, until I recognized the sheer dread this particular choice prompt evoked:
- (Focus on giving the best possible answer.)
- (Focus on being fluent.)
There was real white-knuckle tension during the (Spoiler - click to show)job interview and I had somehow gone from ‘quietly critiquing the artistic choices’ to ‘deeply Engaged’ without even realizing it. The outcome was just crushingly perfect too. I can’t get away from calling the timed text overapplied and Notable to gameplay, but despite that the writing, plotting, choice architecture and winning protagonist moxie got me Engaged without even realizing it. I considered replaying when done, but timed text is REALLY a barrier to that, and a quick peek at achievements suggested other variations wouldn’t speak to me as strongly and directly as my first playthrough. So I left it lie.
Though reading that one achievement was titled “I’ll have what she’s having” was a hair’s breadth away from pulling me in anyway.
Feels like the elephant should make a final appearance to tie this review together, doesn’t it? Jumbo? No? Man when he leaves the room, he LEAVES THE ROOM.
Played: 10/31/23
Playtime: 30min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable intrusion
Would Play After Comp?: No, I feel like the story I got was the most appealing to my sensibilities?
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Metaphor Gone Wild, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Title is relevant, I promise.
Summitting Everest, as a concept, has had a weird journey during my lifetime. It used to be shorthand for “The pinnacle of human achievement, technically doable but laughably out of reach for all but a handful of the best of us.” Now it is, “Yet another achievement available to the sufficiently privileged at unjustifiable and ignored social and ecological cost.” It is a flaw of us, as a species, that it still captures our imagination and cannot completely shake that first symbology. Honestly though, isn’t Everest itself at least partially to blame? C’mon, tallest mountain in the world (yeah, lets not get into technical height minutia, this is a rhetorical device)… Tallest Mountain in the world? It was always going to be more symbol than place. You brought this on yourself, Everest.
So Everest as an achievement. The first phase is getting to base camp, which is a nontrivial physical challenge of its own. Climbers, at least responsible ones, often turn back once hitting it. If there weren’t this haunting peak looming behind it, it could conceivably be a celebrated physical challenge of its own. Except, of course, no one would bother EXCEPT for the peak behind it.
MBTP accomplished the enviable feat of getting me to base camp, but could not get me to the summit behind it. It is an interactive novel, decidedly not a game. The entire purpose of the interactivity is to pace the text for dramatic effect. This is a full on legit use of interactivity, and it often works here. I think I have more patience for timed text than most and by and large its employment here was ok, though there were infrequent moments of ‘I’m waiting, story…’ The presentation is very attractive - blurry graphical backgrounds suggesting the protagonist’s lack of engagement with her surroundings were a really nice touch. The portrait art was very appropriate for the story, grounding its specifics around the characters in an unsettling style. The graphically interesting background that set up the post-death conceit nicely conveyed its “sidebar” deployment.
The text presentation was good, adding and replacing text to nice dramatic effect with one exception that really undid a lot of its good work. Probably due to some default browser settings, sometimes the protagonist’s thoughts or observations were rendered in a dark grey against a black background that was ALMOST impossible to detect, and definitely impossible to read. The only way to consume it was to highlight the text with a cursor, which on my browser meant a color palette deeply at war with the words and mood it was trying to build. If a deliberate artistic choice, I can squint and see why it might be made: to force the reader to probe a bit deeper to get into the protag’s head. But between the clumsy mechanics and mood-disrupting colors it was so not worth it. Maybe a cleaner way to get this effect would be a less fussy mouseover that the author could better control color choice? If it was not deliberate, just really, really unfortunate.
Even so, I would say the presentation was an overall positive, just deeply undermined by the dark font choice that made it rougher than it should have been.
The narrative is about a sister, conversing with her (Spoiler - click to show)abusive brother who through interestingly enough reasons has about a week of post-death pseudo-consciousness. The protagonist relives her (Spoiler - click to show)childhood trauma, inflicted by the brother. The early stages of this story really worked for me. Her deeply conflicted feelings, estrangement, guilt, yearning and poisoning relationship with her mother. It pretty sure-handedly got me to base camp, despite the presentation challenges. In particular the protag’s assertions of love felt deliciously like trying to convince herself of something expected but not felt. Base Camp achieved!
There is a summit to this work, and here I think I got lost on the way. My narrative guide suddenly started leaping ahead miles at a time, like some Kryptonian mountain goat, leaps I couldn’t follow and could barely track with my eyes. I’ll focus on two, and they are super spoilery. After the careful step-by-step buildup we are delivered to a wonderfully conflicted emotional place. Looming large over it all was the question of the mother. (Spoiler - click to show)How did she let it get to this place? What is HER culpability? This was kind of ignored by the text, and in fact seemingly exonerated her without examination. How do I make that jump Supergoat? You have to show me that!
The climax of the piece has a different problem. While I can conceivably head cannon the protagonist’s mental state from base camp to summit, so many precise steps are needed to get me there and none of them were documented. “Here we are at base camp, let me tie my shoe, where did you go Supergoat?, holy crap how did you get THERE?” It doesn’t help, I think, that the central mechanism of the post-death conversation is a pretty shaky construct. If it is a hand-waive, that’s kind of ok when it’s just an excuse to enable the conversation. But when it suddenly needs to carry plot load it is way too fragile, evokes way too many mechanical questions it can’t answer, and collapses under the stress. Thank goodness it was not a ladder bridge over a chasm that the guide marched me onto!
Ok I have officially tortured this metaphor into war crime territory. To sum: really capable emotional setup. Super effective graphical presentation, except disproportionately undermined by one sour choice. Took jumps to climax I couldn’t follow. Sparks of Joy for sure, Notable graphic intrusion.
Played: 10/30/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notably hard to read
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
Jonah's Lament, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Well this work presents an interesting review question, doesn’t it? Do I evaluate the story in isolation, or in conjunction with the novel, emerging IF platform it is showcasing? It’s not like I open every Twine review extolling the virtues of Point-And-Click, that would be weird. Counterpoint, I belabor Texture’s strengths and weaknesses with literally every review. For a lot of IF, how well it integrates its user paradigm can be a key element in its overall impact, for good and bad. Here, NOT acknowledging its novel approach seems incomplete, given the platform’s developer is ALSO the author. I guess it was a more straightforward question than I thought.
In its most superficial read, I can’t help but call it the opposite of a Twinesformer. This is not a parser masquerading as a point-and-click, this is a choice-select masquerading as a parser! Yes, you are typing command line instructions, but only those the story gives you, beat-by-beat. It’s a DeceptaTwine! Ok, contextually it’s much more than that, I just couldn’t resist the gag.
Plotopolis, the new authoring platform, repurposes IM applications to deliver IF. What a great Mission statement! It is kind of ingenious, I mean the command prompt has just been sitting there THIS WHOLE TIME. It also immediately casts the experience as a dialogue with a storyteller, which is a really cool way to leverage IM. Given the cold reception timed text receives, I will be curious to see others’ takes on this. For me, the out-of-the-box tuning was pretty good - more often than not new text became available just as I finished reading the previous. Certainly the user commands to slow and speed things should provide knobs for everyone.
I have to note this story chooses not take advantage of the dialogue paradigm, which pretty quickly reverts back to a limited-choice DeceptaTwine experience. This is not a problem per se, and probably a good way to communicate to future authors that it doesn’t HAVE to be dialogue. It does strike me as an incomplete showcase because of it though.
The story on offer is really offbeat and weird in the best way. You wake up in the belly of the whale. A series of impossible-to-predict things happen from there. As a fundamentally choice-select tale I found this to be about ideal in leveraging the form. Choice-select can falter in a lot of ways: incomplete choice availability given the logic of the world; choices the player can interpret differently than the subsequent text jarringly delivers; choice incompatibility with narrative goals that then must be forced back into line; reconvergent choices that don’t justify the divergence. When choice-select is BEST employed, every choice has a purpose: either to build player affinity with the character or narrative thread or branch the narrative into a new thread. Most authors seem to have a handle on the latter, but the former is REALLY HARD TO DO. It requires casting a spell with words that naturally pull the player in a direction, yet still cedes enough control to make it not feel on rails.
Let’s take an example from literature. The Telltale Heart, a classic. You the reader are unlikely to ever murder someone because you didn’t like their face, then be driven insane by it. Uh, spoilers? Poe’s prose is highly stylized and singular, and not something you would encounter in everyday life. However, it magnetically and precisely carries the protagonist’s deteriorating mind in a way that the reader engages despite themselves. It is fully the magic spell of words that accomplishes this, that takes you somewhere you never thought you would go. If you could conceive of an IF version of TTH, would it end any differently? My thesis is NO on the strength of Poe’s prose, and since it is purely hypothetical I can just declare I’m right!
Whale successfully delivers this alchemy for me. I played through four times, each time getting a different result (many threads!), but each time the text led me naturally and hypnotically to some really, objectively speaking, bonkers places. Three of them ended up being really satisfying stories, qualitatively different from each other. (The fourth was blindingly short, so not too discouraging with its comparative shallowness).
Was it perfect? No. As a parser-like experience, I often bemoaned the lack of abbreviations for general commands like ‘continue.’ The illustrations were too large for my window, requiring panning backwards to see them, a screen-slice at a time which kind of ended up fighting the UI. While I liked the ‘Sanity’ score as a gauge of sorts to soft-guide the proceedings, CALLING it ‘sanity’ often felt wrong given the choices we were making and the places it led us. Probably most disappointing to me was not really using the conversation paradigm to serve the narrative. This tool is CRYING for that! A slightly less than seamless experience.
All that said, between the promise of a really cool new IF platform and a compelling story(ies?) told with it, I kind of have to give this a Transcendent nod. Innovator’s privilege! Also, the characterization of dolphins as prankster-assholes of the sea delights me to no end.
The fact that one of this author’s previous projects was a POETRY GUMBALL MACHINE has no sway over my score, but c’mon, there’s gotta be recognition for that somewhere too!
Played: 10/30/23
Playtime: 45min, four playthroughs, sanity 8/10/10/21
Artistic/Technical ratings: Transcendent, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but interested to see other works in this format
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Didn't Think a Mystery Could Make Me Mad, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Buckle up, this one fired me up a bit
This is a murder mystery. A barista protagonist survives a car crash to find her signature figured into a string of doomed deliverymen, and she is the prime suspect! Relive the previous days to see if you can successfully finger the perpetrator. It is a fairly limited-choice work, more fiction than interactive until the final j’accuse.
I would say up until the final choice, the work has two defining features: 1) very attractive, cartoony artwork, and 2) offputtingly intrusive prose. Word choice is routinely awkward, to the point I stopped grabbing examples after a while. I am not exaggerating when I say every other text box elicited a grimace of “phrasing, please!” “Jackie’s shoulders stricken immediately,” “Until close! No butts!” (wrong kind of ‘but’), a selectable “Group Handle” which to this day I have no idea what it is even after grabbing it. It appears to have had a good supply of play testers, I hope this is not a case of A@%#ole American Reviewer coming down on translation gaps. Best I can say is regardless of source it was endlessly distracting. It is also nowhere near the most infuriating thing about this work.
The character work is pretty light, but when it is applied, everyone feels kind of selfish excepting maybe the college student. A conversation with her best friend about the protagonist’s boss: “I am running the shop this week. Maggie’s on vacation.” “Again??" Casey groans, “That whore. […]” MeYOW, Casey.
The protagonist herself is maybe the worst at this. Her response choices seem to vary between “petty” and “rude” with the occasional “begrudgingly doing her job.” It makes her unsympathetic and kind of a drag to spend all our time with, and something I rebelled against whenever choice opportunities presented themselves. While maybe this is narratively justified… I’ll get there. For sure in the moment it is offputting. Given no alternative, we work with her through four increasingly tense nights as a stalker seems to haunt the perimeter, then suffer a car crash, and hit endgame.
So, who is the killer? As a mystery I would say, drily, it is not very tight. While there are a lot of events that happen, the game goes to lengths to show that any of the suspects might plausibly have a hand in them, or at least can’t be ruled out. When asked to finger a suspect, I went with one whose actions had the least plausibly innocent explanations. Initially it seemed like I was maybe right, or at least in the ballpark? This was far from any kind of smoking gun, btw, but, yay me? Murder motive, a linked robbery, mechanics of the crash, none of those made sense for ANY of the suspects including the guilty party. I could easily have washed my hands at this point, assuming I had ‘solved’ a kind of unsatisfyingly constructed mystery. It was a Mechanical, Notably glitchy prose experience, until I tried to restart from a save game. There seemed to be a bug in the web-play implementation where the savegame was not found and I got error messages, pushing it to Intrusive.
So I replayed from start, laboriously retracing the entire game just to see what happened. I made some different choices that resulted in new incidental text but no new information, and landed again on the “who do we accuse?” And chose someone different. Holy s@#$. Okay, here is the I-promise-its-relevant suspect list: spoilers I guess? (Spoiler - click to show)an African American student, an undervalued Hispanic receptionist, an Asian immigrant, and a spoiled rich White Girl. I reiterate, at this point, I had no convincing clues of ANYONE’S guilt. Instead of my initial guess, I kind of randomly fingered the (Spoiler - click to show)African American student. Not only was I wrong this time (as expected), I unintentionally caused a POC to be gunned down by Police! WTF GAME?!?!?! Is this the game I was playing all along? There is no way I was going to subject other suspects to alternate endings at that point, so I reran again, and this time accused (Spoiler - click to show)no one giving me a reveal that (Spoiler - click to show)I WASN’T EVEN WHO I THOUGHT I WAS???
Quick recap: Blind guess #1: “correct.” Blind guess #2: SO SO VERY WRONG. #3: The “real” ending I guess? (Assuming for a moment this ending made a lick of sense, which it very much does not.) How do I parse this? In a traditional fiction narrative, this would fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions, but it might not be actively offensive. As an IF work though? The game has specifically put us into a mystery solving role. The player is both invested and complicit in getting it ‘right’. With the first solution, you are convinced ‘yeah I got!’ by uncertainly pointing the blame finger and through no active agency or knowledge, seeming to serve justice. That EXACT SAME process, pointed elsewhere led to atrocity. If I hadn’t taken the third path, what would this be saying? Certainly it is saying racial profiling is bad, I get that. Why did it “reward” me for a guess then? Is it saying, God forbid, to serve Justice you sometimes just have to GUESS?? Does it actually make a difference WHO you point an unsure finger at? SHOULD IT??? What clue did I have, other than some time remaining in IFCOMP judging period, that I should keep playing, that this WASN’T the message of the piece?
When you add in the possible third ending, “WHY IS THE GAME EVEN RAISING THESE KINDS OF QUESTIONS AT ALL WHEN IT ISN’T TRYING TO ENGAGE THEM?” As a player, I was complicit in ALL the endings, why is the game sucker punching me, then moving on like its shoddy construction had no role in this?
So let’s engage that third ending. (Spoiler - click to show)If you accuse no one, it is revealed you are actually the murderer, stealing the identity OF THE PERSON YOU FRAMED FOR THE MURDERS. Like, murderer? Literally steal ANYONE ELSE’S IDENTITY but the person you PERSONALLY have ensured the police will scrutinize most closely! And you only learn this because you REFUSED to give the police another angle to pursue, NOT EVEN YOUR OLD IDENTITY, which maybe should have been plan A in this branch!? Nevermind the whole thing coming down when the stolen identity’s COP FATHER swung by to check in. It doesn’t work at all on its own. In some sense the whole piece would at least be more coherent if this ending DIDN’T seem to work, if the police noticed the same inconsistencies and the murderer ended up being too deranged to put together a coherent plan.
Had it done that, it might have retroactively recast the other endings as ‘oh snap, murderer actually got away with plan!’ Or maybe been a slightly more coherent scheme if #1 and #3 were combined. There’s still plenty of gaps for sure, but maybe get at least a slight charge before it crumbled on closer inspection? What gets me is, this thing put me on a journey of player complicity that was deeply uncomfortable. If it had followed through on this in any way, had something to say about it, maybe it would be justified? But in service of AND SUBORDINATE TO a clumsily executed shock twist, it is clear all that turmoil was not the point of the piece, may have even been accidental. That made it kind of offensive. At best, I found it thematically unfocused and deeply illogical. At worst actively Bouncy.
Played: 10/29/23
Playtime: 45min, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy, Intrusive restore bug, language
Would Play After Comp?: No, do not poke the bear. Twice, I mean.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Philosophy 101, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Man did this work intersect some weird slices of my life. I minored in Philosophy years ago. A good chunk of my worklife was spent in a corporate environment where “Meritocracy” was a near-religious tenet, with all the orthodoxy injustice that implies. And my gaming history with choice-select dialogue is lukewarm at best. When I encounter it, my knee-jerk reaction is ‘This game is either going to prevent me saying what I want to say, or garble and twist it unaccountably.’ Oddly, that last attitude was cultivated mainly through commercial gaming, where my IF experience has often been better. In any case, it remains my first impulse.
This is a work about a career student engaging some philosophy questions on return to the classroom. I have to say with one sentence it INSTANTLY put me on its side: “Most discussions or debates generally orient towards the loudmouthed people leaving others confused while going home with some sort of a win.” What a great observation to make at the top of a game about verbal fencing.
The game then almost instantly forfeited those gains with several stumbles. I think most impactful to me (and most fixable!), were the very frequent instances of typos, spelling errors and off grammar. The premise of the piece is intellectual sparring with deeply erudite NPCs in a place of higher education. Sloppy prose undermines that premise more deeply here than say a story about Bikini-girls fighting space jellies.
Secondly, you are told “You play as an individual who has so far struggled to make a living juggling between jobs in an attempt keep their education going…” (Arts majors, amirite?) But the wide-eyed intellectual thirst of the protagonist seems much more appropriate for a new student, not a battle-tested veteran of academia and the cold job market. There are long passages about their intellectual engagement that just ring hopelessly naive and at odds with their purported background. (This will be mirrored by what I might call ‘unnuanced analyses’ later in the game.) I guess maybe credit where due, if they can actually keep their enthusiasm after those bruising life experiences, more power to them? But simply making the protag a new college freshman eases so many of these dissonances.
There is also a pacing problem. The details of the protagonist’s morning (including an extended ‘whoops I’m in the wrong class’ scene) are lengthy and ultimately don’t really serve the meaty dialogues that are the center of the piece. Particularly up front I found myself snarking in my head waiting for the game to ‘start.’
It did start, eventually. We enter some dialogues with a professor (and one kind of with ourselves?) about argumentation fallacies and aspects of meritocracy. Here is where the choice-select dialogue concerns cropped up, and it gives me no joy to report here my knee jerk was exactly correct. When they were presented, dialogue choices uniformly lacked what I wanted to say, and the options available railroaded me into statements I didn’t fully agree with.
Philosophy is tough, man, as evidenced by my academic transcript (sick burn, past me!) Nuance is everywhere and precision is super important! Choice-select paradigm may be the only practical way to deal with this, but requires a LOT more nuance of crafting. The protagonist, as defined in text and especially player choices was not equipped to deal with this. Even the Authority NPC, the professor, came up short often as not. In the first discussion, the prof goes on at length about ‘evaluating arguments on merits’ but dismisses a colleague with the same lack of engagement they display to him! Eventually, the prof does lead into a more nuanced discussion of this, but this initial glitch is never acknowledged.
Later, when the concept of meritocracy is introduced, the protagonist immediately imagines a debate where each side adamantly maintains the concept is ONLY composed of the aspects dearest to their own viewpoints and just keeps repeating them. I mean, not a bad simulation of current political debate, but...
Then the player is asked to choose which side of two Reductio Ad Absurdum positions they align with! I mean, it seems obvious that any real discussion has to honestly engage the merits of BOTH positions instead of just bashing them into each other over and over. The Prof does agree, eventually, but boy does the work take its time catching up to the player there.
An unconvincing setting, incomplete arguments, long stretches of </click to continue/> being the predominant interaction, and infrequent restrictive/deceptive/limited choices are all a recipe for a Mechanical exercise. The gameplay was seamless, but the typos and grammar Notably intruded, given the academic setting of the piece.
And yet.
Notwithstanding the conclusions available and unconvincing plot steps, this thing had breadth and depth. Its foundational explications were pretty good. What it had to say about Meritocracy (on both sides!) were pretty on point and NEED to be part of the discussion. Not sure I agreed with the application of the Trolley Problem (a crucial part of the classic ethical dilemma focuses on the act of throwing the switch, which this resource allocation formula sidesteps), but certainly the questions the prof raises about APPLICATION of meritocracy are vital to consider for any champion of it. The deep dive into ad hominem and source reliability is similarly particularly vital and interesting in today’s world. I really dug encountering these things playing IF, even as I was constrained by gameplay and narrative. For a dormant Philosophy minor, these were undeniable Sparks.
Played: 10/29/23
Playtime: 50min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notable cracks in prose and academic rigor
Would Play After Comp?: No, now ready for Graduate Thesis
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
You Have Solved My Penalty Point Puzzle, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
So this is an Escape Room, full stop. If that sounds prejorative, that's because it is. I’m not here to pretend Escape Rooms aren’t fun. They are like the puzzle parts of IF married to the tactility, collaboration and physical presence of LARP. That’s a very successful marriage, like the couple in your lives that 20 years on are just SO happy with each other it is a burden to everyone around them. (Just shut up already, Tim and Marcie.) With that puzzle/LARP pairing you can forgive Escape Room's often tissue-thin narrative or ridiculous logical leaps.
But if you take the LARP out of it, those things run a real danger of corroding the experience. Successful IF implementations will realize this and replace it with SOMETHING. Lunium actually brings two things to the table, one of the them WAY spoilery, so be warned.
The non-spoiler element is its top-notch graphical presentation. The author’s previous work displayed really impressive graphical design chops and it was no fluke. From layout to UI to image curation it is a constant pleasure to interact with. It makes the claim that the images are not needed to play, but that’s like saying sugar is not needed to bake cookies. Technically true, but what would be the point? (I actually wonder about that assertion in any case. For my play, SO much information was conveyed graphically I’m at a loss to see how that would work. Certainly the experience would be degraded.)
Anyone else engage online Escape Rooms during COVID? We did a few and the experience was ehhh, ok? Zoom collaboration was fun but the loss of tactility and sense of place was keenly felt. None of them were as graphically immersive as Lunium.
Let’s pause here and pretend I didn’t already tell you there was a second ace up its sleeve. If I were to rate this game based on what I’ve told you so far it would be a lie to say it wasn’t Engaging, but I would feel compelled to give a penalty point for hyper-accurately replicating something whose translation loses what makes it unique and leaves only a pale shadow of what the new media is capable of. It would be like creating an elaborate stage production of people performing a scripted podcast. (Ok, that’s an imperfect metaphor but I’m on a time crunch here, roll with me.)
So here’s the SPOILER part, as promised. As is probably apparent, my biggest beef with the conceit is its inherent artificiality. Inescapably, this was my skeptical mindset at game start. Thrillingly, as the game progresses and the secrets unfold, time and again the game JUSTIFIES its artificiality. Amnesiac? (Spoiler - click to show)You’ve been drugged! Lots of keys and combinations? Narratively justified! Well, to a point, but more than it needed to be. A close set of suspects in a murder mystery? (Spoiler - click to show)The solution was tied to the PRESENCE OF THE ESCAPE ROOM ITSELF. It was that last touch that won me over. There are a satisfying array of suspects available, in the sweet spot of ‘enough to be non-trivial’ and not ‘too many to manage,’ and all with enough characterization to be distinct. When asked to solve the crime, I overlooked some in-narrative clues but instead somewhat pugnaciously declared (not out loud, in my head. I’m not insane): SERIOUS SPOILER (Spoiler - click to show)“The only way these puzzles make sense is if the protag made them. It just makes no sense otherwise.” AND THE GAME AGREED! The game traded its central mystery on the Jigsaw level contortions needed to even have an Escape Room with these protag-specific details in the first place. Well played author, you have defeated my Penalty Point puzzle!
Played: 10/28/23
Playtime: 1hr, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless, Penalty Point AVERTED
Would Play After Comp?: No, solved!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Memoir Museum, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
If my review series has a brand, it is sloppy-pouring my so-called personality all over works that really deserve better. When I’m just blathering on about, I dunno, a Pixie PI solving an eldritch horror crime aboard a Tall Ship that is also somehow in space, it’s all in good fun. After no fewer than four awkward attempts, I am forced to conclude my approach is singularly UNsuited to works of memoir.
I have some thoughts on presentation, mainly on offer to the author in recognition of their artistic choices. I am unsure why, but the load times for my browser were insanely long. I nearly closed the window thinking it was hung. Maybe a loading indicator or text could signal that everything was ok?
I really liked the two pane approach: map/photos on one side, text on the other. It was a crisp and attractive presentation. The museum map was also an interesting choice. It’s most significant effect was to guarantee non-linearity. By scattering exhibits loosely around irregular grids, the geography seems carefully chosen to avoid an implied reading order, freeing us to experience things as a collage. I might recommend considering a consistent navigation link layout - sometimes I would try to jump two spaces N, but the shifting directional links shunted me aside. If links were in the same spot on every page, that would make navigation just a little nimbler.
I feel safe talking about presentation suggestions. Regarding content, I see deep, turbulent water ahead of me and am going to steer around pretty quickly.
This is a work of brutal, moving honesty. It is a collection of commentary on artifacts from a recovery journey whose personal specifics are heartbreaking and inspiring. It is not my place to interpret another’s experience when they so capably speak for themself. (Actually, I’m not sure communication skills are a prerequisite in any case.) Thoughts like: “respect towards my queerness was a given, not something I needed to earn,” offered with full context are both cathartic and depressing that the basic acceptance I take for granted is a daily looming threat to so many. I am grateful Bez chose to share this. While I think of myself as a functioning, empathic human being, there is a gulf between sympathizing and experiencing. Works like this help bridge that gulf which only helps all of us.
Played: 10/28/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Are you kidding me? Assign a quantitative score to THIS? No f-in way.
Would Play After Comp?: Experience devastatingly complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Review Sans Context - Deceptive or Merely Unhelpful?, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
WARNING. The following review comes from a place of ignorance. As a recent entrant into IF culture, I had no clue Stiffy Makane existed, let alone its storied position in the IF corpus. As such, the following review evaluates Citizen Makane as a stand alone work, devoid of any of the context that gives it life and meaning. I accept your 'unhelpful' judgements unreservedly. I have also elected not to include my rating in the game's average for this reason.
This happened to me last year also. At some point in the IFComp, when you have achieved a critical mass of gameplay, the brain shifts gears from “Hm, let me objectively dissect this,” to “Hm, this bears the most superficial resemblance to Z, let me dwell on that!” It doesn’t help in this case that I self-importantly had this to say in my review of Ribald Bat Lady:
"The sex scenes themselves were also employed unevenly. They were most successful when erotic activity was actually incorporated into the gameplay as puzzles."
“What’s that you say? Noted!” said the author, somehow hearing this ill-considered advice through a temporal wormhole and acting on it in time for IFCOMP23. The setup is: you are a man, awakened from cryo-sleep to an all-female world, for the purpose of reintroducing heterosexual sex to the species. Kind of an ur-porn-plot. You do this by becoming Sex Yu-Gi-Oh.
If you take out the sex, as a game, it has implementation issues. It is spare, the map is small and limiting. Objects have almost random permanence (sometimes the food I ordered the previous day was still on my table in the cafe! other times not). The conversation system is limiting, repetitive and clunky, and often provides options that the game rejects when selected. The puzzles (again, talking the non-sex version of this game) are few and pretty straightforward. Its most egregious fault though is its screen management. It often throws giant walls of text at you, which scroll to the bottom. Requiring you to scroll back to read it all. As the game progresses, and your in-window text grows and grows, it becomes increasingly fiddly to scroll just the right amount. With the ubiquitous, decades-old availability of the [More] technology it is a baffling, infuriating choice.
When it does try to manage text pacing, it creates different issues for itself. There are times when conversations, or tv shows, or lectures happen around you. If you are inclined to listen in, you must wait as they play out block by block. Not great, but not terrible. But the messages you get… you get to hear some pretty horrific things, and:
"The professor continues. "In the late 21st century, unspoken tensions between
the sexes started turning into open hostilities, and finally culminated in a
series of devastating conflicts known as the Gender Wars. It was a terrible
bloodbath, raging for decades, with immense losses on both sides."
>z
You relax.
That is the most awful response to that news! The other message is “you chill” which actually could be read as ‘get the chills’ so that would have been a bit better?
Now, let’s get that sex back in (that’s what SHE… NO! Actually, that feels kind of inevitable). There is a battle-card based sex minigame that needs to be grinded (ground? it all sounds bad in context) to get your physical prowess to a game-ending level. There is like one, maybe two nuances to it that are apparent after two plays. After that it is the most eye-glazing, mechanical exercise imaginable. And you need to do it A LOT. There is a read of this game that its mini-game implementation and shallow character work are a next level PARODY of dire porn games. There is ample evidence to support that here, including nearly interchangeable random partners, wafer-thin foreplay, and ubiquitous sexual availability. To me though, it reads like it kind of wants to have it both ways - like watching porn ‘ironically.’
[Sidebar: in our post-satire world, is it even POSSIBLE to parody porn? Is there anything so exaggerated and extreme that there isn’t a corner of the internet that wouldn’t embrace it at face value?]
Man, my grip on my pearls got a bit tight. So let’s talk about two things the game does almost exactly right. The first is it’s protagonist’s alternating ‘please don’t pinch me if I’m sleeping’/‘you’re sure this is ok?’ attitude to his situation. Often played for laughs, and lands more often than not. The second though… hoo boy. During your mini-games you are treated to descriptions of the sex that are just the most inappropriate, offputting, and HILARIOUS phrasing. I grabbed A TON, but they are the game’s super power so to just get the flavor:
Some of the ways sex is described is (para) (Spoiler - click to show)“like that one guy clapping too loud” “like an elephant marching in an empty theatre” “like a spaghetti on the floor getting inhaled by a vacuum cleaner” “LIKE A FISH BEING SLAPPED ON A ROCK” and so so many more.
Despite the limited mini-gameplay, these blurbs more often than not justified the effort. It is actually worth the price of admission just to experience all that. Even after topping out my stats, I would sometimes engage the mini-game just to refresh my good will. Really. That’s why I did it. For sure.
In the end, I think I call the humor a single Spark albeit a bright one. Not enough to escape Mechanical gameplay, but more than enough to sweeten the pot since I was playing anyway. I go back and forth on whether the scrolling issue pushes it from Notably to Intrusively glitchy. I’m staying with Notably, but there is an argument to be made.
Played: 10/27/23
Playtime: 2 hrs, level 5, 1/3 quests complete
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notable
Would Play After Comp?: No, despite not finishing I think I’m done (that’s what she…WOULD YOU STOP THAT??)
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
I Be Bailing, Matey, I Be Bailing!, January 4, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
One room IF has a special place in my heart. The authorial challenge of stuffing multiple arcane, challenging puzzles into a single location, and have them be thematic and natural is a kind of uniquely interesting one. Extra points if it doesn’t feel blatantly Escape-room-y. As a player it can be distracting because part of me is so busy admiring the accomplishment, the story may not get my full attention. TSIAS seems to recognize that tension and plays along with just enough story to set expectations and ground rules, then sits back and lets you flail. Adrift on a sinking boat, throw everything overboard against the wishes of your oblivious captain. GO!
Part of the scene setting, arguably its strongest facet, was the language, especially dialogue. It is all stilted early 18th century (not Victorian, no!) pirate talk, very well rendered, playful and amusing, and consistent throughout. Commitment to the bit is not a problem for TSIAS. The language peppers everything with wry humor, which is a time-tested method to generate Engagement.
The central mechanic of a sinking boat was also clever, a sink timer that requires periodic bailing to keep from going under. The counter starts at 10 turns! You have my attention, game! It was the perfect scenario spice to really put you in the story. Yes, it kind of broke the central premise, as conceivably one could bail indefinitely rather than throw anything overboard, but ooh look away! I easily forgave this with ‘need to row to shore’ head canon.
So you’ve got a great premise, some really effective mechanical chrome, terrific use of language and humor. All that’s left is puzzle play! I liked the weird mix of booty that needed manipulating, not the least of which being an aggressive carnivorous plant. I was particularly delighted by the "steampunk" (Spoiler - click to show)exploding dye pack. The game did a reasonable job of presenting different kinds of ‘get this overboard’ challenges. It just felt to me there were enough burrs in implementation and design to flicker me in and out of Puzzle Solving Flow.
For one I found the noun and verb space very fussy - unimplemented synonyms, weird verb constructs, there were enough of these that I often struggled to accomplish what I wanted, and what the game needed me to do. Not so much that I got blocked, but enough that things felt harder than they needed to be. A few times the physical descriptions let me down - one key puzzle traded on spatial knowledge that the text did not firmly establish, or if it did, did it so subtly that it escaped me and was not confirmed through repeat observation. Another traded on counter-intuitive object examination. While I certainly should be expected to eye my boat companion’s clothing, it is unclear I should be able to (Spoiler - click to show)look in his pockets from across the boat! Text could have clued me in there, but didn’t. This didn’t torpedo my Engagement in the game, but it cropped up consistently enough to call it Notable. Thankfully, both a robust progressive Hint system and Walkthrough are provided, the former well designed when I needed it to push me forward.
As good as the writing was, there was a point of friction for me there too. Through the course of the game, your relationship with the Captain gets increasingly prickly in a very amusing way. However, when bailing the incidental text quickly gets repetitious and largely reflects the relationship state at the beginning of the game, nevermind all the growing tension! Look, dialogue repetition is an unavoidable artifact of IF NPCs (I guess until AI rears its ugly head). It is easily forgiven, and can be artfully accommodated. Here though, the contradictory relationship context jarred. It was a rare narrative off note for me.
It seems I have a probably not-uncommon problem of dwelling on the negative, at least when measured in word count. Don’t make too much of it. Notwithstanding occasional frictions, this was an Engaging work, bubbling with wry humor. Full commitment to the bit, terrific use of language and a nice puzzle set spiced with prodigious small, immersive gameplay touches. I be on board Cap’n!
Played: 10/25/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished after dying once
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable gameplay frictions
Would Play After Comp?: No, but will def track down other entries
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Everything, Everywhen, All At Prompt, December 28, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This was my introduction to a series that seems to be picking up steam, with 5 of its 7 episodes coming out in 2023! Seriously author, tap the brakes. You’re making the rest of us look bad. In other media, I despair of jumping into in-flight series, preferring to reach back and ploddingly work the back catalog. IF seems friendlier to in media res, at least the ones I’ve dipped into so far. LMG4 is no exception, I was brought up to speed in the blink of an eye. It is a whimsical Dickens/Anderson/Whedon/Moffet mashup which maybe sounds more precious than it is.
I’m kind of feeling like with only a single, late episode exposure, maybe I’m not the one to explain LMG. The community probably knows this property a lot better than I do. But I’m gonna do it anyway because it’s just so GOOD. Anderson’s urchin Match Girl, through events, becomes a time traveling, vampire hunting ward of Ebeneezer Scrooge, serving Victorian England in averting a Faerie war (presumably on leave from her patronage with Poseidon?). With a six-shooter and empathy. What kind of drug-fueled fever dream produced THAT narrative stew?? Her name is Ebeneezabeth?!?! GET ME THAT COCKTAIL!
It’s structured as a treasure hunt, assemble MacGuffin pieces from a primeval past of dinosaur societies, an Old West silver mine, two different flavors of Pirates (Future Space and Musical Theatre), and a modern vampire conclave. I regret calling it whimsy, because as frothy and fun as it can be, there is an edge to this thing. Our protagonist is a zesty mixture of generous, earnest and no-nonsense. Yes, her first impulse is cooperative, but can flip surprisingly fast to cold anti-hero. In less deft hands it could feel disjoint and all over the place, but no. Here it somehow coalesces into a charged kind of narrative where anything could happen. The puzzle play is light but clever, assembling parts from across time periods to make headway with some nicely flavored environs. The mechanics of time travel are novel and kind of a mini-puzzle/maze of its own.
There are implementation issues, unimplemented nouns that are offputting early, before you get the measure of the piece. Soon though, the urgency of the mission takes over and sluices you easily into the work’s tightly controlled main thread. You are so engaged in the proceedings you have no interest in pulling at the fringes.
So many delightful in-the-moment touches. The escalating bad vampire brainstorming. The madcap disguises. A monologuing gunfight. Cross-timeline shenanigans. Interacting with incidental scenic elements, which is often daffy and rewarding. A fave:
> talk to roadrunner
“Hey,” you say. “Hey,” says the roadrunner, without stopping to look at you.
Lol, he’s got things to do, he’s got no time for you! This is what really makes the work sing - the ALIVE feeling of the universe. This is not a universe frozen in stasis until the player shows up. E-beth pops into others’ stories, (Spoiler - click to show)even her own!, gets what she needs and only disrupts things if she has to! In one instance with surprising pathos. As often as not, events continue to happen without needing or wanting her involvement. It’s a unique, really fun, vivid, breathing universe of casually weird genre mashups and bonkers timelines. Couple that with a generous but fierce protagonist, and I’m here for it. I got me some homework it seems.
Played: 10/24/23
Playtime: 2hrs, timer expired during epilogue!
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but will def track down other entries
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Never Knew that Clever Clue, December 28, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
There is an obvious bit for these reviews, right? Some alliterative rhyming to show I am clever enough to play in this author’s field. Here’s the thing. I’M NOT THAT CLEVER. This is what I learned from BBKK. This is another of ASchultz’ wordplay line, and I do have an affection for these. Wordplay is just inherently fun, the kind of puzzle where even when you fail to guess, the answer still delights you.
I am not sure why I struggled with this one more than others in the line. As now standard, there are clue objects and mulligan objects to keep from getting too stuck, as well as generous tracking of prior guesses. For whatever reason, I struggled to use and interpret those tools this time. I never did figure out how to use the mood mapper and was at best only superficially getting info from the Leet Learner. Don’t even get me started on the Lurking Lump. I did find a lot of hints and text around these things, but struggled to find the info I needed. My only guess is that trying to play in an airport was too distracting? I was a bit crestfallen when the Hint system noted “Not implemented for IFComp”
One crutch I could have certainly used was a tracker to remember NPC friends I had previously discovered. I had to keep consulting my transcript to remember their names. I think this is an artifact of the puzzle type - when you generate dozens of rhyming phrases, remembering SPECIFIC ones is not a sure thing.
I hit another roadblock with these NPCs. Due to an accident of my brain’s chemistry, I discovered 3 of them, but none could coexist. I burned a lot of energy trying to figure out if there was a rhyme that would unite them and never succeeded. Only as my timer expired did a phrase buried in the VERBS command indicate they might come in pairs. If that was clued elsewhere I totally missed it. But it also meant I had at least 3 more to find!! Certainly there were many puzzles queued up for teamwork, unfulfilled at the two hour mark.
To be clear, my frustration is with ME, not the game here. As always, these things provide copious Sparks for me, not the least of which the game’s response to rhyme after rhyme after rhyme. Many individual responses are funny, but at some point the fact that the game is just that far ahead of you starts getting a humorous momentum of its own. I guess I have to call my inability to work the gameplay elements Notable, but I can’t be sure this one isn’t on me.
Ok, to salve my bruised ego, let me say I was some strange mix of disappointed and triumphant when I came up with a character the game did not recognize: the TEAK TUTOR. Who else do you want to learn wood working from??
Game: 345 points; Reviewer: ONE POINT!!!
Played: 10/24/23
Playtime: 2hrs, score 18/74(85), 3/14 bonus
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notable player ineptitude
Would Play After Comp?: Almost certainly, but I probably need to start from scratch in a better mindset
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Conan and the Treasures of Par-Sur, December 28, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
I do my level best not to compare works against each other. I have a nominally objective rubric I attempt to apply so comparisons should not be necessary. Like all such rubrics, subjectivity is merely hidden behind layers of objective indirection. This is brought home to me when works with superficial similarities somehow come out of my cold, mechanical rating machine with different scores.
We all got our own genre preferences. You don’t have to dig deep to uncover mine. Relative to OKLTA understand I’m a High Fantasy tourist. I don’t dislike it, but there’s no spike of endorphins when such a work is on the horizon. This is a Conan riff, kind of a family-friendly version played pretty straight. It didn’t strive too hard to inject humor, plot twists or high concept into the mix, fairly middle of the road there. For me, this is typically a recipe for Mechanical gameplay. Other such works have topped out there.
Where OKLTA did tweak the formula was in basic verb utilization. Instead of >EXAMINE, you are asked to >REGARD. Instead of >GIVE, >PRESENT. Instead of >OPEN X, TAKE Y, >LOOT X and so on. Thankfully most (but not all!) common synonyms still work, but flavorful commands are available. Look, I’m not going to pretend this is a massive innovation - parsers truck in verb-play ALL THE TIME. Here though, the noun and verb space is pretty constrained. Simple things are not implemented. If you only have a limited verb space, why NOT use flavorful ones instead of bland defaults? Despite myself, I found myself chortling at every opportunity to SMITE things.
Oh, it was Notably Intrusive, don’t get me wrong. When the only way to get liquid out of a container is to >LOOT CONTAINER, you’ve kind of gone awry. It can and does sometimes devolve into a ‘guess which new verb will map to a desired, unimplemented verb’ exercise. No clues whether it is the wrong idea or the wrong phrasing. What it was, was playful with the form. It’s like if a crafty but uneducated barbarian wanted to write IF, this is what we’d get. “OF COURSE CONAN LOOT, what else it be fancy man?” That resonance with the story kind of appealed to me!
There was another nifty instance of experimenting with form that again was Notably Intrusive, but kind of playful. At one point, you are asked to rewind time. There is no in-story mechanism to do this, just none at all. The solution requires use of PLAYER powers unavailable to the CHARACTER. Just so, so wrong as a coherent narrative. But as a coy tweak of the form… kind of fun?
While the narrative was unlikely to win me over on its inherent charms, and the puzzles straightforward enough not to bring out my inner thinker, there was just enough of just the RIGHT kind of gameplay tweaking to bring some joy to the proceedings. I also did guffaw at an endgame gag, sucker punching the Magic Child of Destiny trope, which honestly could use a little roughing up.
>QUEST FOR GLORY
>PLUNDER SPARKS OF JOY
>ENDURE NOTABLE INTRUSION
>SMITE PRECONCEPTIONS
Played: 10/24/23
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notable command fussiness
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
The Whisker in Darkness by HP Lovecat, December 28, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
"Mine eyes ope’d, my world 4 walls wide and manifest but as long as my gossamer memories, only the last few secure in my head. In my solitary madness but one path, one sequence of links in an inviolable and ever-tightening chain of fate opened to me. My will was imprisoned by uncaring destiny as surely as my body by my cold, spare cell. I was ensorcelled by a vile presence, denying even semblance of autonomy.
"When the devastating import of my impotence settled on me like a greasy fog, only then did my tormentor take form. First, a hideous mewling, followed by a rasping of pitted, dry tongue on an undulating coat of silken corruption. From the fog it slunk into view, coiling and uncoiling like some biblical judgement, here where the Bible holds no sway. Its horrid, slitted eyes regarded me from beyond reason, its motives unknown and unknowable.
"‘Meow,’ it said.
"In some perverse torment, it feigned liberate me, allowed me a semblance, a mockery of initiative. Giddy with the promise of freedom, I lurched through a maze of non-Euclidian geometries, traversing dimensional boundaries as easily as a madman cackles. Only later, during a surcease in my fever dream, did I pierce the lie, the deliberate and perverse obfuscation of cardinal directionality and a labyrinth that folded in on itself.
"My task was four gates, four slim barriers between everlasting madness and freedom. ‘But speak the Elder Words,’ purred my tormentor, ‘and thy freedom is secured.’ Mine environs were soon revealed as claustrophobic, even in their obscene intertwined passages. Echoes of the Elder Words rang hollowly through the space, slipping through my grasp the more desperately I clutched. In piercing, dissonant tones they evoked mocking images of great power within me - a cruel and despairing counterpoint to my abject inefficacy. Time and again I hammered at the portals, in my desperation forcing my tongue to ever more elaborate variations of the horrid syllables echoing from abandoned rooms. Time and again, my labors for naught.
"I was but mortal man, my desires and thoughts playthings before the awful abyss. Anguished beyond my limits, I pierced the veil and dared stare unblinking into the heart of creation’s grand design. And there, in that void of forbidden knowledge, my sanity shuddered, shriveled and died. In my feverish graspings, I had neglected to start with Capital Letters.
"‘Meow,’ it said.
"My autonomy revealed as futile delusion before an unforgiving syntax, I slumped in defeat. My vile guide entwined me once again in the cold embrace of fate, and the most wretched part of me was grateful. Grateful that but one inevitable path lay before me, my steps as Mechanical as an automaton, ever more quickly pulling me to some new abominable state. And I, limp with surrender, clicked along behind, enslaved by my Intrusive passenger. This was my fate. The Whisker in Darkness deemed it so.
"‘Meow,’ it said."
from The Lurking Feline and Other Tales
Played: 10/23/23
Playtime: 45min, finished via walkthrough
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Intrusively Fussy Gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, sanity banished, I can but suffer
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Punishing Kids for Being Kids?, December 28, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Turns out, you don’t have to be Twine to be part (4) of the “Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise” review sub-series! Gruescript can play too!
This was a lovely, nearly beautiful presentation. It was pseudo-parser, in that clickable buttons resulted in cursor text that mirrored parser commands. Directional and inventory commands are available. It is an interesting tradeoff. Inventory management is clumsier and clunkier for sure, but the paradigm trades that for visible guardrails on what to do and where to go, preventing frustrating thrash. For this work, it really felt like the right choice. You are a tween/teen exploring the forest near your house. Thanks to careful option curation, you are quickly put in the mindset of a young explorer, including ways blocked because your parents will be mad! A true open-world parser would not accomplish that so effectively thanks to the difference between “you can’t even try” and “no, I reject your input.”
I did feel there was a possibility in the interface that was teased at but not exploited. The parser commands displayed after clicking were sometimes much more complicated than an actual parser implementation might support, opening the door for some poetic command interpretation. Ie, where a parser game might have “>TOUCH LEAF” this interface can put whatever it wants after the cursor. “>GINGERLY STROKE THE LEAF’S SURFACE” It seemed to gesture that way and I would have loved to see more of it as a way to build player mindset.
Graphically it was engrossing. The browser window’s background colors changed as the fog lifted and the player explored. Lovely framing graphics faded in and out slowly, suggesting the pace of travel and the variety of terrain. If there was an off note, I would say it was the map - when selected or displayed by the game, there was no option to leave it up between moves, and the “Cancel Map” cursor was inexplicably large and ugly. In the face of the rest of the presentation it stood out, but can be forgiven.
I went back and forth on the gameplay. On the one hand, I really liked the choice architecture that encouraged studying the natural world around you, even collecting specimens to share at school. While my adult “take only pictures, leave only footprints” indoctrination rebelled, it did conjure class assignments of yore. The puzzle play was fairly simple - find stuff in one spot, use in another, made more fiddly by the demands of the inventory management buttons. The map was tight and straightforward. All of it pleasant but too slight to truly engage.
Leaving the remaining burden on the narrative. There are a few off notes, some typos and spelling issues, some unnecessary drama with screaming at caterpillars that are not even touching you. Still, it was first and foremost a great simulation of an illicit childhood nature walk: unguarded moments of openness to nature, complicated by unforeseen events that will get you IN TROUBLE. In particular, interactions with nature were simple and often beautiful. Underneath that was hints of adult awfulness that very appropriately danced in the corners but were too complicated to get much protagonist regard. It hinted at strong drama, but never quite came into focus. While that was a terrifically thematic approach to the story, and kudos to the author for generating it, it nevertheless couldn’t help but be something I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT. The story would later tell me that was on me, but my aggressive “click all the things” approach leaves me wondering how I could have missed anything.
An hour and a half invested with a LOT of clicking and ambling, it was deflating to hear my efforts summarized as “I have the feeling that I’m missing something. That there is something to be understood in the middle of all this, which I can’t understand, I can’t even guess.” I was also somewhat let down by the story’s assessment of the artifact I chose to share with the class. It spent all this time putting me in the mindset of childish priorities, then hit me with, “Well little girl, you really could have done better.” That is the opposite of encouraging to questing young minds! Highlighting missed story elements and achievements is a tried and true IF staple, encouraging repeat plays. This type of story though, with its slow, deliberate engagement and serene environment contemplation isn’t a good fit for that brand of gameplay.
Sparks of Joy for sure, in presentation and terrific mood and player mindset setting. Hints of drama unrealized, a lowkey sour finish and uncompelling gameplay pushed just enough to keep it from fully Engaging. While there were technical glitches, the impressive presentation overall was so strong as to be Mostly Seamless.
Played: 10/23/23
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished, mystery unsolved?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: On the one hand I’d like to know more, on the other the investment required seems just a bit too large.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Sucker Punch Simulator, December 28, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This IF work juggles a few dimensions at once. A unique user interface. Narrative elements meant to be appreciated as a reader, perhaps informing but disconnected from the rest of the game. Mechanical puzzles where the protagonist manipulates environmental items to achieve goals set by the game.
Some games manage these facets by integrating them tightly together, making for a seamless, holistic experience. For great swaths of IF, they can be judged on how effectively these (and perhaps other) elements meld to achieve something greater than the sum of their parts.
Kaboom seemed unconcerned with any of that. It presented a spare problem of two finicky mechanical puzzles. It utilized a choice-select UI that echoed parser-like mechanics, earning a spot in the review sub-series "Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise." Kaboom's implementation has an inconsistent and befuddling paradigm. It included a disconnected-from-rest-of-game, tantalizing maybe-metaphorical dream sequence of intriguing pith. Its premise could easily have been cloying but was SO unsentimental and spare that it wrapped around to sweet again. And it nodded to an understated interpretation that played off that cold sweetness to offer real poignancy.
Say I gave you four fabric dyes: red, blue, green and yellow. You could carefully measure each color to be blended into a specific shade of subtle beauty. That’s one way to go. Slap it on a T-shirt and soak up the "I’ve never seen that on fleek shade before, girrrrl!"s Yeah, I don’t know why you are sharing it on TikTok either. The other way to go would be to tie dye - create a wild swirling pattern where the colors swirl around each other in a nearly fractal pattern that never actually blends them together. The sum is actually the pattern of distinct, contrasting, undiluted shades.
My assertion is that Kaboom is a tie dyed IF that creates its own vibe without ever attempting to blend its disparate elements, and is singular because of it. Let me pull at the individual components.
UI - this is belligerent and confusing. There is main text, the page-specific selection links and an “Inventory.” Which is a weird thing to call it as you are a stuffed rabbit with no pockets and the strength of cotton. Your Inventory are your legs. Just legs. Sometimes there are illustrations - really evocative illustrations - whose impact is minimized by the page layout that strands them in swaths of black and disrupts the text. And that also just kind of stop appearing half way through? I for sure missed them when they were gone. A horizontal multi-pane construct could have mitigated most of the layout issues at least.
That’s how it presents to you. Now let’s talk about the command selection paradigm. It is clunky and clumsy. You must LOOK AT ROOM; LOOK AT OBJECT; SELECT ONE THING TO DO WITH IT. Then start again at the top, cycling round and round to manipulate items. Except sometimes, options show up in your hidden Leg inventory. Since you are nominally doing everything with your legs I never figured out why sometimes things showed up in main text and other times as inventory options (which again, hidden unless you explicitly look). Can’t solve without them though!
That made manipulation puzzle solving difficult, drudgy and punishing. It was further compounded by having at least two silently unwinnable states that required restart.
The narrative was mostly unadorned, unsentimental prose. The first puzzle is (Spoiler - click to show)using a child’s blood as lubricant! I promise it is nowhere near as dire as that sounds, but opposite of cloying, no? Underpinning the cold proceedings is an assumed, understated bond between the protagonist and the mistress. The spare descriptions allow this feeling to establish itself without fanfare, and gradually fill the space with something approaching real depth.
The exception to this default prose mode is a meaty dream sequence filled with surreal, psychedelic abstractions. What a weird, cool choice!
So here’s the thing about tie dye: my wife hates it. (Probably influenced by cultural baggage inherited from her Baby Boomer Dad tbh which maybe breaks my metaphor a bit, so let me recast it as ‘esthetic objections’ without challenge.) The pattern is either going to speak to you, or you’re going to focus on “Geez I really hate that Green and it’s way too prominent.” The UI was super intrusive to me, it quickly pushed me into Mechanical, Super Intrusive gameplay (particularly when I got an unwinnable state).
That’s what I felt for 99.5% of its runtime.
Final twist. There is a dedication in the credits that sang off the setup in such a specific way, it hammered my heart. It is never explicitly stated, but the work supports an interpretation that the bunny and her mistress are (Spoiler - click to show)Ukrainian civilians suffering a missile attack. That gut punch of a thought shook me into reconsidering. I had undervalued the absurdist flourishes of the dream sequence and the understated emotional vibe that set me up for that final poignant punch. This was not Mechanical at all, it was Sparky but took a shock for me to see it. It gets a further bonus point for so effectively wolloping me with that final gut punch.
Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished after a few restarts
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Appreciation, Technically Intrusive, bonus point for unsentimental poignancy
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete. Also, my heart is fragile.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
That's Not an IF, THIS Is an IF, December 27, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This piece brought home to me that relatively speaking, Westerns feel underrepresented in IF. Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Romance and Trauma all have significant bodies of work. Maybe not SO surprising, given the sun had set on Westerns before IF really became a thing. Finding one, or even a work adjacent to Western, is a pleasant surprise.
This is a comedy about a cowboy time slipped into modern New York, looking for his hat because “A cowboy without a hat is just a guy in a poncho.” Well done game, quest economically established! The protagonist is a full-of-himself Old West maybe-lawman. The game gives him RPG-like stats, but really amusing cowboy-based ones. Choices present themselves throughout the game that map to one or other of those stats, either increasing them or testing against them for success or failure. Decide how you want to lean into the search and Find That Hat!
The opening had a real Crocodile Dundee vibe to me, the overconfident frontier man asea in a metropolis he vaguely understands. A lot of it is wryly funny, especially when stats like “Rodeo” are employed to simple modern tasks like following street signs. (Though I’m reasonably sure that technology predated the Louisiana Purchase.) Incidental text is warmly amusing too: “There is a lot of trust in this table and its structural integrity. There should not be.” As is the best case with these things, some atmosphere and humor is competently built through the choices on offer - reasonable things to do that would not occur to a time-displaced cowboy are simply not available!
Between the light tone, brisk pace (fueled by narrow gameplay) and often funny text, the Sparks were flying. I feel though, that it could have been sharper. For as many tasks and activities that sparked with fun as many felt flat, needing a bit more salt to really land. There is an extended (Spoiler - click to show)conversation about the movie 12 Angry Men for example that needed a little more punch. The work’s use of profanity was a bit at war with its vibe. It felt more Singing Cowboy than Deadwood so the profanity jarred. I’m not saying don’t curse. Do what you f&@#$%in’ want, game. Nothing is quite as funny as well-employed profanity, but it should reinforce your piece not stand out.
Second time through, I made different choices (as one does) but still kind of ended up on the same path. To its credit, it was still amusing with enough new yucks to justify the playthrough. The quest thread though, resolved in victory with an almost trivial conclusion. This doesn’t HAVE to be fatal. Low stakes, trivial problems exacerbated comedically by fish-out-of water humor is a pretty reliable formula. Again, here the need for additional spice deflated things just a bit.
The game proclaims it has multiple paths and endings. I expected more divergence than I got, and certainly it is possible for yet-untaken choices to unlock those. For me, the too-repetitive play and unsatisfying victory was just a higher bar that the comedy couldn’t quite clear. Now that the Writer’s strike is over, maybe a script punch up cycle could really make this thing shine?
Also, this game is dead wrong about gin, but whaddya want from a traildust-encrusted palate?
Played: 10/22/23
Playtime: 30min, two playthroughs, found hat!
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, bonus for inspired Western RPG stats )
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
Metaphor Mania, December 27, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Part 3 of the “Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise” review sub-series.
This is a surreal, metaphorical reflection at the end of a relationship. In packing to leave a failed marriage, the protagonist is preoccupied with discovering WHY things went wrong. They undertake a journey into surreal memory space, trying to unlock ever-deeper possible sources for the relationship rot through the medium of deeply symbolic puzzle play.
You can be forgiven fearing that is a self-serious, too-cute-by-half premise. I forgive you. I just need someone to forgive me, because that was my uncharitable thought once it dawned on me what I was in for. Roger Ebert famously said (para) “It’s not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it.” This is the work I’m going to point to in the future to justify that quote. Well, probably not actually, as it requires that I repeat that quote to someone who is familiar with IF, and has encountered this particular work. So I guess just to you guys? I’ll have it in my head though even if I don’t say it out loud.
The challenge with metaphor is that it needs to simultaneously be evocative, precise, internally consistent and ideally surprising. In IF, it also needs to be fun. In earnest but clumsy hands it can too easily fall apart into illogic, or maybe worse, obvious on-the-nose…iness. I think my first hint that I was in capable hands was the first puzzle which required a “mug of insight.” What a terrific phrase, simultaneously ponderous and wryly self-puncturing. It didn’t back away from its import, but winked at itself playfully. That set me at ease, but it was really the series of memory vignettes that closed the deal. They are surreal distortions, diving into still photos then finding out-of-frame details straight from a subconscious dream world. The detail choices are kind of breathtaking. They obey dream logic but unroll naturally and certainly intuitively, and the symbols chosen are often surprising and precise representations of the protagonist’s internal state of mind. Against my own cynicism, I was Sparking all over the place.
Another peril the work sidesteps is overwritten prose. When aiming for High Concept Metaphor it is all to easy for the prose to try to match with overwrought poetry. TGoWYNM recognizes that symbols land more squarely when not obfuscated behind try-hard text. Its unadorned simplicity of prose really lets the intelligence of its metaphorical constructs shine. To the exact degree as that previous sentence DOES NOT.
Interspersed between metaphorical puzzle runs, there was an opportunity to choose among clues, to select threads that were most meaningful to the player. This was a neat use of interactivity to personalize the proceedings, supported by options that were qualitatively different yet mostly equal in weight. It was an excellent use of interactivity to further immerse the player/reader.
The in-the-moment gameplay was often damn close to perfect. It was very parser like - try to use inventory items in puzzly ways to advance. As a UI it was pretty good - your inventory in a side pane bracketing the main text, where links navigate you around. Selecting inventory options in specific locations ‘solves’ a puzzle. The puzzles themselves followed a symbolic logic that was usually pretty rigorous. I want to drive that point home. Despite being nuanced abstract puzzles, more often than not the connections flowed intuitively and FELT right.
It was when they didn’t quite flow that gameplay glitched. The inventory link mechanism lent itself to, hell practically DEMANDED, lawn mowering - selecting every possible inventory item in every single location. It happened infrequently, but was mimesis-shattering when it did. Until the puzzle was solved, when you had to wryly admit, yeah I guess that metaphor did work after all! During those moments of disconnect though, one thought kept echoing in my head “A Parser implementation would have resisted this better!”
As an experience it was overwhelmingly impressive - great ideas conveyed with unadorned but evocative writing. Unfortunately punctuated by brief periods of outside looking in, wanting to get back to that sweet, sweet flow. Is this a narrative failure, prose misfiring just enough to keep me from fully Engaging? Is it Notable Technical intrusiveness, a limitation of Twine that intrudes and breaks the author’s meticulous spell? I’m going to err on the latter, because I found the symbolic worlds so compelling.
There is a third possibility, almost too ludicrous to mention. That the work is fine in both dimensions but it’s ME that’s… ha ha no, you’re right it was stupid of me to even bring it up. Engaging, Notable it is.
It occurs to me that there is a metaphorical read even for the floundering. That the protagonist is so desperate for answers they wildly throw even inappropriate ideas at the wall, anything to try to get some purchase. If that thought could have been teased out in the moment by the game somehow… holy CRAP that would have wrecked me.
Played: 10/22/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable mimesis-breaking gaps
Would Play After Comp?: I might actually. I wouldn’t mind another look at that accomplished use of symbolism.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
E is for Existential Dread, December 27, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
It’s time to inaugurate a new review sub-series: “Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise.” Encompassing Twine works that share enough DNA with parsers, Maury Povich could dedicate an “are you the Father?” episode to it.
Like many in my generation, I have a soft spot for the Muppets. Sesame Street, sure, but especially the Muppet Show. Henson and Oz et al had a unique sensibility of optimism, generosity, and melancholy darkness that just went down amazing when delivered by felt. They created characters (so many characters!) that were multi-dimensional, often with a desperate core that nevertheless served up raw red comedy chaos. Boy did I lap it up.
And boy was I angry when the Disney IP machine gobbled it up. Is there anything more squicky than a formerly creative studio buying what it can no longer produce, then milking the joy from it? See also Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar. On top of its generation-long war on public domain, after building its rep by plundering it. That Disney v Florida feud? I wanted BOTH to lose. DISNEY DIDN’T DESERVE THE MUPPETS.
So you can see I was primed for this game before it ever showed up in my queue. For at least a decade.
The setup is a clandestine raid, to save Handfuls (Muppets) from a monstrous fate under a rapacious and demonic new corporate owner, and by the way rehabilitating their creator’s unfairly besmirched rep. (Yeah, Henson was not actively crushed by Disney, but it FEELS like Disney, doesn’t it?) It is a hopelessly youthful gesture whose success would lead to uncertain benefits, but whose urgency is completely tied to the risks willingly embraced anyway. I love it so much for that. “I’m not sure what stealing Kermit will accomplish, but BY GOD I will risk horrific daemonic death to do it!”
The work makes the crucial, wonderful decision not to replicate the Muppets with thinly veiled pastiches. Rather, it creates a completely different and unique pantheon of felt that effortlessly evokes the VIBE of the Muppets. The bananas, unique multi-dimensional characters. The shades of melancholy and chaos. The super-specific details that marry an impossible breadth of influences. I was smitten and awed by the consistent, creative RIGHTNESS of it.
The writing is a full partner in this, not just via in-character commentary (which is wonderful), but descriptions, incidental text, and the hinted picture of the studio’s hey day, as seen post shutdown. If this had been all there was to it, I’d be fully satisfied. But to then marry it a Horror premise: a deliciously stark contrast lurking around every corner! And to then further up the ante with engaging gameplay!!!
See, there are (Spoiler - click to show)supernatural stalkers haunting the defunct studio. You need to steer clear of those while searching for and liberating the Handfuls. And each of the Handfuls has a specific power to help you, but with two hands (one if you hope to carry a rescuee to freedom), you must select which power will be most helpful for specific circumstances. It’s a puzzly challenge with a terrific buff mechanism, each with their own hilarious and poignant commentary that ALSO can help build an underlying story of sweet sadness.
Exploring, solving key-based puzzles, avoiding monsters, interacting with delightful NPCs in service of a powerfully human story. What a great parser ga… rheeeeCORD SCRATCH. IT’S NOT PARSER. It is a deeply parser-influenced gameplay engine, rendered in Twine choice-select. Look this author can do what they damn well please if they are serving anti-Disney Muppet Horror to me. But there are artifacts: blocks of text not abbreviated on subsequent visits, uncertain geography, sometimes clued/sometimes not adversaries. It is hard to tease out where it is actively wrong, and where it is really just the vibe of the piece. As an experience I have to call it Mostly Seamless, as it’s not game breaking so much as “oh author, parsers could solve this for you.”
This is the first game I rejoiced at being incomplete at 2hr expiration. I’ve got at least two more hours ahead of me and I CAN’T WAIT. An amazing alchemy of Henson-flavored horror and human tragedy. BALZAC (say that name like 50 times. you’ll get it) and BLINTZ 4EVA!
Played: 10/22/23
Playtime: 2hrs, 7 Handfuls, 3/4 buildings explored
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Good luck stopping me!!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Speed Running the Infinite, December 27, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This is a work about all of time, the entire universe, intersection of the divine and the human ideal, and Epic, All-Consuming Love. In 15 minutes or less! Short of a dramatically poignant fortune cookie, I’m hard pressed to think of a tougher ambition-per-word ratio.
Your first choice is an enigmatic one with unclear consequences, on behalf of an uncertain protagonist. So you make a choice! From there you get the sketch of a story about a divine being in love with a heroic human, (Spoiler - click to show)suffering the end of an unspecified history of time loops. On this time budget, neither character is painted in any detail, beyond their emotional connection. This connection is certainly avowed in passionate, earnest terms but without any underlying establishing scenes. This is a “Tell, Don’t Show” narrative.
For Interactive Fiction, the interactions you allow your reader/player are everything. They are the differentiator, the ace where you can give the reader personal investment in the proceedings. That only works if 1) the player makes choices with some in-the-moment expectation of what it means and 2) that the choice serves a narrative or gameplay purpose. Since our choices here frequently do neither of those, it feels like we are watching strangers, and kinda weird ones at that, overhearing a private crisis that is not for our ears. In real life we would mutter some half-apology and quickly give them the room.
Both characters are alluded to in Epic terms, with lives and experiences that could fill volumes. What we see of them belies that. (Spoiler - click to show)In one path our Epic Human Adventurer dies a punk, partially self-inflicted death. Worse, our (Spoiler - click to show)non-human protagonist, whose experiences should inform an alien perspective on existence and humanity, nevertheless devolves to the monomania of adolescent first-love. Where is either of their Epic lives influencing things? Couldn’t they just as easily be, I dunno, an accountant and a dog walker?
It’s almost of secondary notice that the production itself is unpolished. There are many typos and spacing issues in the text. The lack of introduction screen is a minor nit, but absence of clear indication that you have reached an ending is worse. The first ending I got, I assumed was a missing-continue bug. On replaying, I figured out no, all the endings just stopped giving you more places to go. This latter was deeply Intrusive to the experience, and built on typos to give a first draft feeling to the proceedings.
It is hard to escape the idea that the work just tried WAY too much in too little time. It wants EPIC, in scope, emotion and impact. Narrative Epic takes time to build. The reader/player needs to be introduced to large conceits over time, be invested in the cause and effect chains and interactions that created this narrative edifice. Here we are basically jumping in to the end of the story without any of the buildup needed to feel how it lands. I will say, I did experience one Spark in the playtime. After achieving two endings, I liked that for my third I got to see it (Spoiler - click to show)kind of from the other perspective. I do need to be a stickler about the PLURAL sparks in my criteria, but even as the result of an opaque choice, that was kinda cool.
Played: 10/21/23
Playtime: 15min, 2 paths, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Intrusive
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
Bossy, Flossy, and Exhausty, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Say you have a friend that is REALLY into flossing. We all know flossing is important, right? It’s kind of inarguable. For this friend though, flossing is their WHOLE DEAL. There is no conversation, no pop culture experience, no shared activity that won’t in two short steps become a diatribe about Gum Nobility or the evils of Big Corn Cob. Even when you try to agree that flossing is good, 45 minutes later it becomes apparent that you still don’t get JUST HOW GOOD it is. When asked to say three things about this friend your best effort is: “1) They are a flossing champion! 2) uh, they are ANTI-FLOSS’ worst nightmare and 3)…pass.”
Lake Starlight is the IF version of that floss-stan friend. It says some strong things about techno-capitalism and patriarchy. And while the thesis is totally defensible, it is also flat declarative, unnuanced, dripping in contempt and takes every opportunity to remind you of this. It’s biggest sin isn’t that it’s WRONG, it’s that it can’t get over how RIGHT it believes it is.
It doesn’t help that the non-polemic parts of the narrative are a bit unfocused. Let’s start with interactive opportunities. When you are asked to interact you almost never have sufficient information or agency. You are prompted for a name, before the protagonist’s (very specific!) gender and background are revealed, so my 14-year old Hispanic girl carried the name “Gritty.” Her favorite color is orange, and favorite fruit peach, but not sure those choices even mattered. Elsewhere, choices you make are rejected. “Which roommate do you want to hang with?” </select one/> “Nope, sorry, you get this one instead.” You earn “Intuitive Whispers” which I interpreted to be guiding hints, but the one I tried was opaque and unhelpful. It was frustrating enough that when presented with a seemingly-meaningful choice NOT to go to the titular camp (Camp Hogwarts For Girls?), I took it to see what would happen.
It was meaningful alright! Would you believe that a 14-year-old’s choice NOT to go to camp resulted in (Spoiler - click to show)a stifling marriage, casual drug use, and emotional distance from a shrug of a daughter all on the way to an early death? FOR SKIPPING CAMP THAT ONE SUMMER??? Reran with the other path because clearly the work needed me to, begging the question against a field of such limited choice, why was THAT choice even available?
Mostly, there isn’t much interactivity, just continuing to next page for LONG blocks of text about the virtues of nature-based magic and feminine power. Even there the monotone of it is the biggest takeaway - every character we meet has a tale of family tragedy wrought by techno-colonizing males. (Almost) every character is super supportive and capable. For sure, they are all female. (There is a Good Guy Uncle who gets a walkon, but he is the only male we see.) I mean, given what we’re told about the world, I am at a loss why these women haven’t just Lysistrata’d things into order!
Look, I don’t need fiction to be about me. I kind of love it when it challenges me. But if it wants to yell at me (about something I’m already on board with!), maybe try to entertain me also? Instead, I found myself grimacing more than 'yeah sister!‘ing. It doesn’t help I think that the subculture presented as Inarguably Good is much more sus than the narrative believes. Story background establishes an ill-defined Mean Girls’ cult as Bad. I initially thought of that as kind of clever world building. But the reality of our protagonist’s indoctrination into her Magic School… that put off really strong cult vibes. To the point I started questioning, “wait a minute, do we really know how bad this other one is? I really only have the narrator’s word for it, and Cult Camp is getting a total pass from them.” Elsewhere, on the heels of a diatribe against technology, we learn one of our key Role Models is a herbalist? We don’t get a lot of details, but there’s a reason your doctor warns you against herbal remedies. Recent history has shown that there is very little daylight between homeopathy advocates and anti-vacc’ers, where are we on THAT spectrum? If I question the narrator’s assertions on what is Good, maybe what is Bad is in question too?
It is awesome that specific-perspective fiction exists outside CWM wish-fulfillment. It is awesome that THIS long-neglected perspective fuels a fantasy empowerment story. For me, a lighter hand would have gone a long way. I found the narration to be suspect and off-puttingly one note. The protagonist’s primary characteristic was “self-doubt” and was mainly lectured at by Unimpeachable Authorities from behind metaphorically shaking fingers. Those two things made this a Mechanical exercise for me. Lack of meaningful interactivity, except when it was TOO impactful, felt Notably intrusive to the experience.
Seriously though, you gotta floss.
Played: 10/19/23
Playtime: 1.5hr, two playthroughs, 1 short, 1 to end of Book 1.
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably buggy
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
Do Ya, Do Ya, Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna Dance? Please?, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Let’s imagine IF as a dance between Interaction and Fiction. What else you got to do right now? Imagine with me! Sometimes Fiction leads, establishing steps and rhythms while Interaction follows - the player trying to keep up with the gameplay goals the author is setting, swept along in sure hands. Other times, Interaction leads, the player pushing on the environment and story flaring and prancing in response, the author rewarding intricate moves. Some works are structured to have a single lead, start to finish. Other works trade leads back and forth one or more times in a rapturous full body collaboration, ramping excitement and tension as the music builds and builds and gameplay swirls around narrative around gameplay around… I’m getting the vapors. You get the idea.
What happens though, when NEITHER takes the lead? When Interaction’s attempts to coax that cute story out for a spin, are politely rebuffed. And not even during a slow song, the Cha Cha Slide! Meanwhile, Fiction sits in the corner playing on its phone, too cool to come to the dance floor? A painfully fraught middle school dance happens, that’s what. Everyone has a vague idea they should be doing SOMETHING, but no one has any idea what, so there’s just a lot of foot shuffling and awkward glances. An angsty adolescent Thing of Wretchedness.
You start as an elderly woman, snowbound with the titular Thing, trying to figure out how to poison it. Now, that opening is already super sus. If the first (and almost only) thing you know about a person is that they are ready to poison something, it is fair to question how reliable that person is. Particularly when, through their eyes, the Thing is too horrible to behold, but its actions are just not that threatening. It just seems to be wandering around aimlessly, not so different from the protag. After some exploration I even had cause to ponder, (Spoiler - click to show)hey, this is the husband, isn’t it? It wasn’t. Probably.
The environment is spare - 8 rooms and a mailbox, none of it bursting with objects to interact with. And wandering and exploring reveals next to nothing about the protagonist, the Thing, or suggests tension outside the protagonist’s mind. But you can do two things: (Spoiler - click to show)poison the Thing or mail a letter. Since I was unconvinced of the protagonist’s motivations, I chose the latter and the game ended! By which I mean cut to new layer of narrative without resolving anything. And it EXPLICITLY told you that the former would likely not work.
huh.
So I restarted, knocked around a bit, continued to not trust the protag’s sense of threat when tangible evidence was lacking, and got nowhere. Eventually I consulted the walkthrough. Turns out (Spoiler - click to show)the Thing was a menace. It could get angry and start attacking and breaking things. First playthrough I had heard loud noises, but the environment seemed to weather things fine, so I felt no peril. Certainly I shared the room with the Thing often and suffered no harm or even unease. The trick was to wait, (Spoiler - click to show)and maybe poison it (even though the first failure ending told me not to bother!). At that point though, is it maybe acting in self defense? Don’t DO anything, just wait a lot. Until a randomizer exploded. Then, if you didn’t die you could get a vital object to unlock a final area where ANOTHER object led you to a better ending.
Well, the text claimed it was better. Certainly your interaction with the object was opaque and not obviously problem-solvey, but it did? It led to another layer of metatext that only obliquely resolved things for the old woman you’d spent all your time with. The work is apparently part of a series but claims no knowledge of the rest is needed. Maybe not, but missing knowledge of stakes, consequences and cause and effect should be provided somewhere.
I’m a horror guy, October is my primetime. The title made promises to me. My goodwill (and Engagement!) is a horror game’s to lose. Here, the gameplay decisions were its undoing. The protagonist was afraid, that was clear. As a player I was at a loss to see why, and actually suspicious of her fear. While my suspicion of the protagonist was kind of fun, it was deeply counterproductive to the narrative. The work really needed to sell the Thing’s menace better, with concrete, observable consequences outside the protagonist’s mind. To some extent, reliance on a randomizer may exacerbate the problem. The author cannot guarantee a sense of menace if they delegate the threat to a die roll. Without a walkthrough, I’m not sure I would have had the patience or inclination to wait around (doing nothing!) to see if it got worse. Getting exactly the WRONG message from my first failure didn’t help either.
The work had a moderate amount of unimplemented nouns and disambiguation issues between clocks and boxes. In a work so spare they stood out as Notable, where a more engaging work might better weather the glitches. I will say, as a horror fan, evoking Middle School Dance was maybe the most chilling thing about it.
Played: 10/19/23
Playtime: 1hr, 2/3 endings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably buggy
Would Play After Comp?: No, Middle School was DIRE
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
The Ring Must Be Deployed, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Comedy is a macro phenomenon, a numbers game really. Success is predicated on getting just the right formula that resonates with the most people. A “Marketplace of Laughter” if you will. There are tricks to maximize purchase. Surprising, off-kilter connections is a prime mechanism - recasting or contrasting things the audience knows about human behavior, communication, and/or shared culture. So to generate a laugh you need one of those common baselines, and a twist on or connection with it that folks will respond to.
Human behavior is probably the hardest of these - it requires savant levels of empathy, observation and understanding. If you’ve ever bought a complete dud of a birthday present you understand how hard a deep understanding of one individual is, nevermind crafting a more general observation of mass resonance. Communication humor is a more cerebral exercise, playing with the context, meanings and interplay of spoken or written words. (This formulation does require you to concede that even the lowest brand of humor, Puns, is somehow cerebral. Which I am loathe to do and understand if you are done with this analysis.) Shared culture may be the easiest to engage. All you need to know is that a thing exists, and other people know about it.
Easiest does not have to mean laziest! And an easy baseline does NOT mean easy laughs! It’s the audacity of the connection that brings the chuckles, the baseline is just the platform for it. I think of it like Olympic Diving. It is a greater athletic achievement, with commensurate reward, to execute a high degree of difficulty. But even with lower difficulty, precise execution is still OLYMPIC ATHLETE LEVEL OF WOW.
ODNSF is clearly trading in cultural humor. As a macro numbers game, I can only report one data point, my own. Through no fault of the author, my cultural relationship with the Rings property is… I mean its fine? Once you get past the Elvish racism I mean. And “get past racism” is really a whopper of a phrase to have hung on you, isn’t it? Cooking shows are… also fine? So yeah, these are things I know exist, but my affection for them is shallow and quickly expended. ODNSF trades on affectionate connections and twists here, so it was going to need some really audacious leaps to work for me. It’s ok that it doesn’t.
The work was peppered with some fun turns of phrase, though the ones that landed best for me were unconnected from the underlying setup. Talking about skinning cats, this nifty phrase turned up: "or why in the Realms the methods to do it are something people have devoted time to enumerating. " And I don’t know why but my loudest laugh came from “Although your parents died in a showboating accident …” THAT TURN OF PHRASE HAS BEEN AVAILABLE THIS WHOLE TIME!
There were wry smiles around the periphery throughout, but its main-quest commitment to the mashup was its engine and that didn’t speak to me. I think maybe if it clowned in that space for a while, but used it as a springboard for more character-based or bonkers escalation humor untethered from the inspirations it’s goofing on, that might have worked better?
Or maybe more compelling gameplay? I played as Froyo 3 times and granted I was probably not the most attentive, strategic-thinking player. I pretty handily won the cook-off. It seemed to trade on character/stat synergy in a way I needed to recognize, but not manage to any degree of finesse. Coupled with random die rolls outside my control. That same scenario/stat synergy seemed to leave me unprepared to (Spoiler - click to show)defeat the final boss where choices either traded on Froyo’s lowest stats or pure randomization. I’m pretty sure I see what Froyo’s path would need to be, but after 3 cycles was content to leave it be.
Mechanical, Seamless for me. If you have strong affection for the inspirations and don’t need ambitions beyond that, you would likely enjoy this more.
…
Ok, real talk. I’m a Gimli guy. Dude knows who he is, doesn’t apologize for it, and is open to character growth without drama. At my house, “And my Axe!” is a pretty common response to “Hey, you wanna come to the store with me?” This is the makeup of MY psychological stew. Game did itself no favors sidelining him. While I did appreciate the nod in background, HE IS MORE THAN HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH AN ELF.
I’m also a Hufflepuff.
Played: 10/19/23
Playtime: 1hr, 3 cycles, won bakeoff 2/3, beat Sour Ron 0/3
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Seamless
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
Love's Labors Looped, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Time Loop stories have been with us for over a hundred years, but it seems fair to say that their broad cultural impact is back loaded to the last 30. One might be forgiven thinking “Groundhog Day” (1993) inaugurated the sub-genre in whole cloth, given its quantum leap in cultural awareness. Of course nothing is new under the sun and there are ALWAYS precursors.
It is hard to believe the rise of video games as mainstream entertainment isn’t a factor, what with restart/respawn/try again being a fairly ubiquitous game mechanic. It kind of gives people the experiential touchstone and familiarity to launch the riffing. There’s also something very human about believing if we try hard enough and long enough we can ‘do over’ to make things right. Or maybe just wanting to believe, really badly.
At first, LVD suggests it might be feeding that desperate, yearning beast in us. It quickly dispels that notion. The setup is, our protagonist picking up Valentine’s Day tokens for their lover on a short walk through the city and home. (Spoiler - click to show)There they get some hearbreaking news. Then the day seemingly repeats.
This is going to be hard to talk about with minimal spoilers. LVD kind of presents as a time loop story, but puckishly isn’t really that. Broad strokes locations, events and encounters echo themselves, (Spoiler - click to show)but each time different in a way difficult to dismiss as mere ‘interpretation’. It is definitively the same Holiday, and kind of has to be the same year, but many details evolve over multiple cycles, independent of player actions. The world, including NPCs, physical objects, and even the weather, take on shades and details that reflect an evolution in the protagonist. It is all very competently done. The story is documenting some dramatic emotional changes through external details rather than internal monologue, but in discrete, nuanced steps with each loop. I found the stages of progress to be well done in conveying its gradual, perhaps inexorable, flow. The changing landscape leaves the player/reader somewhat at sea. Are we actually Time Looping? Are we revisiting a scene, gradually removing delusions from the protagonist to get to an underlying ‘reality?’ Are we able to affect anything about subsequent loops at all? It is kind of a nifty uncertainty the story holds us in.
I think though, that the mystery has a specific answer that feels quietly satisfying but on reflection falls apart a bit? There’s no way around this, sorry. (Spoiler - click to show)Through the looping (for want of a better word), the protagonist goes from denial, to heartbreak and loss, to healing. Intriguingly, empathy seems to be a key factor in that slow transition. It’s a touching narrative, carefully curated step by step. That slow building makes the final pass feel earned and hopeful and what kind of monster doesn’t appreciate that?
Well Rhaaah, Rhaah, (brandish claw hands) I guess? There are two things that kept me from fully embracing the work, and I think they both trace to that central looping conceit. The first is that in order to take this deliberate, detailed emotional journey we have to start with a deeply oblivious protagonist. That would be fine if we had something else to latch onto about them, but it’s kind of their defining characteristic. To the point I’m like "Wait, if this blindsided you, maybe the problem was you to begin with?" And sure, that could lead into the self-delusion interpretation, but doesn’t that kind of make them EVEN LESS sympathetic?
The interactivity underscores (or can underscore) this gap. If you play as a reasonably empathic human being to NPCs, the protagonist’s seeming obliviousness with their primary relationship jars MORE, not less. Interestingly though, as things progress, (Spoiler - click to show)that empathy reads as a key factor in healing which is both a more subtle and more satisfying message. The message that I think was omitted was any kind of awareness or resolve around how it got to that point in the first place.
[sidebar: this kind of begged the question to me how much influence the interactivity had on things. Late in my run I made a deliberately counter-empathic choice to see if it changed anything, and it didn’t feel like it? Maybe I was already baked at that point per the game’s algorithm, hard to know.]
The second sticking point for me is the central metaphor itself. As a metaphor, time loop can cover a lot of bases. Self improvement. Expanding narrow perspectives. Recognizing importance in everyday things. Value of perseverence. Control (or Lack of it) of your own destiny. The one thing it REALLY doesn’t convey is “passage of time.” It’s all the same day! The story seemed to be making a case that some hurts (Spoiler - click to show)get worse, a lot worse, before they get better and you just keep moving forward until they improve. Told through the lens of NOT moving forward, but repeating! Kind of a 12-step program on 120xFF. Next day, you’ll be fine! It is certainly a hopeful climax for the protagonists’ journey, but the time loop conceit really muddied it for me.
Look, these kind of meaty emotional and metaphorical dissections are my crack cocaine. I am grateful that IF so often provides opportunity to ham-handedly indulge it. I am grateful THIS work did! The emotional narrative was well written, and I thought building empathy into the interactivity worked well. Clearly I was on board for the central conceit! These are Sparks for me. My own obsessive over-analysis just kept it from Engaging is all.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the biggest Sparks, the (Spoiler - click to show)total trolling headfake of its blurb: “You find yourself in an inexplicable time loop, reliving the same day over and over again. Can you find a way to stop your lover from leaving you?” THAT is some top-tier (Spoiler - click to show)artistic bait and switch.
Played: 10/18/23
Playtime: 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings:Sparks of Joy, 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
50% Chance of Exactly As Advertised, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Excerpts of interview between JJMcC from a future where he has played DMcBGKitN, and JJMcC from the past, right before playing. For clarity they will be post-McB and pre-McB, respectively.
post-McB: “You won’t believe the crazy chain of events that led to this, but I’m, WE’RE, a TIME TRAVELER now!”
pre-McB: “This is bananas, tell me all about it!”
post-McB: “Where do I start? Well, on the eve of the Texas Inquisition of '25…”
// TRANSCRIPT -FFWD
“… our Postmate driver population the whole time…”
// TRANSCRIPT -FFWD
“… chants of ‘Martha, Martha’ with a lowing, droning ‘Steeeeewart’…”
// TRANSCRIPT -FFWD
“…K-POP KABAL and their meme bombs…”
// TRANSCRIPT -FFWD
“…and I ended up here!”
pre-McB: “Wow, what a story! You know what this means?”
post-McB: “I mean, so many things. What are you thinking of?”
pre-McB: “Now I can do REAL Reviews Out Of Time!!”
post-McB: (nonplussed) “That’s your takeaway?”
pre-McB: “I was about to play Dick McButts in IFCOMP23 and I have a few preliminary notes, lemme run those past you. Gonna be a lotta testical synonyms, yeah?”
post-McB: (off balance) “Uh, yeah. So, so many.”
pre-McB: “I mean I’m expecting a lot.”
post-McB: “You will not be underserved.”
pre-McB: “I’m also expecting outlandish escalations.”
post-McB: “Yes, oh for sure, but also less than you might think.”
pre-McB: “Less? Really?”
post-McB: “In raw volume. (wry smile) Hoo, the midpoint though…”
pre-McB: “Spoilers!”
post-McB: “I’m you from the future. The only thing we have to talk about is spoilers.”
pre-McB: “We have shared memories!”
post-McB: “And what would we have new to say about those?”
pre-McB: (brief, awkward silence) “Next question, is it funny? Can it sustain the bit?”
post-McB: "Well, understand there are two branches, one outright player trolling. Fortunately we don't get that one."
pre-McB: "Wow, thanks winds of Fate! So it was funny?"
post-McB: “Yesss, mostly, but it’s better when it’s surprising.”
pre-McB: “Is it review proof?”
post-McB: “Iron clad. Impossible to write about.”
pre-McB: (skeptical) “I’ll figure it out, it’s not like I’ll just phone in a cheap gimmick. Oh! Can we say it together?”
post-McB: “Sure. 1,2,3…”
Both: “Sparks of Joy! Seamless!”
pre-McB: (laughing) “I figured…”
post-McB: (laughing) “Dude you haven’t even played it yet.” (laughter dying) “Wow, we really had NO integrity in this did we…”
pre-McB: (oblivious, still laughing) “Is the gameplay worth discussing…?”
post-McB: “WHOAH! Something weird is happening, oh crap I can feel a slip coming on. Quick let me tell you about the Great Collapse of …” (rest inaudible behind…)
pre-McB: “DON’T GO! YOU HAVE TO TELL ME DO I GET TO RACK HITLER?! DO I GET TO… FUTURE ME DON’T…”
//TRANSCRIPT ENDS
Played: 10/17/23
Playtime: 35min, finished after 4 crushings
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience is complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Oog-Ug Make Society, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
James A. Michener (JAM! called by no one. UNTIL NOW.) was a singular author, wasn’t he? His most famous, well-received works were meticulously researched historical tapestries. They were fiction, or maybe fictionalized narratives where he portrayed broad sweeps of history through created characters (often generationally related). He crafted historical mosaics composed of individual, detailed shards of fiction. Characters were sketched only roughly, kind of subordinate to the march of time but just present enough to shade events in human terms. Michener was pretty good at it. He also was SPOT on about the American Electoral College, but I digress.
Anyway, Michener has nothing to do with anything. Shanidar is a tale that… no of course he is relevant. Shanidar is strongly Michener-esque. Michenery? JAMmy! Those JAMmy synapses closed in my brain early and stayed with me through the entire piece. A work could do far worse than to evoke that comparison!
Before we really invoke JAM though, let’s start with presentation, because it is noteworthy. The work is choice-select, with each choice pulling up a window of text, overlaid on a (mostly) black and white illustration. The illustration style is tuned directly to the narrative. It is reminiscent of cave drawings, often conveying things with almost abstract line work. When it does ahistorically increase detail to capture a character’s emotion or likeness, it retains the flavor of cave drawings, which is enough. It is a really nice effect, enhancing the proceedings at every turn. I particularly liked the rendering of (Spoiler - click to show)the group’s emergence from a tunnel to their new home.
It is all underlaid with music and sound effects similarly tuned to the current scene. The choice to make individual text blocks short and concise gives the sound work its best shot at not over- or under-staying. Text discipline was also an evocative choice. Mostly two to three very short paragraphs conveying the action and a bit of environment and off to the next. This is where the JAM of it really rang out for me. You see just enough of the onscreen cast to get a feel for them, but as much or more of the community impact on and from their actions. To be clear, I found this a compelling narrative choice.
The story itself is told in three parts: an initial tense escape, some community building, then a final migration to a new home. I didn’t get it right out of the gate. There were two things that made the work harder to engage for me, I think. For one, the cast is just on the fat side of ‘wait, who is that again?’ Particularly early on, a lot of names are thrown at us, some of them phonetically similar, though only a few get ‘screen time.’ Names without scenes are just names to a reader. (Notably, Michener himself has sometimes fallen into this trap.)
If not clear by now, this is an interactive fiction, not a game. The interactivity is a nifty thematic echo/expansion of broad sweep storytelling. Let’s think of a JAMmy story thread as a series of discrete action snapshots, implicitly connected by the reader into a larger timeline. Are you thinking of it? Just do it, humor me. We’ll call that the X direction. In the Y direction, we have discrete characters intersecting or not with each other, each with their own suite of discrete scenes that march forward along X. The interactivity lets us decide which threads to look in on. It makes us a drone of sort - where our autonomy is expressed in what we choose to watch while concurrent actions happen outside our view. We are experiencing two-dimensional historical sweep with a one-dimensional camera! Y’know LIKE WE DO EVERY DAY OF OUR LIVES. The corresponding downside to this is that characters we DON’T follow remain opaque and maybe even forgettable to us. The story sometimes concedes ‘flashback’ options to catch up on concurrent activities, but that seemed unevenly applied to me.
The author does one really vital thing - allows a ‘restart this chapter’ option at the end, so the reader can maybe go back and drone-stalk threads they missed the first time. Really the presence of this option is what won me over. I intellectually appreciated the 2D approach, but found it sometimes made the narrative difficult to follow and engage. By letting you cycle a few times, you can explore the entire two dimensional space. Don’t sleep on this capability, fam!
The middle part of the narrative to me was where the work fired on all cylinders. Characters introduced, short one-off scenes with subsets of cast members, deeper intersections between the threads (and maybe fewer to manage) all painting the picture of a community coming together two or three characters at a time. I mostly had the cast in hand by this point. Strong, effective stuff, no notes.
The third part pulled away from me again. It is presenting a much larger time window than the prior two parts, so the sampled character work has a lot more to do and doesn’t quite succeed as well. Characters age, life events that plausibly happen in large timeframes are mentioned in passing leading to a ‘well I guess that happened offscreen?’ kind of feeling. The follow-a-thread architecture meant you were missing a lot MORE of the other threads as time whizzed by. It had a distancing effect, or at least more distancing. I feel if it had adhered more to the fuel-air mixture of part two, or even accelerated more evenly to the faster pace I would have better enjoyed the ride. As it was, it started to feel not just like acceleration but also getting thinner?
I don’t want to sound too down on this thing. Despite the taffy pulling sensation of part 3 it nevertheless really captured the sweet melancholy of time passage and generational handoff. And it paid off many of the recurring characters. This work stands out in epic sweep and subject matter; in narrative style; in thematic use of interactivity; in whole-package presentation. I really really liked it, but couldn’t quite overlook the minor burrs on the way. Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless, bonus point for a thrilling mix of uncommon artistic flexes.
…
Ok, you may be asking ‘why just Mostly Seamless?’ Was hoping I could just drop that and run. Part of it was the sometimes jarring time jump transitions in the third part, not fatal but noticeable. But really the big thing was, and I’m putting reviewer-is-petty blur on this: (Spoiler - click to show)At one point, in lieu of the evocative illustrations we instead get a 3D modeled archeological artifact. It felt unwelcome in the moment, but by the end there was a scene with actual archeologists. WHY WAS THIS NOT USED THERE INSTEAD? I don’t know why this obvious-to-me missed opportunity is such a rock in my mental shoe, but there it is. Look, the gap between Mostly Seamless and Seamless is pretty thin and doesn’t even affect the score. You gotta give me a pass on this.
Played: 10/17/23
Playtime: 35min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless, bonus for kicking out the JAMs!
Would Play After Comp?: No, but I will probably check out the rest of the series
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Aimlessness in the Crosshairs, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Reading the title, I immediately assumed I was in for a black and white hard-boiled mystery joint. I was mildly chuffed when I realized it was not that. Surely the implications of a title with a punch like that were invoked on purpose? Suffice to say that though noir-less, the title is firmly justified by the end of the work.
This is a lightly interactive novel. Or maybe more than lightly, it is hard to tell, which is mostly a compliment. It took me a while to synch with the rhythm of this prose. The first scene wrong-footed me a little, when the protagonist seemed to respond to banter that was not as amusing as it purported to be. They were obviously in a different place than I was, and the disconnect was distancing. I think though that the key choice that reversed this was the choice to abstract the protagonist’s dialogue. Rather than hear the protagonist’s ‘voice,’ we are only ever informed what was said via narration. We ‘hear’ every other voice, but only absorb the content of the main character’s dialogue. It is a powerful way not only to remove barriers between us and the protagonist, where phrasing may jar or push, but to subtly encourage our own voice to creep in behind the text.
I am not sure if the writing shifted gears after that first scene, or if I just adjusted, but either way notwithstanding infrequent burrs I mostly got on board with the narrative after that.
The setup is a time jumping narrative of an army sniper’s life, showcasing their life’s arc before, during and after a harrowing service in Afghanistan. It is overwhelmingly linear. I counted three choices that felt consequential in the moment over its runtime, with maybe four times that overall. After the final scene though, I have to wonder. Certainly the preamble and blurb to the story suggest many different ending possibilities and I am at a loss to figure out what choices would have led to different outcomes. If true, this is really subtle writing! Every choice I made felt almost inevitable, and organically reflected in subsequent events. If it was truly a branching narrative, getting it THAT right on my specific path was pretty admirable.
I particularly appreciated moments of LACK of choice, in Afghanistan in particular. Offering true choice in some situations would likely betray the setup and reality of the piece in destructive ways. Further, I felt the time jumps were ably managed - it was typically quite clear when I was within a sentence or two even before the date/location headers were established in my head. The narrative overall built steam, brought me into its rhythms and was compelling to read.
All of these were Sparks of Joy to be sure, some developed slowly over time which is kind of at war with the Sparks metaphor I’m using but whatever. I would say two things held me at remove, ultimately. The first was the ending I got. It was a beach scene where (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist threw his phone in the ocean. Despite the previous 50 minutes, I had no idea why we were doing that. Only to find that that was the Big Finish! It left me perplexed, though somehow didn’t render the story pointless. Just unclosed. Did the text somehow misfire on my choice path? Maybe that was the intended effect? Ok, but that final action was not needed for that effect! Why was it there???
The second was that of the three time periods portrayed, the early years percolated with promise and dramatic tension. The wartime scenes positively crackled. The post-war scenes fell flat to me. Their purpose and resonance eluded me. Again, maybe lack of resonance WAS the point, but… that feels like it kind of denied the impact of the war? The protagonist felt aimless to start with, submitting to their father’s priorities irrespective of their own. The war was horrific and impactful, and afterwards the protagonist kind of … stayed aimless just without the push? Made more so? I can’t tell how much of that was my choices vs authorial dictate. Again, this is to the author’s credit. But with a story this long, with so few actual choices to make, maybe a heavier authorial hand is warranted? It is long enough and linear enough a narrative (which is kind of a wild thing to say about a time jump structured story) that I don’t think I want to retry, which in some sense speaks to not breaching into full Engaging for me. Really Seamless integration of choices though.
Played: 10/16/23
Playtime: 50min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, my experience is complete, and bar to creating another feels high
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Artificial AI, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This is a short choice-select story about saving a threatened space station and perhaps the ground population beneath it. It is attractively, liberally illustrated. I find myself increasingly preoccupied with the “is this human or AI?” question when I encounter this style of art these days, and I hate it. The question I mean. On the one hand, enabling artistic expression for everyone, including all-thumbs illustrators like me, is a powerful creative tool. On the other, the massive-scale corporate theft necessary to feed it is despicable. In this case, the art was in fact NOT AI-generated, sidestepping that particular concern for another day.
Though if the artist had been AI, at least here it’s kind of thematic?
The setup is you are a commando engineer, called to fix an injured space station. The presentation is reasonably good, illustrations wrapped by text with choices at the bottom. I liked the darkening of old text as a way to emphasize the new, though the illustrations more often than not provided sufficient break that it wasn’t really necessary. The choices on offer are sufficient to make progress, if a bit constrained. The blocking is a bit weird though, you have a full exploration cycle before encountering the ship’s boss?
The story itself ramps quickly from ‘well, what’s going on?’ to ‘ok, dire decision to make!’ I think the story kind of sabotaged itself on two fronts though. For one, nearly the entire plot, certainly the player’s main conundrum, is completely exposed (Spoiler - click to show)in the blurb! Before the player has started playing! That’s some spoiler-Inception there BTW, spoiler-blurring some spoiler spoilers!
The second way it sabotaged itself was with the writing - it pretty routinely telegraphs its intentions in advance of the narrative in a way that both jars and dilutes whatever surprises might be coming. It applies an urgency to your work, before the need for urgency is uncovered. An NPC (unprompted!) alludes to a difficult choice long before any such choice is apparent. Even the text pacing is off - after some scene setting we get some observations by the protagonist, followed by a REsummary of the setting and setup! It is a jittery focus - from macro to micro back to macro.
There are other choices that jar in the moment - stilted, unnatural dialogue, choices being forced when there are clearly other options possible - that latter maybe ultimately gets some measure of justification? The question mark is because it is not clear that the narrative recognizes these things NEED justification or not. It is possible I am doing more work than the narrative there! Anyway, you make your choice then things proceed to an ending with a reveal that is interesting but also kind of confounding on its mechanics. All in all, the text consistently put me just off my center enough that it never crested beyond a Mechanical exercise for me.
Played: 10/16/23
Playtime: 15min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless after bugfix
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete. Well half complete, but complete enough.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Turbulent Seas of Text, December 24, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
I am starting to worry the “Here There Be Poopdecks” nautical review sub-series is going to take over the main series! Unsurprisingly, with a name like The Ship we are up to part 6. An argument could be made to call it part 7 as well, but that’s a false accounting. HTBP is counting stories not instances.
This is a choice-select driven work. The choices are either embedded in descriptive text (when ‘free roaming’ for want of a better term) or in a postscript list when conversing. Most of the roaming choices are descriptive: things to look at, places to go, NPCs to talk to. When you click on a character you get conversation topics to cycle through. Only rarely do choices seem to have divergent narrative impact, beyond moving the plot forward. Even then, it seems mainly to affect relationship scores that at 2hrs have yet to affect the proceedings. The net effect is that yes, there are things to click, but functionally might as well be turning pages. Makes sense, as the work is decidedly narratively driven.
The narrative concerns two journeys, linked across time, by two captains asea for purpose and… self-awareness? It’s not a terrible setup, but by its introspective nature requires some heavy lifting in character and tone to usher the player along. For me, I don’t think the prose was up to the task, and sometimes the available player choices also deflated the objective.
The scenario opens with an urgent pounding on a protagonist’s door - pounding that is ignored to briefly explore surroundings. Certainly the scene-setting is necessary, but having the protagonist ignore what seems an urgent issue outside shades both the character and the narrative unflatteringly. It is a weird choice, because it would have been child’s play to enable casual exploration, then interrupt with urgent pounding later - it’s an unforced error. This lack of control over the narrative manifests often.
Open ended IF, where exploration and interactions occur at the player’s initiative, are an authorial challenge. Your text has to make sense regardless what order they find, say, the vampire and the holy water. With a constrained choice architecture, the author has more control and is able to make transitions feel more natural. Ship inexplicable cedes this advantage. Selections often introduce jarring mixes of non sequitur wordplay or sudden emotional swings as if the author did not anticipate the sequence. In one notable area, the protagonist goes from blind fury to playful friendship with the thinnest of transitions.
Character voices similarly suffer inelegant writing. While there is an attempt to give each character a unique voice, the voices chosen don’t quite ring true and are inconsistently rendered. For one, despite having characters from hundreds of years in the past and future, most have a decidedly contemporary use of profanity. Where the voices are different, they also feel… wrong? Inappropriate familiarity from crew members, a computer that occasionally dips into slang, contradictory emotional swings (one character reacts to a protagonist with both paternal fondness and abject terror). All of it undermines the settings and keeps the reader from Engaging. It is not helped that some conversation options never go away (while others do!), but when selected repeat context and information both characters have experienced before.
I’m not sure why but this example, where one protagonist’s belligerent avoidance of self-reflection is described, particularly rubbed me the wrong way:
Endless ways to avoid taking a peek within, finding out one’s
true call, this elusive idea that defines you, that drives you.
The Captain: “Maybe what drives me is precisely this: that I have
no idea what drives me.”
The text is explicitly saying the character resists introspection, except the VERY NEXT LINE is an out loud self-analysis. And talking to who, the narrator? The narration itself could easily have provided this insight, but the choice for the character to do it awkwardly contradicts exactly what it is asserting!
Narrative IF lives and dies on its prose. For me the clumsy moments accumulated over two hours and ultimately disconnected me from the story. There are other aspects around the periphery - some neat minigames tangential to the narrative, a simple but pleasant use of player-state icons, but the main thrust of the work did not click for me.
Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished, 3/7 chapters complete, 7/20 Achievements
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably jarring choice transitions and architecture
Would Play After Comp?: No, can’t get past my prose distractions
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
From Nostalgia with Love, a 008-bit adventure, December 23, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Adventuron, that’s a thing! An authoring tool that explicitly enables and embraces 8/32/64 bit adventure games. I love that it exists. It’s like a web-enabled portal to the past. If I read the background right, this particular game was originally developed 35ish years ago and reimplemented today? As a guy who reengaged the hobby after a similar gap, what a powerful way to make cross-time connections in your life - reconnecting with ancient passions and enhancing and expanding with the life lived between. I whole-heartedly endorse. Even if it were fake meta-text, I endorse that spirit.
Adventuron presentation is evocative, well-serving its core mission, not the least of which with its comfort-food font options. The, lemme say 32-bit? graphics are terrifically reminiscent too, presenting a variety of Italian scenery with rakish aplomb. All of it transports the play experience to the dawn of computer imagery, just past mainframe text only, and just before home PCs were powerful enough to do more.
The gameplay here mimics that also, and I am taking the authorship claims at face value here. The game has tight descriptions, bounded interactivity, and many unimplemented nouns. All of which precisely reinforce gameplay of the purported era. There is instant death which can only be avoided through un-deducible and unrelated coincidence. There are puzzles that don’t make immediate sense, but are still the right vibe ((Spoiler - click to show)cf the hacksaw in a bottle). The plot is a PG Golden Age Bond Movie type riff (and a breezy, fun one!), but you are nevertheless talking to Witches and repairing statues. Mapping is not strictly essential, but probably time saving. There is a late losing state very easy to blunder into. I HIGHLY recommend SAVING as you go, certainly once you get to the (Spoiler - click to show)Control Room. It is an interesting alchemy: gameplay is not Mostly Seamless by modern standards, but IS a Mostly Seamless pastiche! It seems very much of its 80’s pedigree and effectively weaves a ‘game out of time’ spell.
So the question I found myself asking as I played it was… what is the value of nostalgia, and how far does it go before it runs out of juice? Offering nostalgia without commentary, without sly subversion, without subtle updates or contrasts with the intervening years’ culture, norms and gameplay conventions… what is the value of a fake time capsule when REAL ones are still available? To be clear, it is not valueLESS, but how satisfying is it, ultimately?
Mental exercise: what if Adventuron somehow became the dominant or even just a prominent authoring tool for IF, does that ultimately help the hobby? Does it hurt? Does it make for soft historical shackles and somehow back pressure innovation and modernization? (A charge that has been leveled at Parser IF for a while now). I mean, it is a fake mental exercise. Adventuron’s presence is really just MORE flavors available, not LESS of other things. But playing modern Adventuron games today, I kind of feel should trade in just a little more. Doesn’t have to be alot!, but just a little. There was a Spring Thing 23 Adventuron game I thought managed this well - while gameplay and presentation were bound to the 80’s there were more sophisticated narrative elements that tweaked the formula just barely enough to make an interesting frisson. Codename Obscura is not about that and doesn’t care to be.
Look, there’s a reason nostalgia exists. It works. It Sparks. This is nostalgia-bait for ME specifically, and I am powerless before its siren call. But at this point, I don’t think nostalgia without a twist gets beyond Sparks.
Played: 10/14/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished, Schwarzberg escaped which I think can’t be avoided?
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless
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
I'm Thanos Now!, December 23, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
The term Interactive Fiction, just the term now, implies technology but leans heavily into literary tradition. But we call them GAMES more often than not. Does that seem right to you? I get it, its the ‘Interactive’ part. It creates a deep intersection with the game experience. Sure, and it’s also the march of history - the early ouvre’ was decidedly game based not narrative based. And who am I to snippily try to draw a line between two things that have lived together in one big muddy swamp for decades anyway?
So Vambrace is a game. A full on ascii-map, fight-the-monsters game. On firing it up I felt I had its measure instantly: Rogue-ish RPG-lite dungeon crawl. It wasn’t stunning insight on my part, the blurb told me that right up front. I settled in for what I knee-jerkingly presumed would be a Mechanical experience because knee-jerks are the province of REAL jerks. I further dug a hole for myself when I looked up vambrace (and I do like learning new words) to find it is forearm armor. That you put power gems in. Yeah, I’m Thanos now.
What a dickish way to engage a game, right? Thankfully, early on a single detail threw my preconception baggage out the window and forced me to engage it with unbiased eyes. That detail? One command was named INVESTIGRAB. I can’t stop smiling at that goofy portmanteau. I wish I had come up with it. The syllables sing with sincere, silly poetry. When I used that command (the single letter ‘I’) I consistently proclaimed in dramatic timbre INVESTIGRAB!. Mostly in my head, but occasionally out loud to the deep consternation of my family. Hey, IF like no one’s watching, right?
[Time to queue up this review’s soundtrack!]
That single ridiculous, wonderful word temporarily flushed the self-satisfied a@%hole out of my system and let me meet the game on its own terms. It is an ascii map, navigated and interacted with in single letter commands. This UI choice pops ya’ll. There is almost no friction between you and game progress. Pop! Pop! Pop! While you were reading this, I just ran end to end and killed two monsters! This super-fleet implementation choice, along with tight humor and legit puzzles delivered on the frothy good-time promise made by INVESTIGRAB.
As the game progresses, your suite of frustratingly mild-effect spells grows organically so as not to overload your progress with ‘what all can I do now?’ The Ascii map is similarly poppy and crisp - exactly the details needed to zip around. And it builds its puzzle space as well. You start with ‘hey I know this spell, use it and win!’ to ‘Yikes, none of these spells are Aces, I need to start building combos.’ It ends up being way more puzzle than RPG, to its extreme benefit.
Now, some of the puzzles didn’t click for me - they required using spells in ways that are counter-intuitive, (Spoiler - click to show)like using GUST to also mean PRESS OR SELECT. I think I consulted the walkthrough twice and was glad I did. But others were EXACTLY right, and still others challenging, but delivering that sweet sweet endorphin rush of ‘hey that’s a clever puzzle AND I SOLVED IT!!!’ I think maybe I am slower than average, I did not finish in two hours. Two hours in, the thing pops with Sparks of Joy. A little too light and a shade too ‘need the walkthrough’ to be truly Engaging, but peppy fun for sure. Notwithstanding puzzle design that sometimes was not quite there, a Seamless experience with a great, simple, transparent UI design.
PostScript: As I was playing, I kept comparing it mentally to last year’s Trouble in Sector 471. Turns out there’s a good reason for that! For me, this one (wait for it…) popped just a little bit more.
Played: 10/13/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: I mean, yeah, I’m gonna finish this. It is light, friendly, amusing and more fun than frustrating.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
[You can kill the soundtrack now. You probably got the gist.]
Make Art, Not Money, December 23, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Part 4 of the “Playing with Matches” IFCOMP23 Texture review sub-series. Recap: as an IF tool, Texture must be tightly managed due to its 1) potentially powerful drag and drop UI and 2) deeply challenging presentation choices. The latter in particular can cripple a work if the Chaos Twins (Text Hunting and Font Dancing) are allowed free reign.
It is with near religious ecstasy that I report Sculptor has tamed that infernal duo! By my count only a single page was subject to resized font, and that only a single step. Text Hunting was banished altogether. How was this miracle performed? Through exacting text formatting and page size discipline. New text was metered tightly, sometimes replacing, sometimes adding and bar one always with an eye to the fully displayed page. What an ungodly relief this was. It is actually distressing to me how much joy I derived from this basic craftsmanship. Too, the text formatting was clean enough, the options delineated effortlessly to make new text intuitive and not distracting. Occasionally the text would get laid out on the page in modest flourishes that further kept things clear when modified. Barring anything else I am about to say, this is the standard for future Texture authors to consider.
I wish I could report that the narrative and gameplay provided as much joy. Let’s start with narrative. It is a short work about a sculptor at the end of his life, having sacrificed everything to create his magnum opus, then making a decision about it. If your first impression on reading that is ‘art about art, its going to be artsy isn’t it?’, then you and I are on the same page. And we’re both right. It is a work flowing with elevated, poetic language, capturing the passion and sacrifice of an Artist (and only that), as well as more than a little self-pity. All in the kind of overwrought language that leaves me cold:
“And through them shimmered back the reflection of tears, now held up by your thirsty, wrinkled lids.”
“Regardless of all, yet another comes to deny your craft.”
It’s the kind of work that uses the phrase ‘gird your loins’ unironically, straight faced, and portentous. Maybe it’s just me, but that phrase seems best employed in full acknowledgement of its stiff pretention. I don’t want to belabor the point, suffice to say I am not the audience for this kind of prose.
So let’s move on to gameplay, or more accurately interactivity. Here too, I felt the work undid itself a bit. For one, while the work tamed the Texture Big Two (which let’s not lose sight of that tremendous achievement), it did nothing to leverage the power of its drag and drop interface. Options were connected without surprise, the connection bubbles offered no nuanced comment on the connections being made. It was largely mechanical, punctuated with baffling choices. At one point you are asked to connect “Sand” to “Still”. I’m not sure a typo’d ‘Stand Still’ made any more sense there and am just at a loss. Elsewhere, two connection choices provided different linkages when one was “Examine” and the other “Gaze Upon.” None of this is fatal, mind, just missed opportunity.
A more damaging gameplay artifact is that the game was undecided how much player-protag autonomy it wanted to allow. Now despite some strong traditions, IF doesn’t REQUIRE protagonist autonomy. Books are famously entertaining, requiring only the occasional player page turn. IF could use interactivity to enhance the reading experience while still presenting a linear narrative. Many works do. You could argue that Texture is specifically engineered to enable that kind of work.
Sculptor can’t quite make up its mind. It offers the player opportunity to mold the protagonist with choices how to react to events. This gives the player latitude to tailor the character somewhat, to build a character in their head. But not always. At one point it requires (Spoiler - click to show)pleading with a lender in a way that clashes with other character choices the player (me) might have made. These are off notes that come to a head at the climax decision. The work has VERY specific ideas about the final choices and their import. But given the prior decisions available to a player, it is possible that these choices, and their narrative characterization, feel false. I know it is possible because it was my experience. The game WANTED me to feel a way (boy did it), but had let me build a protagonist in my head that just DIDN'T feel that way. As a result the climax fell flat and unconvincing. This is an IF work I think would benefit from LESS player choice, and more focus on using interactivity to shepherd the reader to the final destination.
Between the prose and cross-purpose interactivity I could not connect. It was a Mechanical, Mostly Seamless experience for me. But I don’t want to lose sight of the Texture Taming accomplishment. That is real and significant.
Played: 10/12/23
Playtime: 20min, 3 playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
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
Sold My Soul for Humor Droll, December 22, 2023Exactly one third into comp at this point, and the gauntlet is well and truly thrown. This game is the whole package, ya’ll.
- Off-kilter spin on horror theme
- Constant, often laugh out loud, funny
... A comedically overconfident protagonist
... Enables player clowning one example of many: (Spoiler - click to show)close door in Hans’ face while he’s talking
... Incidental text in contracts, books, notes, gravestones, everywhere really
- Organic, story-based puzzle design
... Well but not overtly clued
... Progressive hints if needed
... Includes a (Spoiler - click to show)TRANSUBSTANTIATION puzzle fr cryin out loud!
- Rich NPC conversations (a few anyway)
... Some more than one (funny) dimension!
... Resist uncanny valley better than most
- Default Messages that don’t break mimesis even for unimplemented nouns
- A SEAMLESS PARSER IMPLEMENTATION
Let me let that last one sink in. Parser games are TOUGH to code and write. You have to somehow anticipate the actions of dozens (or hundreds if lucky) of independent consciousnesses. You have to lead all those myriad consciousnesses through a story with a razor’s balance of less-than-too-much, more-than-not-enough prodding and not make it FEEL like prodding. You have to balance the tone and detail of your descriptive text, because without discipline you open space for the player you can’t hope to accommodate. And you have to entertain with prose and (often) puzzles and narrative. Here’s an example of how far this author went: when engaging an NPC, whose beverage was total scenery, nothing to do with anything…
>spill beer
That’d just have made a big mess!
>*how is that even implemented??? awesome
(Noted.)
Now I’m not blind to the possibility I am just on this author’s wavelength and they are on mine. Elsewhere in reviews, I made some throwaway joke about “Olde Englifh.” Actually calling that a joke is way overselling it, I’m reasonably sure most folks gloffed over that without notice. Not this author! There were “afpiring daemonologist” and their ilk everywhere! I crackled and cackled through this thing like a greedy older child on an Easter egg hunt, running rings round their toddling siblings. Yeah, maybe its a vibe thing, but 100% of what I can report aligned with this work!
Even the ‘don’t see/can’t do’ messages were tightly crafted. Little is more deflating than "You see Z. >X Z “You see no Z.” Contrast that to “There was no such thing in sight! Or, if there was, it was beneath my notice.” Adding that second sentence changes it completely from a programming issue to a character one, and happens to align with this protagonist precisely! I don’t know how to generalize that trick for all scenarios, but what a simple, super-effective nuance! Everything about this game is just that tight.
I’m gushing. All this analysis pales before the entertainment power of the game itself. If you can’t see how jazzed I am by this thing I don’t know what else I can say. Every moment you are reading this blathering nonsense you are NOT PLAYING DR LUDWIG AND YOU NEED TO FIX THAT, STAT.
Engaging. SEAMLESS. “Come at me, rest of Comp” it’s saying.
Played: 10/12/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless A SEAMLESS PARSER GAME
Would Play After Comp?: Every possibility, to remind me what’s achievable
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Morality Play for Make Benefit of Great Soviet State, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Another terrific work from my favorite Russophiliac! Here we are presented with an ambitious interactive play, a play informed by periodic audience choices. Then repurposed into IF where the player takes the role of audience. So there are a lot of layers here! Let me diagram it, with ‘->’ shorthand for “inhabiting role of”
player (you and me, in our homes, in front of computers) ->
modern audience or audience member (maybe?) ->
post-War Soviet audience/member, making choices
about play's progress
With me so far? This is the worst of it, we’ll get there. It’s all made reasonably clear with some clunky but effective preamble. So, this is a morality play in the truest sense where the morality system in question is Stalinist Communism. That thought immediately conjures horrific collisions between Stalinist social expectations and actual human ethics. All these layers create a wonderful confusion. What is the point of the interactivity? Are we meant to play AS a Soviet audience, implicitly being judged by our ominous narrator/Guide as we make choices? Are we exploring Soviet-era ethical dilemmas from a smugly comfortable remove? So much promise in plumbing those questions.
The play itself is terrifically realized. To my only-superficially trained eye, the details of Soviet life and politics, and the charged paranoia of life under surveillance ring true. The cast are carefully curated to maximize drama, each an avatar for heightened social forces but also a character in their own right. By casting the proceedings as a play, we are expecting a certain artificiality of performance, where motivations, personalities and actions are tilted to the dramatic for performative effect. I found this aspect of the work also spot on. It read (and sounded in my head) like a live dramatic performance, where nearly every interaction was fraught with nonverbal tension and subtext. No casual, “Hey did you pick up some milk?” mundanities here! There are plentiful stage directions, the most powerful of which was “unless otherwise specified, all dialogue is whispered.” C’mon, top shelf stage conceit right there!
The plot is probably exactly what you dread: Stalinist society running roughshod over human wants and dignity, and real tension is wrung as the setups telegraph their climaxes. At the end of many scenes, the Guide comes on to ask the audience how a key decision point should break. The first few are fraught with overlaid pressures - “will this choice only reflect on the play, or am I, the audience also at risk here? Will a counter-Soviet choice even be honored?” It is a great and subtle use of the power of IF.
Aaand now I am courting spoiler territory. I am loathe to give up too much of the plot. Suffice to say, the choices are meaningful, and the resultant scenes are consistently well written. But you only get a few choices all-told, maybe five or six? before the play ends. I ultimately wanted more. Not even more choices, just more consequences. Early on, our Guide makes it clear that as a morality play, we are free to choose counter-Soviet paths, as a way to be instructed by the true depths of these awful Westernized choices. That messaging neuters half the tension, the crowd involvement half! Regardless of which audience I am, I’m not at risk! Additionally, most of the choices themselves unlock nifty scenes and dialogue, (Spoiler - click to show)but do not impact the arc of the play except in detail. Granted some details can be poignant. On the one hand this is almost certainly the artistic aim of the putative Soviet-author, if not the author-author. On the other, it is also kind of the most OBVIOUS construction? There is one choice though that… crap, helmsman, engage blur:
(Spoiler - click to show)At the climax you the audience can choose to rebel against Soviet doctrine and impose Liberal Western Mercy. Should you do so, the play capitulates to your demands in a wryly insincere way. What is the message of that? That collective action can overthrow autocracy? That seems too pat. That because the victory is so artificial it was a lie, that the Guide was still going to meet quota outside the theatre? That even if all you can manage is making the powers that be uncomfortable, still do it anyway? I felt like I wanted more payoff there, given that is the only (Spoiler - click to show)unique one of many endings.
Perhaps the best use of interactivity would NOT be IF, but an actual live audience, where you couldn’t undo, check other options and assess the entire artistic space. Maybe the best payoff would be endlessly asking yourself “Why did I make those choices, and how might it have gone differently?” IF format couldn’t deliver that particular punch with a determined clicker like me.
If you are familiar with my long litany of personal biases, this work hit so many sweet spots I was deeply Engaged. Hell I explored the entire choice tree and THEN reread the script! It was a Seamless implementation for sure. I am applying a penalty point because I felt like the interactivity itself didn’t live up to its own promise (both for the IF player, and a putative live audience), and boy are there lots of my biases baked into THAT assessment.
Played: 10/11/23
Playtime: 1 hr finished, another 1/2 hour exploring all branches
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Seamless, penalty point for interactivity left wanting
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
Wicked Witch of the Was, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
It is with a head hung heavy in shame I must confess to you, dear reader, that I have hit another milestone in my short reviewer's life. This one is somewhat ignominious. For the first time as a comp reviewer/judge I did not persevere past an hour and a quarter playtime of a long game. As with many other prior failures, I had cause to reflect on larger issues and learn a bit about myself in the experience.
Witch wants to be an old school parser. REALLY old school, like dawn of IF old school. These formative IF works were notoriously opaque and cruel, the gameplay PRESUMED innumerable restarts and experimentation to make progress. They were also necessarily spare - they were often operating within hard storage limits so wit was applied where room was available. Mostly it was a tight, shallow “only what’s necessary” implementation. If assessed on a ‘unique text/hour’ metric, the numbers would be shockingly low. They would complicate progress with things like inventory limits, need for food, water and sleep. Quiet, unwinnable states were commonplace. Instant death with no reasonable foreshadowing. Hey, they were busy inventing the form, cut them some slack!
The net effect of early state-of-the-art was to make the puzzles punishingly hard, deeply trial-and-error, extremely time sinky, so many restarts, and triumphant once finally beaten. At some point, people started questioning, 'was the triumph really all THAT great, compared to the chore needed to achieve it?' The consensus answer seems to be ‘no,’ but it is true that it was a very specific pleasure that is hard to come by these days.
I have fallen into the trap of over-explaining what this community is well aware of.
Witch doesn’t initially present itself as that. It presents itself as a flawed, incomplete implementation. The game is rife with “You see Z; >EXAMINE Z; You can’t see any such thing.” RIFE with it. At first it I attributed it to “unimplemented nouns, amirite?” Parser IF is riddled with this, it comes with the territory, you pretty much have to have some forgiveness to engage at all. But it is one thing when scenic elements that have no gameplay function are missing. It is quite another when a key puzzle is undermined by it.
“You see a (Spoiler - click to show)magic tree.” >X (Spoiler - click to show)TREE. “You can’t see any such thing.” >(Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREE. “You can’t see any such thing.” To later learn via walkthrough that you need to (Spoiler - click to show)>UP. A key puzzle requires you to engage with an object, but refuses to acknowledge its existence! The player can be forgiven never thinking to try this, even through Herculean trial-and-error.
The game is crammed with this kind of thing. Later, the one complicated puzzle I solved refused to acknowledge I had solved it because I did it out of order. And treated me to bafflingly contradictory state messages until I spammed things into the right order. I did endure for an hour and a quarter, wandering around collecting things, performing teeth-grittingly unrewarding inventory management. I eventually got to a point where I needed to consult the walkthrough.
And there, dear reader, is where my resolve abandoned me.
On the first few pages of the walkthrough I realized: 1) there were two puzzles (including the above) I would never have solved on my own, requiring me to detect where the game was actively deceiving me; 2) solving the above case leads to a throwback trial-and-error maze which, classic yes, but good riddance; 3) another puzzle I would only have solved through belligerent spamming then BEEN INFURIATED by the solution; and 4) that I had put myself into not one but two unwinnable states, with no hint that I had done so.
Dear reader, I had until that moment considered myself made of sterner stuff. It was not rage that undid me, it was stunned incomprehension.
Now the framing story for this is similarly old-school. Occasionally playful generic fantasy with unapologetic anachronisms among the setting. But even back in the day that was a super thin framing device, unique when it started, exhausting its novelty very quickly. Nothing is done to burnish the tropes here: no unique twists, no knowing asides, no innovative variations. Even when flashes of wit present themselves, the game quickly abandons them. I had a sinking feeling when up front this sequence played out:
>I
You're carrying:
a plain flagon (which is closed)
a headache
regret
>X REGRET
Are you familiar with the term "intangible"?
Yes, amusing in its inclusion, but why abandon the bit so perfunctorily? Absent compelling story or bouying humor, the gameplay bounced me hard. I am of the camp that all history does not need to be repeated, some is best left in the past. While I am amused by 80’s hairstyles, I will never purchase a feathering comb. It’s fine that it’s of its time. I was tempted to rate it Unplayable, but was it really THAT much more unplayable than early IF?
I kind of respect the author’s effort here in one sense. In this day and age to develop a game of this size (36 pages of walkthrough!) committed to this style of gameplay… it is an old saw to “make the art you want to see in the world.” I hope it finds its not-me audience.
Also, thankfully, at least the Elves here aren’t racist.
Played: 10/11/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, seems got to two unwinnable states, score 10/150, declined to restart
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy, Intrusively buggy gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, my nostalgia only reaches so far
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Ia, Ia, Cthulhu F'ishtix, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Part 5 of our nautical sub-series “Here There Be Poopdecks.” And its about time we got us some eldritch horror, no? In the Assembly review I alluded to an Elder Gods + X formula, but I didn’t give you the whole thing. Here it is:
Elder Gods + humor + X = PROFIT!!
I guess X here is a fish factory? Hey, the formula does not require that X be High Concept all the time. Don’t complain to me, the math is the math. The game is a lighthearted battle at sea on an underpopulated fish factory. Eat the Eldritch is a delightful wordplay of a title, perfectly matched to the spunky artwork that sets the tone out of the gate. And that tone is its biggest asset. Some favorite quotes:
“You have a screwdriver in your ha… hm… You have a screwdriver, but you have no hands. Whatever.”
After encountering (Spoiler - click to show)an elder beast of epic proportions: “It’s fascinating, you really don’t see that every day.”
I have gotten good at curbing my impulse to just throw lots of stolen funny quotes at you, so I stop here. In addition to pervasive wry humor, there is red meat for Lovecraftics - (Spoiler - click to show)Randolph Carter makes an appearance, as well as an unseen crew from either Arkham or more likely Innsmouth. All in service of that gloomy but somehow also bubbly tone. There is modest puzzle work at play here as well, and for quite a long time things clicked along at a crisp, breezy pace. The puzzles were up and down the fiddly/clever scale, as well as the story-organic/puzzle-for-puzzle-sake scale, but reasonably well clued so it moved.
The biggest flaw though is the climactic puzzle. Somehow, here the nudging signposting ran out, and you were foiled repeatedly by specific word and sequence requirements. There is a special kind of ire reserved for a puzzle where you have assembled all the component parts, deduced a clever way to employ them, then spend 30min failing to get the game to accept it. Shrugging, you resign yourself to checking the hints (which, sidebar, I really liked the backwards text format to prevent glimpsing unwanted information. not sure how that plays for accessibility but worked for me) to see where you have gone astray AND THEY TELL YOU TO DO EXACTLY WHAT YOU’VE BEEN STRUGGLING TO DO.
THEN YOU SPEND ANOTHER 15min TRYING TO MAKE IT WORK. Yes, I spent more than a third of my playtime on one puzzle. A puzzle I had a fair idea what needed doing. I did manage to finally get it, finessing a sequence nuance the hint fails to mention, but time ran out and I could not complete the game. So for something this fizzy and light, how do I justify that much time on one puzzle? Is it me? Did I get hung up on a fatal blind spot? Maybe, probably. As a judge am I empowered to take it out on the game? I mean yeah, if my experience was frustration, how do I NOT? I will justify that decision by saying that somehow the cluing text, crucially including failure text, that had serviced so well to that point suddenly abandoned me. Simultaneously the forgiving puzzle flow suddenly became super finicky about position and timing. It was a recipe for getting it wrong with no help identifying WHY. If you make finicky puzzles, provide the player failure feedback, that’s MY hint. If not the puzzle mechanics, then at least if you provide hints, ensure you provide COMPLETE hints.
But. The fact that I was so mad about it is a clue how Engaged I was with the story. It is not heavy, nor revolutionary. It is wry and playful and a very fun hang kind of game, where you agree with the author to just do some IF Lovecraftian clowning. Then drink some sake.
Played: 10/10/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished, score 45/55
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notably Buggy error messages and infuriating final puzzle
Would Play After Comp?: No, will finish after locking review and score, then experience will be complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Look Back in Gameplay, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This one shares some DNA with Hand Me Down and some more with Spring Thing 23’s Repeat the Ending. That is excellent DNA to share! Like a champion livestock breeding program! Ok, not that DEFINITELY not that. As with those very worthy titles, LAKE Adventure is a modern (or near modern: COVID-era), nostalgic look at IF creations intersected with family trauma.
Here, you the player are Zooming with a friend during COVID, playing a recently-rediscovered DOS-based adventure game they authored as a teenager. The implementation is spot on. From the 32-bit graphics to the DOS bootup screen, the font, everything rings immediately, immersively true. Threaded through all that is constant commentary by your embarrassed friend, slowly recalling their personal history with the game’s development.
The game itself is so perfectly realized: the limited descriptions and telegraphed noun space, clever but imperfectly coded puzzles, the sometimes awkward gameplay, all befitting its putative tween author. It weaves a spell on the player (maybe moreso for players with experience in the inspirations?) where implementation gaps that might otherwise draw stern “Intrusive!” proclamations instead elicit wry smiles of ‘yeah, that’s about right.’ Talk about turning bugs into features!
Insta-death, childhood home as setting, author as protagonist, repeated respawns, mazes of sorts, all de rigueur for its time and author, rendered sweetly melancholy by the helpful and embarrassed modern narrator. The narrator’s voice is vital to the proceedings, by turns embarrassed, sad, deflecting with humor, helpful and forgiving of their younger selves. The interplay between the game progress and their recollections are natural, understated and impactful, as well as subtly guiding the player forward through the narrative. The underlying adventure is not the star here, it is a character, painted not by adjectives and nouns but by gameplay. The whole thing just so effectively captures both youthful grappling with tragedy via unsophisticated but earnest fantasy, and the bittersweet remembrance by the older author.
If there was an off note, I would say the timed intro/outro sections - they were too fast for me to devour the details I wanted (I barely clocked my ‘score’ before it vanished!) Yeah, that’s it. All the other stuff I usually complain about was here and it was PERFECT. Geez, I didn’t even mention the spiral Mead pdf-eelie that was note perfect as a youthful development logbook. Yeah, its a hint/walkthrough of sorts but even if you don’t need it, check it out when you’re done.
Oh, it was Engaging. So very, very Engaging. Yeah sorry though, not counting it for “Here There Be Poopdecks.”
Played: 10/10/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished, 748/750 points
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, mostly Seamless, and when its not, in JUST the right way
Would Play After Comp?: Probably not? I mean experience feels complete, but such a lovely time… maybe?
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Escape Room, M.E., December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
The classic closed room mystery makes an appearance! Here, a bloody body with no wounds, and a somewhat spare residence to extract clues from. It’s a parser game, so you are X’ing everything you can find, and asking your partner and the victim’s landlord anything you can think of. It’s a fairly quick play, but man is there a twist at the end.
For most of its runtime you are pushing against a Notably incomplete parser implementation where puzzles are harder than they should be due to terse descriptions that hide lower level details. The most egregious will not let you manipulate objects, but if you X an incidental object, only then moves items around for you. Puzzles like these are tough, because when you find let’s call it the Implementation Horizon, the level below which parser commands yield only ‘you cannot’ or ‘there is no,’ as a player you might conclude ‘this is a dead end, there’s clearly nothing more here.’ But this game will pierce that Horizon randomly with super important low level details amidst a sea of gaps.
It also has a few code breaking type puzzles - one of which is clever enough, but the other defies in-world credulity. It is nominally a mnemonic for a password, but it is the most convoluted mnemonic imaginable and nothing anyone would actually use. But it is a puzzle, and it can be solved, so there’s that.
Conversation similarly has a an Implementation Horizon problem - talking to the two NPCs about everything you find yields information, until you start getting ‘no answer.’ (Ignoring you is a curious choice for this messaging, given you are actively trying to solve a crime the NPCs are notionally invested in!) Made worse with incomplete synonyms. If you ask for details about the victim by his LAST name, you get an answer that suggests there’s nothing to learn. If you ask about his first name, hey, info! (Spoiler - click to show)If you ask about an autopsy you are told its not done yet. But lower level medical details are still in the chamber!
Inhabiting this unevenly implemented world are a protagonist and NPCs that are all but ciphers. The most human personality you encounter is through investigating the victim, and even there the details are spare and incomplete. All of this combines to a kind of representational reality, a parser-based psuedo-world, rife with simplifications, non sequitor logic puzzles, and short-hand logic leaps. Like animators only drawing three fingers because that’s representationally good enough.
Thankfully, the game does come with actually helpful hints to point the way through the darkness, at least as far as the parser-search. When you exhaust your environs, it’s time to solve the murder, via answering Who/What/Why questions. The first two questions reasonably trade on what you might have learned from your first half gameplay. But for that third… it’s like you jumped from an abstract cartoon mystery into the middle of a busy emergency room!
That final question encompasses DEEP cuts of biology, science and tragic inferences. Where most of the game was soft and well-meaning, suddenly the last question was gritty, clinical and super detailed! Boy, if you could have seen those options FIRST, before stopping the inquest… because it turns out, that you COULD ask about a lot of that. Based on the light gameplay, there was no hint that you SHOULD, but you could. I ended up taking reasonably educated guesses and hitting it, but it didn’t feel earned. The fact that that last question was so out of place relative the prior gameplay was shocking and kind of subversively fun. The fact that that level of detail was also implemented in conversation (if you go back and try it) was amazing. Sure, all of it deeply unfair, but amazing. I can’t say it justified the unnecessary struggling or elevated it above Mechanical, but I’m glad I saw it.
Played: 10/9/23
Playtime: 40min, “solved”
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably uneven implementation
Would Play After Comp?: No, mystery solved!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
In his House at I’kea Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This work is a masterful mashup of Elder Gods and Ikea-based gameplay. Sure, I know what you’re saying. “sniff At this point, haven’t we had pretty much Allll the possible Elder Gods + X mashups?” Yeah, that’s what you sound like with that question. Because NO. We have NOT had an IKEA and Elder Gods mashup, Captain Buzzkill! As with most mashups of this kind, the glee comes from the wildest possible disconnect between Elder Gods and X, where X here is deeply in the sweet spot of ridiculousness.
Assembly makes the crucial decision to commit to its bit completely and totally straight-faced. It has the (justified!) confidence of its premise to not apologize for, nor snark at, itself, the best way to completely sell the conceit. It commits not just tonally, not just as reflected in cutscene backgrounds and scene setting, but in gameplay itself.
See, if you divorce the outre’ aspects from this, what you are left with is a pitch perfect parser IKEA simulator. Not an outright reimplementation, but an interpretation that replicates the feel of the experience through the unique milieu of parser IF.
And prefab furniture is a right of passage for most young adults at this point, no? Those weirdly efficient fasteners, precisely milled parts and cartoon instructions. An endeavor that despite the exacting Nordic engineering and studied graphical communication, can go horribly wrong with the slightest misstep. Assembly distills that experience down to (usually) three precise steps that you better follow to the letter. ATTACH X to Y is the given instruction, but if you ATTACH Y to X, you are suddenly asea, falling in a deep space you only had the thinnest of tight rope wire to support you through. Just like real life if you stray from your cartoon orders! Assembly has reduced the IKEA assembly experience to its essence, distilled and streamlined it, translating it representationally to parser IF play in a way direct transcription would fail. Could you imagine a 40-step sequence of fussy parser tool work?
Then it repeats the feat with the shopping experience! The “twisty little maze” (chortle) of showroom is both unnavigable and forgiving in gameplay, giving you the essence of the box store experience without falling into parser-nav hell. You are introduced to a handful of inexplicably named furniture, then it is pure IKEA/parser gameplay. It is all very tightly integrated, paced well with a few VERY organic puzzle variations, then out before its welcome starts wearing.
It feels ungenerous to rate it shy of Mostly Seamless, because it has taken on the Herculean task of representing half a dozen or more pieces of furniture, each with multiple components and fasteners, and not falling into the “Which screw do you mean, the screw, the screw, the screw, or the screw?” trap. It is a testament to the author’s diligence and creativity that it fails so infrequently. Perhaps inevitably there are glitches though, most notably with the instruction books. Toss in a handful of unimplemented nouns and just shy is where we land.
But those complaints are nits that do not detract from the Engaging experience. The combination of inspired gameplay engineering and unblinking straightface against its ludicrous premise is winning.
“That is Not Assembed, Which Leftover Parts Can Lie”
Played: 10/9/23
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, short of Mostly Seamless
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
Two Reviews in One!, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Not ONLY is this part 4 of the “Here There Be Poopdecks” (nautical) review sub-series, it is ALSO part 3 of the “Playing With Matches” (Texture) sub-series! My opinion on Texture is well documented by now: lots of possibilities in drag and drop UI, deep presentation challenges, keep it on a super short leash.
All Hands took a very different approach to Texture. Rather than try to integrate the UI into its story, it instead pressed it into service as a lightweight choice-select mechanism. Effectively, the player is given three tools to interact with every page of text: REFLECT (think about, remember or examine); APPROACH (move around, probably to new page); TAKE (sieze, but also ‘internalize abstract concepts’ especially songs). It becomes an action menu of sorts, all options present until the end, even when a particular page has no response for them. Selecting an option shows any number of words to pair it with. The most effective strategy is to exhaustively explore them all, as unconnected commands could limit options toward endgame.
I respect the chutzpah of bending this VERY singular UI to new purpose, but it is hard to escape that it is a hack. The mechanics are clumsier than choice-select implementations, and the connection balloons read awkward and superfluous almost all the time. Even without balloons, forcing interactions to one of those three verbs results in some notably clunky leaps in phrasing.
So the interface was not fully successful but interesting as an attempt to grapple with the platform. My old nemeses Dancing Font and Hunting Text were left mostly unattended. Hunting Text at least was managed better than most through careful wordsmithing - while still an intrusive exercise at least text made sense before and after revelation which is not always a given for this engine. Dancing Font though, ran WILD. In many places there were plentiful connections for all three commands. Because the author eschewed new pages even when adding very wordy revelations, ALL the text ended up on the page. As selections were made, font size went from “Grandma’s Sudoku” to “Microfiche” appallingly often. Have I mentioned this is a TERRIBLE reading experience? Just awful.
Now, all this presentation cruft is employed in service of a story - a man’s dreamy interaction with a sinister ghost ship. That story itself has Gothic and Lovecraftian overtones. Our protagonist feels pulled by forces stronger than himself, but still retains some degree of autonomy. It is an interesting dance that the author pulls off very well through excellent mood and tone building. Gameplay choices that might feel chafing and railroading elsewhere, here are nicely integrated into the dreamy vibe of the narrative.
The story also neatly balances detailed background (with successful investigation) and unknowably alien horror. The details of the setting are wonderfully bizarre and off-putting, and build through its runtime. Often in horror, when a monster’s background is revealed it has a deflating effect. The specifics of backstory are almost never as compelling as a dark mystery our imagination probes but cannot resolve. The author here does something extremely effective: provides specific details that are WOEFULLY INCOMPLETE. We understand some aspects of the proceedings, but only some. The rest remains in shadow, if not compounded by other dissonant details. The horrible unknowability is maintained to the end! Effective!
There are multiple endings achievable, at least six by my count. Unfortunately, most of these endings require renavigating the full story for a final choice. I replayed to find four of them, but as interesting as the story was, it was not up to the stress of full repetition, including the clumsy UI and the chaos twins Dancing Font and Hunting Text. The four I found were legit horror short story climaxes: reasonably resolving the buildup, and different enough to justify their inclusion. As I contemplated firing up for a fifth run, I couldn’t help conclude this Sparky story would have been much better served by say Twine or ChoiceScript. Something much less Intrusive.
Played: 10/8/23
Playtime: 40min, 4/6? endings
Artistic/Technical ratings:Sparks of Joy in the effective story, Notably Intrusive unmitigated Texture artifacts
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience feels complete. I would be open to a reimplementation in a different engine!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
A Shaft of Gold, While All Around is Dark, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
The second of the review Subseries, “Playing With Matches,” covering IFCOMP23 Texture entries! I went into depth on Texture as an authoring platform here. A quick summary: lots of possibilities in drag and drop UI, deep presentation challenges, keep it on a super short leash.
Lonehouse is a short study about loss, not just of an important person in your life, but of the possibility of ever re-closing an emotional distance. The player is inhabiting a surviving sibling, going through her somewhat estranged sister’s things. Texture is a good choice here, almost tailor-made, as the entire thing is about connecting thoughts with artifacts.
For most of the runtime, I found the implementation uneven. In particular, the connection balloons - text that appeared as you were about to do the drop of drag’n’drop – often asked yearning questions about the thought being connected. (Spoiler - click to show) Connecting THINK to PLUSHIE: “How long have you kept him for, liv?” Sadly, they just as often did not. On the same page as the above, connecting THINK and CHILDHOOD simply read “think childhood.” More than just a missed opportunity, the contrast felt mocking, belittling, and cast a pall on the revealed text. Some pages managed the crime-against-nature font resize well with short, punchy text and page breaks. Others jumped two or three sizes with multiple selects, further adding insult by exposing text ordering problems that broke the flow. For example, text about a door decoration:
“The other had a strikingly red knitted organizer, filled knick-knacks and keys hanging over the knob. You know this thing. You’ve made it yourself.”
If you examine the other door, the injected response (in bold below) mangles the text around it, sapping the integrity of the page:
“The other had a strikingly red knitted organizer, filled knick-knacks and keys hanging over the knob. A plain white door. You can only assume it’s the bedroom. You know this thing. You’ve made it yourself.”
It’s a shame Texture was allowed to run unfettered, because there are some very affecting passages, including a nicely metaphorical stuffed animal that does double duty as subtle possible explanations for the initial distancing while also providing hints of path forward.
There are other technical glitches though: options remain on screen when no further use is possible. In one spot the choices MOVE and INSPECT are available, but INSPECT does nothing and MOVE provides text (para) “no need to move, lets inspect this thing” The tool allows out of order connections, but the narrative does not accommodate them - sometimes you get word salad, other times you advance without seeing key details. Cumulatively, despite flairs of leveraging the Texture platform, I was prepared to write this off as another narrative undone by inexpert use of a super sharp two edged sword. Until I came to the (Spoiler - click to show)Journal page.
I’m going to try this with minimal spoilers, but its gonna be tough. I found (Spoiler - click to show)opening the journal to be about the most powerful use of Texture I have yet seen. Seriously, it might as well be the Platonic Ideal Texture implementation. You are connecting with obscured passages, and each time, the connection bubble changes your understanding slightly, then the new text powerfully replaces one character’s words with another’s thoughts. You experience things through the filter of yearning questions rather than declarative narration. AND THEN CAPPED BY A FINAL HEARTBREAKING CONNECTION BUBBLE. (And not for nothing, the page size is rigidly engineered to avoid font changes, at least until the end.)
This is the reviewer’s lament. I am trying to recall an exceedingly powerful moment to an audience that may have played it while also trying to entice without spoiler an audience that hasn’t even played it yet. I THINK if you play it, you will know it when it hits you. It sure hit me. If you haven’t played maybe just take my word that embedded in this flawed experience is a deeply affecting sequence.
I have to call it Sparky even before that moment, as the work was decidedly if unevenly leveraging Texture’s unique powers. It didn’t completely escape Notably Intrusive thanks to those jerks Text Hunting and Font Dancing. But that one moment was a white hot spark of “THIS. THIS is how they should teach it in Texture School.”
Played: 10/8/23
Playtime: 20min, two playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notably Intrusive lack of constraints on Texture
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
Family Tech Support, the Game, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
I do love me some Adventure Snack. A “slice of life comedy” seems in the brand’s wheelhouse, particularly given the pregnant-with-possibility title of the thing. I found it long on slice of life and short on comedy, though I don’t mean that as a dig. Yes, I had expectations coming in based on some truly funny prior games, but the game’s graphic presentation is assured, quickly establishing its own vibe and rhythm. There is no misdirection in title. You are in a Zoom call (sorry, Swoon), fixing your Cartoon Mom’s printer.
If I try to look at it dispassionately and objectively, it is a weird beast. Lots of time spent on the minutiae of printer debug. Lots of family story digressions (including the repetition of family chestnuts!) that are traditionally more entertaining to family members than strangers like me. Some family drama, some advice, questionable hobbies, an intrusive cartoon dog, it all adds up to a surprisingly long runtime, low on out loud laughs.
What it has going for it though is exactingly tight timing and near-supernatural verisimilitude. The printer debug steps (including the missteps!) are exactly correct, as my extensive family tech support experience attests. Cartoon Mom’s tolerance for confusing technical exercise is laughably, relatably short, leading to wild, random topic changes and stories. That are ALSO paced quite well, sometimes needing player intervention sometimes not to get back on task. The whole thing, even the attendant mild impatience with slow progress and digressions, just FELT real. This was a laser-precise, loving simulation of its title.
Maybe let me underline that. This game builds a mood of exasperated impatience, coupled with fond forbearance. ON PURPOSE. Have you ever been impatient with a loved one? Of course you have! Swooning romance, intellectual puzzles, physical thrills, dread and horror, grief and regret. IF trucks in these things ALL THE TIME. “Pssh, low hanging fruit,” sez FYMP. “Let me offer you a tightly curated mix of frustration and good will. How’s THAT taste?” Honestly? Pretty great!
This is how well-constructed it was. I restarted the game, determined to “ok this time I’m gonna be a jerk and see if that unlocks Adventure Snack Comedy ™.” AND I COULDN’T DO IT. I couldn’t be a jerk to my Cartoon Mom. The atmosphere felt real enough that even second time through, the idea of getting selfish and snippy with Cartoon Mom was unthinkable. Yeah I was modestly jerky, but when it came time to commit to full on garbage-child mode I balked. Cartoon Mom didn’t deserve that!
I’m usually only half Engaged when providing real life tech support, so topping out at Sparks of Joy seems perfect. Seamless and attractive implementation. Bonus point for cutting new ground and just nailing its conceit in a stunningly accurate, pitch perfect simulation. Adventure Snack - not just comedy anymore! (Though I do miss that just a little.)
Played: 10/8/23
Playtime: 45min, two playthroughs
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless, bonus point for uncanny accuracy
Would Play After Comp?: I promise, I’ll call next Sunday! (but I probably won’t)
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Squib Game, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Alright, with a game name trading on Inception you are inevitably going to bring some baggage to this one. Early on there is imagery that invokes Squid Game as well, so you’ve got a heady mix of influences informing your expectations regardless of gameplay. Given the inspiration source material, you might expect some significant spoiler risk in a review, and boy would you be right about that. I’m going to endeavor to minimize or shade that as much as I can but with a game whose conceit is SO central I don’t know how that’s going to play out. Let’s find out!
Its starts out with the protag and major NPC introduction. They are fairly blank slate, but I did find the history of their friendship nicely and economically observed as they transitioned from (probably one-sided) rivals to fast friends. The game is not a character study, and barring a limited aspect or two the characters are not that specific or intriguing. The game doesn’t need them to be, that’s not what its after. Which made this intro stand out a bit in a pleasant way.
From there, we cycle to the main event: a mysterious competitive game, driven as most atrocities are by capitalism. I’m kidding, autocracy is equally capable of atrocities. Uh, digression there.
The run up to the game is similarly invested with unnecessary but nice touches. I particularly liked a bus ride that started as “c’mon, there is no way that’s how the fellow commuters behave” and quickly shifted to “Lol, ok game, well played, you got me there!” It did it once or twice more, in one instance leveraging what seems a misguided interface decision into a nice bit of meta playfulness.
In isolation, you might think of those as Sparks, and in isolation you’d be right. Unfortunately, this game creates a HUGE burden for itself that it never quite escapes. Thanks to the prominent metagame context, you the player are SO far ahead of the characters in terms of what’s really going on that it borders on ridiculous. Not that in ‘Real Life’ would anyone’s first thought be (Spoiler - click to show)‘OMG they Squid Game’d me!’ But the idea would be inescapable even if unprepared to accept it as a realistic possibility. (Hm, why did I irony quote ‘Real Life’ there? OMG it’s because I’m trapped in the game aren’t I? AREN’T I? AM I STILL PLAYING THIS GAME??
OR IS IT PLAYING ME???)
Ahem. I was talking about metagame context. The context is SO prominent that not only are the characters jarringly behind the curve, even the game’s central conceit and final twist is kind of telegraphed. So that when the characters and later the game play up major revelations with implied swelling music sting, you’re already there and have been snacking and doing crossword puzzles waiting for the game to catch up. And then its over, the final twist a victim of its own heavy-handed foreshadowing.
I think though, that this kind of narrative is polishable. Certainly, the core idea here is pretty cool. It requires a much defter, softer touch in foreshadowing. Change the name of the game to something bland and without baggage. Construct a not-so-familiar scenario, then misdirect characters with red herring reservations to keep the real machinery hidden. Do not explicitly ask the player questions (Spoiler - click to show)“Who is the player?” whose very posing reveals the conceit. What you’re after is to lean on misdirection to let the reveal impact the player as well as the characters. If you can manage it with metatext even better.
Between the lack of finesse and the dominance of the central conceit, all the sparks felt like incidental pops in the periphery. Their presence was nice but so tangential as to not lessen the fundamental Mechanical nature. Mostly Seamless implementation.
Played: 10/7/23
Playtime: 40min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, Experience feels complete. Well, I would try a more subtle one as described above. Though then I would have THIS game as meta-context and… (Spoiler - click to show)THIS GAME WON’T STOP INCEPTIONING ME!!!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
I Don't Feel Doomed, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Part 3 of the “Here There Be Poopdecks” sub-series, this one on a spaceship. This is a light ‘escape the doomed ship on a timer’ joint. The playful tone of the thing is its dominant feature, and who doesn’t like that? From object descriptions, to the increasingly sassy emergency voice, to the voluminous easter eggs you are encouraged to meet the game on its own feather-light terms. Even the puzzle play is pretty unadorned, ‘get X, goto room Y, use X.’ This is not a terrible choice, it ensures the focus is on the playful miscellany, not just the [orchestral sting]MAIN PLOT[/orchestral sting].
A game with the lightness of a feather its going to succeed on how well it can tickle you. Don’t pretend you don’t see what I did there, I know you saw it. And boy did I try to meet the game on its own terms. I tried all the things, I snarked back to the overhead voice, I did Star Trek stuff in rooms that begged it. I also solved the main puzzle and speed ran it. I read the accompanying feelie (which, awesome production value) and tried a lot of the recommended things.
I really went above and beyond to embrace the work’s spirit, if I say so myself. And I came away thinking ‘Maybe this is TOO light?’ It doesn’t help that there are some common implementation issues - unimplemented nouns, overtight verb space, at one point asking for disambiguation between ‘south’ and starboard’? Recommended Easter egg commands that didn’t work ((Spoiler - click to show)>TAP ON GLASS), though later did without clear reason why. A dumbwaiter that was clumsy to navigate. To the game’s credit the light tone did a lot to minimize the impact of these artifacts.
I think where I most wanted more was the Easter eggs themselves. You can do a wide variety of silly things as you amble your way to rescue, but the most common response to doing them is “Yup, you’ve done it!” Ok, but maybe goof with me a little about it? Like, even the most tepid attempt at joke would work, I’m not holding a high bar here, just something more than 'Dunnit!" In the end, I felt like I was doing more work than the game to keep things fun and that kinda lost me.
I will say, there was a vertiginous moment when I thought the game was talking to me directly. (Spoiler - click to show)Jumping into space unprepared led to a death message: “You’ve been sucked out into space. This does not spark joy.” For a mad moment I thought it was talking directly to me and my scoring criteria. That’s how big MY ego is. It was clearly referencing Marie Kondo though, another deflation for me.
Sparks of Joy (MINE, not Kondo’s) and Notable Intrusiveness in implementation, and yearning for just a little more playfulness to realize its goals. That’s where we land. I did get a soft chuckle at “USS Icarus.” I mean, second only to “New, More Unsinkable Titanic” in hubristic boat names.
Played: 10/8/23
Playtime: 1hr, escaped once, died once, stranded twice
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notably Intrusive
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
Outside the Circle of Trust, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Last year I thoroughly embarrassed myself tossing around a “My Little Pony” reference in reviewing a work without any real understanding of the property. This year, my first impulse was to repeat my mistake by calling this work 'anime-inspired.' From a guy whose son is in the weeds with Anime, but whose only personal exposure was Starblazers/Spaceship Yamato (do I need to say decades ago?), this felt to me like a strongly Anime-influenced work. I have been subsequently informed by folks more knowledgable than me that this is not a compelling analog. *whew* embarrassment averted!
The setup is a persecution-turned-war between humanity and the titular Beat Witches: girls that at some point in their lives (tradition would say ‘onset of puberty’ but the work declines to specify) become mute psychic vampires, undone by music. Pretty cool, and to my untrained eye, could easily be an anime premise. (Also rife with potential metaphorical interpretation, though maybe kind of toxic. To be fair to the work, this does not seem to be its intent.) It is billed as ‘an interactive loneliness’ which is an intriguing blurb to be sure, though ultimately feels tangential to the goals of the work.
The opening is a pretty effective fakeout, though it does trade heavily on player knowledge lagging protagonist knowledge. I am always fascinated by this choice in IF. While this often work like gangbusters in movies - where what we think we see turns out to be surprisingly wrong – its use in IF carries more burden. When we are invited to inhabit the protagonist, there is a presumption of agency and alignment on the player’s part. When the twist is revealed it immediately creates a break between player and PC. It is a betrayal of sorts, made personal to the player rather than something they appreciated dispassionately. If the work leverages this frisson it can be quite interesting. If it apes movie tropes without understanding the difference, it cedes a goal in the first minute of play, and is playing catch up from there.
In the case of Beat Witch, it doesn’t feel intentional in the sense of deliberate player effect, but it is super consistent with gameplay. The game continually denies player agency to distancing effect. Mainstream puzzle IF can be uncharitably characterized as ‘on rails’ (narrative IF typically even more so). The author is positing a problem to which they have a solution in mind, and until the player regurgitates that solution they are blocked. But if the intent is to put the player in the driver’s seat this must be offset by real or perceived autonomy. The act of puzzle solving itself is one method, one of the first. Enabling multiple paths/solutions is another. Really deft wordsmithing to make the player feel autonomous and not detect the strings being pulled is yet another. Even something as simple as ‘open world exploration’ can give the player a flavor of it. Sure, to advance you have to do the specific framistat jiggering the author wants, but at least you can do it on your own time.
For my playthrough, none of these were in evidence. The vibe the piece is striving for is a hyperactive enhanced reality of action set pieces and cool visuals. Pace is absolutely a key element of all that, but the author refuses (maybe justifiably so) to trust the player to play along. Instead, the play space is constrained, choices are telegraphed the moment they’re needed and rejected any other time. A sequence that drove this home for me played out as follows:
- aah! bad things are happening, let me look around and see what I can leverage in the environment!
- (para) “Wow things are bad, but nothing is revealing itself”
- yikes! ok, let me try this other thing
- (para) “Well that didn’t work. You should probably look around now.”
- really, game? should I? should I look around now? ok, >L
- (para) “Hey! Here is this thing that is the only thing that will help you now!”
Even when I have the right idea, legitimately arrived at through player initiative, the game rejects my input because it prefers to LEAD me. That was particularly enraging, but the work makes these choices all the time. It is common that you only have one cardinal direction to move from place to place. The protagonist has unspecified ‘powers’ of some sort, and the game is super-ready to tell you ‘sadly that is not one of your powers’ but never tells nor provides a mechanism to define what those powers are! Then, powers (most especially super strength) that might have opened doors for you earlier are suddenly revealed. But wait, there are two powers the game explicitly tells you about, but almost never rewards their application! Except when the game DEMANDS their application. Even what may be the only legitimate choice you as a player have, how aggressive to be with the villain, is undermined because you are asked to specify it before you’ve actually met the villain. As a player I mean. The protagonist sure has a backstory that could inform things, but that is opaque to the player at the time of selection.
So, how much do you like the specific vibe I am describing? Because if you do like it, there are things to enjoy here. There are some effective, over the top horror and action set pieces. The pace is often frenetic and twisty. Physics is routinely sacrificed for a cool visual, things like teeth flying over modest impacts, glass shards defying physics. There are fun plot twists and a monologuing villain that falls short of even a single dimension but is so committed to their one note as to be entertaining. Even the details of the Beat Witches are just strange and specific enough to ring some bells. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sole gameplay moment that landed for me: (Spoiler - click to show)a death scene and the subsequent, standard RESTART, RESTORE, UNDO or QUIT prompt was recontextualized in a delightful way. Unblur with caution, you probably want to experience that for yourself.
For me, it was not enough. I chafed at the author’s heavy hand too much to enjoy the rest. Mechanical and I’m going to call rejected player agency as Notably Intrusive. On top of that, I am THIS CLOSE to a penalty point for the line: “squeeze you like a juicy fart” but will refrain.
Played: 10/6/23
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished
Score: 4 (Mechanical, Notably on rails)
Would Play After Comp?: No, not what I come to IF for
Things to Do While Plummeting, December 22, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Over time I have developed a love/hate relationship with Texture as an IF platform. There are a few things it does uniquely well. I am super enamored of the drag and drop paradigm. It suggests connecting thoughts in an organic way that is appealing to me. Because the connecting words are highlighted only after selecting a command, it can create intriguing surprises about the connections the author is offering. The text bubbles that appear when you connect words can similarly be used to great effect, refining the nature of the connection you just made. For me, it adds up to a powerful and unique authoring opportunity.
As much as I love those things though, there are two things I hate. Actually one I hate and another I HATE HATE HATE OMIGOD WHO DO I BLAME AND HOW DO I BRING THEM TO A DIRE RECKONING HATE. The former is that making those connections allows inline (rather than appended) text changes. On dense pages it creates a ‘hunt the new text’ problem, where new text probably but not necessarily shows up where you just clicked. Because it is most buried in large blocks of text it also means often REREADING large blocks of text desperately searching for the New Thing.
That’s bad, but the factor that aggrieves me beyond all rational thought is the font-resize problem. Texture dynamically resizes font, based on text volume and window size. You’re not getting it? Every page potentially changes its font size during play as text is added, sometimes multiple times and WILDLY so. Then all over again with a new page. How are you not as mad as me now? My hands are trembling in fury and/or PTSD just typing about it. It is maybe the worst reading experience since Catholic Grade School where nuns whack you with rulers on mispronunciations.
So, this is a Texture piece. Like most, it will live and die by how it maximizes its platform’s strengths and minimizes its… challenges. Let me say that differently. A Texture piece that does NOTHING on either front is going to default to infuriating, without counterbalancing merits. That is an unfair burden to place on even the strongest narrative. Fall may not recognize that peril and is brought down (heh) by it.
Fall is a surreal, metaphorical story about connections and fear while navigating a life we have little control over. It is about perfectly sized for what it is, though maybe the narrative balance is a bit off. We spend what feels like 1/3 of the time getting to know our two mains vs 2/3 describing the weird environment they are in. That feels imbalanced, though I didn’t count words and maybe my impression is off. If it is, then I would say the time could be better used, as at the end I had only the vaguest sympathy for the pair. The details were a little too generic to enthrall me, which is a weird thing to say about a person in a spiked leather jacket. The message of the piece was well taken, but lacked emotional punch.
To leveraging Texture’s strengths, I consistently (and painfully) felt missed opportunities abounded. Most word connections were exactly what you thought they would be, and the connection-bubbles basically concatenated the two words rather than offering any surprising insight or nuance. That reduced the drag and drop to a nifty variation on Twine/Choicescript “click the options.” In some cases, connection choices remained on the page even when there were no further connections to be made.
And those Texture-Cons? Hoobidy, they were present in spades. Font Dancing was my persistent companion, made worse when Text Hunting revealed the connection I made was say an eye color and nothing more. I think maybe Texture is the Arc Welder of IF authoring tools. Insanely powerful in practiced hands, guaranteed to severely injure the enthusiastic novice. I’m going to inaugurate another review sub-series here, “Playing With Matches,” to tie the IFComp23 Texture reviews together!
Played: 10/6/23
Playtime: 20min, 2 playthroughs, different choices changing nothing
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical, Notably buggy. Why not Intrusive? Honestly, because 1. it is short and 2. Its page length sometimes dodged resizing which elicited actual sighs of relief during gameplay.
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
Film Theory 101 - Lesson 6, Italian Giallo, December 21, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
“I love your work.”
“You mean, you love to watch me die.”
Students? This is how you start a film. Crisp dialogue, like a punch in the chest. Get the audience enthralled from the get go. Today we are studying a retro-Giallo, Barcarolle in Yellow. I trust you have done the required reading, and viewed the background Argento, Fulci, Bava. You’ll want that background later when we cover DePalma as well.
First thoughts. Anyone? Hm, let me prime the conversation a bit. Note the playful opening credits, the rapid single dialogue snapshots, intercut with spare authorship text, building to the roar of the graphical title page. Delightful. The graphical design of that title page itself is pitch perfect in setting the mood.
Then the complete break to… anyone? Spaghetti Western, yes of course. The western scene that itself was a fakeout to introduce our star. Terrific use of pace and misdirection to keep the audience on its toes, looking for purchase. I am hard pressed to think of a film that so sure-handedly established its protagonist, mood and expectations.
What do we think of the train station scene? Less focused, no? It starts to get away from the director here. I’m sure you all spotted some technical issues, anyone? Yes, our protagonist seemed to search too long for the right wordplay. The director insisted on overprecise blocking, but declined to leave instructions for the actors. The effect was a floundering performance, where if the actress did not say or do the EXACT phrase, the ensemble left her hanging. The ‘hail a cab’ sequence was particularly befuddling where sometimes it was on screen, and sometimes not without clear explanation. The director helpfully provided a script, but it was woefully incomplete. In the later bridge scene it was actually deceptive, but lets stay in the train station a bit longer.
After an interminable march of repeated dream sequence deaths or static head turning, I hope you all consulted the provided shooting guides. The “Walkthrough” in the parlance of this director. You will note that what the director was looking for was (Spoiler - click to show)a dropped scarf. You cannot fault the actress for not reading her director’s mind. Only after this arbitrary and unforeshadowed detail is finally serviced do we proceed, nearly a half of our runtime expired! You will note some jarring editing choices there, too. Previous characters appearing from nowhere, non sequitor dialogue and inexplicable footage of the director themself intercut with a tense chase scene.
What do we think of the production values on display here? The Venice setting is lovingly rendered in the large, but closeups suffer. Granted, this can be an afterthought to some giallo, but the masters perversely paid INSANE attention to it. For Argento it sometimes was the POINT of a scene. There are flashes in Barcarolle, but all too often the camera panned too far one way or the other and the set was exposed on screen. Even for simple things, like views through windows. The film makes the curious choice to chide the lead actress for these shortcomings. At first playful it starts to feel vindictive after a while.
There is a short scene of voyeurism and aggressive sexual tension that does some work to restoring the atmosphere of the piece, though even there, the director character inexplicably repeats their dialogue.
The subsequent bridge scene repeats a lot of the sins of the train terminal. Our protagonist is asked to perform to a script that turns out to not be what the director wanted. One sequence, where the script called for (Spoiler - click to show)snapping a photo of the bridge, then the antagonist, until the protagonist did them in reverse order the scene was allowed to drag. Similarly, her scene partner was supposed to be a provocatively dressed woman, when (Spoiler - click to show)the bit player was instead an elderly man. The main actress can be forgiven thinking she was off mark for long stretches of time there.
It ends with a tense fall from the bridge, to a dream death after reasonable attempts to swim to safety are rebuffed.
Well, that was as far as we were assigned today! So how do we assess this effort so far class? It seems hard to believe the director is allowing the lead actress to flounder (with contradictory instructions!) without some underlying purpose or artistic statement in mind. But if intentional, the first two hours show no hint of it. Even if true, I think the impact on the audience is the same - without access to the “walkthrough” the audience has no practical hope of understanding the work. Certainly, modern multi-media artworks utilize this kind of cross-media trick, but for a retro-Giallo it seems misplaced. The directorial choices, and perhaps sloppy shortcomings are deeply Intrusive to the viewer’s experience. And yet, do not lose sight of that powerful beginning, and many wonderful details throughout the work. There are Sparks to this work without question.
I see our time is nearly up. For tomorrow, let’s look at the cross influences of Hitchock and Giallo. We will return to this work after the semester is complete, for those interested in extra credit.
Played: 10/6/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Intrusively Buggy, almost Unplayable without walkthrough. Sparks of Joy in subject matter and opening sequences
Would Play After Comp?: Probably. I am too enamored of the source inspiration not to.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
What is My Damage?, December 21, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
How can you be mad at a game that checks all these boxes?
- Amiable, pleasant protagonist
- Light, character-based humor
- Solid but non-urgent plot
- Lovingly rendered from a place of knowledge and affection
It hurts my heart when despite all that goodwill, I cannot connect with the material in the way the author does. I am a cold, emotionless husk it seems. My play experience was characterized by in-the-moment investment but tellingly, little regret when my gameplay led to unwanted/unintended places. I just kind of rolled with it.
Let me start by emphasizing the game’s superpower. It is chockablock with specificity, both in the setting, the characters that inhabit it, and the B&B that is the central location. The setup is, you are tasked to run your Grandmother’s B&B for a week, a job you are uncertainly prepared for. It is all painted so smoothly and effortlessly with straightforward, effective prose. All too often, I find IF text showy and distracting. Here, the text disappears and images and events are planted in your mind with economical aplomb.
The choice to make the narrator the main protagonists’ stream of consciousness is well taken. It allows for often wry comic observations to also simultaneously act as scene-setting and character building moments. It’s not a chuckle-fest, that’s not how the protagonist rolls, but there are smiles aplenty to be had from their understated comedic observations.
The NPC work is similarly effective - the array of guests and staff all have unique personalities and voices, and must be interacted with uniquely. As a writer, this is often much harder than it looks but plays out seamlessly here. As a hospitality host your job is to make them happy, and it does feel like the tasks (and results) are satisfyingly specific to the personalities involved. Really strong verisimilitude and world building.
So. With all that going for it, why did I feel at arms’ length the entire time? For one thing, early on you are asked to establish the protagonist’s goals. The scenario is very subtle and complex! It is overrun with NPC personalities and protagonist motivations! That kind of complexity itself is hard to do so well, and another reflection of the author’s talent. But the player choices are more constrained. I selected what felt best to me, but the ensuing gameplay kind of sidelined that choice in away that felt… ignored? The author painted a nuanced set up, but the IF-specific demands of player choice anticipation were just too great to honor those choices. It’s hard to get my head around. The day to day operation, much like life, is NOT preoccupied with overarching life goals and shouldn’t be. But the author is SO talented at soft word choice character building, even the phrasing of ongoing events pushed against my mental model of the PC.
The other facet that I think kept me at a remove was the problem set. Now, with this setup you can easily imagine a comedically escalating madcap farce of compounding, competing crises. This is not that, and doesn’t need to be. Instead, you get a series of low-key hospitality issues to manage, each with multiple reasonable and straightforward strategies to resolve. You may make a soft choice of prioritization, but nothing dire. I think maybe the protagonist specificity worked against things here. You make choices, yes, but the protagonist knows so much more about B&B running than you do (thankfully!) that they do the heavy lifting of problem solving once you nudge them in a direction. Often utilizing skills or knowledge it wasn’t clear they had when you made the choice. That gameplay decision had the effect of keeping me from fully inhabiting the protagonist, and more watching them work. Yes, I wanted good things for them, but I wasn’t convinced they needed me to make those happen.
There is a climactic problem to solve, again seemingly more under the protag’s power than my own, and then a final choice. The dramatic arc is there for sure, it just felt like my participation was more directorial than performative. “Sparks of Joy” is the measure I chose for my rubric, but how does that map to “Low, Pleasant Glow”? Was it Mechanical for me? Kind of, but not with the cold disappointment that metric implies. Implementation-wise it was mostly seamless - there was some wonkiness up front with version selection but clean after that. I guess I have to go with Mechanical, Mostly Seamless, but that rating really sells short the super strong writing and warm vibe of the piece.
Played: 10/4/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings:
Mechanical, Mostly Seamless, bonus for warming my cold heart at least a little.
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
Crooner Spam, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This author is all over the map, we know this about him. He has produced games that tickled me, engaged my math-puzzle brain, and bounced me with material not for me. This entry recalls my favorite product line of his, the… Wordplay line? Here, we are engaging Spooneristic items and locations, trying to match them, to notionally transform them into their better Spooner partner! An example: I would give anything to turn a Gabby Trump into a Tabby Grump. (Cat-skeptics are much better than Mad Despots! That is its better form!) Should I use a generous do-gooder, the Gifty Nun or… the other? Ehh, maybe don’t ask me that question.
The fun here is the wild logic leaps it takes to use say a “dummy scoop” to somehow transform a “Zany Brew.” (NOT A REAL EXAMPLE. WELL, NOT EXACTLY.) They are not obvious, they are not fair, but boy are they fun. It is a somewhat trivial puzzle, easily solvable by trial and error, but much more fun when you try to outguess and predict what moon logic contortions are going to effect the transform. It is a short lark I took my time with. It lands where most short larks do for me - Insanely sparky just short of Engaging. Seamlessly implemented. Such a good use of 45min.
But really game, this is FAR from Trail Stash! I would purchase endless 50’s song compilations through Crooner Spam to get my Spooner Cram!
Played: 10/4/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, 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
Bubble Gumshoe's Sweet Return, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This game is a sequel, a welcome return to the syrup-slick streets of Sugar City! That’s the most alliterative thing I’ve done today.
I have a unique relationship with these works. I find the pervasive, over-the-top candy puns and unreserved embrace of its conceit hits me just square in my pleasure centers. Last year, we opened with rain, as mandated by Noir Law. This year, we get rain AND shadows cast by Venetian Blinds! Way to up the ante, author! Slow sax, swirls of powdered sugar/smoke and rotgut cola are still on the table for upcoming entries, no fear. Yeah, the commitment to the bit is impressive. Rather than pull them all (cause boy did I grab a TON as they went by) let me leave you with an ur-quote that is deeply representative:
“[…] the Good Ship Lollipop foundered right in the middle of the channel - blocking access to all other vessels - that was the final marshmallow in the s’more.”
But for whatever reason, as much as I click with the atmosphere of these works, I struggle a lot more with gameplay. This time, we are escaping a locked warehouse before it explodes and by the way looking for clues to a murder as we go. I knocked around A LOT in this one looking for daylight. I’ll take the hit on the first room. At this point, there is a classic IF locked door puzzle I should know enough to try. Like in every game. sigh Not me. But as I hammered around the game I got a lot of unimplemented nouns, odd descriptions and deceptive messages. In one spot, the game aliased >GET NOTE to a note that was already in my inventory, and it took me a while to realize I didn’t actually collect the new one. Imagine my confusion, thinking there were two copies of the same note! In another, two locations open to each other, with adjacent items in their descriptions, nevertheless had no shared scope when examining.
The biggest flaw to me though was inadequate descriptions. A key clue noted blue staining as important, (Spoiler - click to show)but the only reason I knew the victim was blue was the cover art, not the text. A super important item, (Spoiler - click to show)the det cord is never fully described. In my head, I was carrying a (Spoiler - click to show)short length of flammable fuse. According to the game it was a (Spoiler - click to show)weight-bearing length of rope! With just a few more adjectives and detail casually tossed in I would not have operated under that misconception for so long.
This applied to the protagonist as well, btw. I went all of last game and most of this game with an ungendered detective I just inhabited. In the blurb, we are informed Bubble Gumshoe is female, but in the text of the game this is not mentioned until late in the endgame. It provides a dissociative shock when our mental picture is torpedoed late in the game. Not fatal obviously, but when our mental picture is let free reign, then later contradicted, it just jangles.
This time around I did solve the mystery, though it relied on some information the character had that I didn’t, which again was a slightly off note. In the end, I am fully invested in the wry setup and epic commitment to the bit. But the gameplay has enough friction that I can’t quite engage. I guess that is the textbook Sparks definition. Implementation issues were a constant feature of gameplay so I have to score that as Notable. But it wouldn’t be representative of the Joy this series gives me if I didn’t award a bonus point for leaving it all on the court, conceit-wise.
Played: 10/4/23
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Notably Buggy, bonus point for committing to the bit
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
Ready, Aim, (mis)Fire, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
The blurb had me excited for this entry. These were bold themes: forbidden sibling love, violence fetishization, family and social hypocrisy. I eagerly launched the web version on my Linux machine and watched Unity, a platform I have no experience with, fire to life. In retrospect, the opening screen was a foreshadow of things to come.
The opening is a clever sniper scope graphic, inviting the user to ‘fire’ on menu options. It was not exactly clear how to operate it, but swooping around found menu options and I deduced a trigger was needed. I inadvertently hit CREDITS and for a mad moment thought the game was a one click prank! I chortled at my ineptitude, then fired again like a mischievous child. Then the screen locked up.
Restarting, I was able to begin the game, and then my long battle with the UI started. The UI is a series of text bubbles of various sizes, floating in a virtual space much larger than the browser window. The first two I got were obscured on either side of the window, neither legible. I figured out I needed to start panning around a virtual space, but the calibration was punishing. The slightest track pad movement rocketed text bubbles across and off screen. Arrows helpfully pointed to where offscreen bubbles might be but it was a trial of extreme precision to get any one of them centered and readable on my screen. I can see how the bubbles were loosely organized to navigate around the grounds of an estate, but the chore it was to find even one of them, let alone manage any kind of deliberate exploration, was exhausting. Often as not I was clicking options not because I wanted to go a particular way, or explore a particular location. Rather, I had just managed to get a random one centered and bird in hand…
It was particularly frustrating, because I could see a winning UI trying to establish itself. The thought balloon choices in particular I really liked. Perhaps a more damped motion scaling. A zoom or inset full virtual space map. A vertical wrap to match the horizontal one. These could have flipped the script completely and made me love it. But you live the life given, not the one you wish you had, no?
Looking past the UI, reading the text bubbles was a different kind of challenge. I can be fussy about language, I know this. While comps have treated me to wonderful examples of elevated, poetic language, I find those the exception. Far more common in my experience is florid prose aiming high but falling short. I found passages like “A southeasterly tor watches and chills and wets you from its prominence, irrespective of yours.” and “a rifle getting its colon cleansed” representative examples and well short of the lofty goals they strove for. Distractingly so.
Now, the underlying story being told was damned interesting! The opening game of cat and mouse, the fraught family drama of social shame and innocent yearning, the political intrigue, the indoctrination of martial violence, the alternating brother/sister POV, all of these pulsed with life and energy when the text got out of the way. I grit my teeth and strained my wrist and powered through as best I could. I was not giving up on the emerging drama, dammit, I was not!
Until I hit a blocking bug, where choice bubbles became unselectable. (This has likely been fixed post comp.) Whatever the review equivalent of ragequit is what I did. I was prepared to submit a review and a score that encapsulated all my frustrations and disappointments, and even documented them in the first draft of this review. Then I went to bed, woke up and remembered, “wait, there was a RESUME option on the main menu.” Sure enough, firing it up again, I was restored just prior to the blocking bug and successfully steered clear.
I can’t tell you how ambivalent I was about this. Ok, that’s not accurate, I am kind of telling you right now. I dreaded fighting the UI for another hour. Thankfully, the game had a few tricks up its sleeve. Starting with a dinner party, the UI shifted modes from player led exploration to chaotic table conversation. Instead of asking me to navigate around, the UI itself shifted around with spontaneous conversation options, centering themselves for my convenience! It was an exceedingly clever use of the interface, though I’m not sure how much credit to attribute to “you momentarily subverted my agony for a clever twist.”
Nevertheless, buttressed by that twist, I was able to complete the story. I am not sure how much my choices impacted the tale or if I was subtly steered to a single story, but plotwise it was pretty good! Betrayals, deceptions, misunderstandings, complicated feelings. The text and a return of UI navigation still made me work for it, often too hard. But by alleviating, at least a little bit, my UI pain, I was emboldened to power through.
So where am I left? I have to call the underlying story Sparky - it engaged very nuanced topics with admirable ambiguity feeding interesting plot twists. But that UI was frustratingly belligerent, no two ways about it. Couple that with great swaths of text that triggered my, “please do less!” reflex and Intrusively Buggy is the only legitimate rating. [reminder: tech rating is not just bugs, but technical intrusiveness into the reader/player experience.]
Played: 10/3 - 10/4/23
Playtime: 2 hrs, finished at the wire
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy in the underlying plot, sabotaged by Intrusive UI and verse.
Would Play After Comp?: Y’know what? Some overhauling of the UI and maybe. That plot could soar if it was free.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
When Art Speaks, Listen!, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
This is a melancholy work about Francis Bacon, the troubled violence artist. I know the blurb denied this but I am unconvinced. The player is in a small, three room museum, examining three triptychs spanning the artist’s career. In a quite literal sense, the game is a dialogue with the works, thematically tied to Bacon’s demons and how those demons impacted his relationship with his longtime muse/model/lover. Ok, yeah it’s nominally about the muse, but Bacon himself is the dominant force over all of it.
The most prominent feature of this work is the writing. It is soaring and often sublime. The game is strongly NPC-driven, and between the crazy-broad conversation branches, the subjects you are steered to pursue and the nifty voices of the characters it is Engaging right out of the gate. Here’s some examples that really resonated with me. If you don’t recognize these quotes as top tier writing, blame me for yanking them from context:
“I will be his father and his patron and his lover and his lover and his lover and so many more of his lovers, and one day I will be him. It is inevitable, as much as I wish it weren’t.”
“That’s why The Underworld, or Hell, or whatever you want to call it works, you know. Because you have no sense of solidarity.”
The game also performs a minor miracle… actually I don’t want to call it that. It implies some kind of providence or accidental confluence. The author’s wordsmithing talent and painstaking word-by-word precision has rendered deeply affecting, wide-ranging, almost natural conversations on super heavy topics of mortality, trauma, art, unhealthy sexuality, and corroding relationships. I know, right? With parser-IF NPCs!
There are two tricks the author leverages, and again I don’t want the word ‘trick’ to cheapen the achievement. Firstly, the use of TOPICS provides a quickly-disappearing gentle steer into all that great dialogue. Second, the nature of the NPCs provides just the barest distortion that papers over whatever uncanny-valley glitches might be there. These choices ensure the dialogue shines bright without the slightest scuff. And boy howdy, the stories they tell are complex, tragic and affecting. By the time I had plumbed the depths (breadths?) of the triptychs, I was ensnared in the tragic history and surrounding discourse.
And then the thread ran out? The art narrative had pulled me along with ever deepening ideas, drama and tragedy, and then kind of stopped without climax. (Or perhaps a tragically understated one.) Had the game ended there, it would have been fine. Had the painting climax been echoed or integrated into a larger ‘real world’ climax it would have been better, and we might be talking Transcendent. What it did instead was segue to a different kind of wry but simple puzzle collection.
The story all along was signposted by ACHIEVEMENTS. I think I understand this choice. It kind of refreshingly kept things from becoming too self-serious and provided a teasing counterweight when exploring the paintings. Buuut they also triggered my inner Ash Ketchum, and so I started chasing other achievements. Much more mundane ones. And I interacted with other NPCs that didn’t have the… distortions… that the paintings did and felt just the slightest off because of it. I don’t want to be too down, these mini-puzzles and real human interactions were sparky and joyful and fun. Objectively, stronger NPC implementations than 95% of parser games. The (Spoiler - click to show)barista’s reaction to the philosophical topic list was particularly giggly. But they were qualitatively a step down from the central story of the art (barring one interaction with the (Spoiler - click to show)guard that DID subtly resonate in a complex hopeful/creepy way).
So I’m left with a work that was deeply Engaging for 1/2 of its runtime, then downgraded to the finish line. This seems unfair as I’m thinking through it though. The second half was actually Engaging as a parser puzzle, it just wasn’t the SAME Engaging as the first half. After expertly cycling me into an affecting dramatic state, it asked me to take a breath, then just play around a while. Am I really complaining that I had to deal with two different flavors of Engaging IF? I think I have to acknowledge that Engaging+ added to Engaging- is still Engaging. Yeah, maybe I could have wanted more connection between the two halves but maybe I should just shut up and not look an IF gift horse this wonderful in the mouth. Engaging it is.
Two final disconnected notes. Don’t limit yourself to provided topics, these characters have DEEP wells of things to say. Beyond the tour de force dialogue implementation, the whole package is the most robust amateur parser implementation I’ve seen to date, in terms of fully implemented nouns and organic ‘can’t do/talk about that’ messages. I have the vague sense there were glitches around characters remembering-but-not-remembering you, but have no specific memory of them. Vanishingly close to Seamless.
Played: 10/3/23
Playtime: 2hrs, 12/17 achievements
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, ~Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Yes, more achievements please!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Heist For Cats, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
What a lovely palate cleanser this is. A short, unadorned Twine game about thieving, that is to say, finding. Fine, heisting. I had to laugh out loud when my chosen thief Quinn noted biscuits and gravy were their favorite. Mine too, I see you Quinn! Now, my position on felines is publicly documented so I won’t weigh in on the client. Suffice to say, for me and Quinn a job is a job. After being given your target, off you go to improvise some crime! A quick glimpse of the city (I was partial to the pocket museum) then down to tacks.
You explore a 5x5 grid of Egyptian displays, avoid cameras and cops, engineer the crime and get out. In general the text is terse and tight. Not a lot of flair or adjectives, just some concise tangible details to set locations in mind. A few nice environmental changes on revisits so things don’t get too static. A little bit of character work with a tour guide. All of it with a light, deft hand. Don’t want to spoil any of it, but exploration is rewarded and you eventually cobble up a multi-phase plan and execute. I appreciated the gentle nudging the game provided. Notwithstanding the clearly signposted puzzle elements, the player still feels some agency and initiative thanks to the neutral text. Things progress with light tension. If your plan fails to disarm the alarm, you have a timer on your escape (which ups the tension!). The puzzles are logical and satisfying if not brain burny, then you get to see the achievements screen and done. I might have wished for a little last minute sass from O’Brien, or Agatha(!) but success is its own reward I suppose.
Only one possible bug found - after a few tries at using (Spoiler - click to show)a thieving box it disappeared from my inventory, and a cursory cycle through the museum did not turn it up. Also not enough text detail (Spoiler - click to show)to make camera positioning clear, though in retrospect I have a pretty good idea what to do. Probably lost some endgame points for those, but had enough other tools to complete the job.
It was start to finish a breezy, pleasant outing. Just a bit too slight to be Engaging, enough personality to Spark, a great way to shake the weight of some longer games.
Played: 10/2/23
Playtime: 35min, 82/100 after some timer backups
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Mostly Seamless
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
The HMS Outsider, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
IFCOMP23 had a weirdly prominent nautical subcurrent. In recognition, this is the inauguration of the review sub-series “Here There Be Poopdecks.” We'll kick off the sub-series with a shipboard murder mystery. The setup is this - two down on their luck brothers find work aboard a foreign cargo vessel, only to be accused of the murder of the only person that speaks their language! Now one brother must solve the mystery before they arrive in port and are committed to foreign justice. Also, it is an airship. Still counts!
It is a confidently compact setup, both in the tight map and the crisp text renderings of the environs. Maybe a little too crisp? The first puzzle, getting tools to escape your quarters, is straight forward enough. But the timing is a little wonky. There is a reveal about the nature of your boat that feels surprising, except it is so underplayed that it initially reads as buggy text. It is not actually clear if the author intends it as a reveal, or they believe you already knew.
Great swaths of the game are like that. My initial impression was that the world building was half-baked. But the more I played, the more I realized the world building was actually pretty robust, it was just communicated through oddly underplayed or weirdly timed details. It made it hard to get a bead on what was happening, and made the puzzles harder than their construct.
During another early sequence, you are navigating a space with two parallel hallways fore/aft. To do so requires counter-intuitive ‘port/starboard’ directions to get into the right passage, then ‘fore’ to continue. Particularly when avoiding speedy NPCs, its just enough to trip up. At other points, when handling containers, the text refers to them by contents you haven’t seen yet. You don’t meet the crew exactly, they breeze past you with vanishingly small expository text. There is machinery maddeningly, opaquely described. It all added up to a first hour and three quarter where I made slow, steady progress, but often wasn’t clear why things were working or failing, and only a hand drawn map keeping the geography clear. If asked to stop and rate at an hour and a half, I likely would have rated it a mechanical exercise of clever puzzles and inadequate (and occasionally misleading) text.
But something happened with 15 min to go - the cumulative weight of the drip-fed world building, the opaque NPC movements, the clues that had been slowly accreting, even the arbitrary-seeming game mechanics suddenly crystallized. I hit some sort of informational critical mass and the machine of the game revealed itself to me, and it was pretty cool! On the heels of that revelation came a second: the author had super effectively put me in the shoes of a man stranded in a society not his own, outside looking in. It was kind of opaque to me because it was kind of opaque to him too! Slow clap, author, slow clap.
Unfortunately, these revelations were not in time to finish the game, at two hours it remains unfinished. I had spent too much time adrift to call it engaging, but under the wire the game sparked white hot.
I would fix those premature contents messages though.
Played: 10/1/23
Playtime: 2hrs, not finished
Artistic/Technical ratings: Buzzer beating Sparks of Joy, recasting Notably Buggy descriptions into Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: Most likely yes, now that I finally feel the click.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Second String Polo Hero, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
It occurs to me that due to some accident of providence over the last year I have seen very few ChoiceScript games. The ones I have seen have had respectable polish, so I’m starting to think of it as the luxury car of IF authoring brands. OKS makes a case for itself here early. The graphical components utilize a crisp iconography that quickly establishes a visual identity. There are some very nifty tricks with font (I particularly liked what I called “arcane crossword puzzle font”) to build atmosphere.
There is even a generous dose of sound and music, albeit somewhat less successful. The pages of text tended to be long. Not a problem, the work had a lot to say. When the sound mapped to top-of-the-page text it was pretty ok - the sound punctuated the text you were reading. When the sound was relevant to a passage halfway down the page it created incongruity. At the top of the page, you got an irrelevant noise that only made sense a few seconds further down. Notwithstanding that artifact, the presentation overall made for an ambitious package.
The ambition seemed to be promised in gameplay as well - a pregame peek at the status screen showed an RPG-like character page full of intriguing stats, customizable descriptions and character background.
You’ve set quite the expectations here, game!
The setup is an encroaching Arthurian Apocalypse with only polo players to save us! THE HORSE KIND OF POLO!! This work inaugurates a Heroic Polo genre!! I mean, huge points for innovation there.
Our protagonist is suffering some outre’ incidents that quickly escalate. Actually, quickly is not the word I want to use there. The work does something I admire in theory: it attempts to have you define and customize your character via narrative. Theory. So that immense character sheet I mentioned earlier? You go through page after page of text and selections to fill out that sheet. Its not enough to know I have brown hair, I need to define the SHADE of brown. The process took 1/2 hour before I could leave my apartment. The whole time, I am given tantalizing hints of the drama to come, and presumably my reactions to it are helping frame characteristics, but it got chafing fast. You’re telling me about all this cool stuff, but I can’t engage that until my eye color is established?
Then finally, you are off to polo practice (I know! Such a WEIRD detail, I love it!) and introduced to some supporting cast, then more plot prologue. At this point I want to stop describing the details of the plot, though I will say I found the urban magic/horror aspects pretty effectively done. Instead, let’s talk about pacing. ChoiceScript is, unsurprisingly built around choices. Each generous page of (pretty well-written) text ends with a series of possible choices. Select one and presumably some game effect will payoff down the road. These games live and die on the choices offered, and they are DEEP here! With every development you are given a broad array of nuanced (and often funny) responses to choose from, and your choices are acknowledged deftly on the next page! It really does feel like the narrative is listening to your choices, regardless of the stakes, and that is gratifying. But. Then you get the NEXT dense page of text with a deep array of choices. And the next. The effect of all those words, and evaluating and selecting among nuanced choices, is to slow things to a crawl.
As the prologue creeps forward, another curious narrative choice was made. Now, given the deep decision tree that got me there I can’t be sure it wasn’t my own choices that boxed me in, but when the action started in earnest… the game sidelined me. I was a spectator while NPCs did all the work. Sure, I still had lots of words to read, and decisions to make, but I couldn’t DO anything. If I tried, the narrative quickly shut that down.
Part of it was a (Spoiler - click to show)mind-control attack of some kind. The mechanism for this was kind of cool: you are presented with a full slate of choices, but only able to SELECT what the bad guy (or circumstance) allows. I could SEE the other options but was powerless to choose them. The author was super clever with variations on this, sometimes for drama, sometimes for laughs. As GAMEPLAY, when I was struggling to do anything, it was taunting me.
This sidelining happened not just during real peril by the way. THE GAME DIDN’T EVEN LET ME PLAY POLO WITH MY TEAM.
There were some other odd choices: remember that character sheet? Yeah, you were still filling it out, even when the action got going. In particular, as you were fighting to get involved with the plot, suddenly you need to pause and choose a secret backstory. Boy did that chafe. Not just because the choice is completely orthogonal to the urgent action around you, but also because at this point you have painstakingly established a clearly defined character, and now you are asked to decide how that was partially a lie! You might imagine a narrative where that was a cool twist. Maybe if I felt any kind of agency, or if it was related to any action in progress to that point it might have.
So two hours in I had exhaustively established a character and some NPC relationships, been along for the ride in some actions sequences and got PARTWAY through an infodump background exposition. And never really saw those character sheet stats employed in a meaningful way. You ask too much of me game. I liked the writing, found the choice architecture often very clever, respected the graphical presentation, LOVED BEING A (what??) POLO PLAYER ((Spoiler - click to show)even though yeah, that’s just an excuse to get on a horse later, innit?) but eventually time and my patience ran out.
The game on display is so much bigger than the 2 hrs of IFCOMP. It is not well served by the judging limit. There were lots of in-the-moment sparks and a seamless implementation, but I am assessing a penalty point for infuriating slow-motion player impotence. If I’m honest, even if it turned out to be a 100hour game, 2 hours is just too long to get where I got. At least I made it to the (Spoiler - click to show)amazing pop culture Merlin list. I at least got that. But c’mon, you coulda let me play polo.
Played: 10/2/23
Playtime: 2hrs, infodump w/ (Spoiler - click to show)Merlin
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy, Seamless, penalty point for 2 hrs of escalating impotence
Would Play After Comp?: It is hard to imagine having that much free time.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Is That a Codpiece or Just Happy to See Me?, December 20, 2023Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
So human sexuality, that’s a huge thing innit? Nearly universal in concept, infinitely unique in application. I am hard pressed to think of a tougher genre to write broad-audience-targeted fiction in - the variations are SO numerous and SO personal finding the magic combo that hits broadly with an audience is statistically laughable. The easiest, most knee-jerky response is going to be “works for someone I guess, not for me.” Gonna resist that. The OTHER easiest response would be a throaty “I’ll be in my bunk.” Will set that aside too.
RBLPQ does a few things right, out of the gate. By choosing a sexually aggressive female protagonist, we simultaneously acknowledge, parody and skirt eggregiously toxic male sexuality which looms like a cancer over a lot of sexual entertainment. It also fundamentally understands that humor and sexuality are great partners. Cultural shame is best combated by reminders of how FUN healthy sexuality can be, and humor is the weapon of choice in that war. Here, the humor on display so far rests on two pillars: 1. The over the top Alpha behaviors of our heroine and 2. Juxtaposing stilted “olde Englifh” fantasy-speak with brazen, in-your-face sexual descriptions.
I found the first to be consistently pretty good - her bog-simple motivations and confidence are consistently entertaining if not laugh out loud. All her NPC interactions were fun, but in particular her distaste for NPC backstory brought some earned chuckles. She is helped by at least one legitimately entertaining plot twist that she gets to react to. We are paired with a fun protagonist, inhabiting an engaging narrative.
For the second pillar of humor, well, assume spoiler mask is ALSO NC-17 mask for this review. You’re going to want to find these funny in close proximity: (Spoiler - click to show)“I shall plan thee a grand feast,” she spake. “Every accoutrement and revel shall be accounted for, and naught awry.” “his girthy, slick schlong flopping down on his meaty pubic mound with a satisfying plop…” And here, I think the composition choices maybe undermined the work a bit. When it worked best was long stretch of florid, then short punch of profane. That’s a winning combo. Too often, I felt the reverse - long passages of profane with tepid thou’s and thee’s peppering the outskirts. There was one encounter in particular where the sexual acts were described WITH the olde Englifh flourishes. That actually worked kind of ok until it fell apart, reminding me what a tightrope walk this was.
The sex scenes themselves were also employed unevenly. They were most successful when erotic activity was actually incorporated into the gameplay as puzzles. Ok, I don't know where your mind is going now, but hear me out. You’re playing IF, right? If you just want raw titillation boy has the internet got you covered, no problem, you’d probably be there right now. But playing IF it is not unreasonable to say, ‘ok, but I’d like something in an interactive option.’ Too often, it felt like the erotica was pasted on the side, separate from more standard ‘find the…’ ‘give the…’ ‘use the…’ parser puzzles. For long stretches it felt like big mode switches: EROTICA ON, IF OFF; EROTICA OFF, IF ON.
Even when the game leveraged its unique power, it had a new challenge: how do you make IF sex fun? Humor is the key there, and I consistently felt it was ALMOST but not quite there. See, a less disciplined reviewer would make an ‘edging’ joke here, but not me, nossir. I am too dignified for that.
Now all of this is circling the most challenging issue of this game: gameplay. There are a lot of parser implementation issues, most of them Classics. Incomplete nouns are everywhere ("A few low, wooden benches were set about the place, … " >look under bench “She couldn’t see any such thing.”), NPCs are not described as being present in room, making it a shock when they speak. Exits that appear in banner are not implemented. Debug messages still in the game? (>x crate “Insert uh.”) There are inadequately clued puzzles ((Spoiler - click to show)one character is interested in a trade, but the descriptions don’t really gel and it gets solved with trial and error TBF, that particular puzzle was wryly amusing.) You are wearing a cloak that does not appear in inventory, nor can you manipulate it. Not seeing a ladder you just climbed. YOU HAVE WINGS BUT CANNOT FLY. I think maybe if the technical issues were more polished, the work could breath a little better.
In the end the amusing protagonist and plot couldn’t quite escape the implementation issues and text choices to provide the Sparks of Joy I wanted them to. And yeah, I promised I wouldn’t but the erotic content “works for someone I guess, but not for me.”
Played: 10/1/23
Playtime: 1hr, 50min, 2nd Act stuck above public house
Artistic/Technical ratings: Mechanical/Notable Implementation gaps
Would Play After Comp?: Unlikely, not my kink
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Step 1: Revise Life Goals, July 14, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/11/23
Playtime: 20min, finished as prizefighter
When I first found Adventure Snack in IFComp, I went bananas. What a lovely thing to exist in this world. Bite size IF for the busy guy/gal on the go. YPATDL is very much on brand. It is a pretty stripped down hog farm simulator, with post apocalyptic flavor in the tasks (like shoveling toxic dung or Road Warrioring). (I promised new verbs.) You have more tasks than you can complete in a day, but rudimentary prioritization schemes seem to work just fine in keeping the oinkers happy until you can figure out what you want to do next with your life. In my case, apparently, fight in death matches.
The text is consistently fun and light, more bemused chuckle than belly laugh. The graphical presentation is nicely informal. The algorithm is pretty forgiving with only slight time management tension. It appears, based on what you prioritize that you might get different end game careers. And then it’s done! I feel like an extended review a) would miss the point of these things and b) would be less successful than Adventure Snack itself in navigating the value/time equilibrium.
Adventure Snack indeed. So far, every one I have encountered (YPATDL included) is a testament to Oscar Wilde’s ‘brevity is soul of wit’ observation. It is impossible to begrudge even the goofiest premise or constrained gameplay when it is so deeply, and wryly, respectful of your time. The word I want is impish.
“Adventure Snack: what’ll those scamps get up to next?”
Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! What would I do if this were my project? I mean, clearly start working on the next Snack.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Dammit Jim, I'm A Doctor, Not a Wordsmith!, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/5/23
Playtime: 20 min, finished 76%
Off to the races! Using a personal randomizer for Spring Thing, and it did right by me. Great game to launch the Thing with. BMUS is a wryly funny word game. It’s what happens at a pitch meeting when 8 people are brainstorming, and seven say “Whatever we do, we have to avoid Guess-the-Verb. People hate that.” Then the eighth says, “Team, I got it! The game IS Guess the Verb!” I am just giddy at the subversive audacity.
Ultimately it is a word game/vocabulary test. But if a spoonful of sugar famously helps the medicine go down, what does a cascading deluge of sugar do? Makes you cackle like a rooster in a madhouse is what. You launch from one terse absurdist scenario to another with the perfect amount of lubricating text: almost none. And you guess the verb. All you know is, it starts with B.
The tone is just perfect for this game. It opens with over-the-top exaggerated denial of the obvious that builds on itself recklessly. I am a sucker for blithe denial of the obvious when it’s not being used to corrode democracy. Then it smoothly shifts gears to serially casting NOT familiar characters into absurd scenarios, all to wring that B-verb out of you. I wasn’t counting, but you get 10-15 of these and you’re done!
This game knows exactly what it is, clicks along crisply, delivers the chuckles, and finishes without overstaying. Like an appetizer at a 5 star restaurant - it’s gone in a moment, but lovely while it lasts.
Only a few notes on polish: I found early inclusion of images set a graphical expectation the rest of the game did not deliver on. Would strive for a more consistent application: more or none. Really dug the combination of hyper links and parser input. Also liked the text color fading for older input and bright for new, though in a few instances the new text faded with the old. Would have gone with icons instead of loose “I” (inventory) “L” (look) and “U” (undo) letters in the corner. Nits really, a really smooth presentation.
Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful.
Polish: Smooth.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I would focus on making failure more fun. The PASS capability is nice, keeps things from dragging which would be death for this thing. In one instance, I failed to guess, hit pass, and the transition text obliquely let me know what it was I failed to guess. It brought a knowing laugh at myself - of course that was the word, dummy! It seemed very much in the spirit of the game but I did not see that again. (Yes, I PASSed more than once.) I would do that every time. Alternately or additionally, I might add some code to detect multiple failed guesses (say, 3) then have one of the NOT Enterprise crew chime in with a hint. Both seem in the light spirit of the game, and would smooth out the drag of “I just can’t think of it!”
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
What Mysteries the Night Holds? At Least Two Dozen..., July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/5/23
Playtime: 40 min, 26+ Endings
Talk about right-footing me. Something about “An enthralling tale with more than 25 endings!” when the title proclaimed 26 just tickled me. The intro screen further cemented my good will by providing 4 hilariously disparate possible endings, only to sadly tell me no, those don’t count. Between the instructional text and these examples, the stakes and purpose of the game were communicated economically and amusingly: FIND ALL THE ENDS!!
After that it is a click-select exercise to explore all the narrative branches. Some very short, others long and extended, only a few reconvergent. The scope of the game is about right to keep all branches in your head, almost. Like most time loop games, after reading text once, you madly click past text on subsequent cycles to get to the new stuff. A bit of a chore for long paths, but the game is smart about rewarding your perseverance with skip-ahead, jump to branch-point, and achievement unlocks to keep things moving after you collect enough endings.
There is ample wit on display. Which is about the coldest, least convincing way to convey the pleasant humor of the piece. (“Oh really, ample wit you say? Well ha ha HA indeed.”) It was at its best when it ramped from mundane to transcendent dizzyingly fast. I chortled aloud at (Spoiler - click to show)“Have you touched the divine?” Mostly I was just kind of smiling as I went.
At about the 30min mark, I started questioning myself as I continued, “Is this too long for what it is?” Just asking that question felt like a yes. The more interesting question is, “Why so?” Here’s what I came up with: the early promise of the game was 26 wildly divergent endings and paths, the humor residing in the disparity. I didn’t count, but it felt like the truly disparate endings (and make no mistake, they’re in there!) amounted to a third or less, the rest being variations on them. Meaning you get a few unique, then 4-6 variations of one, 2-3 another, 3-5 of another and so on. To me, this chipped away at the early promise enough to let me feel the time. And some of these variations were noticeably less ambitious than others. If they had been more audaciously varied, I think it would better justify the length.
The work was well polished, no noticeable bugs. Most interactions are single-screen easily digestible chunks. The early warning screen was notably longer, and by notably I mean I didn’t realize I needed to scroll for an embarrassingly long time. Otherwise, definitely a smooth presentation.
Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Comedic Time Loop
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would invest in committing to the bit: reduce or even eliminate the endings that are modest, reasonable variations. The more tortured the logic, the funnier it’ll be. Just test myself to see how many unconnected bananas end states and scenarios I could pack in. More than 25!
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Mr. Mouse, meet Mz. Cat, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/6/23
Playtime: 1hr, in tutorial mode with Sneak off, escaped!
Ok just up front, let me say I’m going to do my best to stay neutral on this but you should know my biases:
1. I’m a TADStan. Full bore. While clearly pushing me one way, there is also some back pressure in that I can’t help but constantly think ‘ooh, nice use of OutOfReach Container object…’ ‘aah, they maybe implemented it this way…’ ‘ehh that prepositional variable is off…’ which fights engagement.
2. Triggered is too strong a word. Maybe Tweaked. I get tweaked by ‘things stalking you’ games. It gives me anxiety way out of proportion for a guy typing on a keyboard.
3. The TADS author group is populated by a wonderful cast of Mensch and SuperMensch. Even among that Menschy population, Joey stands out among the Menschiest.
What I’m saying is you will have to judge how successfully I put all that aside. Anyway, this is surely the best game of the Thing, probably the year, maybe all time.
No, let me try to run at that again.
The setup is, you are a new life form in a sci-fi closed base setting, pushed into a life and death game of cat and mouse by a chatty but mostly unseen Adversary. WHY ARE WE ALWAYS THE MOUSE IN THESE THINGS??? There are two supporting docs you should absolutely secure before playing. A map and a rule book. I was a bit put off by the rule book. It is certainly complete. It also throws a LOT of information, gameplay reveals, and commands at you, before you have any game context. I definitely felt information overload reading it, the anxiety of needing to remember lots piling on my ‘I don’t like being prey!’ anxiety. Which is weird, because I am also a board game guy, and it certainly is not excessive in those terms.
On the other hand, the map is both cool and vital. Don’t try to play without it.
After the preliminaries, you wake up from your sci-fi cocoon and must parser your way to freedom! Despite the nervous wreck it made me, the stalking aspect is absolutely crucial to this game. Between that and the Turn Counter (or, as I though of it, the Stalker Progress Tracker) you are immediately focused on optimizing everything you do. Given I was playing in baby mode, maybe I didn’t need to be so nervous but whatever. The environs are economically described, in the sweet spot of having personality but not weighing down with repetition. There are some ‘gamey’ aspects (like letter coding segments of corridor) that at first feel weird to read, but quickly settle into transparent map orientation shorthand. Though god forbid you don’t have a map. (To be fair, there are accessibility hooks I did not test drive that may alleviate this.)
I really dug the parkour element of the game, though I chafed at calling it ‘parkour.’ Practically speaking, what it amounts to is finding hidden areas and exits in rooms by scrambling over stuff. That’s cool! As a word though, ‘parkour’ evokes a kinetic, acrobatic dance of sorts, and this is not that. This is finding hidden areas and exits. What it does do is make even the most spartan of rooms intriguing with possibility, and often rewarded! There seemed to be a few glitches once you parkoured (yes, I will be making up verbs in this series of reviews too), specifically around what was visible/reachable from different perches, but rarely and nothing fatal. At least on baby mode.
Two more quick quibbles. One, I think the Adversary needs just a little more spice. The impulse to let the reader’s imagination do the work is good, as I think we are meant to be unclear whether they are human or not. (Sidebar, there are some enigmatic things you can find that beg all kinds of intriguing questions.) It would be even better with just a few unexplained and disconcerting details. “The voice somehow catches when making glottal sounds, in a way human tongues never do.” “Every now and then, a dragging sound accompanies the footsteps.” “I catch a glimpse of cold, unblinking eyes. I’m not sure if it’s a trick of the light or if they glowed with a frigid inner light.”
Second, I think the search puzzle could be a little harder. Thanks to a quirk of the randomizer, (Spoiler - click to show)I found over half my escape items in one place! Though maybe I shouldn't complain about being Too Easy on Baby Mode.
Yeah, I’m overcompensating on the negative. I really had a blast playing this, and in particular liked the additional nuance of the parkour mechanism. Notwithstanding the mechanic’s name, it made what could have felt limiting and sterile breathe a bit with its own vibe. And I didn’t mention the stealth capabilities which were also crucial to this! You can manage or be tripped up by slamming doors. You can peek into and around areas before bumbling into your pursuer. There are atmospheric cues that help you gauge how close your pursuer is. All of these really push you into the role in an effective way and make the game feel more fair. While I didn’t include my IFCOMP metric of 'Would play after comp?' I definitely will.
Prolly also devour the source code like a novel.
Spice Girl: Scary Spice
Vibe: Controlled Panic
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? YES, oh gods of my fathers! Lo’ the clouds didst part and the skies were rent with sweet music… sigh
Feels like I took the long way around on this gag.
Gimme the Wheel! While spicing the villain seems an obvious next step, if it were me I think I would instead focus on internalizing the rule book into the game. Not just cut and pasting it into HINTS/HELP, ( I mean definitely do that, but the author seems to already have that planned) but introducing mechanisms through early gameplay. “He’s almost caught me! As I duck into the Lab, I reflexively SLAM the door behind me. I hear his satisfying cry of pain and the sound of feet staggering. That gave him pause, I reflect with momentary satisfaction. What do I do with the bought time?” If narrative alone can’t get the job done, “(I have unlocked SLAM DOOR!)”
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Paging Mr. Cussler, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/7/23
Playtime: 3hrs, finished, good guess author!
IF in Google Forms. What even is my life right now? Of course, in five years, I’ll be typing “Live IF via GMAI, what even is my life right now?” I guess I should enjoy the ignorant bloom of youth. (Because that phrase TOTALLY applies to me.) Look even if Kuolema were terrible, the chutzpah of a Google Forms implementation alone would rack up goodwill points from me.
But its really not. Terrible I mean. Yes, it’s a Clive Cussler-esque abandoned mystery ship carrying a terrible secret on stormy seas. But it’s a pretty good abandoned mystery ship carrying…etc. Roger Ebert famously said (paraphrasing) “It’s not WHAT it’s about, it’s HOW it’s about it.” And Kuolema has a long laundry list of things it does really well. For one, it feels like a well thought out ship, inhabited by a well-thought out crew. Every location has a reason for being, its absent inhabitants real motivations and impact on their environs. The puzzles have at least some rational motivations, though lordy the code pads. The mystery is capably rendered with the requisite twists that satisfy, if not amaze. The overarching plot is that nearly impossible sweet-spot balance of grounded and goofy. All of this is upper tier IF stuff.
I think though, its not so secret strength is its art. The rendered style is moody, a little dark, but consistent and immersive. Most especially the artifact and document art, which smoothly integrates you into the experience. You get to see corporate letterhead, “hand” written journals and notes, technical manuals, promotional posters, scientific and casual computer screens, and all of it feels perfectly designed.
In most ways, it might as well be a worthy choice-select IF from any number of systems. So let’s talk about the strengths and challenges of the GF implementation.
The game goes out of its way to, ungenerously, apologize, or more generously, set player expectations for the GF experience. The first caveat that drew extreme skepticism from me, was the statelessness of it: the game would only intermittently remember your inventory, or things you knew. You would have to track them on your own, in a separate document. Pencil? Paper? Like a STREET CORNER BOOKIE??? But man did I get whiplash turning around on that. Turns out, the quickest way to get me to engage deeply is to write stuff down. I actually knew this about myself, I often map as I play, but to be told I HAD to was a shock. Regardless, once I accepted the inevitable, I got into a rhythm of game screen/note screen that was just fun and immersive. Look, spreadsheets are a hobby of mine, leave me alone.
So points for GF on that one. Definitely making a limitation into a strength. On the downside, statelessness also meant that revisiting locations, you were often treated (with minimal shading) to outright repetition. You can have the same conversation as many times as you want, (mostly) without acknowledgement that you’ve had it. To be fair, GF is far from the only platform to see games with this weakness, and even games that successfully mitigate it, do so with caveats of their own. Minimal points off.
I think I’d call it an unmitigated success, except for one thing that bugged me all out of proportion. In order to advance the story, most pages would close with a radio button list of options, and a BACK/NEXT button pair. Meaning every time you wanted to move on, you needed two clicks: radio-select option, next button. That is twice as many clicks as necessary. It didn’t help that oh so frequently a page down was necessary too. It sounds small but man did it grate! I really enjoyed the game, but I think I would have enjoyed it twice as much with half as many clicks. Could GF really not support direct links there? Or was this a perverse choice by the author? What did I DO to them???
As far as polish, the artwork and page layout lent a really professional air to the proceedings. The only thing that kept it from being gleaming was some wonkiness in the progress tracker. I think maybe I solved a few puzzles “out of order” and got to watch my progress meter dance back and forth a bit. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a distraction. Don’t start me again on the radio buttons.
Spice Girl: Scary Spice - I may never look at Refresh buttons the same way.
Vibe: Pulpy
Polish: Smooth++
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! Dear God I would drive myself to the madhouse fixing that double click. I would engineer a hostile takeover of Google for the express purpose of deploying their entire software development capability on only this until it was fixed. If that’s what it took.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Bizarro Job Hunt, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/7/23
Playtime: 20min, 3 endings
This entry lives up to its title, without doubt. There is a loose plot about finding a job, but so not the point of it. This is another (the third so far in Spring Thing23!) IF patterned after a joke: setup and punchline, no goal but to make you laugh. This one struggled a bit to find its footing, I felt. It is rife with misspellings, awkward sentences, and questionable grammar. An early gag about mistaking computer for social networking was structured too loose to land, but there was something there. It just felt like the language was making me do a lot of the work to find the humorous core of the idea.
When comedy is most effective on me, not only do I not have to work, the language is a full partner in laughs. It is the sharply honed needle that injects that uncut, industrial strength funny right into my brain. Which is not to say that there were no chuckles. In selecting a book (after selecting your wardrobe) to prepare for your party-cum-interview-opportunity, two options are:
"2. How to gain friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie :
"Talk about networking while networking to network the network
"3. Business at the speed of thought by Bill Gates:
"Business business, business is to business what business."
The first one tickled me, but right on its heels I was brought up short by “I don’t know how to read that.” There were some other amusing bits: (Spoiler - click to show)the protag’s spider sense, continually misnaming the ex (once I realized it was not a typo), and especially one ending reveal about your host. The sum of these and other gags leaves little doubt that the protag is not going to be a model employee wherever they land. For all the successful gags, there were as many or more that elicited “I think I see what they were going for there” instead of a laugh.
It’s short, as far as I can tell at most 3 potential jobs you choose from, then done. While the selection of potential bosses was daffy, I felt they could be MORE widely disparate to really land the absurdism. A (Spoiler - click to show)sentient cactus and an urbane donkey felt somehow more similar than different to me? Maybe that’s just me?
All in all, I found I was working too hard through the language to find the humor. There were a lot of frenetic, goofy ideas on display, but more often than not they were undermined by the sentences they had to inhabit. It was thankfully short, a soul of brevity and all. But I appreciate it more when I don’t have to work so hard for my laughs.
Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! For sure spell and grammar checking are the next stops if I drive this bus. It would both sharpen the laughs and improve the polish in one fell swoop.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Aggravation Can Be Fun, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
To Be Clear: Review title refers to Character, not Game
Played: 4/8/23
Playtime: Distracted timekeeping, maybe 2.5-3hrs
IF feels like a nice match for heist/crime caper stories. Between the logic problem of defeating security, the think-on-your-feet crisis management during the inevitable reversals and complications, and even the manipulative work to defeat physical barriers it all just synchs nicely with IF strengths. Unlike, say, punch punch kick punch I win fighting. Throw in some quirky character work, and maybe a relationship or two and you’ve got a great stew boiling.
Here, you are renowned GentleLady Thief Thalia. (I know Lady is the proper feminine to Gentleman, but by aliasing it to 'woman' so often, it kind of sheds that essential ‘Upper Crust’ connotation.) I understand this to be part of a series, but this was my intro, and the game eased me into the setup smoothly and seamlessly. In no time I was hosting a social event, crossing mental swords with intellectual inferiors and plotting an intro heist. While this worked well to set the table for the main event, I found myself at a remove, and it took me a bit to understand why.
Either through the staging of the introductory sequence, or due to the choices I made, LadyT was consistently the smartest, bestest, most capable person in the room. And knew it. Boy did I find her tiresome. She was surrounded by amusing bumbling wannabes, socially awkward gadgeteers and conflicted adversaries. In particular, I enjoyed the Q character Gwen, who only near the end of a conversation did I realize was actually a Scoreboard telling me my score from the previous scenario! It was a delightfully subtle bit of writing. Every one of the supporting cast was fun to read and engaging to interact with. If only the protag half of the interactions wasn’t such a chore.
Now fiction is full of these kinds of characters. Characters like Doc Savage work because you spend more time with his colorful, flawed assistants and he acts more like a walking Deus Ex. Superman has endearing humility. Classic Bond works thanks to his sociopathic sense of humor. The immediacy of IF puts us IN the protag, where remove is not possible and an absence of mitigating personality is pronounced. I am given to understand that this negative impression may be an artifact of jumping into the series cold, which, fair enough.
As the game shifted to the main heist planning, I was further thrown off by narration telling me I had a map. This led me to believe I didn’t need to do paper mapping, as the protag/game would take care of me. Boy was that not true! I was a few rooms in before realizing, wait a minute, I’m lost and shoulda been mapping all along. It’s not that the museum is geographically difficult, it was just a bad expectation.
So I’m in a hole, enjoyment wise, and then the game does the most perfect thing. It introduces an adversary character who is EVEN SMARTER than LadyT! Mechanically, this character is basically a reversal generator to keep the plot fun. But CHARACTER wise she has the crucial function of putting our protag off her game, getting her worried and frustrated and second guessing herself. She is so much more interesting this way. It was compounded by me the player totally bollixing an interview. LadyT’s frazzled self recriminations (due to my ineptitude) were perversely amusing. The protag was much more fun when I was doing badly!
This turnaround came at a crucial time. From here, we are off to the races in the Big Heist. A quick word about the setup here. This game made some really smart game play choices, specifically in the preparation (recon! interviews! staging! NPC coordination!), giving real perceived agency in getting things set, and how easy or hard the endgame would be. While I suspect failure would be really hard (if not impossible) to achieve here, the illusion of creating success was strong. Not to mention the detailed work of engineering a heist was just plain fun. Ditto managing the inevitable escalating reversals, culminating in a nice bit of character work (if you’d done your homework earlier!) to secure your escape.
Overall, I spent about half the play time at a remove, a quarter of time “ooh wait, I like where this is going,” and the final stretch fully engaged. This game dug a hole for me, then through a few tightly choreographed twists, propelled me to a very satisfying end. Seems about right for the genre!
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Crime Caper
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I think my next step might be to create an in-game map. Either as a pdf-eelie, or better yet use that Twine dead space left window to implement a dynamic map that grows as you explore. You might need to rotate the museum 90 degrees (the map is wider than tall, but turning on its side could take advantage of that narrow window). In addition to realizing the promise of the text, it would add a nice graphical flair to a bare bones presentation.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Theatre of the Mind, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/8/23
Playtime: 30min
Depending on how you approach it, this one either packs a lot into its short runtime, or not enough. It’s a Monster of the Week kind of setup, an in media res supernatural investigation with personal stakes. It’s also very linear, very few choices to make and most of those adding details without changing anything. For sure, the narrative is the star here, not the game play.
To the narrative’s benefit, the writing style is smooth and confident, and plays with itself in fun ways. At various times it subverts itself with humor, and elsewhere falls victim to the powers of the monsters it is documenting. The latter in particular is a really fun tweaking of form that works better in IF than it might on the page. All in all, the writing style is a solid foundation to support the story.
But the writing’s biggest strength I think also ends up ham stringing it. The narrative leans a lot on implied back story, loric details tossed out without much explication, leaving the reader to speculate/fill in the gaps. It is a powerful technique, and the details dispensed are singular, odd, evocative and intriguing. (Spoiler - click to show)Rainwater Death filters, reality bending creatures, god shards, there is a lot to tantalize, but because it’s new to you but not the characters you only get oblique hints. It really engages the reader’s imagination.
Unfortunately, the same remove that makes the backstory so tantalizing is also applied to the main character and their relationships. This works less effectively, and makes the protagonist a bit of a blank. Interesting things are happening to and around them, but they remain enigmatic at the center of it. There are relationships presented as fact, but without details that showcase the emotional underpinnings that have to be there. While the reader’s imagination is fully engaged in theorizing the setting’s details, it’s quite a different thing to ask us to ALSO plumb the main character’s personality and emotional history. Most especially because of the personal stakes in the plot.
As the story drew to an end, the most overpowering impression I had was that I had just read an outline, rather than a fully fleshed out story. A really intriguing outline, with details I’d love to hear more about, but needing a lot more meat on its bones.
Spice Girl: Scary/Ginger Spice
Vibe: Horror Outline
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would focus on fleshing out the protagonist’s character. Let the reader see more of their inner life, either through dialogue, actions or direct access to thoughts (a bit easier to do in IF). Most especially the two relationships that are at the heart of the story. The plot and background can get away with leveraging the reader’s imagination. The protagonist and their emotional life is going to be more powerful delivered on the page.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
.. and the Delightful Despot, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/9/23
Playtime: 2 hrs, finished. FOR NOW.
Like [REDACTED] years ago I went through a phase where I was fascinated by the pulp magazines of the 30’s and 40’s. High Adventure, against a backdrop of first draft wild ideas and third-hand science knowledge, delivered on an insane monthly deadline. These ingredients created some propulsive, wonderfully goofy, imminently readable stories. Not for nothing, the source of the word ‘pulpy’ as a narrative type. (Also yes, so much racism and sexism.)
Galaxy Jones is a wonderful echo of those tales - Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon without the White Man’s Burden. The game makes the crucial choice to cut away all the problematic baggage without comment or fanfare, and give us the straight uncut adrenaline. It would have to REAAALLY drop the ball to lose me, and it didn’t.
As a parser game, there were rough spots. Quite a few unimplemented nouns:
"[...] the dock features several dozen speeder bays. Only a few are
filled right now. [...]
">x speeders
"There's nothing like that nearby."
Or worse, then:
">x speeder
"(the speeder)
"Galaxy One [...]"
This kind of thing happened often enough that it left an impression, but the piece is so tightly paced it doesn’t let you dwell on it in the moment. Most commands give a concise and often amusing 1-2 lines max in response. The thing is sprinkled but not drowned with dry humor and pulpy spice, letting your internal Buck Rogers fan fill in what’s necessary behind the nicely thematic cues. This gives the whole narrative an internal momentum, like ‘no time for details, here’s what’s important, quick, what’s next?’ It is such a successful marriage of form and function. The pace is further reinforced with relatively spartan locations, again discouraging extended loitering. When you do get more than 4 lines of response, it immediately conveys, ‘wait, this is big!’
The puzzles are, for the most part, also pretty streamlined. It is uncommon that things you need are not a room or two away. I struggled with one ledge-related puzzle but was otherwise fine. (I particularly like the task boards, though I was crestfallen that adding ‘solve my puzzle’ to the board didn’t actually get it done. :] ) I go back and forth on whether the relative simplicity is a drawback or a feature - it certainly supports the dynamic momentum of the story to not spin excessively on locked doors. Given all that, the presence of inventory items (some of which were tricky to collect) that were ultimately unused was confusing, unless some puzzles had multiple solutions?
The game further endeared itself to me by implementing in-game hints in the form of your ‘gal behind the keyboard’ over comm link. For sure the positive outweighed the friction by a good margin, and that’s even before the part that had me giggling and clapping like a toddler getting a new woobie. Which I will spoiler because the surprise is part of the delight.
(Spoiler - click to show)The piece opens with an ascii-banner, the logo of our heroine. Itself, just a perfect mood setter for the vibe of the piece. Then, after the first significant victory, the logo flashes beneath your success text, “GALAXY JONES!” It is the most perfectly surprising, evocative, and delightful touch, and you get it with every subsequent major success. I am on record calling that the best 8 lines of IF in 2023. I stand by that assessment.
After a whirlwind of action/adventure, it ends on a cliffhanger, promising another episode! A really well executed homage, crisply translating classic pulp fiction’s narrative momentum into the IF medium. Also translating retro-pulp into the new millennium, come to that.
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Sci-Fi Pulpy
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I would take time to scrub the noun universe, and to a lesser extent verb responses. There were enough glitches for me to notice them, even at the speed I was moving. The skeleton and muscles of the game are there. At this point, it’s all polish.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
The Purring Chaos, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 1hr, with hints and transcript
This is an established fact about humanity: that there are dog people and there are cat people. It is further an established fact that cat people deserve empathy for life events that led them to welcome into their hearts a being that at best greets their suffering with complete disinterest, and at worst passes the days mentally creating Final Destination fan films where their owner is every victim.
// What is this feeling suddenly possessing me, of being alone in a vast minefield surrounded by shadow-born trebuchet? Probably just the wind. //
Sacred Shovel of Athena is a notionally fantasy IF about befriending a cat, then fighting. Boy does it whitewash the first half of that.
Stepping away from the premise a bit, this was mechanically a rough ride for me. There was a lot of guess the noun/verb. There were some positional dependencies not well flagged, where the right action in the wrong location failed without explanation. There were descriptions that didn’t quite convey the mechanics of what was happening, and inconsistent levels of detail. There were successes without clear explanation what I did to make them succeed. All of this led to an overwhelming feeling of constantly fighting the game to make progress.
Other games have these challenges for sure. The tone, stakes and narrative act as motivation in those instances to push through. Here though? The narrative is really thin, it’s intended as a puzzle fest. The tone is occasionally wry, but not overly humorous. The stakes are low, which by itself can be admirable. Low stakes can still be compelling stakes, and even when they’re not, if the game play is short and light you may not notice. But an hour, mostly fighting this thing, is not the right balance for these stakes. Not when the stakes are befriending a creature that would kill me in my sleep if that would grant him my opposable thumbs.
// Eyes fierce with determination, I gaze upward at the distant lip of the pit. Ignoring the old man’s counsel, I redouble my efforts to dig free. //
The bug that ultimately crashed my experience was the Hint system. When I tried to use it in Gargoyle, I got 18 lines of help topics, notably short of what I needed. I got the same when I played the downloaded HTML, or the online link. It was only when I cribbed another reviewer's transcript that I even realized more were available (not sure what interpreter they were using). This left me in the unenviable position of trying to solve some obtuse guess-the-sequence puzzles via someone else’s similarly struggling transcript.
For me, this was way too much work for too little reward. I fully acknowledge that Cat People may find a better experience here. But don’t they already have ENOUGH cross to bear?
// And lo, a chill wind surges and the clouds darken. Too late, the peril is revealed. I dared trifle with Pet Forces Beyond My Ken, and my reckoning will be swift and violent. //
Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Fantasy-Lite
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! Ok, if this were mine, the Hint bug clearly needs addressing one way or another. But my first stop I think would be to internalize as many transcripts as possible to a) add noun and verb synonyms that make sense and b) add cluing prompts and feedback in areas where complicated sequences are required. “The cat curls up snugly. You can’t imagine that angelic face being anything but pleased once it wakes up.
“AND MURDERS YOU.”
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
"Can we talk about our Relationship?" "Look at that Architecture!", July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 10min, happy ending
Well, this work was a nice change of pace from the pretty narrow “Pulp or Funny Only” algorithm that seems to have inhabited my Spring Thing randomizer up to now. This is a relationship drama piece and stands out in direct contrast to everything else so far. It is specifically a tale of two lovers working through some doldrums and tensions in their relationship. It travels a clear path to success, by committing to the details of the characters in question and selling us on the reality of those.
Early on I was worried. A conversational path had a bug that delivered non sequitor text that both jarred and cast a pall worrying whether more glitches were to come. I happily report they did not.
A smart choice the game makes is to alternately put you in one, then the other’s head, back and forth as the drama progresses. It takes the additional step of providing a unique graphical cue for each protagonist which was a nice touch. The author uses this conceit to nice effect - contrasting their respective concerns and highlighting their dissimilar emotional priorities. This contrast (and neither character’s acknowledgement of the difference!) was a very mature, very interesting, and very well observed artifact of relationships. If I had a quibble here, it is that I found Yaan (the older, more powerful member of the pair) much better rendered than his young lover Kel.
As we are introduced, Yaan seems congnizant of the power imbalance between the two but not OWNING it, if that makes sense. He is further struggling with work anxieties and pressures. Between the background descriptions and the potential actions he might take, I felt he was really effectively painted with few strokes. Now that picture is a little skeevy, but it rings complex and true and interesting.
Kel on the other hand, despite having lots of concerns, felt less clearly drawn to me. He wants to befriend cats. (A clear cry for help… no, this is not the place.) He’s aware of the power imbalance. He wants closer relations with his family. He likes an old theatre. In particular, the options provided for him felt less nuanced and more melodramatic, most especially around the theatre topic. Which honestly, is really not their relationship problem, yeah? That comment was too flippant. The text is clearly using the theatre as a catalyst to air their deeper grievances in an indirect way. But it didn’t always come off that way for Kel’s options.
The game allows multiple gameplay styles. You can try to “two hand solitaire” it, and role play both characters, or you can “I’m the director” it and orchestrate the drama. For me, the latter made more sense because 1) I didn’t want to be skeevy and 2) Kel was harder to get a bead on. So in gameplay, I tried to work against 1) and find ways to add complexity to 2). And I got a satisfying drama and a good ending doing it! Well done, author!
Now the Achievements page told my there were 4 more endings, and two more achievements I might find. I don’t think I want to go for those though. I really enjoyed the character study I went with, and don’t think alternate ones will satisfy my sensibilities insomuch as it requires choices that were not as compelling to me. I’m happy enough with the story I got that I don’t need to poke the sleeping bull.
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Relationship Drama
Polish: Smooth, bar one.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d fix that dialog bug next (which I believe author did). That sounds easier than the jeweler’s tool precision of character refinement.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
My God, It's Full of Stars, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/10/23
Playtime: 1.5hr, 3 endings
Is it me, or did it get heavy in here?
My hands are kind of frozen immobile above my keyboard as I figure out what I just read, and what on earth I have to say about it. Ok, they WERE frozen immobile, but I coaxed them into action to type that they were immobile, and now momentum is just chasing the ouroboros down this typing about typing path. I’m struggling to get my brain out of the hypnotic tarpit of Protocol and my go@!$#^mn fingers are going on about what good typists they are. Yeah, that’s the kind of work this is.
It’s fiction, not a game. Not really. There’s only a handful of choices and a limited plot. The story is set in space, aboard a damaged space station. With a large swath of the crew gone, the protagonist is wakened, injured and amnesiac, to repair the damage. Now in standard IF, this is a framework on which to hang lots of clever find the gimcrack and weird use of item puzzles. Here, the narration takes care of all that for you. And it does it under a deluge of language. It’s like there is so much impressionistic description, you are watching the plot unfold tens of feet below you, under water. Or maybe even you are tens of feet under water looking up to the plot above the surface. It is distorted and wavering and sometimes easier to just focus on the water itself, with its hypnotic rhythm and surging beauty of its own.
I can be a bit fussy about language. I balk at long compound sentences, packed with an overrun of syllables and clauses, and metaphors on metaphors. (Lord knows I don’t do any of that.) If you’re going to throw barrage after barrage of syllables at me, you better know what you’re doing. Poetry is the wobbly apex between histrionic and pretentious and if you falter even a moment you’re going to tumble down one side or the other.
I think maybe Protocol defies the odds to proudly plant its flag at the summit.
There is a tension between poetry and science, and slamming the two together is inherently fascinating. (Yes, to me. I’m writing this, everything here is according to me!) The opening prologue are science lessons, or reminders of them. They are rendered in cold, scientific language. But SO coldly and SO scientific it takes on a patios of its own. Before you even get to the story, it has started enmeshing you in its rhythms. Then the first page talks about stars, and hoo boy are you through the rabbit hole. I was seduced by the confident complexity of the metaphors, tying scientific phenomenon to human biology. And the language consumed me. Even as the plot wound through injuries, dopplegangers, cramped then expansive physical passages, you were never far from the soaring descriptions and contemplations of the void. And most of it worked. Really, really, really well.
Its not 100% perfect, according to my sensibilities. I feel like it went once or twice too often to the ‘overwrought emotional reaction to pretty specific physical activity’ well. Also, while it struck me as very competent in underpinning its poetry with realistic mechanics of space work, there were a few glitches that stood out: tethering and hand trucks were both sacrificed to drama. Looking at my notes, I captured a few passages that lost me, and a few that grabbed me, but to repeat them here does the work a disservice. It is really the cumulative use of language whose effect was so impactful. Miraculously, after every stumble, the work managed to time and again claw its way back to the summit.
To proudly stand there when the tale ends. The endings (and I looked at 3 readily available to me) were fine I guess. I chafed a bit at what felt an artificially limiting triad of choices - three variations of one idea really. But this is definitely a work where the journey is more important than the destination. And man, did that thing take me on a trippy, mesmerizing journey.
Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Surreal Sci-fi
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! What would I do next, if I wrote it? Publish it, then engage whatever the literary equivalent of a decompression chamber is, to twist my brain back to mundane conversational English.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
But Not Too Familiar, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 1hr
Oooh, this was a fun one. Retro font, graphics and sensibilities married near perfectly to retro gameplay. The game makes really smart decisions, limiting the verbs available to a very small list. This effortlessly casts aside the vocabulary guessing part of parser play and focuses on the story and puzzles. It also has a perfect in-game rationale. You’re a crow, how many verbs do you need? (Feel free to use that as a cover blurb.) It is hard to overstate just how well all these elements play with each other. At no point are you thinking “well, this would never have actually been on screen back in the day.”
The text is a full partner in the time warp surrounding the game. Descriptions are tight, evocative, with just the right blend of concrete detail and suggestive back story. If there’s a noun, you better believe there’s a description. (paraphrasing, wish I’d grabbed it)
">X BIRDS
A flock of birds flying past. You don't recognize them."
Lol, that is just old school personality right there. Not a word wasted!
The art is also spot on. Every location has an 8-bit rendering whose distinctive image matches text description, and carries the mood effortlessly. Your encounters on way to gathering the spell elements you need are varied and melancholy. It’s not high adventure, it’s encountering people and places with full histories you just happen to intersect with briefly, so they can give you stuff. Just like life!
There’s a few things I might wish for: maybe one or two more verbs to add nuance to simple puzzles; an alternative to crow backpacks; a subversion of (Spoiler - click to show)an enemy’s all-too-expected endgame return; some minor typo and bug fixes. But none of those are hugely impactful. This work has excellent moving parts that combine to make something even greater - a precisely paced, pitch perfect portal to the past.
Pastiche/homage is hard to do well, near impossible to do this well, and often unappreciated as an endeavor. I’m here for it. I SEE YOU, CROW!
Spice Girl: No Spice Girl! Will go with “Jem and the Holograms” here, as 80’s predecessor. I’m reaching, there’s no true connection there.
Vibe: Old School
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were my project, I would probably spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to eliminate the backpack, only to conclude that every solution made gameplay more frictiony and less fun. Like a LOT of time coming to that conclusion. So many attempts, each worse than the last. Then just go back to the backpack. As an afterthought, I would fix some bugs and typos, to somehow legitimize all that wasted time.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Long Live Goth, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 45min, 4 cycles, 2 unique endings
Author’s Comment: “For those with jewel-eyed ancestors.” LOLWUT? You got my attention game!
Mood is a tricky beast. Every word on the page builds on every previous word to weave an atmosphere, a vibe of the piece that can work on you, independent of the narrative it is conveying. (I kinda wish I had opened this door in my review of Protocol but we can tackle it here. I wasn’t thinking this clearly after that one.) Hemingway’s big literary revelation was that Less is More - that you can convey ideas, events, emotions and mood as or more effectively with minimal typing.
But you know what else is More? More is More. Just ask Melville! You can also use carefully curated metaphors, nuanced adjectives and cross-sentence resonances to build mood out of scale to the words you put down. It is very delicate business, though. Done inexpertly, it can become jarring or worse self-parody.
Gothic Horror leans more heavily on the More is More tradition, and Etoliated Light leans into Gothic Horror. I don’t want to say I’ve cracked the code, but EL gave me a hypothesis I’m going to test in front of you all. Elaborate verse is most effective when it presents an interesting new idea (or a new expression of an old idea), and also reinforces the developing mood and/or narrative of the piece. I found EL pretty competent at this, but not without faults. Here are two early examples I think work really well:
"One smiles and the others’ face slackens, as if the expression is something they’re passing back and forth between them."
"You’re pleased by this because you’re a child. It feels wonderful to be bigger and stronger than others."
Both have mood, novel observations, and reinforce other spoilery parts of the narrative. Here’s one I don’t think is as successful:
"You grab onto your mother’s skirts and bury your face in that comfort yet again."
While arguably nicely observed and expressed, it actually came out of nowhere that the comfort was wanted or habitual, and did not resonate with any other text around it. It felt like a showy/writery statement mostly thanks to its isolation. Overall, I credit EL with a pretty high nice/clunk ratio. Certainly it was high enough to competently build the Gothic mood that powers this story. I’m going to call the language here a win, with an asterisk.
The presentation is pretty bare bones - black screen, white text, blue selection links. You are launched into the story without cover page, cover art, acknowledgements or preamble. The intent seems to be to put you into the young protagonist’s not-quite-sure-what’s-going-on mindset but it had the side effect of making it feel more amateurish. A more robust presentation could have offset that. You get some nice atmosphere, set some genders and names, then find out (Spoiler - click to show)you’re being married off. I’M SORRY WHAT?? It’s a nicely executed shock.
Fast forward and you are living on a remote island with a sickening, that is to say ill, spouse and an elusive caretaker. The requisite family revelations, historical horrors and physical dangers unroll on cue which sounds condescending phrased that way. I found it to be quite effective actually, mostly on the strengths of the mood the text continued to weave. The details of the threat were unique and creepy enough to be effective. It also had quite a bit to say, metaphorically speaking, and for me at least the combination of mood and monster just clicked. The protagonist selection options for conversations and actions were similarly nicely curated. They were clearly steering you into the plot, but they allowed a good latitude of control over the mindset of the protagonist, which really swept you into the proceedings.
I will say, the ending was a mild letdown. (Spoiler - click to show) For one, the resolution suddenly demanded a sacrifice including a child option that somehow was not mentioned earlier at all. Also concerningly, there was no non-sacrifice option. I would say the endings I found were THEMATICALLY on point, but NARRATIVELY ill-justified. It’s possible other story branches covered that ground. But my narrative choices seemed to enable a branch that was unceremoniously cut from beneath me. I’m on record as appreciating (Spoiler - click to show)no-win horror. But I do need the work to do the work to convince me and not just TELL me.
It’s probably a clue how much text you’ve seen on this entry that it did stick with me. Yes, I had quibbles. I always do. Always. ALWAYS. ahem. But the combination of prose mood setting, really effective Gothic Horror, nice interactive character building (until the end), monster-as-metaphor, and even the maybe not earned but appropriate endings… that combo really came together. I’m only 2/3 the way through the Thing, but for me this one is in the ribbon conversation.
Also, it improbably but convincingly justified that “Jewel-eyed” teaser.
Spice Girl: Scary/Posh Spice
Vibe: Gothic Horror.
Polish: Textured.
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would do another pass of editing, with an eye to trimming easy lines that are flourishy but don’t serve the narrative or mood. Also ones that are a little too on the nose.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
The Computer Is Your Friend, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/12/23
Playtime: 4.5hrs of contradictions, finished
NCBFFTT seemed like it had an attitude about it from the start. It simultaneously flies in the face of convention, and embraces what consensus seems to categorize as the worst aspects of early IF. Instant, not always clear why death. Magic nouns and verbs with incomplete synonyms. Extended puzzle sequences that can play as hurdles for the sake of hurdles. Incomplete descriptions that require just the right sub-component EXAMINE to shed important details. Repetition of lengthy, specific, random interaction scenes. A CONVENTION-DEFYING NAV SYSTEM THE AUTHOR THEMSELF STUMBLES ON.
It is reasonably fair play, in that most of these things are told to the player right up front. There isn’t any confusion of mismatched expectations. Just confusion of WHY. Any one of these things could just sink an IF work outright, vanishing without a trace in the pool of “too much work.” Most of these have established best practices to manage or mitigate. Punters, sez NCBFFTT. So how on earth did I manage to last 4.5 hrs?
NCBFFTT has a big thing going for it. Its setting is loosely based on an ancient sci-fi satire rpg, Paranoia. For the uninitiated, this was a deeply cynical, deeply funny sci-fi dystopia where the main feature was repeated, arbitrary death at the hands of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Where incompetence was if not a virtue, certainly a pervasive force to be reckoned with. Where the resistance was basically as disfunctional, just with less resources. So much good satire and slapstick to milk from that premise.
And NCBFFTT is pretty good at it! For a while. The protagonist’s back story, death scenes, the wry newspeak descriptions of locations and items, the random newscasts and interactions with NPCs, these are consistently funny and biting and kind of sad. It buoys things along for quite a while. It is fighting the good fight, but man the moving parts of the game do not make it easy. Opaque descriptions, usually unclear paths forward, inconsistent levels of detail, all challenge the player. In an environment where the learning curve is punctuated by constant death/restore/undo. In the first 3 hours, I found myself on the verge of rage quitting practically every 5 minutes, but something about the alchemy of the setting, the wry text, *just* enough unhinted progress kept me afloat. Even though there was no escaping the Hint System.
So yeah, the hint system was used early and often. It is complete, I’ll say that. There is a special kind of anger though when consulting a hint “How do I open door?” (Spoiler - click to show) “Turn the Wheel” When the room description mentions the door but no hint of (Spoiler - click to show)wheel. >X DOOR Oh yeah, did I not mention there’s a wheel on it? That’s my own paraphrase, btw. Doesn’t it seem like its trolling you on some level?
To make matters worse, here’s my analogy for the hint system. Take a complete set of progressive hints and navigation menus. Then shuffle them. Shuffle them, like you’re a Vegas blackjack table on the Card Counters World Tour. Shuffle them like the penalty for two spades in a row was death. Then tell the player to find the Queen! Every trip to the hint system felt like a minigame of its own, trying to guess where the relevant clue was. It was actually perversely engaging (because I am damaged), in that it felt less like cheating, more like you EARNED that daggum hint.
For the first 3 1/2 hrs, it felt like the game was crossing the room with a towering, inverse pyramid of jello desserts. Every step pitched dramatically one direction, its thundering crash a seeming certainty. Yet somehow a quick sidestep changed the angular momentum enough to forestall disaster, only to wobble precipitously in a different direction. FOR 3 1/2 HOURS! I mean that exhausting endeavor alone kind of has its own majesty.
At the 3 1/2 hour mark though, there is a narrative choice that ultimately torpedoed me. (Spoiler - click to show)To solve a puzzle, the protagonist commits mass murder. Including of innocents and children. And seems fundamentally unaffected by it. On the strength of the hint system, I assume this is an unavoidable outcome. I might complain that the text (and a death-fail) kind of led me to believe that would not be the outcome, but really, the clues were there, I just ignored them. (Spoiler - click to show)I mean it was called 'Cleansing Fire of God" or somesuch.
Now even that didn’t HAVE to be a destructive narrative choice, but in the version I played, somehow the wry comedic tone that had kept things from crashing until this point chose that moment to take a bathroom break. (It probably says a lot about me that I’m half convinced even a choice that dire could be salvaged with the right tone. I accept your judgement.) The text shifted to a near cold, journalistic description, and THEN tried to overlay a jarringly light comedy puzzle.
To be fair, I understand the current revision to have modified tone somewhat here, which will DRAMATICALLY improve the experience, at least for me.
There is some subsequent fun business in the final boss, but in my play the jello was already on the floor so to speak. Which is ABSOLUTELY going to be a catch phrase in my reviews going forward.
So in retrospect, I still grapple with this one. Far and away the biggest time investment of the Thing so far. So much of it in fighting the parser, the physical descriptions, and omigod dying. A lot of it skimming big blocks of repeated text. A lot more of it fighting the Hint system. But the breadth of the puzzles was cool, the amount satisfyingly large. Often, the hints left me with, “hey pretty cool, wish the text had given me more to go on.” The fact that the amusing text and puzzle mix kept the jello aloft that long, against those challenges, is noteworthy. Fixing the tone of that one plot turn probably gets the jello to the table.
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Dystopian Satire
Polish: Distressed
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I mean if it’s mine, it’s gotta be rewriting that climactic scene/puzzle, no? At least for tone if not rethinking it completely. You could assemble a year’s long to do list of text/puzzle/hint cleanup, but without addressing that I think you’re still back to “Oh, no. No no no.” Author agreed?
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Rating omitted from total, as from previous version
... Dead Door, ah, Jello Door?, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, bad ending
RDYD has a really nifty setup - school age girls playing what seems to be a party-hypnotism game. The writing is just perfectly on point. There is significant risk of potential confusion between competing reality layers (one mostly dialogue, another mixing dialogue and surreal scenery). But between font cues, authorial voice and crisp writing it is all conveyed seamlessly and compellingly. It was understated in the best way, accomplishing a lot with minimal verbosity, just precise and pitch perfect tone.
The surreal mindscape you navigate is pretty bare, deliberately so, but punctuated with one-off colorful details that reinforce the unreality of it all. At one point the game uses the word “uncanny” and I’m like, “Well yeah, that really sums it up, doesn’t it?”
I think what really won me over though was the upper layer dialogue between the un-hypnotised girls. You have a lot of interesting dialogue choices and all of them are crisply rendered with the character of the speaker. Really well executed, natural dialogue set the perfect backdrop to this tale, and really sold the plot when things got weird.
It’s a parser game, and the bareness of its environs nicely contain the description space to minimize the noun/verb implementation gaps. Even so, weirdly, the longer I played, the more I seemed to trip over stuff. Maybe its not so weird. Exploring/looking/collecting is more straight forward than anticipating every crazy player object manipulation, and the former dominates early game play.
An hour in, I felt like I had exhausted the map. Thanks to some clues, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do, and what I DIDN’T want to do. Suddenly, the game got combative with me. I could not figure out how to do what seemed easy enough: (Spoiler - click to show)pick up some rotten meat with a plastic bag. I spent a crapton of time trying and getting nothing but “nope,” and not even gently steering or cajoling “nope” just cold, stock “nope.” It felt like a noticeable departure to what had until this point been a pretty convivial, immersive conversation between me and the game. That’s where I went looking for HINTS to help me.
Yeah, there’s no HINTS. Or walkthrough. I wasn’t prepared for how much it vexed me, and I think I know why. I think of HINTS as weakness. Sometimes, on the part of the game where puzzles are unfair or inadequately clued. Sometimes my own because missing the obvious is my brand. HINTS are usually how I tell the difference. “Well, this is on you game, you expected me to guess MASTICATE when you didn’t even implement CHEW.” “Ooh, yeah that’s a clever puzzle. If I’d just remembered the speed limit sign and turned both dials to 5…” Due to reasons maybe only a therapist could explain, the NOT knowing is the worst. “Whaddya mean it could have been my fault BUT I’LL NEVER KNOW FOR SURE??” It was made worse, I think, because the tone of the thing, and the smooth progress I had to this point had kind of convinced me the game and I were on the same frequency. Like a skeevy parasocial relationship, I presumed the game thought more of me than it did. It stung a little!
So that whole spiral put me on tilt. What I SHOULD have done is internalized “ok, clearly this is not the path I thought it was, what am I missing or how do I approach this differently?” Where instead, I went with “WHY CAN’T I DO THIS?? FINE, I’M JUST GONNA DO THE THING I DON’T WANT TO DO INSTEAD.”
So I did it, and it was bad. Outcome wise I mean. Narratively, I was still in capable hands despite the maybe under-justified leap the plot took.
I can already feel the wheels turning in my psyche though. Like the memories of an immature first infatuation, I am losing the crappy way I ended it and dwelling instead on the early attraction and heady honeymoon period. Not sure how long it will take, but will undoubtedly take another run at this, when I’m mature enough to handle it. What? That day could come.
Spice Girl: Scary Spice
Vibe: Psychological Horror
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were my project, I would let the reviewer know it wasn’t him at all, it was me. And as a peace offering to show what we have is REAL, I’d implement a hint system so robust, he’d come running back and we’d have a glorious future together of running hand in hand across sunny fields, feeding each other expensive food at sunset and relaxing in inexplicably matching outdoor bathtubs. Yup, that’s what I’d do.
If it were my project.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
I'M NOT SCREAMING, YOU'RE SCREAMING, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 30min, 6/10 tracked endings plus 1 untracked
I’ve been down this path before. When you play a lot of games in a short burst, inevitably similarities emerge. We’re humans, we’re wired for pattern recognition. EATQOTSK is a short option-select joint, oozing with comedic tone, whose main point is to collect all the endings. It’s not the only such experience this Thing, but has its own strengths and weaknesses in this emerging subgenre.
You are the titular Elf, called to solve a fantasy mystery, how to end a curse that forces everyone in the kingdom to yell at the top of their lungs. Excepting the protagonist and their manservant. This is only the thinnest of premise, used to connect a variety of unconnected subquests, each with a wry twist on expectations, tropes, or just an excuse for old fashioned slapstick. The tone is self-aware, with characters commenting on everything from screen layout, to fantasy and rpg tropes to the game itself.
The paths are of varying lengths, but none are long. The formatting is creative, and lent itself to quick digestion. I got a lot of dry chuckles at it and it was done! It could easily fit in what I have come to think of as the Adventure Snack product line - short, funny, does not overstay its premise. Is this the Showbiz Pizza to Adventure Snack’s Chuck E Cheese?
There did seem to be some technical issues. One of the setup’s conceits was a header and footer with inessential RPG-like stats. Those seemed to reappear and disappear during subsequent loops without obvious pattern. It was particularly unfortunate when the text was riffing on rpg tropes that were not on screen. There was also a tracker, showing you the endings you found, though it appears not all endings are tracked? I found one with no accounting.
Like a downhill mountain biker, none of that stopped things - it was moving fast enough to roll over those bumps, where a slower pace would have caused the bike to spill. Momentum compensates a lot! I feel like maybe I’ve said it three different ways by now, but it’s short, it’s funny, it’s pace makes it’s shortcomings non-impactful. Like potato chips, it’s a lot of satisfying if not good for you crunch, and once the bag’s empty, you can get on with your day.
Spice Girl: Baby Spice
Vibe: Playful
Polish: Textured
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d have to get the disappearing header/footer addressed. I might even tweak some meaningless values during game progress to underline the arbitrariness. Y’know, while I was in there.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Stirred, not Shaken, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/15/23
Playtime: 1.25hr, die twice, then win
At this point, I think we sometimes agree to pretend that parser IF will be enjoyed equally by novices and old hands alike. That as a form its evolved norms have made parser IF more friendly and less obtuse. There is some truth to this, of course. Certainly modern games are less cruel than their ancestors. Everyone who has a second is going to have a first IF experience and it COULD be any modern game in the archive. Even so, there are many informal norms that are deduced over time, like:
* If it’s listed, it will likely be important sooner or later.
* Walls and ground are rarely, but sometimes, interesting.
* Any location not connecting other locations has a purpose as a source of clues, objects or puzzles.
Despite having recently returned to the hobby (and enjoyed discovering the intervening years’ progress), my game play can never not be informed by the informal norms of the form. (“…informed by the informal norms of the form.” I wasn’t even trying and look what my brain came up with!)
It doesn’t feel calculated, so I’m going to say Marie Waits effortlessly leverages these informal norms to make a rarefied parser experience. The game opens with you, a plucky English detective, captured by villains and needing to escape before time runs out and their plan comes to fruition. There are objects to find, locked places to escape, and backstory and clues to discover. The text is constrained, with terse descriptions of environs and objects. The places are tight - each location with just a few things to interact with, maybe lugging around to be used later, maybe needed now. This has the nice side effect of constraining the noun/verb space within the bounds of normy actions. The ‘can’t do that’ messages seem fair and few. The spark of this game is the time limit. You are given three hours to secure your escape, and minutes tick by maddeningly fast.
Between the text, the location design, tight vocabulary space and the time limit, after two missteps I felt like this game put me in some Platonic Ideal IF Player zone. Leisurely trying random things to see how deep the implementation was was not going to be rewarded. There was a premium on leveraging meta norms to search, poke, prod at high payoff areas and shed distractions. And they were almost always rewarded! (Spoiler - click to show)There’s a bush here. Imma needa dig that soon as I can." “Can’t find exit, check the walls.” “Got a match, gonna need to light it when it gets dark.” It sounds like I’m running this game down, but I don’t mean it that way at all. It really felt like I was in the IF Zone, clicking along with the puzzles because of the tight adherence to metagame in a way that felt harder for newbies than me, but made me feel like a king.
Everyone who has a second whiskey has had a first. And it suuuuucks. The mouth experience runs contrary to millennia of species-preserving evolution. It’s kind of a miracle anyone ever has a second. But maybe you take it with coke for a few years in college, then someone introduces you to a perfect Old Fashioned, and before you know it, you’re having two fingers at night just to stay sane. I mean, you have grown to appreciate the nuances of the flavors. You even start differentiating whiskeys from each other as better or worse, but really as what is the best whiskeyness for your palate.
That’s what this felt like to me. Not a super sweet combination of spirits drowning in fruit juice. An unadorned experience that showcases the learned pleasures of a very specific flavor for someone who has trained themself to appreciate it. A perfect two fingers of cask strength IF to be savored and enjoyed, but quickly before those thugs come back.
A quick note on the narrative. The game makes an interesting choice to foreground the ‘escape from bad guys’ stakes (that is where the urgency lies after all), but background the underlying mystery that got you caught in the first place. As you navigate the spaces, bolting for freedom, you periodically find clues that trigger flashbacks. These flashbacks provide discrete snapshots of mystery pieces, puzzle pieces if you will. Some that snap into others to expand your knowledge, others that are in empty spaces of the puzzle tantalizingly hinting at a larger picture. The incompleteness of the mystery both underlines how inessential it is to the urgency of the escape, yet implies a compelling larger struggle outside the bounds of this 3 hours (game time. less than half that clock time.) It is just the right spice, the bitters to the cocktail if you will, that make this a crisp, satisfying experience.
So, I’ve spent a lot of time comparing this game to a perfect cocktail for the spirits enthusiast. The dirty secret is, when I really enjoy a perfect cocktail, I usually want another one behind it! Marie? You gonna keep me waiting?
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: In Media Mystery
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! I see that this is an entry in a series of games, which is absolutely what I was about to recommend. If it were mine, I might entertain a deconstructed mystery approach: a series of short IF showcasing discrete sequences of an overarching mystery. Perhaps out of order. Standalone IF type puzzle games, (or even disparate IF forms: a Twine detective relationship game! A Texture code breaking excercise! An I dunno Ren’Py point and click!) whose full mystery only makes sense when fully assembled. If this was already the path… points for guessing it?
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
I'm Not Worthy, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/17/23
Playtime: 4.25hrs score 23/33
I, ah, wow.
Boy do I owe my randomizer an apology. Deferring this particular work to the end absolves whatever sins I attributed to it. The Thing would have been an altogether different experience if chance had front loaded RTE. This is an incredibly layered work, taking on a broad collection of themes and commentary with some central conceits that I found… deeply dispiriting in that it kind of shamed any similar artistic ambitions of my own.
But because I am a heroic reviewer of Epic Scale I must cast all that aside to describe what a wonder Repeat the Ending is. The game purports to be a “25th Anniversary, Critical Directors Cut Rerelease” of a technically crippled but thematically unique 1996 IFComp game. The remainder of this review takes that claim at face value.
There are at least 5 layers to this work: 1) the original troubled magical realist/mental health focused game (itself with several layers!); 2) the historical context of psychological narrative IF and its reception 3) the updated version of the game, most especially the significance of the modern changes; 4) tropes of IF, including “post-puzzle” tropes; and 5) the critical analysis of all that.
It is a collected work, a collage, the playable portion of which is the minority. There is companion text in separate pdf-eelies and integrated into the hint/GUIDE system. There are context-building historical blog posts, critical essays and reviews. Exhaustive explications of the limitations of the original game that act as stealth training. Deep annotations by a trio of critics that act as hints as well as context builders. I was over a half hour in before typing my first command. I was still reading for 45 minutes after typing my last command. It is deeply effective in portraying a body of discourse surrounding the work, compelling in its breadth and vision. Each component of the patchwork has a distinctive voice, especially the trio of critics that are our guides (with varying levels of esteem for the project), and the author themself whose wry commentary peppers everything with suspect honesty.
All of it tonally perfect, from the erudite critiques, the playful and perhaps disingenuous hints, to the raw sometimes immature game play at the heart of the work. As I do, I grabbed a few lines that tickled me early on, before the scope of the work overwhelmed me and I just clung to the dashboard for the rest of the ride.
"In a recent survey of parser IF fans, four out of five respondents were found to care far less about mimesis than they initially believed."
"author's hegemony" (which you are conseled to fight)
"Cook's use of 'score' is almost certainly ironic. Audiences who consider themselves too sophisticated for such outdated narrative features might better enjoy themselves by referring to it as a 'failure index,' 'success deficit,' 'flop quotient,' or, more portentously, a 'present assessment of counter-narrative guerrilla action.' "
It would be easy to just grab funny/well-written/cutting quotes, but man, out of context they are insufficient, and even somewhat deceptive, in conveying the scope of the work.
There is so much to latch onto here. The historical context stuff was a clever, yet melancholy series of observations about artistic endeavor. The way the author subverted his own game, by layering a counter-narrative motivation that started funny but got increasingly unpleasant. The critical commentary that was in some ways a gentle parody of facile criticism, of the insufficiency of both fawning and ‘takedown’ critiques. Girded with legitimate caveats and observations that acknowledge the simultaneous importance and unachievability of full perspective.
(Sidebar: I topped out my “flop quotient” at 23/33 by choice. While my completist nature initially pushed to get all the ‘soft’ endings reflected in the score, the tongue in cheek humor sublimated to something altogether uncomfortable as time went on and made completism less attractive. This seems a deliberate, and effective, artistic choice.)
Awash in all that, to me the most compelling thread was the contrast between the original work and the 25-year-later revision. The early work rings like the work of a young artist - in love with their narrative conceits, possessed by a powerful emotion demanding documentation, convinced of the importance of their artistic vision to the exclusion of mundane craftsmanship. And fraught with an epic helplessness, a not uncommon youthful preoccupation. The modern revisions (some small, some dramatic) showcase a more mature artist, actively rebutting his younger self with nuance, generosity and insight. "Yes, and"ing his earlier work, both acknowledging its power, and offering additional perspective. And, not for nothing, smoother game play. The picture is a compelling one, most especially in the progressive ‘new’ endings created for the later revision, suggesting a final gift of freedom from the raw suffering inherent in the original work. (Spoiler - click to show)It’s not just the devastatingly gentle rebuke of those alternate endings, but the fact that the way to achieve them is to actively resist the defeatist track of the main story. UNTIL THAT RESISTANCE ITSELF BECOMES DEFEATIST! How perfect is that?? Yeah, I don’t know why that observation deserves a spoiler and not the whole rest of it, but that’s just where my head’s at twisting over this thing.
The work is simultaneously super controlled and shaggy as life. As a reader/player, you can bounce around this vast creative space engaging any or all of these themes as your mood strikes. It is a rich environment, with many ecosystems, each with their own marvels - some standalone and no less compelling for it, others that shed new light on previously superficially understood areas.
It is a compelling achievement. Deeply immersive. Demanding a lot from the reader, but pretty consistently rewarding for it. I hate how much I love it.
Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Psychological Meta
Polish: Gleaming
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If this were my project I would burn it to the ground, and deny its existence forward. I’d probably take legal action to silence the beta testers and even the cast of Spring Thing 23. Just expunge this thing from the record and people’s memories. I wouldn’t want this impossible miracle to POISON THE GROUND FOR THOSE THAT MIGHT COME LATER.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
You Can't Get There From Here, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/16/23
Playtime: 30min, 3 cycles
This one was an interesting experiment: implementing a parser interface into the historically link-select driven Twine. The presentation was very attractive, the clean font, blue on black graphics were unique and sharp. It was also quite well written. The story conveys a coming of age ceremony in some unspecific post apocalyptic future, maybe not even with humans. You are pretty limited to surveying the ceremony’s location, minimally attending (or not) the instructions given to you, remembering things, then making a choice about your future. The descriptive text is clean, conveying a lot without being showy or distracting. You have good latitude to engage or ignore details, depending on your mood.
As a proof of concept, I would call it a success, but as a polished for play feature, a few burrs to buff off. There was a hint mode, which I think turned interesting nouns bold but don’t think the feature actually toggled so I still don’t know if I was playing in HINT mode or not. Despite being told I could use N/S/E/W navigation, only one direction seemed to be implemented. This was consistent with the scenario setup, but an odd thing to advise when invariably I got “cannot go that way” responses.
Again, not sure if HINT mode is to blame, or a legit design choice, but I found if I typed bolded text, I almost always got something interesting. Begging the question, “This is different from link-select how? More work?” Now it wasn’t ONLY that. I found non-bolded nouns that had interesting descriptions too. And a lot that were “can’t do that.” Occasionally, I needed to enter a hidden noun or verb to make progress. It wasn’t awful, the text gave enough info to trial and error, but it seemed inconsistent. HELP also sometimes provided additional guidance, and sometimes didn’t.
All that summed up to a UI that never quite disappeared into the background, and perhaps colored my responses to the text. Which itself was crisp and clean and friction free (a bigger compliment than it sounds). You get a lot of background, character, setting, and then you are told to make your choice. I think I did 3 cycles, (Spoiler - click to show)and all of them were bad endings! I might have done more, but the game did not allow UNDO, and provided no FF feature to arrive at the decision point again.
As much as I belabored the UI above, I think my net takeaway was positive. Certainly, the text itself was seamless and propulsive. It was the ending, and interpolating the message behind it, that pushed at me the hardest here. At my most generous (and discounting a dramatically DIRE ending), it seems to resonate with the title in the sense that given a single impactful, no-return choice, we are doomed forever to an unanswerable “what else should I have done?” That is an interesting statement, but only works if you don’t take ALL paths. Which I didn’t. Good job me!
If I had though, then I would have to grapple with the author’s statement on the universe of outcomes. The alternatives are (Spoiler - click to show)either that all choices are in fact bad, or that there are good ones but you have no way of predicting which they are. These are unconvincing artistic statements to me in general, and the text did not try to convince me otherwise. I already rebel at the assertion that any one choice can be so life-defining. (Well, barring that dire ending. I do get that.) These assertions run aground against my fundamental belief that life is long and varied, and all but the worst decisions redeemable, mitigable or minimizable over time. Especially decisions whose consequences are so arbitrary, meaning agency and intent are effectively nullified. While acknowledging the world is not ours to control, I can’t help but feel our responses to that world ARE. At least to some extent. TRNT, I respectfully disagree!
So all that said, I do think the trail this game blazes, of adding parser capability to Twine, is a pretty cool one. I could see future efforts leveraging the expanded interface to good effect. It is this game authorship achievement that I find most compelling here, and that is where I land on Spice Girl.
Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Social Sci-Fi
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d scrub the UI in general for friction. I think there is an interesting mix in here, of combined parser/click input, worth playing around to refine.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Cain't Touch This, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 45min, died same way 4 times, caught in same apparently unwinnable state 4 times
Here’s something I knew nothing about before Thing23: Mamertine. For weeks, when I read it in the list, I rhymed it with “Hammer Time,” and mentally included the distinctive musical sting. I am still enamored of that reading, tbh. According to the Internet WHICH NEVER LIES, Mamertine is variously ancient Roman mercenaries or an ancient Roman prison that housed the Apostles Peter and Paul. Seems this work is referencing the latter. One of the few descriptive blurbs on the work suggests escaping a cult which is a really subversive connection, if intentional.
The work itself has a tremendously attractive facade - the graphical interface design is slick, functional and appealing (standard taste disclaimers apply). The moody background music, effective. It implements a click-based parser of sorts, providing a stripped down menu of standard parser verbs, and highlights potentially relevant matching nouns when selected. You are effectively building parser commands with your mouse. It is a not unsuccessful choice! You deliberately trade command speed for guaranteed valid entries. My personal preferences may lean the other way, but this was as slick an implementation as I could hope for. “Why is this a back garden?” I asked myself. “Seems pretty polished.”
The narrative may have been a first clue: it was pretty bare bones. Hinted backstory of betraying a master landing you here, environs to navigate that presented more mystery than coherent story, an NPC much more concerned with their immediate surroundings than any background or table setting. Now this artifact is far from unique in IF, particularly in puzzle driven IF. Here though, the puzzles encountered were minimal and straightforward (at least partially an artifact of an interface that inevitably allows for exhaustive permutations if all else fails), so not the star. It kind of left the piece without compelling plot, story, character or puzzles. What is left?
And then I got to the game play. It opens with timed text, deliberately dragging the introduction. While I have seen timed text used effectively in support of artistic choices, without a compelling justification its use can easily become tedious. The game play itself harkens back to an earlier time, where death arbitrarily follows seeming benign choices. Where you can blunder into locations without crucial items and get locked into an (unacknowledged) unwinnable state. And I’m not sure you can achieve anything OTHER than that. I couldn’t. I made a good faith effort to restart and explore all location branches and that’s all I could find - death or purgatory. Maybe I wrote off the puzzle complexity too soon. Certainly there might be more business with the only NPC that could help me, but no clues guided me nor paths suggested themself. Not ruling out that I somehow missed a path (I didn’t actually map it out), but I did plumb my memory hard before throwing up my hands.
Which is where the lack of HINT/HELP systems became important. None exists here. I guess I am more forgiving of this omission in a Back Garden entry, but without that tool I kind of had to give up.
In the end, the star here was the pseudo-parser implementation, including the graphical flourishes. Those were pretty successful I thought! As a showcase of what the platform is capable of, it makes its case pretty well.
Apropo of nothing: CAIN’T TOUCH THIS! (doo-do-do-doot. yeeeah, yeah)
(Post Comp update: seems like what I interpreted as unwinnable state was an ordering problem. Game - 1, me - 0)
Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Maze
Polish: Both Gleaming and Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If the engine were mine, I would focus on adding Hint/Help capabilities. That tool is crucial for a fully usable IF authoring system, as it is the surest tool to get players past brick walls, authorial or personal. If the GAME were mine, I would take a hard look at unwinnable state handling and engineer those out as best I could - or at least put the poor player out of their misery. And maybe also provide a walk through, pending the hint system release.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Mirror Mirror on the GHOUL, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 30 min, all 4
An IF anthology! I LOVE that idea! (Notwithstanding from a certain remove Spring Thing itself is a functioning anthology.) This seems to be an umbrella release of 4 new-to-authoring student projects. Packaging together is a great move, as they are too slight to stand on their own, but that compactness is a strength in anthology format. Particularly since the common “use mirror somehow” prompt gives a unifying theme that still elicits maximum individual creativity.
In that spirit, I am changing my approach here, each substory will get a “Marketing Blurb” “Great” “Learning” and “Notable” reading.
Mirror by Mihi:
Blurb: “You’ve won the lottery, plan a trip! Wait…”
Great: Really liked the prioritized tasks/choices after the lottery - fun in specificity.
Learning: Choices that immediately reconverge are not choices! Easy to code, not too fun to play.
Notable: Leans more into the fiction than interactive, with legit narrative twist!
Mirror by Liliane:
Blurb: “If a mirror is a portal, it is a fragile, unforgiving one.”
Great: Smoothly surfing the ST23 zeitgeist of “find all the endings, and make them WILD”
Learning: A score of ‘endings found out of total’ is a tried and true way to keep player engagment.
Notable: Loved the embrace of arbitrary, bonkers end states
Mirror by Filter James:
Blurb: “If this is your house, why is everything…off?”
Great: Embraces classic IF find/unlock/explore tropes, but at breakneck speed.
Learning: Arbitrary puzzles and deaths work when pace is fast, would be contentious in longer works.
Notable: Mixes narrative and puzzle play! Always a winner!
Mirror by Dr. John:
Blurb: “Where are you? WHO are you? And why is IXI so interested?”
Great: This had the tenor of an abstract puzzle, compounded by intriguingly enigmatic players.
Learning: If it was an abstract puzzle, a ‘reset’ capability is key to giving the player deductive agency.
Notable: If it wasn’t an abstract puzzle (I didn’t solve it), the fact that it MIMICS one so well is actually kind of funny. The kind of gag well suited to short anthology.
Spice Girl: A whole band!
Vibe: Anthology
Polish: Distressed
Is this TADS? No. Get on that teach!
Gimme the Wheel! If this were mine, I’d take the extra step to wrap these 4 shorts into a single Twine interface. Maybe as simple as introduction/table of contents. Maybe a much cheesier Crypt Keeper type host and intro, replete with groan-inducing puns. Honestly? Definitely the latter.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
To Perl, or Not To Perl, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 50min, finished
Man do I love how omnivorous this author is in subject matter, narrative interests, puzzle creation and platform engagement. If you’d told me ahead of time this was his next project my response would have been, “Are you kidding?? Where did THAT come from??” [pause, thinking] “Ok yeah, I see that.”
As is a my wont, a quick digression about ME. I have a long history with coding, starting from any number of BASICs, Pascal, Fortran, Intel and Motorola assembly, to C, C++, verilog, vhdl, Java, Javascript, BASH and Cshell, Tcl/Tk, TADS of course, and on… I am deeply unafraid of new languages which I condescendingly characterize as “where does the semicolon go?” Various programming languages come easier or harder, depending on how their syntax and operators align to my own thought patterns and algorithm organization. One language has long towered above all others as just GETTING ME. I speak of course of PERL, God’s Own scripting language.
As a Perl zealot, there is a special contempt for non-Perl scripting languages. Ruby, inessential. AWK, aimed at alien intellects.
Python. Sterile, pale, uncanny valley of scripting languages.
As a veteran of the Scripting Language Wars, arguably on the losing side (but the right side of history!), I have so many feels when I see Python. Boy do they surge when I need to fire it up, or worse, DOWNLOAD ADDONS TO A LANGUAGE I WOULD AS SOON PURGE FROM MY DISTRO.
Anyway, all that is inessential to this review, but was essential to my mental health.
WOR is a clever math puzzle, overlaid with a writer’s block simulator. You are given progressively more interesting rules about balancing writing and reflection, and asked to derive the variations (under the guise of ‘finishing a chapter’). Each correct variation you enter is accompanied by amusing mini-narratives about staying on task. Or not. I quickly got immersed, at first using fingers to brute force enumerate possibilities, then pencil and paper trying to math them out. This is my kinda fun! It did pull me down a rabbit hole of abstract thought, so much so that the choice to engage this right before bed was revealed to be a deep miscalculation. I found myself spinning on the same thoughts a little too frequently, blunt as my mental auger was. Reluctantly, I put it down. Next day, refreshed and caffeinated, I readily closed it out.
There were either a few bugs, or a joke that went over my head. I got “New ideas form. They should be more specific, but I forgot to fill them in! This is a bug that I should fill in, in wor1[or 2].txt.” quite a few times. I understand these bugs to have been subsequently fixed.
Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Fun Math
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No. It is THAT LANGUAGE THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine? Re-implement in Perl. Obviously.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Greek?, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Maybe I should have done some preview reading at the start of the Thing. In my review of The Kuolema I wrote:
"Of course, in five years, I’ll be typing 'Live IF via GMAI, what even is my life right now?' ”
5 Years? It was TWELVE DAYS!! Now I’m playing an AI-assist generated IF! Even the DARPA Grand Challenge took 2 years before self-driving cars completed the course.
The implementation is a hybrid click-select/parser set in Greek Myth. In practice I found that to be… pretty ok. It even seemed to handle my mischievous “click on link near top of page, after subsequent commands.” In practice the link acted as a ‘canned’ command for the parser, but did not preclude full parser input. My usual complaints with hopping input devices were kind of addressed here, at least addressed enough, and it was kind of… convenient.
The presentation was attractive, nicely evoking classical mythic art. That’s got me a little conflicted, tbh. Chokepoint Capitalism (ref. Cory Doctorow, 2023) has already transferred huge swaths of revenue from artists to rent takers/platform monopolists. Voice artists are under siege from AI audio, visual artists from AI artwork, now the extremely rarefied sector of IF?? We’re hardly a pot of gold waiting to be raided here! With that charged background I take no delight in saying: the art was pretty attractive and evocative. That’s how they getcha.
I take significantly more delight in saying the IF work shared a lot of shortfalls that beset pre-Beta human-created IF. I wish I could have transcripted it, but I understood the online interpreter to be required. There were lots of typos (a “fairly plan->plain corridor,” “later” instead of “latter” among others). There were many unimplemented nouns, including many samples of the evergreen “You are by the side of a river…” “>X RIVER” “You see nothing like that here.” There were issues with state awareness. (Spoiler - click to show)After freeing Narcissus, the room description still had him mesmerized, but trying to X him yielded “not here.” There was some overwrought prose: a cave mouth described with fangs instead of stalactites.
Wait.
Did we feed the corpus of IF art to a machine, and it decided THESE THINGS WERE FUNDAMENTALLY PART OF THE FORM?? WHAT DOES THAT GO@^#$%#MN MACHINE THINK OF US EXACTLY???
Before I get too paranoid, I am going to attribute human agency to some key elements of SD. For one, the overarching plot is very much aligned with modern, revisionist Myth interpretations. From Broadway to video games there has been an impulse to infuse these classic stories with modern sensibilities and twists and by and large I’m for it. Why not? Cultural currency. We got a Winnie the Pooh horror movie, can’t wait to see the same thing done with Micky !@#$%^ Mouse. SD is very much in the former vein. (Not so much the latter, but I would also watch the crap out of an Achilles Slasher movie. “Andromeda, he’s not dead! Get him in the heel Andromeda, the heel!”) Don’t know that I was clamoring for a redemption arc for (Spoiler - click to show)Narcissus but why not? On the other hand, its more generous take on (Spoiler - click to show)Phaedra was nice. Cause man could that have gone a different way.
I think my favorite dear-god-I-have-to-believe-this-was-a-human moment came in an error statement. Instead of “You can’t do X with Y,” or “I don’t understand that,” I got “That’s -not- Greek to me.” I guffawed aloud at that, not the least of which because the piece is pretty straight drama otherwise. I swear to god if you tell me a machine produced that line I’m going to go full Kaczynski. (Minus the postal terrorism of course, Jeezuz.)
In sum, I found this to be a promising work. It suffered a lot of the issues that plague pre-release hand crafted IF, but none fatal. Its premise was neat and well executed. The story was contained and linear, but I understand that also to be a work in progress. Look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Just keep the machine out of comedy for me.
Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Greek Mythology
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would institute a world wide pause on AI while we enlist our best thinkers to really plumb what it means for humanity to offload increasing amounts of cultural, technical and legal authority to inauditable, evolutionary systems. And for once, create guard rails and policies that keep technology in service of us, rather than letting clumsy, flawed systems run roughshod over the social order to keep enriching fewer and fewer. I mean, after I submitted this for a grade of course.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Purple Prose, No Prejoratives Please, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 25min
A lifetime ago, I began my fascination with the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, and to a lesser extent the dime novels and serials of the 00’s and 10’s (the last ones). Of course Sherlock Holmes played in that space, he practically loomed over it. There are a lot of qualified charms to those stories that still appeal to me. Not the least of which is the purple prose that was a hallmark of so much of it, at least until John D MacDonald and his peers entered the scene.
In a handful of reviews, I have complained about what I called ‘poetic verse.’ I have NOT called it Purple Prose. This is deliberate on my part. While the majority of the world may not see a difference between the two I very much do, no doubt due to my formative fascination with pre-war low culture. My personal distinction between Overwrought Poetry and Purple Prose is that I really like the latter in an only semi-ironic way, while the former pushes me away. What’s the difference? I couldn’t really articulate a grammatical definition, but in application it seems to be one of stakes. If you scale a mountain to leap for the heart of a universal truth… and then fall short it is heartbreaking and hubris-revealing. If you bend over with dramatic flourish to brush lint off your shoes and stumble, that’s kind of funny. The contrast of high language and low stakes is near irresistible.
Secret of the Black Walrus feeds that beast. It apes the tropes and the vibe of Victorian mystery stories in creating an Asian super sleuth, then aiming her squarely at a locked room murder. The language does a lot to settle us in with bangers like:
"the freshest in our bloodthirsty city’s contemptible compendium of heinous crime."
"Bixby had a mind like a lightless cellar."
among others. If anything, I wanted MORE of that! No, it’s not realistic dialogue. Yes it goes out of its way to make its point. That IS the point! That overwrought energy is as much a hallmark of the genre as the Deerstalker hat. I fist pumped in delight whenever it showed up, and was sad when too many screens went by without. Shout out to the pastiche language of the thing in general. Even when too restrained for my taste it ably carried the vibe of its inspiration.
The mystery itself is nicely fit to its conceit, plenty of a->b clue following and twists and peril. It’s not particularly revolutionary but is a nice representation. Mysteries are tough in IF, particularly when your protagonist is a superhuman detective and the player is very much not. Walrus takes the tack of letting you point the protag in an investigative direction, but then letting her do the heavy deductive lifting. Nothing wrong with that, but in providing limited options that can be exhaustively selected it can take on the feel of a wind up toy. Yes, I periodically give it a twist, but all the motive energy is its own doing. I’m not saying I know a better way to do it, I’m saying these kinds of characters are uniquely challenging in IF (see also Lady Thalia).
I wish that those were my only lingering impressions of the work, but there is another heavier impression I carry. Pre-war pulps were deeply racist. There is an entire sub-genre called “Yellow Peril.” When I first engaged these stories, fandom approached this artifact as “awful of course, and kind of quaint in its ignorant hate.” That take itself has not aged well, and my (and society’s) tolerance has shifted significantly. There is an impulse when doing pastiches of pulp stories to underline the racism, as a way to show you are not blind to the faults of the form. This comment comes not from a place of condescending judgement, but of lived experience. I wrote some pulp pastiches decades ago that have aged REALLY BADLY. (I took it even further than Walrus. In a pre-post-satire world I thought the perfect takedown was to exaggerate for satirical effect, to drive home how awful it was. When all I was doing was creating more of it in the world. What was I even doing wading into that anyway? Was my big insight “Hey guys. Hey guys. Racism is BAD ACTUALLY.”??)
Thankfully, Walrus didn’t follow me down that ruinous path, but it did belligerently embrace the ‘don’t forget the racism’ impulse. At this point in my life, I am pretty convinced that just starkly OBSERVING racism (or sexism or sexual abuse or any number of awful things), without having anything to say ABOUT them weighs a work down. Especially when looking back from a different (and hopefully better) cultural context. If the narrative is a light lark meant to thrill or amuse, it is particularly defeating. I think there are defter ways make the protagonist uncomfortable that don’t unintentionally make the reader uncomfortable. Some complain about “woke culture” ahistorical racial diversity and acceptance in fiction like say Bridgerton. Those snowflake whiners somehow don’t care that the practical effect of what they champion is that wish fulfillment fantasy becomes only pleasant to the historically privileged. What are they defending here, the ongoing right to exclude people from WISH FULFILLMENT FANTASY??? If you’re not making historical documentary or pointed polemic, let everyone play! I am swayed by the idea that realistic racism has no place in a light, high society romance.
I am kinda done with “historically accurate racism” in pulpy detective adventures is what I’m saying. Didn’t mean to take this all out on you Walrus, but you stirred up some Stuff for me. I guess its good to know I can get spirited over things other than cats, broccoli and python.
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Victorian Whodunit
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would cut out most or all of the racial stuff, and replace it with MOAR PURPLE PROSE!!!1!!1!!
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
Elves are Racist, December 20, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
In reviewing some IF works, I’ve grappled with poetic language that clashed with my own sensibilities. I seem to have a heightened sense of "ehhh that's trying too hard." Superficially, this should have tripped my hair trigger, but somehow the language here just sung for me. It was consistently evocative and surprising and carried a rhythm that was somehow both measured and propulsive. When I tried to figure out how this succeeded for me where other works did not, I think the best I came up with was EfG minimized the use of extravagant simile and metaphor, and just straight up described stuff. Elegantly, evocatively and beautifully. This offhanded passage early on was just so precise in its socio-political observation, its multi-syllable employment doesn’t end up diluting or obfuscating it. (look at me! so many multi-syllable words of my own!)
"to the glittering glitterati of the donor class, those brahmins of the City whose funding feeds the fringe-work (performance, poetry, painting–even it turns out, mythohistoric research), fattening it up until it can pass as avant garde, or perhaps–if you’re lucky–even 'cutting edge.' "
For the first chapter or so, it's all narration, and the language rolls like a manuscript from the protagonist - its half-academic half-poetic tone seems about right for the background they’ve presented to us. Quickly they meet with a poet they’ve idolized, let’s call her Didi Joanion. Just pulling syllables out of thin air here. The rest of the work is a dialogue between the two about Didi’s time among the Elves. Settle down spoiler-police, it's in the title.
Let me break for a moment to talk about the interactivity - it's kind of inessential. There are some exclusive choices early that shade how the protagonist understands the world. I was a bit put out at those, because every option I selected had text that thrilled me, and I wondered how much MORE thrilling the choices untaken might have been. I wanted to select them all! Later though, when choices stopped being exclusive and I had to select all (or just most) of them I was like “why am I even selecting here? shouldn’t these just be page breaks?” You can’t win with me game, ask around, that’s just how I am. A lot of the time, the interaction was straight-up page turning, but even when it wasn’t, it was. Every now and then there was a nice pacing effect in the interactivity, but very much the rare exception.
So back to the text. As soon as Didi started talking things jarred for me. She spoke in the same evocative, deliberate, erudite voice as our narrator. And she did it describing things from decades ago, with a precision and clarity that … eeehhhhh. Here:
“[…] hanging from every horse-drawn troika and gondola poling its langorous streams, […]”
“Poling its langorous streams”? “POLING ITS LANGOROUS STREAMS???” Does that sound like something one human would say to another human in human conversation? I want you to try something: work the phrase “poling its langorous streams” unironically into any conversation with anyone in your life, and report their reaction back here. Some homework for you.
Something about putting quotation marks around it shifts the way the words work, and it drew the wrong kind of laughter. I considered, “maybe this is the protagonist’s recasting of her words in flowery manuscript as they’re being written down” except that previously they made a point of how diligently they were capturing her exact words. Then I thought, “well, she is a renowned poet in the text of the piece, maybe this is less an authentic conversation, and more her slipping into some well-rehearsed bit.” Which the story later outright confirmed! Ok story, you got me!
It did it twice more. Once, it noted there are 20,000 elvish words but only 3 for hello. (Is that the number? It was presented as a lot more than we have, but that feels super low.) I’m like, “c’mon that doesn’t make any sense, we have more in English.” Story was like “yeah that’s weird, hold my beer, let me tell you about ‘Goodbye’.” Elsewhere they’re talking about her silk flooring in her fabric house and I’m like “fr reals story? Doesn’t it rain there?” Next scene, rain! I felt like an overconfident amateur chess player realizing the unassuming player across the table was actually a prodigy.
So yeah, the language in dialogue never really felt ‘real’ but it was cool. I mean, I really liked reading it even if it wasn’t ‘believable’. So if I’m sluicing through this joyful, vibrant literary rapids why am I not Engaged? Why? Its about Elves. (IT'S IN THE TITLE, IT'S NOT A SPOILER.) Elves are racist bastards, that’s just facts. You see how they treat Dwarves in those Rings/Hobbit movies? Screw those Elf Supremacist dickheads.
Wow. That got away from me. There’s a possibility that was not about Elves.
So this work is about a gloriously conceived fantasy city and culture whose inhabitants are not important. And it's basically a long, super-evocative and thrilling to read description that only kind of barely crests to a dramatic resolution. It’s a beautiful artifact that doesn’t do much, consistent with its unnecessary interactivity. Is there a place for beauty? Of course! I just need a little more to get Engaged. That may be on me.
Played: 11/5/22
Playtime: 30min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Ack! I am Betrayed!, December 13, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This is definitely an interactive novel, not a game. It is structured as a series of irregular calendar day snapshots of life after a zombie apocalypse. Really the only choice on offer is what day (as denoted by circles on a calendar) you want to see. At first I just went monotonically forward in time, until still in the first cycle I periodically decided to “skip ahead” and fill in gaps after. (Spoiler - click to show)Really just to see if the cat lived. As you work your way to December, you sometimes revisit days you’ve already seen where the narrative expands or changes but you do arrive. Then the entire year opens up AGAIN. This time, I went backward just to see how it played.
The narrative itself pushed hard on me at first. A few early examples of text trying way too hard and totally not landing for me: “The train unfurled from the tunnel like a tongue.” “Now the swollen joint rolled in his boot like a marble.” “Thirst serrated him.” These are super representative of persistently showy prose that pulls you away from the apocalypse you are nominally watching in a very distracting way. There are plot choices that are as equally confounding/challenging. The protagonist seems simultaneously very clever about apocalyptic survival (I particularly liked the hinting that he was salvaging kibble because it was overlooked by other survivors), and just not smart. He is a wanderer, yet winters in snow and ice?
But but I gotta say the pace of this thing, so slow and deliberate, couples with the language to kind of weave a mesmerizing, melancholy spell. This is not a survival tale of high stakes action setpieces and heightened relationship melodrama. It’s a taciturn dude and his cat figuring it out as they go. At the half way mark, it had eroded away all my complaints with its slow, steady rhythms. The language didn’t get less florid, not at all, but its omnipresence kind of became… atmospheric. I didn’t live in a real, or even realistic world anymore. I was here instead. It was kind of… comforting? It was weird to realize I had been so effectively seduced by the offputting language of this thing. And I was cool with it!
The presentation is consistently inventive and interesting. The days you click on play tricks with layout and text, almost always in unexpected ways. It crucially adds illustrations, very much of the vibe of ‘amateur drawing in his diary’ which is just perfect for the presentation, and crucially signposts when you subsequently revisit certain days. The presentation reinforces and becomes of a piece with the language to really draw you in over time.
Again, but but but. At the halfway point you get a 4th wall break that is so jarringly inconsistent with everything that has come before it's like a slap to the face. I’d been mesmerized by sirens leading me, willingly!, to my doom only to break the spell at a crucial moment. Story, you pushed your excesses in my face up front, then in a cocksure demonstration of your power confidently and slowly won me over anyway. Why would you push me away again? This proved to be hubris it couldn’t recover from. In fact, my choice to do reverse order on the back half was kind of a passive-aggressive dare. “Ok story, you wanna slap me? Let’s see how you fare backwards.”
Now, that choice to Will Smith the reader is clearly deliberate. From post-play discussions, one of the work's themes was (Spoiler - click to show)constructed, edited memories, and the slap arguably provided a dose of cold water showcasing exactly that. The problem is, the florid language ALREADY lent it an air of (Spoiler - click to show)interpreted, artificial construct. I didn't need the metaphorical violence to get that. Maybe if I got the sense that there were dramatic beats of self-deception now stripped from the protagonist this would have stuck better for me, but that's not what I got. What I got was (Spoiler - click to show)one big omission, that was pretty understandable, all things considered and a series of what seemed to amount to minor detail changes. For me, there was no big payoff to this sudden sea change, just a lot of minor nuances.
With the spell broken, the work kind of boxed itself in. In revisiting the past, all the textual excesses were exposed a second time and the additional shading insufficient to dilute them. The graphic inventiveness continued, the drama ramped ever so slightly, but I was lost, and it's really that stunningly jarring 4th wall choice that did it. It doesn’t help that the story doesn’t build to a dramatic or thematic resolution either. I’m not sure how it could, since it ceded control to me (mostly). You get more information, more backstory, but none of it comes together thematically to any kind of crescendo. I actually wonder, had not that one scene freed me, what would have happened to me at the end? If I’d remained under its spell as it wound down like a music box to no finale? Would my wife have found me the next morning, blankly staring at the screen, a shell of my former self?
I kind of have to honor the spell it was able to weave as Sparks of Appreciation. Seamless, technically. Bonus point for inventive presentation, penalty point for that violent mid-story slap and lack of closure.
Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 1.75hr, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Bend and Snap Bakery, December 12, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Students of comedy and interested rubber-neckers like me are aware of a joke comedians tell each other called “the Aristocrats.” If you’ve never heard of it, do yourself a favor and watch the documentary about it (on AMZ Prime if that’s your garbage billionaire of choice). Ancillary to my reason for bringing it up, there was so much to Bob Saget most of us didn’t get to see. To the point here though, the joke hinges on the insanely wild disconnect between setup and punchline. Not just conceptually but narratively as well. However long and meandering the setup goes, the punchline is a whipcrack of two words. Thanks to Legally Blonde we can now call this the “Bend and Snap” effect. (I am loathe to dive deeper into “the Aristocrats” than that for those that haven’t seen the doc.)
There is another comedic tool, one we’re all familiar with: repetition. This has a lot of forms - escalation, recontextualization, deadpan emphasis, and its most overworked form, the callback. You’ll see all these variations a lot in televised comedy once you are sensitive to their use. It is tried and true. The callback in particular is the wobbly prop on which improv is built. I’m no statistician but 86.224% of improv skits end with a callback. SNL skits may be higher.
Since I’ve taken the time to steer the conversation this way, you may now be asking, “Reviewer, what if an IF work were to somehow put the two of those comedic devices together?” To which I would coyly touch the corner of my mouth with my pinkie and reply “Perhaps bake them together… IN A CAKE?” And now it is clear to you why I explain comedy instead of DO comedy.
LTEC presents as a vaguely-medieval or renaissance small village bakery setting. Your task is to assemble ingredients in a cake, with the gentlest of “and don’t be too nosy” as a caution. The author knows full well neither the protagonist nor player gives that advice a moment’s consideration. So off you trot, probably whistling, I’m pretty sure whistling, to the miller, farmer, neighbor and church. The presentation, in screen layout, in use of font and illustrations is I’m going with pastoral. It is nicely evocative of the Canterbury Tales of it all. The language is slightly formal but light and breezy, also of a piece.
Until you let curiosity get the better of you and SNAP (Spoiler - click to show)you are treated to an over-the-top horrific excess completely divorced from the pastoral amble you started with. Kind of like a David Lynch movie, if those didn’t start by telegraphing the utter creepiness of their seeming banality. And also played for laughs. So, nothing like a David Lynch movie. (Spoiler - click to show)And you probably die horrifically too. It’s fine, you can restart.
Then the piece builds on itself, echoing, recontextualizing and escalating, so that somehow it gets funnier each time as you try to anticipate where your why-can’t-I-just-resist curiosity pokes free. That’s the game: go fetch the flour! Bend… and Snap. Now the eggs! Bend… and Snap. Now the milk, sugar! Bendbend… and Snapsnap! Fine! you say. I’ll put my blinders on and just make the damn cake! At which point, the finale finally breaks down and invokes a callback that ALSO rockets into a whole new level of narrative leap. BEND AND SNAP M-FER!!! Repetition!
I really liked my playthrough, I thought it built on itself marvelously, and had me trying things I DEFINITELY didn’t want the protagonist to do just to see what would happen. (Spoiler - click to show)I died a lot, learning stuff as I went. Comedy is super-precise though. I couldn’t help but wonder if the building effect that was bouying me along so actively was really just a happy accident of my choices. If I’d made different choices would the repetition not have felt like escalation at all, but deflation? Is every judge getting the same potent dose of comedy? Seems like they wouldn’t have to?
It’s not seamless. There are some screen layout issues where the illustrations (just lovely - also pastoral with an unsettling edge to them) corrupt the choice prompts and make them hard to click. There are narrative paths that reconverge and reuse text in a frictiony way. (Spoiler - click to show)And the restart after dying mechanism. After you’ve experienced the worst of a particular sub-quest, had a good laugh at it, then just want to get your ingredients - it was a fairly clicky prospect that no longer had any surprises for you. And God forbid you (Spoiler - click to show)die after having collected 2 or 3 ingredients. You have to do it all over again! A much better design decision would be to introduce a “Just collect X option” after you’ve managed it one time. It really introduced a drag into the experience.
Lastly a note about Engagement. From an IF perspective, the Achilles’ Heel of these two comedy tropes is that they are appreciated at a Meta, not Immersive level. This is not gentle character-based comedy or acerbic personality driven comedy. These are metajokes which work best when NOT engaged. So Sparks for me!
Quick shout out to that cover picture, btw. Chef’s kiss.
Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 20min, 1/8 endings; 3/? bonus endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy, Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Book-like Interactivity, December 10, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Everything about the pre-game hit my brain pleasure centers and put me in this thing’s corner. Grown Up Detective Agency is just a fantastic title. Time jumps? Mystery solving? The phrase “follow the trail of a missing heterosexual”?? It’s like a marskman-level glee sniper.
The work itself did not disappoint. The 2-in-1 protagonist was incredibly well realized. Their dialogue crackled with wit and personality and was simultaneously, recognizably same and different. The time gap shenanigans were not overplayed, just tossed in like precise seasoning. (I laughed out loud at “why are people getting more deliveries?”) I simultaneously felt bad for Kid and understood Adult perfectly. There were a few times I chafed when remembering this world-weary gumshoe was all of 21, but the text was strong enough to get me past that.
Secondary characters didn’t fare as well, but with one exception it was actually fine. Most of the non-protagonist cast was pretty one-dimensional, but in an amusing and winning way. We don’t NEED them to be fully fleshed out, they just need to be fun in their respective roles and most of them very much are. The bros, the bartender, the club owner, the furry… unique and consistent and funny. Even the client filled her role, though I suspect if I’d had more exposure to the other games in the series she would be more fleshed out. We’ll get to the love interest in a minute.
The mystery itself was extremely clever, in the sense of everyone’s motivations making perfect, hilarious sense, however surprising their reveal is. But the mystery-solving gameplay? Less clever. It relies a bit too heavily on NPCs withholding information more for plot than character reasons. It also appeared that player choice in following clues and interrogation tacks ultimately didn’t make a difference. You were always going to be able to visit every clue site, and get relevant info regardless of dialogue choices. I don’t know this is true, I could just be an Ace Detective. Honestly though, it's definitely not that. Which led to a thought mid-game that popped in my head unbidden. “Would I be enjoying this pretty much exactly the same if it were traditional fiction? Yeah, I think I would.” As soon as that thought popped in, I realized I was not engaged because of the interactivity, it was the story and characters. My clicks were less about participating in progress and more like turning pages. Is this a problem? Maybe? Didn’t feel like it in the moment, I was still Engaged in the narrative and enjoying myself immensely.
Really the only narrative shakiness for me was the love interest sub-plot. Characters made admiring assertions about them that I didn’t see corroborated in the narration or the character’s own dialogue. If I can be forgiven the pronouns for a moment, my reaction was basically straight out of Arrested Development. “Her?” Maybe this was a ‘play the previous episodes’ thing too.
As I roll up the score, I am again confronted with the inadequacy of my judging criteria. I was Engaged, no doubt about it. But I feel like the interactivity of IF was inessential and irrelevant to the experience, and I think I want to count that as ‘notable technical intrusion.’
Played: 10/11/22
Playtime: 1hr, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaged/Notable
Would Play Again? Probably Not, but the rest of the series, likely
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
So Much Cleverer Than Me, December 10, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
“The world is ending, and you are still paying rent.” Ah game, you had me at tagline.
This piece collects a handful of speculative fiction ideas, each of which was so deeply, deeply cool it could support an entire story on its own I think. Then it mixes them together in a surprising and unique heady brew of world building. World building is a delicate balance of information and reader-filling gaps, and it kind of has to be carefully tuned to the tone, themes and length of the piece. You can’t let the detail overwhelm the narrative, but you need enough so that contextual dramatic moments hit big. TAatR feels like it hits exactly the sweet spot for its narrative, and does so while juggling multiple Big Ideas. By the end screen, I raised a proverbial glass to the accomplishment.
The central mechanism is filing: in order earn money you must file snippets of data from “the past” on behalf of a faceless bureaucracy. You’ve got to do enough of it to make rent. So much good stuff is wrung out of this mechanism. For one, the “snippets of data” are world and personal background, which you navigate based on your interest. You will start to recognize narrative threads based on data “encodings.” As you assemble more background, you realize the protagonist was more than an impartial observer to some of these events, and then get to decide how much you actually want to give the government. This in turn can create a money problem that the game offers character-defining ways to solve. This mechanism melds grind, data dump, and character moments in a very compelling and Sparky way.
You’re already like 4 layers deep in your IF parfait, and more to come! On top of all this, the protagonist’s uniquely complicated personal life gets folded. Here’s where things pushed at me a little, and I can’t figure out if the text needed to do more, or maybe if I did. There are choices to make about how the protagonist prioritizes and interacts with other cast members. Only (very!) belatedly did I realize I was fully empowered to collaborate on defining those things. Early on, I thought I was trying to pick the ‘right’ choice based on the character so far presented. As such, some choices made no sense to me and felt false. Often the results left me wanting more. If I shift the blame, I think the text could have nudged the narratively collaborative nature of its choices a little better. I realize this is weird feedback to give an INTERACTIVE FICTION piece. It could be I am just a dummy. I will say, once I realized (whoever’s) mistake, I appreciated that the choices were actually really interesting and varied and opened up the dramatic space tremendously.
There was another narrative, I don’t want to say ‘problem,’ how about ‘inelegance’? Because you are selecting which historical and personal events to pursue in juggling your day job as data filer, and because you cannot pursue all of them (I guess you live in a world with no coffee?), you will not see the breadth of narrative possibility in one sitting. This is cool! It effectively conveys a world so much bigger than what you see. However, it also doesn’t guarantee a fully satisfying narrative arc. In my case, the ending ended up leaning directly on less than 10% of my overall gameplay, and maybe indirectly on another 25%. I did dig the ending as a story twist fwiw, just didn’t find it fully satisfied my investment. I can’t help but wonder if I bypassed a key file or two that would have driven it home for me.
This game did so much that is hard to do, and did it so well, I feel a little ashamed that I couldn’t push past (lots of!) Sparks of Joy. The perceived but probably false choice steering, and not-quite-crisp narrative closure just kept me out. That said, this game is probably the first Sparky game I’ll revisit after close of IFCOMP.
Played: 10/20/22
Playtime: 1.25hr, finished 1 of 9 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I think I will, once I work off my backlog
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Wait, What Is "The Magic Flute" About?, December 10, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I’ve always had a soft spot for opera, but it's always been very tightly bounded spot. The music is just really vital - soaring and complex and dynamic. But man GOING to the opera is a LOT. There are minimalist productions to be sure but straight-up classical opera? Costumes and set design are hat on hat on hat on hat - pageantry for its own sake. The audience too, maybe the last place in the world you can see capes worn unironically. Maybe it is ur-cosplay? And then there’s been one or two productions that have decided either to sing in English or provide electronic scrolling subtitles. Hoo boy does that take the shine off in a hurry. When you don’t understand the words, the vocals are a featured instrument, weaving into and above the orchestra and engaging directly with what makes us human. When you understand it though? Swelling, compelling music in service of “What does the gypsy boy want? The gypsy girl the gypsy girl the gypsy gi…iiirl.” For cryin’ out loud opera, you were better when I didn’t know.
Obviously I mention this because Prism evoked imperfectly analogous feelings. The most prominent feature of this work is its language. Like opera it can be by turns deeply satisfying or so over the top as to be kitsch. I grabbed a bunch of quotes, examples of both, on my playthrough, too many to incorporate here. Let’s use an early one [annotated]:
"The thought strikes you in perfect time with the dry-storm lightning above. [I mean, no, that didn’t happen. Perfect time? Statistically, what are the odds?] It works into your chest like truth [ooh, that’s a nice phrase] as electricity strikes from rotating hexagonal clouds above into the humming cylindrical basin at your back [wait, what are you describing here? I understand those shapes but not in that context]. "
The overriding atmosphere here is poetically over-written, except when the poetry resonates just perfectly. The problem is, when it is perfect, it kind of draws attention to itself. When it’s not it ALSO draws attention to itself, and also the fact that it’s not perfect.
Now all this poetry is pressed into service, not by philosophers or y’know poets, but by hard-scrabble street dwellers. This is not a fatal choice, but certainly a challenging one. It clashes with the stark practicality of their day to day struggle in a way that is never truly resolved. You could forgive the poetic narration matching the protagonists’ voice, if you assume their inner voice is also the narrator. But everyone in the world talks like that, except the beings that talk MORE that way. There are beings whose alienness is conveyed in a very specific, kind of cool but nearly impenetrable patois. It is alternately admirable and confounding. And unfortunately showy, as the protagonist by turns seems to converse just fine (like dialogue with adults from Peanuts), then call them out as POEM TALKERS. Mr. Kettle, maybe don’t throw that particular stink at Mr. Pot.
There is some impressive world building in the first half of the game. I want to say in spite of itself, but really no, the over-descriptive poetry is every bit a core element of the city as the neighborhoods, buildings and infrastructure that are lovingly described throughout. As a setting it is nicely conceived: physically specific but also impressionistically singular through the language used to describe it. Like Scorcese’s New York but fantasy, if that doesn’t feel like too much of an overreach. Looking back, this is the most prominent achievement of the game, and its biggest Spark.
I have just described the first half of the narrative I experienced, which comprised more than 3/4 of the playtime. At the turn - probably not coincidentally when I chose to leave the city - suddenly what had been an almost meditative, expansive, exploratory, quasi-open-world experience contracted to a limited-choice rushed plot on rails and almost no setting. The pace and interactivity shifted gears with an audible thunk. Ok, that’s crazy, clearly I didn’t hear anything. I think the style is leaching into me. If the language made it a struggle to Engage the work in the first half, this shift really made it a lost cause. And yet, the story still found a last sentence that was so nicely resonant I couldn’t just dismiss it either.
It appears, based on the options I didn’t take, to have many narrative paths to explore. That’s always nice in IF. Not sure whether I’ll explore more later, or just let that final sentence ring.
Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 1hr, 1 ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable
Would Play Again? Not ruling it out, with the right mood
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Alfred Hitchcock (Does Not) Presents, December 10, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Goot eev’ning. Before I was a horror movie nerd, I was a Hitchcock nerd. I do appreciate that the game very quickly squashed any expectations on that front (39 Steps was an early Hitch film, based on the same source material). Sometimes it’s best to just pull the bandage off.
The presentation was spare, but attractive and efficient. The black/white/green palette was functional and compatible with the on-the-run thriller story. The music was really top notch. The author apparently composed it himself, and it could easily have fit in the background of any of Hitch’s black and white works. I know the disclaimer explicitly said ‘not inspired by film’ but take the win, game! Just about perfect for the story. I was vaguely disappointed it only presented during chapter breaks. A much lower volume background could have worked in a few set piece spots.
The game presents you/the protagonist with three general approaches to decision-making: Open (ie truthful), Sneaky and Bold. Characters and scenes seem to be informed by which of those you lean on in given circumstances. I like the mechanism overall. It allowed you to define the protagonist as whatever mix of the three you-the-player wanted to work with. I vibed with the concept of that approach and about half the time it seemed to work pretty seamlessly. The other half kind of pushed me away from Engagement, unfortunately. Some of the options seemed MUCH more appropriate to some decision points than others, watering down the open-endedness.
Not all decision points were structured around the three OPEN/SNEAKY/BOLD choices, some had more or less unaligned alternatives. Those were also hit or miss. I can remember seeing a few options laid out and thinking ‘why would that be an option?’ Eventually I tested it out by selecting what seemed an obviously bad choice, and yup, it sure was.
Another design decision that was smart for gameplay but pushed against my Engagement was the option to replay each chapter before moving on to the next. This worked in conjunction with italicized text that acted as a hint system of what should be accomplished in a given chapter. Because it's a thriller, it is definitely dependent on cause and effect so I understand the impulse. I also appreciated that it wasn’t a full game reset. But I would hope that kind of thing could be implemented more organically in the text. Until the final chapter, it was a take-the-bad-with-the-good thing. The balance definitely tilted when the hint up front set expectation that you’ll need to replay the final chapter multiple times to be ‘successful.’ This sapped all the immediacy out of what thrillers famously deliver.
Narratively, it was also a little uneven for me. On the one hand, the protagonist went from ‘hey a dead body’ to ‘omg I’m surrounded by enemies’ blindingly fast, in a way that didn’t ring true to me. It could be that the sequence of decisions I made didn’t quite cohere the way the author intended, but I passed through a phase where I thought he was a raving paranoid. Uh, the protagonist, not the author. There were actions taken (Spoiler - click to show)hiding the MacGuffin from the bad guys that seemed to have obvious impact on the finale, yet went unremarked upon. On the other hand, there was real tension in some of the chase set pieces. The overall language of the piece was delightfully evocative of early Hitchcock thrillers, in that earnest and slightly stagey way. The author really nailed the black-and-white film language and tone, just nailed it. I know what you said Game Disclaimer, you’re not the boss of me.
So many Sparks of Joy here in the setting, the language, the music(!), the decision framework. Just enough clanky narrative and gameplay choices to keep me from truly engaging. I did smile a LOT while playing.
Played: 10/21/22
Playtime: 30 min, replayed final chapter multiple times for 4 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I could see revisiting it after a Hitchcock marathon. Not the boss of me, game!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
A Psychic's Work is Never Done, December 10, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
You’re selling beer WITH YOUR MIND. As one does. You can probably guess where.
…
…
I’ve stared at those 3 sentences for a while now, trying to decide on the best path forward, and I’m kind of concluding it will take me longer to type, and take you longer to read, than to go ahead and play the thing. So just hit me with your questions.
Was it parser based? No, option-selection.
Was it a game? Barely but yeah, you have sales goals to meet and powers to employ.
Were there puzzles? Only loosely.
Was it Interactive? About the same as any option-selection game.
Was it Fiction? You’re kind of phoning these questions in aren’t you? Well, psychic powers are fake, so yes its fiction. There’s a plot and a twist too I guess. It counts.
Were there NPCs? Yeah a few of them, and their inner monologues are pretty funny.
Can you lose? I mean yeah, but how much can you really lose in 5-10 minutes of IF? Assuming you’re not driving.
Were there bugs? No. Not enough moving parts to draw them.
Was it Mechanical? No, too funny for that.
Was it Engaging? No, too slight for that.
So it was Sparks of Joy? You’re catching on to how this works.
What was your favorite part? Honestly? “Adventure Snack turns your inbox into an adventure with new interactive email games twice a month. Subscribe at AdventureSnack.com.” This thing was an ADVENTURE SNACK! That is just the most perfect description possible and so succinctly captured my exact feelings about this thing that every word of this review that isn’t ‘Adventure’ or ‘Snack’ is just self-indulgent bullsh*t. You guys, a thing called Adventure Snack exists!
…
Are you just a paid shill for Big Adventure Snack? I am. WITH MY MIND.
Played: 10/25/22
Playtime: 10min, two runthroughs.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience feels complete. I might could go for a snack later though…
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
New QBasic Parser? Hold my Beer., December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Alchemist is a homebrew parser game, with a retro font and block-graphics sensibility. Retro puzzle-heavy gameplay too, as you are experiment-sitting for an eccentric alchemist, wandering around his mansion using magic and unlocking rooms!
I hit an early block with the parser dialect, where container/surface contents were listed, then made out of scope to subsequent commands without first removing them. Once I dialed into the command structure, I adjusted easily enough. It periodically re-intruded. You can jump ACROSS but not OVER things (or maybe the other way?) but I came away more impressed than not with the implementation. Given the daunting prospect of fifty years of parser technology to learn from this was the most complete effort I have yet seen. The QBasic implementation also was lightning fast, the command-results loop positively popped with energy. Between that, the ability to chain commands(!), and the insanely generous amounts of shortcut keys (including definable ones) the whole thing practically burst with propulsive momentum. I think I may be burying the lead here. A FULLY FEATURED HOME BREW PARSER THAT FLIES!
The puzzles themselves were zippy too - they were mostly pretty well signposted and clued as you went along, including an enigmatic but solveable clue book and robust hint system, which I really only needed for occasional dialect corrections. There are one or two spots of alternate solutions disappointingly ignored, but no real bouts of spinning on what to do next. One might be underwhelmed that the puzzles were fairly straightforward, but the choice pays off as the thing really moves!
Writing is solid, descriptive as it needs to be (though some unimportant rooms suffer lack of definition. There is a cupboard with no shelves or contents?). Sometimes you don’t get room exits, most times you do, but it's always just an X away in any case. There is light wit, particularly with the naming of the active machines and magic items, but its not really a chuckle-fest. All in all, the writing is completely transparent, rarely elevating but never distracting, which is kind of the Hippocratic Oath of Writers: First, Do No Ornamentation. Maybe heavier on the “repetitive recharge of expendables” sequences than I prefer, but more than compensated by multiple use puzzle elements.
Between the solid if straightforward puzzle design and lively, peppy pace it was seamlessly Engaging. Calling it Notably intrusive in parser dialect gaps, but easily enough accommodated and bypassed. All in all a great wrap for IFCOMP22, closing out on a high note.
Played: 11/13/22
Playtime: 2.5hrs, score 300/300, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
I Am Not on this Game's Level, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I am bad at puzzle IF, this is what I have learned. I got stuck in a 5 room spaceship for almost two hours. Yes, 5. Captain’s door (a likely 6th room) never yielded to me for the dumbest of reasons. But let’s flash to the beginning before we expose my shortcomings to the world.
You are a spaceship repairman, just punchin’ the clock when disaster strikes and now you are adrift on a small spacecraft trying to repair your way home. Sounds simple right? You’d think. It is a classic parser format, decently written with clear, unadorned declarative statements. Not a lot of flair, but not needed by the setting, and kind of nicely underscored the workaday view of our technician protagonist. I don’t know why this one ended up so opaque to me. In classic parser style, you go everywhere, open-examine-and-take everything you can, then try to figure out how to use them. There’s even a hint system! To no avail.
Here’s a puzzle I did solve, and why it felt like more work than it needed to be: (Spoiler - click to show)To fix the airlock door, you needed to find, then cannibalize a toy bear for parts. This was all as involved but solvable as you might imagine, no qualms here. Then it came time to replace the part, but first you needed to stand on something to reach it. Here are the ways that don’t work: you can’t stand on your toolbox; you can’t fill a cardboard box with MREs to make it sturdy enough to stand on, you can’t push either a large cabinet or a large piece of equipment closer, you can’t use your magnetic boots to climb the walls, you can’t stick the part on a knife with bubblegum to reach it into place. You CAN get the game-approved trunk to stand on then go. Now it is clearly unfair to ask an author to anticipate every crazy thing a player is going to try and have a reasonable reason why it doesn’t work. But some of them, maybe? Or even have alternate solutions available? Lots of others probably tried the right thing first time and never had cause to pepper the air with profanity like I did. It just felt like I was spending disproportionate energy on the least interesting part of the puzzle. This will be a throughline.
The ‘puzzle’ that blocked me the longest, probably 45 minutes or more, was (Spoiler - click to show)FINDING A FLIPPING SPARE FUSE. Just finding it. Nevermind the rest of the puzzle, just finding that one thing. IN 5 RELATIVELY SPARTAN ROOMS. And again, though I found many items or locations that plausibly could have what I needed, none of them yielded. Not the (Spoiler - click to show)bear (he’s got electronics, right?), the handheld videogame, the other panels in other rooms, the microwave, the big engine in the basement, the fuses in the panel that controlled other things, the electronic locks, none of them. This doesn’t even account for the energy I spent (Spoiler - click to show)trying to find or make a small wire to act as a bypass. When I first posted this review for IFCOMP, I knew what would happen. I saw the future as clearly as a carnival psychic - some kind soul would reply to the review letting me know the insanely obvious location I somehow missed and I WAS GOING TO JUST TOTALLY LOSE MY SH*T BECAUSE I BANGED MY HEAD ON SPACESHIP BULKHEADS FOR ALMOST AN HOUR!! Here was the HINT text provided for this particular thing:
3/7: (Spoiler - click to show)Looks like we need a new fuse. Have you found one?
4/7: Okay great, you found (Spoiler - click to show)a fuse and replaced the old one. Now close the panel.
Hey game? I didn’t. I didn’t find it AT ALL.
Puzzles are satisfying because we humans love to feel smart by solving things. It confirms that the world is conquerable by only the power of our human brains. Suck it rest of animal kingdom! The harder the puzzle, the smarter we feel, the higher the endorphin rush. Sooner or later though we get to puzzles we can’t solve. There is still joy to be had in those, even the mooniest of moon logic puzzles, because the solution once revealed in all its baroque, intricate glory can still delight as an intellectual construct. “OMG I’d’a never put that together, but man those parts just click right into place don’t they?” But within the parameters of the puzzle, if 5 solutions are plausible, but only 1 is ‘right’ it is our nature to ask “Why? The other 4 obeyed the rules too, why are they wrong?”
The answer of course is that IF authors are at the end of the day people with their own problem solving habits and viewpoints and are no more omniscient than the rest of us. Sorry you had to hear it from me! For whatever chain of chemical events that led to my brain and this author’s brain being so divergent, all I can say is viva le difference?
As a reviewer is it fair to penalize this work because I am a moron? Games that more successfully accommodate my… limitations… do a better job nudging in the text, or being explicit in hints, or not leaving reasonable but invalid solutions all over the place. But do puzzle games owe me that? No, solving the puzzles is the whole point. Given the sparse narrative it was always going to be the quality of the puzzles that brought the Sparks or Engagement. Fiction is a dialogue between the author and the reader. Puzzles are a challenge set by the creator to the solver. In both cases, there are authorial choices that can push the audience away or make the work unsuccessful. But what happens when the creator is operating in good faith, with seeming competence in their craft, and through no fault of theirs some portion of the audience just can’t engage? What on earth can a reviewer say about that that is of general interest?
All I can say is that for me, this was so, so much unrewarded trial and error. Mechanical and mostly seamless implementation. (There did seem to be one bug - if you re-examine the airlock panel you fixed, y’know (Spoiler - click to show)LOOKING FOR A FUSE, the text seems to indicate it is not fixed, and still needs to be. Thankfully, the to-do list is still correct. That was a bad moment for me.)
Twist ending: my prescient prediction was only half true. While some kind soul did flirt with my total mental collapse by providing a hint, turns out it was because of a completely wrong assumption I had made. I'm not sure why that's better, but it was.
Also, I understand that the HINT system has been subsequently updated. I can't say for sure it was my total freakout that drove that, but I can't say NOT either. Because this review was for a previous version of the game, am omitting rating from the total.
Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 1.75hr, score 1/10, another 15 min was not going to get me anywhere
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Likely, newer version. Why do I do this to myself??
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Looting the Nostromo, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
You’re a space scavenger, see? And it’s slim pickins, behind Mercury. Lucky day! A hulk ambles by, and you have salvage rights! What about your life, that parked you apparently alone, behind the most inhospitable planet in the solar system, with maaaybe enough fuel not to plunge into the fiery core of the sun but maybe not… what about that life suggests ‘good’ and ‘luck’ belong anywhere near each other for you?
It’s a parser game. Not really puzzles or narrative, more like collect as many objects as you can until your nerve breaks and you run back to your ship. (Spoiler - click to show)Cause the salvage hulk is overrun by Aliens. Yup. THOSE Aliens. There’s some writing concerns early on: you encounter a person split in half, guts everywhere, that is also described as a skeleton. A skeleton with guts? Elsewhere an observation window is ‘scared’ when it was probably actually ‘scarred’ but these lapses are infrequent. In general, the descriptive text isn’t trying much, and so succeeds at its relatively low bar. I chafed a little at the endless description of smoke and orange light. Maybe there was a subtle hint in that? It didn’t vary enough to be interesting, nor did its density or brightness seem to affect gameplay in any way, and typically had more words describing it than the rest of the room and its contents. Which are pretty spartan affairs. There’s not a lot to poke into or rummage, mostly there either is or isn’t a salvage item, move to next room. I thought there might be a ‘fall into the sun’ timer at play early on, but that never really materialized.
I did appreciate the maps. The layout wasn’t complicated really, but having the maps definitely kept things clearly oriented. You are periodically (Spoiler - click to show)attacked by an Alien. At least for me, I was never really without something to (Spoiler - click to show)fend it off. It wasn’t completely clear if the events were narratively driven based on what I had collected, on rails where I could conceivably figure out a pattern, or random. This would be an important gameplay consideration, as your (Spoiler - click to show)weapons had the unfortunate habit of being limited-use. I suppose an attentive player could try to figure that out.
The game makes a deliberate choice not to share its stakes with you: there is some importance put on finding ENOUGH salvagables to keep flying, but there is no feedback as you are collecting to know how close/far you are from that goal. So you are (Spoiler - click to show)being hunted in a hostile craft with no clear idea where events will happen, and whether you have the wherewithall to deal with it; collecting items you have no idea either their value or when you have exhausted the supply. It’s really a big game of ‘press your luck’ without knowing either how lucky you might be, or when you can stop. Certainly over multiple games you could probably suss that out, but neither the gameplay nor narrative seemed compelling enough to warrant that. I got out with some pocket money, and importantly, was neither shredded to pieces, nor had space worms impregnate me. I took the win!
Played: 11/5/22
Playtime: 30min, $adj855
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Can a UI Hate You?, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Dreams are certainly useful settings in IF. When used effectively, they can explain and justify any of the inherent limitations of the medium or even lean into the limitations as features. The role dreams play in human experience also immediately gives entree to a deluge of symbology, psychology, metaphor and abstraction.
LatM starts in a dream, invoking the other kind of dream, y’know aspiration. It also highlights to you the double entendre' of Market - to promote and a target customer base. It notably does NOT mention ‘place to buy stuff’ which is the easiest of the three to get lost at. So much wordplay in so little time! It won me over instantly.
And then I crashed into the user interface. Now, first impressions are not awful, its an uncommon but pleasant color palette. Any hopes of the palette being part of the story quickly vanished and that’s fine. It briefly got me hoping for more, but whatever. But not ‘whatever.’ The interface refused to be dismissed and instead stepped to me like I had insulted its mother. It was a 4-bar implementation which I’ll call ‘current command’ ‘inventory’ ‘game control’ and ‘log.’ My biggest gripe was that the log and current command bars frequently repeated the same text. Adjacently on different color backgrounds. This is where the color palette first became a problem.
The inventory bar was also problematic, in that it took a lot of real estate between item lists and interaction options, and ended up crowding the display. I think there’s an esthetic reason inventory is classically a command and not just a list printed on the screen after every turn. A quick fix here would have been a standard dropdown - let the player engage the list when they want, not have it thrust on them. Same for game controls which similarly never left your peripheral vision.
The command bar had another issue in what it offered as a next action. Too many times once you look at an object, the command bar gives you no option NOT to interact with it. This was frustrating early when the only way to make progress was a mindless act of destruction I was disinclined but forced to do. It was really bad when I encountered an object that felt game endy, but I had no option but to manipulate it once clicked on. I could (and did) use UNDO, but that is a big hammer. There is a significant narrative difference between “you drop the X and continue on your way” and “REWIND REALITY.”
“Well reviewer, you’ve certainly bellyached about this UI long enough. You can’t possibly have more to say about it,” you might reasonably say right now. I would have to condescendingly shake my head and reply “Oh no, dear reader, no no no.” Most distractingly, the colored bars constantly resize themselves based on input, output and new options. So not only are the bars distinctively and contrastingly colored. Not only is significant real estate taken by infrequently needed information. Not only is text distractingly repeated and options limited. The bars themselves jump around like hyperactive frogs with every click of the mouse. This constant motion demands you unceasingly monitor the entire cockpit. This was so distracting I can’t even, and I never got over it the entire game. I am a shallow, petty person and I don’t love myself right now, but you see what its done to me??? I can’t be free even after four paragraphs!
You might have detected, this user interface ultimately prevented me engaging the story in any meaningful way. For its part, the story is a relatively sparse journey (perhaps a dream?) with a few object-fetch puzzles, capped off with a story-ending choice. I took three paths to two endings and none of it allowed me to shake off the user interface. The theme of musician struggling with the collision between reality and aspirations is one I could engage. The wordplay on display out of the gate was fun. To my shame if it was present elsewhere in gameplay I was too distracted to appreciate it. In the end Technical Intrusiveness of the UI is what dominated my experience.
I do want to know more about Betty the Drummer though.
Played: 10/17/22
Playtime: 20min, 2 different endings, another duplicate ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive UI
Would Play Again? I can’t do that to myself
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
I referenced this game in a review of Lost Coastlines. Crosslink!
IF by Avalon Hill, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
In a bout of review Deja’ Vu (Deja reView?), I said this about Lost at the Market:
"Dreams are certainly useful settings in IF. When used effectively, it can explain and justify any of the inherent limitations of the medium or even lean into the limitations as features."
Kinda wished I’d saved that gem for this review, it’s much more relevant here. This is a procedurally generated dreamscape, and boy does it ever “lean into limitations as features.” Freed from demands of terrestrial geology, ecosystems and logic Lost Coastlines goes bananas with strange, whimsical, fantastical, nightmarish and just plain clever map nodes, butting up against each other without rhyme or reason in a deeply complicated map. Evolutionary scholars and tectonic plate experts would die of apoplexy. The scope of the different encounters in the first hour was dizzying – one minute you’re plundering ships on the high seas, the next you are desperate NOT to look under a clown’s mask, right before you collaborate on an undersea steampunk engine. The breadth and scope was giddy, you really did feel anything at all could show up next, and were kind of drawn to see what that would be. It’s realized ambitions were super high.
But I was not Engaged, and it is some combination of gameplay design and bugs that I was fighting the entire time. Let me preface by saying I have no insight into the code, I am describing in pseudo code how I modeled the game in my head. Every location you find has one or two of these states: IDLE and IN_ENCOUNTER. Most of the time you enter a location into IDLE, where you can look around, examine things, or enter one or more encounters by typing site-specific phrases helpfully capitalized for you. Or you can just exit to the next location. Some locations put you directly into IN_ENCOUNTER state. If you engage an encounter you have to see it to its conclusion before you can leave, and then cannot engage any others. This is made frustrating because verbs and nouns that work in one state are infrequently recognized in the other - same location, mind – and the text doesn’t do a great job of hinting why or what state you are in. I spent a lot of time getting “not recognized” on capitalized words the game supported but I didn’t know I was in the wrong state to exercise. It was exacerbated by a finicky parser. If met with the prompt “FRAMISTAT THE WHOSIDINGIE” sometimes the parser recognized just FRAMISTAT or WHOSIDINGIE. Sometimes you could omit the THE, and other times you needed the whole phrase, and every failure was greeted with “I don’t recognise…”. I mean, you told me to FRAMISTAT just LET ME DADGUM FRAMISTAT!!!
Ahem. This is also an RPG of sorts, with stats and equipment that need to be managed through gameplay - maximize good stuff, try not to accumulate and/or get rid of bad stuff. Because you are wandering through a randomly generated world though, there is no guarantee you can find what you need when you need it and boy do you accumulate that bad stuff. Character creation is light, dreamlike and clever. One particularly nice feature is depending on what role you choose you have a special power. However, mine did not work consistently. At first I thought it was a bug, then I theorized maybe there was an invisible state limitation I didn’t understand, then came back around to “pretty sure its a bug.” (Spoiler - click to show)Several times my Pirate ability to bypass storms/sea monsters/pirates flat didn’t work, but I got ‘charged’ for using it every time. Either that or the action feedback didn’t educate me about its use.
For the first hour, there was an equilibrium where I fought through the parser to enjoy the majesty of that tangled, tangled map and its delightful patchwork universe. Then the randomizer caught up with me, and some of the least interesting settings started repeating. A lot. Fighting the parser became a lot less rewarding, and the unavoidable encounters I had no chance of winning became less amusing.
In the end, I found myself preoccupied with my mental model to the exclusion of the dream-logic narrative of the game. I thought of it like an ameritrash boardgame where : move pawn to adjacent space, draw 1-N encounter cards, choose one of them with limited insight into potential results, roll dice, add/subtract appropriate scores to resolve, move to next space. Rule 12.4.3.1 - you cannot return to previous spaces within X turns.
I gave up at the 1.5hr mark, still begrudgingly admiring the majesty of the randomizer and the tapestry it weaved for me. So many individual encounters were Sparks of Joy (more in their description and variety than gameplay). Notably buggy implementation for sure, but I can’t help but give it a bonus point for epic dreamscape sweep. There were some cool characteristic-tradeoff rules to work towards for the endgame, but that was down the road, way beyond my exit ramp.
Played: 10/28/22
Playtime: 1.5hr; 28 pleasance, 40 knowledge, gobs and gobs of Worry and Fury, and a good amount of Madness. Like real life!
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Check Out My Screenplay?, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I can’t tell if I was surprised by the unusual script formatting, or surprised that I don't encounter it more often. The script format is a super interesting choice, it immediately suggests a whole bunch of things: formal structure, a level of artificiality, a level of performance, but also audience intimacy and to some extent a level of heightened drama. It has a lot of opportunity, but also presents some challenges and potential pitfalls and I’m chomping at the bit to JUST TALK ABOUT ALL OF IT!!
But let me first demonstrate that I am in fact an adult, fully in charge of my passions and capable of delaying gratification when warranted. Thankfully, my wife’s laughter cannot transmit through this medium. Before I get consumed in a sugar-rush of form, let’s talk about function, about the plot of this thing. It is structured in three acts, loosely (Spoiler - click to show)two friends discussing imminent life change; one friend’s tangential, psychedelic journey; two friends making life decisions. No reason not to call those Acts1-3, since the work itself explicitly does.
In Act 1 two friends are discussing the incoming rush of entering college. They unsurprisingly do this at least initially in the setting of their childhood school. I appreciated the specificity of the Eastern Pennsylvania setting. I have to assume readers unfamiliar with the area would experience a more generic “childhood school setting” than I did. I assume this, because the nature of their conversation while specific in details was pretty generic “I don’t know if I’m ready” “Really? I can’t wait…” kind of stuff. The interactivity in this act were mostly choices between “Do I focus on the past or the future?” It didn’t feel like these choices had plot impact per se, but definitely allowed you to collaborate on developing the two characters.
There’s gotta be a word for “near universal experiences that have zero shelf life.” First love, birth of first child, wedding, retirement, or as here, Graduation. The art that you encounter when you are at the cusp of those experiences are going to be vibrant and vital and moving because they speak directly. Doesn’t matter if its been done before and since, doesn’t even matter much how adept it is past a certain threshold. The Graduate, American Graffitti, St Elmo’s Fire, these all spoke to the same cresting young adulthood fear, regret and promise as Act 1 did. For the generations that consumed them at the critical time, these were definitive markers in their journeys. For the rest of their lives, other works covering the same ground are not as compelling. I guess what I’m saying is, Act 1 didn’t really bring anything new to the table here, but arguably the others didn’t either. It's universal. What Act 1 DID do was backdrop the drama with a very ambiguous, weird world of supernatural? extraterrestrial? multi-dimensional? wonders. I literally was slouching in my chair to snap upright at points “wait, what are they talking about?” For me, I ended Act 1 trying to look past the protagonists to all that stuff behind them. It reminded me of nothing so much as Tales from the Loop.
Holy crap, two paragraphs on Act1? I better not run out of room to talk about stagecraft.
Act 2 has one of the characters go on a journey through this backdrop. (Spoiler - click to show)There’s the Layers, and between them and our world, the Layer’s Edge. Except not exactly a journey, more like a prelude to a journey. Really, it is a discussion about maybe going on a journey. This kind of had a similar vibe for me as Act 1 - it was spending a lot of time talking around the wonders, but not really experiencing them. It’s a curious choice that seems to give away a lot of potential (but is highly consistent with its 'staging' conceit), but it is subtly having you do one thing: lay groundwork for the character in choices about what she focuses on and prioritizes.
Act 3 the two friends reconvene in the Layer’s Edge and plot their paths forward. If I’m honest, the first two Acts kept me at a remove. I wasn’t really synching with the protagonists. Each was a two-person dialogue that felt shopworn in Act 1 and unfocused in Act 2, and the most interesting thing, the Layers, were kept background and abstract. But Act 3 is where the choices made during those Acts seemed to crest into very interesting options. Depending on how the player has characterized the two character’s responses you seem to have fairly broad authority to shape the ending. Is the voyager now the counsel to an insecure friend, reversing roles from Act 1? Is embracing adulthood the correct path or not? Continuing on a journey of exploration? Do they share a destiny, or diverge with each other’s blessing? It’s kind of a genius Act 3 actually. In the various permutations I explored every path was the ‘right’ answer, because it was right for the characters as defined by the current playthrough. A completely different endstate was right because completely different character decisions that led to it MADE it right for that end state. If this trick has been used before, I haven’t had the privilege and it really worked like gangbusters on me. You’re not ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ you are tailoring a reasonably satisfying dramatic resolution to the characters you built along the way, with a lot of latitude to do it differently. This realization came too late to push past Sparks of Joy, but talk about finishing strong.
Yeah, so I don’t have time to talk about stagecraft. @#%^@#$% delayed gratification. Speed round:
Stage Artificiality - bad fit for story, cross-dimensional Layers an ill fit for stage presentation, even with the decision to background the most outre’ aspects of it
Stage Performance - mixed. starts not great due to well-worn premise, but if there’s anything more stage performative than two actors talking, I don’t know what it is.
Audience Intimacy - feels like it didn’t work until suddenly BAM it did
Heightened Drama - see Stage Performance, above
Formal Structure - just crushed it. Like out of the ballpark. Turns out, the player was never either protagonist. I wasn’t synching with the protagonists because (Spoiler - click to show)I WAS THE PLAYWRIGHT ALL ALONG!!
Now that’s a third act twist!
Played: 11/9/22
Playtime: 1hr, 4 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I actually might, to see if I can break the ending! I am a damaged person.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Reminder: Superhero Horse!, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
When I initially wrote this, I had a feeling my review was going to say more about my age and cultural blind spots than I intended. I meant this in the least pejorative way possible: I read this as a serial-numbers-filed-off My Little Pony fanfic. It's not at all, so suspicion confirmed!
It is an adventure story in 3 parts, set in an indeterminate Renaissance-feeling time period. Notwithstanding the lack of opposable thumbs in the dominant sentient species, it is recognizably urbane and advanced. Also, there’s a super-hero horse? This thing is overtime on whimsy, and good for it. The story understands that whimsy is often best served by a snappy pace, but here it is somehow too rushed. You are whipped from one encounter/location to another without much pause. The whimsy of its setting is crying to be highlighted by examining surroundings. There are nods of it, like the brief overview of museum exhibits fit for the inhabitants, but they seem limited to the first part and almost completely disappear in parts 2-3. It could really use more. It is all too easy to forget you are a flying super-horse. WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO FORGET THAT???
Part I is an investigation of the Heist in the title. While amusing, there is little to navigate, and barely more to examine before the case is cracked. There are two NPCs you can’t really interact with, which is fine. There is a technical glitch where one of the characters is always talking, and should you engage them, ends up talking both to you and not to you simultaneously. That could probably be fixed. There is some interaction no doubt but it feels very linear. Certainly the mystery is cracked at lightning speed and without much twist.
The next two parts are tracking down and battling the miscreants, in an apparant extended text-IF combat system showcase. Each part has its own setting, but the settings are 3-4 rooms max, with little to do but fight. It feels like the system has randomness involved, but I can’t tell for sure. While there were a few fighting options available, there didn’t seem to be any reason to do anything but strike, then up-arrow-enter repeatedly until done. The battle text was kind of amusing, but ultimately repetitive. The foes were Bond-villain thugs - each had their own signature flair, but were otherwise interchangeable. The game was at its most Mechanical here, and kind of washed away what charms part 1 offered.
This impression seems to be rooted in a, for me, large disconnect between expectations and gameplay. By invoking 'Heist,' I was immediately expecting convoluted planning, deception, reversals, grand set pieces. By invoking 'Superhero Horse' (SUPERHERO HORSE!!!) I was expecting lighthearted, whimsy-driven humor. A combat system showcase was so far from my expectations, I basically rejected it outright.
It felt like a missed opportunity to me. The star was the whimsical setting. I wanted so much more of that, and less fighting. Which, maybe as a review of a combat system is not so helpful. If you engage it as a combat system and resist being distracted by its intriguing chrome, maybe that would be a more rewarding path. But c'mon, why would you bury the lead? It should never be a surprise to remember I am a super hero horse.
Played: 10/20/22
Playtime: 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Mixology Simulator, Minus Sad Alcoholism, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Ok, take two parts snarky, amusing characters, 2 parts crisp custom graphical presentation, one part grind and a dash of IF. Serve over ice with umbrella, and a sense of wanting more?
Let’s start with the most tangible detail: the graphic presentation is just winning. From the Day placards with flowing beer background, to the text scrolls, the fonts and iconography, even the adorably cartoonish bar area it all just fits together for a complete graphical experience. Like a glacier cool martini with a lemon twist suspended in the hyper-chilled surface tension, the hint of its oils eddying on the icy-taut surface.
The narrative tone and character voices are all welcoming and fun, neither over- nor under-written, and all of it moving along at a snappy, snarky pace. You speed through the text rapidly, a smile tugging at your lips due to the turn of phrase or an outlandish character moment. It pulls you through as steadily and satisfyingly as a tiki drink! (Ok, I’m going to try and resist the urge to end every paragraph with a barely-relevant cocktail metaphor. I don’t want to SOUR you on… ow ow ow ow OW OW)
Triple-T has so much going for it, so why don’t I find it more engaging? Let’s start with the opening - there are fully two different intros, and they are kind of disjoint from each other. After two hours of play, one of which isn’t really justified. Neither opening is short, and both are minimally interactive. Once the table is set (bar is stocked?), our motivations and goals established, and the basic bartending mechanisms taught, we’re finally ready to go. Time to start grinding out drinks from recipe cards. As a simulator of mixology, seems about right. An endless flow of drink orders to service in the most mechanically efficient way possible, until your shift is over. You are at least insulated from having to deal with increasingly obnoxious drunks while you work.
After a gameday of serving drinks, there is some lubricating text and interactions, then you’re back at it next day. And then again. It is unclear whether your choices, either conversationally or actions taken, have any effect on the overall narrative flow. Certainly, neither seem to derail the job you have to do. The situation varies a bit, but your tasks don’t. So far, it felt like a grindy, minimally interactive kind-of-RPG where you are earning pay towards a goal. On Day 3, I achieved enough money to satisfy my goal. However, the game did not acknowledge this, and instead repeated itself for Day 4. Literally. Day 3 was an amusing day, thanks to a character’s screwup, but I guess that screwup happened again? This time jarringly without the establishing text, but otherwise word-for-word identical. And then time ran out.
At the end of two hours, I had powered through an overlong double intro, enjoyed some peppy text and graphics, grinded a LOT, and then got Groundhog-Day’d when I met my goal. The stakes were pretty low to start with – which can be cool actually! Not everything has to be save the world. In this case though, for all the entertaining wordplay the motivations just didn’t click into place. Meaning when the timer expired, the snappy presentation and writing couldn’t overcome the mechanical central mechanism and worryingly repetitive 4th Day.
Sorry, no more for me. I’m driving. (You got 3 cocktail-free paragraphs, take the win.)
Played: 10/7/22
Playtime: 2hrs, finished 4 gamedays
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Don’t think so. Too much grind and Day 4 was a worrying portent
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Chatbots: Innovative Same-iness, December 9, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Because of specific compatibility needs, this game made me install Opera. Better be worth it! It’s fine actually, the linux build was seamless enough.
I think this is my first interaction with a Chatbot since I tripped over ELIZA (already deeply out of date) on the early internet. “Pshh, c’mon reviewer, Siri and Alexa are everywhere…” NO. NO NO NO. Spybot Siri and Agent Alexa are not welcome in my life! “Dad, they only listen when you talk to them…” said my adorably naive daughter. It took a way too long silent stare to get her to tumble onto how they know you are addressing them… Does this make me sound like the Unibomber? To repurpose a Chris Rock OJ Simpson joke, “I’m not saying he shoulda done it. I’m saying I understand.” Hm, not sure that was as funny as I wanted it to be. Not sure the original joke was either. Oh God, I’M WEARING A HOODIE RIGHT NOW!!! Maybe its best if you politely let me cut away to…
Thanatophobia! A chatbot that is totally not spying on me! Well, the server is logging my every input… I’m backing away from the brink. I promise.
My first impression was both how much and how little progress has been made since ELIZA. As I recall, Eliza’s ‘trick’ was to keep asking questions using text you had just typed to give the illusion of talking. Was that Eliza? I think so. Or maybe I’m confusing 'her' with a psychoanalysis bot. I’m just gonna go with Dr. Eliza for the rest of this. Thanatophobia kind of reversed the equation. It was at its most convincing when I asked questions and it answered. It had a convincing array of answers ready for me too! About family, friends, jobs, relationships. There were great stretches of reasonable dialogue, though inevitably most of them terminated into “don’t wanna” before I was done. The "don’t wanna"s were pretty ok, felt natural as much as unnatural which is a step above most IF. The illusion was enough that I slipped into Engagement pretty quickly.
It was a weird experience though. I would go through stretches of hyper-effective conversation to hit stretches of close-but-not-quite. The uncanny valley of dialogue. The overall effect was Engaging, but with intellectual reserve. It did give me a moment of amusement, albeit perhaps at the game’s expense, when I had cause to say “I got that” after a particularly egregious bout of repetition.
The uncanny valley was most pronounced when what felt like a pretty natural, meandering conversation suddenly took on NPC-driven endgame urgency of “who is it? who is it, huh? tell me, who is it?” I fought this for two reasons. On the one hand, in my role as therapist, I didn’t feel like we were ready for specificity. On the other, there were some questions I still wanted answers to that seemed as or more important than the mysterious identity. Eventually, I was bullied to spamming candidates until there was an answer they liked, and only as a declarative, not a suggestion to digest together. It seems like there is a narrative fix for this, if I can be forgiven the presumption. (Spoiler - click to show)If the threatening figure, so far aloof, had advanced on the NPC in a perceived threatening way that would have given some rationale to the sudden urgency of the question, and gotten me on board with providing an immediate answer.
The rushed ending, and in particular my spamming response to it, nevertheless credited me with a “win.” It made me wonder if there was a “loss” scenario. That’s fine, sometimes IF is really only about the story. Here though, a key part of the Engagement was the illusion that I could help, and driven by the prospect that I MIGHT NOT. A bit of edge is taken off when it feels like (warranted or not) maybe failing was never a possibility. Or maybe, that impression was just an artifact of Chatbot limitations, I can’t tell. Let’s credit it to that, and club it with the uncanny valley to call it Notable. I do really like how different this was than most IF I've played this year.
Anyway, I’ve got Opera now. But who am I kidding. I use Firefox/DuckDuckGo with a massive superstructure of privacy plugins. That’s not gonna change.
Played: 11/2/22
Playtime: 30min, success
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Notable chatbot limitations
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
You Do Not Have My Consent to Experiment On Me, December 8, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
And we’re back to the “What Do I Do With This?” Sub series of JJMcC’s Reviews Out Of Time. Today’s conundrum: an IF implementation of a real-life Christmas scavenger hunt!
Look, I could wax academic about the quality of the map - how sometimes directions get turned around, or exits not flagged, or verbs incompletely implemented so you struggle to (Spoiler - click to show)open a secret bookcase door. I could whine about how thrilled I was to use the nifty folding map player aid, only to realize after struggling fruitlessly for a half hour that I needed to also fold the map in the parser – that being the only way to unlock game state, so I could find what I was looking for in the places I had already tried to look. I could bemoan falling into the same trap later when I visually decoded a word puzzle, to then need to guess-the-verb to solve it again in the parser before I could advance. I could admire the chutzpah of implementing your own house in parser map, then more dramatically in a note-perfect Potter pastiche prop. There would be words about language choice, words about spare descriptions, words about lack of interact-able objects and NPCs, and words and words and words words words.
Then I’d have to score it.
I am becoming convinced that the entire concept of 'reviewing' is actually an elaborate social psychology experiment being conducted on me, and all of you ALL OF YOU are in on it. You seem to be testing the theory that any random person of good will, when given the power to pass judgement on another’s creative work, will inevitably become a callous monster, glibly making half baked pronouncements on hours on hours of truly impressive labors of love. Cold to the people behind the stories. Well I see behind the curtain IFDB, if that is your real name.
Today we have a work based on a real-life father MAKING MAGIC FOR HIS DAUGHTER ON CHRISTMAS! What’s next IFDB? Huh? A toddler writing IF to earn money for life saving surgery for his out-of-work single mom? A collective work by an orphanage trying to keep an opioid manufacturer from foreclosing the only home they’ve ever known?? An overworked animal shelter volunteer desperately cranking out IF because it is the only thing that distracts the puppy ward from counting days??? YES, ADORABLE, PRECOCIOUS, DOOMED, IF-READING PUPPIES!!!
I’m not playing your little game. Y’know what happened when I made an outdoor Christmas scavenger hunt for my wife? It rained. In a state where water from the sky is the stuff of myth, it rained. Screw this, I am rating this game 10 out of 10 for Father of the Year. Did you see the photos (The Last Christmas Present - Photos ) of that map he made?? Good lord who am I to shade on that?
Played: 10/28/22
Playtime: 1.5hr, finished with hints
Artistic/Technical rankings: Seriously, don't. (Spoiler - click to show)YOU HAD TO DIDN'T YOU?? Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? What’s happening to me???
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, December 7, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Very short work, giving you the role of witch in 1800’s Scotland trying to do good while evading close-minded witch finders.
Overall a pretty Spartan experience. The interface is functional, but not very evocative of its setting. Use of color is actually well done - different colors highlight three different game functions. The text has some offputting grammatical issues, like maybe a non-native English speaker or young author, but certainly forgivable. The text is functional enough, though contains few descriptive or character flourishes to establish the setting or players. Unfortunately, the relative sparsity of the text made the errors that much more prominent and memorable. Ultimately, without any textual immersion we are left with sequencing puzzles - how to fix certain problems without tipping off the Witchfinders that you are sus.
The NPC interactions are limited to problem identification and/or solving. Some action choices are contextual - options become available after you’ve heard of things – others appear to be available at time 0, even though you don’t know what they might be good for. People can be asked only one or two things, with only one or two actions available. It creates a claustrophobic world of limited possibilities that isn’t that compelling to explore.
Some responses and actions are obviously witchy, and these provide some tradeoff tensions, but others are ambushy - what seemed like a safe move still turned on you. Not outright unfair, just sour gameplay. There are really only 3 good deeds to do (that I found), one easy, one medium with tradeoffs, and one I didn’t solve after three tries. Was not really motivated for more attempts than that.
The text and/or presentation could have elevated by setting a stronger sense of environment and characters. Expanded, more interesting choices and destinations would have created a more interesting playground. Without either, definitely a Mechanical experience.
Played: 10/11/22
Playtime: 15 min, 3 playthroughs best score 60.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Braaaaains. And Speed!, December 7, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Zombies have had quite the cultural arc, haven’t they? From their racist beginnings, to Romero’s definitive lo-fi masterpiece, to gorehound cutting edge horror to ubiquitous then backlash to now just a cultural staple. I mean there are zombie musicals, comedies, heist pictures(!), romances, its just a whole thing. Somewhere along the way their metaphorical power was diluted, but is still endlessly malleable (not unlike vampires).
Surprising no one, the genre is a great fit for a a tower defense/resource allocation game. My first introduction to the game was trepidation - I’ve learned to be wary of this engine’s graphical presentation which errs just on the side of Notably Intrusive most of the time. Some early spelling and grammar errors also were a little concerning. There was some clumsy action sequence blocking where mid attack, suddenly the zombie was still approaching but almost immediately the tone not only saved it but started leading the charge. (Spoiler - click to show)As you are being attacked by the shambling remains of your spouse, the narration observes (para) “…normally a good thing…” This really cemented the breezy tone that had been building to that point, and set the stage perfectly. After this, to the extent that spelling and grammar were an issue the tone easily sailed you past.
As you segue to the defense portion, the graphical presentation really starts to shine: the simple but effective use of screen, color, task selection dropdowns, and status bar tracking made for a seamless and pleasant cockpit to steer your crew of hardy survivors. As it is a timed game, especially appreciate that scrolling is almost never needed. The roles you need to juggle are well thought out, and crisply implemented. The tasks all make sense, in the logic of the game, and like a real apocalypse it's not clear where to focus your energies at first so you wing it and fire and adjust. All in the face of a doomsday timer in the form of an incoming zombie horde.
You’re balancing survival/happiness against crucial future building tasks, on a timer. The timer started to move a touch slow (actually I was probably moving faster) as the game went on, I could see tweaking to subtly speed that up as the game progresses but definitely not at first. Even as you are in a frenzy of your survival balancing act, the wry tone periodically keeps you smiling. At one point my zombie researchers, after quite a long research effort, concluded “zombies cannot be reasoned with.” Lol, no sh*t researchers, why are we feeding you again?
And then its over! A short denouement and you get to read about your score in an amusing news story. This is a kind of slight, short game, but it is such a winning mix of tone, tension and logistical puzzle that I have to say I was Engaged. It does what it wants to really well, and knows to leave before it wears out its welcome. I would call it “Notably Intrusive” for its occasional writing clunks and slight drag before the end. None of that degraded my enjoyment for sure.
Played: 10/29/22
Playtime: 40 min, 8 survivors, down from a peak of 21
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Notable
Would Play Again? Very likely. It’s somewhere between an Adventure Snack and a full meal. Second Breakfast?
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Sibling Scares, December 6, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This is an uneasy marriage between a paranormal adventure and a sibling relationship drama. Let me start by answering the question posed in the title. “No, you are your SISTER’S keeper.”
Now I am on record as admiring the Texture interface. I think an author can do a lot with the drag and drop mechanism, particularly what options you make available, associated with what text, and through creative use of the “balloon text” when you do connect the two. I don’t think this work leveraged the power of that interface to its narrative fullest. On many early screens you are presented with two options. Turns out they are not exclusive, you actually need to connect both to advance. Worse, each choice reveals a subsequent paragraph, but they are not position independent. If you choose to reveal the ‘second’ paragraph before the ‘first’ the text doesn’t really flow right. Or if it does, the insertion of the final paragraph dispels that equilibrium. Now creative text choices could use that to advantage, to lead the reader on a different mental path depending on order. Here, I couldn’t detect that. It just felt like a single page that required two pulls to see. It didn’t connect prompt and choice in an interesting way and didn’t leverage that delay for dramatic pause.
I’m not sure why, but I also hit some issues that I think belong to Texture and not the author. It's weird to me how much Texture work I consumed before this registered. I don’t know enough about Texture to know if other authors were able to mitigate these artifacts better or if Texture’s luck just ran out here. For one, the VERY distracting “font resize” issue reared here. (Is it just me? I complain about it a lot, like a LOT a lot, and I’m starting to question whether this is a fundamental flaw of Texture itself.) Texture appears to do an HTML-like dynamic formatting for line wrap, paragraphing, etc. Which suggests that like HTML, an author would need to do some extreme intervention to tightly control their screen. In HTML, when text overruns the available window space, it scrolls. In Texture it seems to shrink the text until it fits. Man is that an intrusive choice.
There was another presentation glitch that I noticed for the first time here. The “text balloons” that hover over the prompt word do not recognize edge-of-window. If your prompt is on one side or the other of your window, and you have more than a word or two of bubble-text, it disappears under the window’s edge making it useless. Since Texture appears to auto-wrap, its not clear how the author could mitigate this, and yet this is the first work I saw this artifact so consistently. Bad luck?
Leaving aside the distracting formatting, the narrative was a little too bare bones for me. It’s a missing sibling search, that culminates in a Big Bad dream-dimension battle for freedom. It has always been true that horror is a genre practically screaming for metaphor. The supernatural stakes are completely at the author’s whim, and creative authors have crafted innumerable monsters as sophisticated metaphor for real-life horrors. Buffy the Vampire Slayer famously did so for years until the true monster was revealed! I wrote that line as comedy, but it actually makes me a little sad.
Here, the Big Bad doesn’t strike me as having any metaphorical resonance, it's just a (really cool!) monster. Its realm, whose description is also a high point, similarly doesn’t seem to serve a metaphorical purpose. The central sibling relationship seems to be crying out for such a treatment, but no. So it ends up being a pretty straight-forward, unnuanced pulpy adventure.
I don’t think it succeeds as that either though. It's not moving fast enough to paper over its plot contrivances, which is crucial for pulp. If it’s not a white knuckle thrill ride, the audience will have time to question, “Wait, he rode all the way to Germany CLINGING TO THE OUTSIDE OF A SUBMARINE???” Zip them past that, author, that’s totally not important! I get no joy from listing “plot holes” so I’m going to spoiler these just so we don’t have to read them. If the author is curious what didn’t work for me, here are a few plot choices that jarred loudest: (Spoiler - click to show)finding not one but 2 crucial clues, in minutes, that a presumedly much longer police search failed to turn up. Keeping the police out of the loop before the supernatural angle was obvious. Reading about the savior MacGuffin, that the sister suddenly has, but does not realize how to use. Why else would she have it?
I think though, that all of those I could have forgiven with a taut sibling drama, and I feel let down here too. The missing sister was presented as flighty, disappearing for long stretches without reason, the implication being she can’t take care of herself. More traditional use of spoiler-mask: (Spoiler - click to show)At the climax, the sister is begging, pleading to be trusted to effect her own rescue, or at least effect a heroic sacrifice. The game does not even give you an option to honor her wishes, and so the protagonist siezes the agency, denies the sister, and saves the day. The real answer to the question in the title “Am I My [Sibling]'s Keeper?” is apparently “Yes. Yes you are and always will be.” This is like the least satisfying answer to that question.
Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 15min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
The Despair of Davey Jones, December 6, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Another default(?) themed Twine entry, this one set on a research vessel out at sea with a crew of young oceanographers. The black/white/blue color scheme serves this game a little better than others given its horror theme, but barely so. During I think the 5th play through I did stumble on a nifty use of dynamic font, would have loved to see more of that but as far as I can tell that was a one-off.
The tone on this one was noteworthy. The protagonist is not dynamic, they either perfunctorily or begrudgingly follow the choices you make. They got some stuff they’re dealing with, and not particularly effectively. It’s an unusual choice which at first puts the protagonist at a remove from the player. This is reinforced if you try to goad them into action – things don’t really working out if you do. Heroic-feeling choices either outright fail or come with significant unforeseen drawbacks. Driving this PC is kind of like pushing jello - you can’t always get them to go the direction you want, and even when you can its never very responsive and requires more work. Fortunately, they are surrounded by much more dynamic NPCs which definitely give some welcome propulsion to the action. First play through I never did synch with the protagonist (and kind of admired the NPCs) and was left at a remove.
Construction-wise there are long linear sections of action, punctuated with choices you have no real way of assessing, meaning things can feel arbitrary. Some of them do allow you to build the character, or maybe shade them at least. Normally, this design choice frustrates me if there isn’t a thematic reason behind it. There’s two reasons why here, this actually kinda works? The first is that when the action gets furious in the third act (really there’s only two acts, so second act), making choices in a spur-of-the-moment panic probably isn’t going to result in deliberate, fully-informed decisions. This tracks. The second reason it works, and why the character choices can work, is only really revealed on subsequent playthroughs.
There seems to be a lot of plot divergence available here. Early choices take you down very different plot paths. It is a short game, but nevertheless it feels very broad. This is not a ‘plot will always reconverge, it's the friends you make on the way that change’ design. The protagonist/player alignment benefits from these multiple playthroughs. It’s not a long game, and it's a race to see if you will come around on the protagonist before the end. First play through I did not, not even close. But on subsequent playthroughs, because the plot varied SO much, you weren’t revisiting the past, it was like you got more time with them. I wouldn’t say you ever really like them, but you at least get past “would you just step up??” to some early stage of sympathy.
But the real secret that multiple playthroughs reveal is how deeply cynical and hopeless the whole thing is. First play through you might assume “well I made some bad choices, sorry dead characters.” (Spoiler - click to show)I played to 6 endings and they’re ALL bad! The ‘best’ was physical survival but very depressing and it went down from there! That’s not necessarily pleasant or enjoyable, but it is… bold. Pet Cemetery is one of my favorite Stephen King stories because it is so unremittingly tragic. There is no ‘magic book/shaman that saves the day at the climax.’ Uh, spoiler. It is a no-compromise approach to horror that dares you to appreciate it. Which I kinda do? (Someday I’ll figure out why it works for King, and fails so spectacularly in Halloween Kills. Probably because it's King, right?) I did not try to determine if there were NO (Spoiler - click to show)optimistic endings, but I do kind of hope there aren’t.
So where does that leave me? Play through wise, between the difficult protagonist, limited and arbitrary choices, mostly vanilla presentation it was Mechanical and Seamless. (Spoiler - click to show)But it gets a bonus point for committing to its bleakness across multiple endings.
Played: 11/1/22
Playtime: 30min, 6 endings.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Sisyphus Wept, December 6, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This was my first exposure to Texture pieces. Maggie H’s use of it, including formatting, color choice, response management and graphics use felt like an extension of their expressive prose in setting an overall mood of the piece which I’ll call ‘lazy disquiet.’ Even where the choices were limited to one or just a “next” button, the text blocks, breaks and changes all felt deliberate and evocative in a really nice way.
But there were bugginess issues. In particular, it seemed that regardless of my choices (and boy did I try a lot of permutations of them) I could only get at most two nights’ sleep that ended either in waking up with an unexplained loss of time that seemed narratively important, or on a page whose bug was that none of the presented choices allowed you to leave the page. Stuck.
I hit both of these end states within 15 minutes and spent the next hour and a quarter trying choice combinations and failing to achieve a different result. Early on, this actually seemed intended (stuck bug notwithstanding), striking a “Russian Doll” / “Edge of Tomorrow” / “Happy Birthday to Me” vibe which generally is catnip for me. (Just realized I didn’t invoke “Groundhog Day” above. Is this where we are now? We’ve now got so many it’s lost its primacy as naming this genre?) If that was not the intent, boy did I misread it, though it was that read that motivated me to try and push through.
According to my arbitrary judging criteria, my first few playthroughs elicited true Sparks of Joy in turn of phrase, surprising interactions, creepy description variations. This was not to last. Repetition, especially in time loop type games relies on setting narrative expectations, then either building on them or infinitely and creatively varying them. Without either, there are two possible progressions: long blocks of text will be ignored and clicked through mechanically; short bursts of text will be read so frequently that, like rapidly repeating words for a not-so-long period of time they will lose all meaning. Both happened here, though a third thing did also. Maggie H’s prose is wryly singular in a way that sustains it for a while. But with repetition, many passages seemed to undergo distillation - with every cycle, they concentrated. Not unlike boiling sugar water until it sublimates from lightly sweet liquid to way-too-sweet syrup. An example: the game poetically presents a few things as “gaping.” That is an insanely powerful word, immediately invoking a symphony of feelings. But the more you read it, the stronger its impact is, until you start engaging it with “Is this really the right word here?” “This is saying a lot more than it should.” “Oh my God please stop saying ‘gaping.’”
So I’m left with very positive feelings of my first half hour, quickly eroded away through repetition and lack of progress. My criteria shows its flaws: while my impression showed “Sparks of Joy” initially, repetition eventually sanded those moments down to “Mechanical.” Alternately, if repetition was NOT the point of the game at all, maybe my experience was due to “Intrusively Buggy”-ness. (There is a third option. That I was too dense to make progress, missing some obvious out for over an hour. I acknowledge the possibility but “Just Know Something You Can’t Figure Out” has never been actionable feedback for me.)
Played: 10/3/22
Playtime: 1.5hrs, stuck for 1.25 of it
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy -> Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? Maybe, If reminded and bugfixed
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Parser Problems Punish Potential Players, Piss Away Pleasant Playground, December 5, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I was cautiously looking forward to this one. Looking forward, as my fondness for early text adventure is just a thing about me by now. Cautious because those early days are much more enjoyable in my head than in front of me. And as a standalone app, unless Paul was building on a rock solid parser there were decades of learnings he’d need to implement.
I was right to be cautious. Part of it was my fault. I was bringing TADS-like parser dialect to this game. I did reasonably quickly figure out my blindspot and adjusted to this new parser syntax. But man was it frustrating. So much guess-the-noun, guess-the-verb. A tried and true way to combat this is to artfully provide valid words in descriptions and error messages. Not only do we NOT get that here, the text actively steers us wrong. An early puzzle involves getting out of a thick copse of trees, but…(Spoiler - click to show)it requires you pull an object out of your pocket, which I never thought to do as a ‘status’ command had previously told me I was carrying “Nothing, zilch, nada.”
Other tried and true ways to combat search-the-X problems is the hint system and walkthroughs. The hint system is context aware, but pretty primitive in that its suggestions are of limited help and relevance. But the walkthrough, I’m not sure what to do with that. I explicitly tried commands suggested by the walk through to be variously met with “Be more specific” or “you can’t do that.” Why are you taunting me, walkthrough?
To be fair, early games sometimes used “You can’t do that” as a synonym for “You don’t need to do that yet.” I certainly tried to embrace the experience with that in mind. So for 40 minutes I exhausted the hints and walkthrough and just typed variation after variation trying to hit the magic combo that would do what I wanted (as told by the walkthrough!) to do. I gave up at the 1 hr mark.
It’s a shame the parser problems are so dire. The bones of the game seemed amusing - the ASCII art was the perfect note of blast from the past, and much of it was really well done. It was SO well done I could even use the pictures to suggest relevant nouns, but that ended up being unevenly implemented. The few puzzles I encountered were simple but very evocative of early text adventures and would have elicited wry smiles had it not been so hard to bend the parser to my will.
Really, it feels like this would be a warm happy play if the parser could get out of the way. It would probably take heavy coding, but parser work alone wouldn’t solve it. Even with the current parser, the author could do a lot more in descriptive text to cue the players, and in beta testing to wring out contradictory, even deceptive text. I kind of hope they do, as this is a thing that makes me happy it exists, but the parser won’t let me enjoy it.
And at a minimum, ensure the walkthrough gives actual commands that work! It is the promise of this that pushed it from a 1->2 for me. A valid walkthrough would be a good way to show it is not Unplayable. Yes, I am committing the cardinal sin of critiquing on content that doesn’t actually exist.
Played: 10/5/22
Playtime: 1hr, stuck for 40min of it
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? Probably not but Maybe? If hint/walkthrough and in-game guidance significantly improved.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
FRPG Lite. Like, Helium Lite., December 5, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I don’t know what to make of this entry. It presents as a super light, highly randomized FRPG kind of thing. You get an apparently randomized starting character with a name, race, some traits and background. None of those come into play again, except maybe magic use. Then you walk, trade and warp until you either win, decide you’ve had enough, or a bug ends the game. I achieved two of those in 45 minutes of pretty repetitive playtime.
You have a short list of items, effectively a status screen, that tells you what you have or don’t (helpfully pointing out you can GET them). Walking and warping lets you navigate the world, such as it is, but there is no map per se, just an endless series of terse, repeating random encounters that kill you, give you money, or neither. When I say no map, I mean your location has no discernible effect on your encounters, or even your relationship to other areas. You can still find Inns and Houses inside a Labyrinth for example.
And you can die. Either because you randomly encounter foes you are not yet equipped to beat, or you just open a box. It’s not really that big a deal, as you immediately respawn with most of your stuff, but is that fun?
In practice, gameplay is just as repetitive as the encounters. You walk (dying as often as you need to) until you have enough money to get stuff (some of which has game effect, others do not as far as I can tell). Or you warp to some area you’ve been before, but if locations don’t matter not sure why you would. Repeat many many times. I don’t think I’ve ever typed the word ‘walk’ that many times in 45 minutes before.
I did hit a small bug - I would lose money if I couldn’t afford an expensive item but already had a sword and tried to trade. I hit a big bug — an ‘out of range’ crash on something called TT. But the game asked so little of me, neither elicited a reaction. Ultimately, I stopped playing when I jerked awake to see that I had typed ‘wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww’ on the command line.
So yeah, what is this? Is it art, a wry commentary on FRPG gameplay? A zen mindfulness exercise? An impressionistic IF that you bring the story to from your head? I don’t think any of those things are for me.
Played: 10/10/22
Playtime: 45min, 1 crash, 1 quit, so many respawned deaths
Artistic/Technical rankings: Bouncy/Notable
Would Play Again? No, not my cuppa
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Inspector Bull, Chinashop PD, December 5, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Can you like a game for pointing out how shallow you are? Cause I kinda really do. When I get in a IF consumption mood, it sometimes turns into a gluttonous, overindulgent frenzy. There’s times I may not be completely zen when I power these things up. The moody, pixelated black and white artwork shoulda been a clear clue. The melancholy music shoulda been a clear clue. The fact that it shattered my preconceptions within minutes when I went from “yeah yeah, help an old man remember, got it” to “crap, wait, there’s supernatural in here.” That shoulda been a clear clue too.
Not for Inspector Bull of the Chinashop PD, no sir. I hammered my way through the house like a warrantless entry, clicking nouns like they were Ticketmaster tickets on opening day. I was able to slow down enough to appreciate the early mechanism: connecting supernatural investigative thoughts to picture and word clues, but only just, and hammered into phase two where you (Spoiler - click to show)bring artifacts to the spectral presence you are trying to save. Only to be justifiably punished for trial and error in a completely narratively satisfying fail. This caused me to rock back. I’d made a terrible mistake here.
I poured myself two fingers of calm the F down, and restarted, and this time I tried to breath the atmosphere of this thing on its own pace. Holy crap you guys, it is the complete package. The artwork resonated so finely with the music, the page layout, the mental connection investigation mechanism… I went from ENGAGED, I’M ENGAGED, OUTTA MY WAY ENGAGEMENT COMING THROUGH to…
engaged.
The conceit of (Spoiler - click to show)effecting the rescue of a woman who was essentially so unseen by her family and so self-denying that she faded away. And that rescue requiring that you see HER, and not all the things that are not-her that clogged her life, and then TELL HER THAT YOU SEE… And the genesis of all that not being evil forces from beyond, just casual, amiable taking-for-granted from those that notionally love you. What a heartbreaking story whose only solution is to understand the heartbreak squarely and fully. You have to (Spoiler - click to show)assemble her story from artifacts in the house, then deduce what they mean to her when others may not have bothered to. Yeah, some of the artifacts’ meanings are not revealed as well as others but the whole tapestry of artifacts, spread logically and perfectly throughout the house, builds as complete a picture as you care to deduce. It is a super rewarding, tightly constructed, fragmented narrative that builds like a puzzle regardless of the order of your discoveries. It really is a terrific achievement. It is hard to believe the author was not also commenting slyly on Inspector Bull as well - if you as a player insist on treating her as a problem and not a person, your rescue is doomed to the same forces that put her there to begin with. You have to consciously care about her story, and her as a person to succeed.
Wait, was I like, the perfect IF player-partner, whose bad behavior textbook showcased the full breadth of the author’s artistic vision??? You’re welcome AML! Also shocking twist ending, even with what I thought was extreme due diligence, I needed still more focus to get the best ending! That is just the perfect thematic capper. It’s not enough when I think it is, she is the only arbiter of that.
Were there issues? Yeah maybe two. The connect-thought and inventory-use mechanisms were very clicky, required a lot of motion to do a little. That could be streamlined. And maybe when one puzzle is (Spoiler - click to show)the name of the victim DON’T PUT IT IN YOUR TITLE. That’s all I’ve got. It was so deeply Engaging if there were other flaws they totally didn’t register.
Played: 11/3/22
Playtime: 1.5hr, finished after restarting to adjust my attitude, “there is hope” ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Yes, bring her all the things!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Bureaucratic Botworld, December 5, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This is another nifty little puzzle game. You are a 'bot squashing bugs via a series of unlocking-style puzzles. Either explicitly unlocking doors, or unlocking new abilities needed to solve subsequent puzzles. The puzzle design is reasonably pleasant and seems to play pretty fair. It does require some logical leaps or guesses, even trial and error from time to time, but that is far from rare in IF, classic or modern. The text descriptions are succinct with a light, breezy feel that keeps things chugging along and doesn’t grate when you re-enter rooms multiple times.
It does a few things really well. For one, I really dug the ascii maps. They were easy to parse, eminently useful, and exuded an old-school vibe that matched the text tone nicely. The game seemed to disconcertingly read my mind at one point. I realized there were a few interesting items littered about behind me, but I really didn’t remember where and was not looking forward to exploring to find them again. No sooner did that sour thought form than BAM I unlocked “ITEM mode” on the map to helpfully point them out! Had to be a coincidence, right? The alternative is super creepy.
While the game did not really implement deep NPCs (most are one-response once their puzzle-state responses are exhausted), like the room descriptions their dialogue is short and to the point with a splash of personality. Since they are bots anyway, this doesn’t really jar - making a strength of its limitations! Same for the limited vocabulary - as a relatively simple bot, there isn’t really an expectation of full autonomy and the limited action palette feels pretty natural. Between the marriage of form and function, the enjoyable puzzles, crisp page and map layout and snappy writing there were plenty of Sparks of Joy. There was however also a friction-y design choice and one small but really annoying bug.
Bug first. It’s a parser game, and the web implementation autoscrolled on command entry for a while. Until it didn’t anymore - instead, it autoscrolled whey you typed the NEXT command. What this meant was, you would go say W(est). The descriptive text of the new room would appear below the bottom of the screen, and only after you input a character THEN it would scroll up for you to see. This had the effect of needing to type something/anything after your command, then maybe erasing that and putting the real command in. Eventually I figured out I could hit Enter-Backspace to force the scroll but man was it annoying. I don’t really have a bead on if it was the author’s bug or maybe the web implementation.
The second was in command choice. This is a parser game, but it implements very few commands. It tells you what they are, that’s fine. Most of the frequently used commands (cardinal direction, look, wait) are implemented as single letters. This has the effect of keeping things light and moving quickly. There are some mode and status commands which are full words, but as they are rarely used that’s not impactful. However, the special powers you accumulate, and use all the time (sometimes in elaborate sequences), are 3 letters. Now, you are instantly thinking less of me because I am going to complain about three letter commands instead of 1. While that is 300% more typing, I accept your scorn. But in a game this light, with a vocabulary this limited, having to repeatedly type the same 3-letter words just starts feeling unnecessary. Especially when all of the ones I unlocked could have started with unique single letters!
The cumulative weight of these frictions led me to a point where after a particularly involved surprise side mission (which I had mistaken for a ‘core’ mission) I didn’t feel compelled to finish the game. So, definite Sparks of Joy, short of Engagement. As I look at the ‘intrusive elements’ above (buggy text scroll, why can’t I type less?) while it for sure informed my experience they don’t really rate as ‘notably buggy.’ Just a spot where more lubrication could have been applied. Hey-O, that’s what sh… no. Just don’t.
Played: 10/30/22
Playtime: 1.5hr, did not finish
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? doubtful, got the gist
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Shopping is Hard, December 5, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Aaaah, TADS. Like slipping my feet into a warm bath. This is the parser-based IF experience I look for. Amazing, goofy premise and quest, large map, many puzzles from lever-and-button to locked-door to coerce-NPCs to (probably) wildly inappropriate and satisfying uses of everyday objects. The narration is capable and fun, integrating game-facilitating pointers and sly humor in equal measure. It’s not perfect: one NPC seems to attach to you without much lubricating text; a few incidents of can’t-do-that would benefit from a variable list; dense place descriptions without subsequent shorter summaries and/or bolded direction cues.
But really, those feels nit-picky. Especially in the face of a tremendous effort to flesh out nearly every noun with flavor text that makes poking around rewarding in the best traditions of early IF. Even the relatively limited NPCs which won’t make you fear the singularity, they are imbued with enough personality to remind you of NPCs of days gone by. Yes, they are code constructs, but they are amusing and welcome ones.
And that map! A gloriously dense and elaborate multi-level map to explore. Daunting even. Many locations have 4 or more cardinal exits and maybe some ups and downs too. Navigating the map was a treat - most locations have personality too, unique and idiosyncratic: weaving flavor and nav puzzles all over the place.
And here’s where my unfortunate game experience intrudes. For the first hour I wandered around mapless. I was so caught up in the delightful spell the place descriptions were putting on me I darted from one shiny exit to another without much rhyme or reason. And boy did I get lost. Over and over again. It was fun doing it! But eventually I realized I was never getting the dress this way. So I saved my game at one hour, determined to pick up next day with graph paper in hand.
Next day I went to restore my save… and couldn’t. It turned out to be an artifact of my own inexperience, exacerbated by some unfortunate HELP text (subsequently clarified to prevent others following my misguided path). It ended up being a happy accident though, as my flailing for solution showed me that there were maps (and walkthrough) available! Armed with those maps, I decided efficiency would make up the difference.
At the second one-hour mark I had fully recon’d the mall (locked doors notwithstanding) and a bit of its grounds, but only really ‘solved’ two puzzles. Plenty more were tantalizingly laid out before me. The narrative tone is friendly and fun, details plentiful and unique, and puzzles littering the joint. I found myself typing faster and faster as I noticed the clock running out, trying to eke out just one more location, conversation or search. If that's not the textbook definition of Engaged, I don't know what is!
This thing hums with love for the traditional IF form, and is a wonderfully capable pastiche in the best possible sense of that word. It stands fully on its own with wit and verve, and echoes all the best traditions of IF.
Played: 10/6/22
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Of course. Calls to me like a Siren from the 80's.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
[redacted] the [redacted] Out of This, December 5, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I had been low-key looking forward to this one for a while - both due to the philosophical connotations of the title (originally posited to refute the concept of ‘sentient AI,’ there is some nice resonance to IF design itself) and because as a former Cold Warrior… Russophile is not the right word. I need a suffix for “morbid fascination with.” How about Russophiliasis (second ‘i’ is long)? What I’m saying is I have an unhealthy fascination with modern Russian culture, especially the more Kafka-esque aspects of it.
I was faintly disappointed when I once again encountered the black/blue/white Twine formatting. If ever a game was crying out for all-greys, with an occasional splash of impactful color this was it. That superficial reaction was quickly dispelled when I noticed it was a double game, of interlocking IF stories. That’s a cool conceit. And it can be simultaneously played by two players? Loving the ambition. Checked in as Caroline first (as advised) and off to the races!
Caroline is a housewife, mother of two near-adult children, married to a minor politician. Her life is one of quiet burden that she shoulders matter-of-factly. This part I found really nicely painted. Here the use of interactivity, specifically lack of choice, really resonated when contrasted to her undramatic acceptance. The husband is obliviously self-absorbed but not an absolute dick. She ekes out joys for herself with cooking and her kids. This table setting for me was super impactful to what follows. It so cleverly aligned me with the protagonist: both my sympathies and my wearied acceptance of the-way-things-are. The latter is challenging to pull off. As game players, a natural impulse is to be WAY more action-hero than real life would support. This first section defuses that impulse in an impressively successful way.
I think this is going to end up being more spoiler-y than most of my reviews, let’s see if I can keep it coherent. It’s after the protagonist gets involved in a political job that a some serious cracks intrude. To this point in the game, I am basically welded to the protagonist - kudos for that! Then choices start presenting themselves that do not resonate, specifically (Spoiler - click to show)possibly flirting, then pursuing an affair with your ‘boss’. For me this failed on two counts: 1) the object of these decisions is not compelling. Like at all. So much so that even the presence of the options felt jarringly wrong. At best the character in question is an amiable blowhard which sure, maybe better than a self-important blowhard but really not a sufficient upgrade. 2) there is text that portrays the protagonist as reacting much more strongly to this character than any of my decisions and attendant prior text suggested. It felt unjustified and contrary to the protagonist we had carefully crafted to that point and I kind of rejected it. This showed me the second edge of the IF sword. While a traditional narrative can sometimes get away with “I don’t get what they’re doing… but whatever, I guess the plot needs it” if you have invested the energy and skill to get the IF player aligned with the protagonist, those disconnects suddenly become personal.
So that was a sour note. Conversely, there is some dramatic business with the kids late in the story that landed like gangbusters. It had everything to do with how real-feeling the interactions with the kids (and husband!) were prior to that point. Whether the text actively accommodated prior player choices, or was at least deft enough not to contradict them, it was so, so much more successful.
Then there’s the matter of the ending. I should make clear at this point I was playing solo. Shite, I guess I just need to… (Spoiler - click to show)Ok, throughout the middle of the game, you are periodically ushered to a mysterious room, have a colored light flash at you, then given the option to match or not-match the light. There’s no rhyme or reason to this, but it is faintly sinister. Cool. Turns out you were torturing people somehow?!?!? At least, that’s what the government said about you in court. Nevermind that it was a government(?) functionary that coerced you to do it (probably deniably so, to be fair). The court scene kind of fell apart for me, top to bottom, and not because I rebelled at the premise. (Spoiler - click to show)A totalitarian government politically prosecuting an individual on absurd charges is absolutely believable and horrifying which was almost certainly the aim of the piece. The implementation details just torpedoed it for me. Up until this point, the narrative employed precise use of no-choice interactivity. It’s super-effective! Here, as the protagonist is (Spoiler - click to show)literally battling for her life, the ‘no choice’ takes the form of adhering to advice from her lawyer. Yet that lawyer came across as kind of hapless at best, and a possible prosecution functionary at worst. At one point the game even rubs this decision in your face by headfaking a choice that doesn’t exist. The equation had shifted and acquiescence suddenly became a mimesis liability, not a feature. It was further exacerbated when (Spoiler - click to show)the options I chose in the mystery room were not used against me. To the contrary, the state seemed to imply I took actions I decidedly did not. Now they can lie, sure, but at that point why even bother with the mystery room? How much more effective would it have been to map (Spoiler - click to show)my ‘crimes’ to actions I had actually taken? And the decision to only obliquely allude to (Spoiler - click to show)the horrors my oblivious button-pushing caused, that was an opportunity to drive home some personal horror just forfeited.
I think the game makes one final small mistake with a disproportionate impact: it spends a lot of time detailing (Spoiler - click to show)the ‘strategies’ being used in the court room. This has the effect of underlining again and again the absurd nonsensicality of the prosecution argument, and to a lesser extent the ineptitude of the defense. (Also, I’m not sure I agreed with how the Chinese Box problem was employed in these arguments, but I’d need to look at it closer.) None of this is the problem, it actually could be parlayed into a strength, (Spoiler - click to show)showing how hollow the prosecution is. But it isn’t, because (Spoiler - click to show)the text also alludes to actual humans in the audience being persuaded. It’s almost a throwaway scenic element but it does so much damage to the reality of the scene I didn’t recover. How much more effective would the horror have been, if it was clear the audience saw it too?
Above, I burned two and a half small paragraphs on what I liked, and three large paragraphs on what didn’t work for me. This is deeply unfair. I actually liked what those two and a half paragraphs describe SO INCREDIBLY MUCH, I think that caused me to take the subsequent shortfall way too personal. What it did right were white hot Sparks of Joy straight out of Flashdance. Those two crucial misfires though kept it from breaching into Engaging. I can’t help but wonder how the interlocking second story is going to play out, and whether that ultimately overcomes some of this or not.
Yeah, I’m definitely playing that other half. Also I kind of dig the thematically appropriate (Spoiler - click to show)‘redacted’ feel this review took on.
Played: 11/3/22
Playtime: 1.5hr, finished 1/2 stories
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? Of course. When your Russophiliasis flares up, its best to let it run its course.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Donna. Hey, Donna., December 4, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Here’s something you hear every year around Oscar time: “Comedy is hard, why isn’t it respected like manipulative, obviously thirsty, overwrought sob-fests?” Well, you mostly hear it phrased like that at my house, but the sentiment is trotted out pretty consistently. This is going to be relevant in a few minutes.
Historically I like some things about parser IF better than others. Way at the bottom is the ‘search’ ‘look under’ ‘look behind’ mechanics. Its classic, I get it, but it feels so unrewarding to both look at something then look again ONLY IN A MORE SPECIFIC WAY. AWAN, you have turned me around on this. This is a one-room joint where you have to find a comedically large number of things in an exasperatingly spartan environment. And you do and its hilarious! Using all of those mechanics deliberately and precisely, this game is a perfect “I know its around here somewhere” simulator. Its the first time I’ve ever seen them used so effectively.
Here’s another thing I’ve never really liked: abrupt, non-foreshadowed instant endings that require restart or undo. AWAN fixed that too! The 3 abrupt endings I got were laugh out loud non sequitor funny and I happily Undid to see more. Usually my spoilers are kind of vague, but this is a no-fooling overt one: (Spoiler - click to show)OMG Try calling everyone on the red corded phone. DO IT!
I always appreciate a narratively integrated hint system, but AWAN upped the ante even further. You can call out to your partner to a) solve puzzles, b) get hints and c) get snarky offhand replies to dumb questions. To the point where I decided to be the Ikea guy just to see how far I could push things. (If you don’t know what I mean, google “IKEA Donna youtube puns.” Totally worth your time.) I really wanted to preface every conversation thread with “Hey Donna. Hey Donna.”
I don’t want this review to just be listing delightful things, though maybe we could use some of that these days. (Spoiler - click to show)Wait’ll you get the TV on. There are so many to find on your own. The implementation is mostly seamless, light, and amusingly frustrating but in a way we can all satisfyingly relate to. And it does it all with economy and verve. It gets in, makes its impact, and gets out while you still want more.
It also does some small things absolutely seamlessly: its choice of characters allows the player to slip cleanly into place, regardless of gender/sexual preference without fanfare or menus. In particular there is a point where you might want (Spoiler - click to show)to open a window before you’ve found your shirt. The game handles this lightly and elegantly with no false notes.
So here’s where I strike back at the Oscars. AWAN is just consistently and effortlessly its own funny thing that had me completely Engaged and often grinning in delight. Get on up here, AWAN!
We will play you off though.
Played: 11/6/22
Playtime: 45min, 4/18 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Was thinking no, until the game told me there were 18 endings. So yeah, probably.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Inner Child is not MPD, December 4, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Hey, there are IF works for new readers! This was an absolutely delightful interactive rendition of a children’s book. When first few clicks showed no choices, I grew uneasy. The illustrations were note perfect for the milieu, but my family situation is quite removed from kid-lit. Turning virtual pages was not significantly different than leafing through a kids book which I never do. (I mean, Seuss excepted, what am I a monster?)
That ungenerous thought couldn’t even gel before the choices started. At that point the illustrations, text and choices played off each other wonderfully. Even then, I wasn’t won over immediately because I am damaged. For whatever reason after a few choices I spontaneously conjured an imaginary child next to me… what? you don’t know my life! Reading this work, imagining a small child sounding through, making choices, then experiencing the results of that choice — that’s when it clicked into place for me. The playful problem solving, character frustration, trial and error, evocative illustrations and unexpected outcomes would play like gang busters to a new reader, and through that imaginary child’s eyes I could experience their delight.
Older IF fans take as writ that interactivity is the differentiator in this medium. The (however illusory) perception of choice, narrative influence and immediacy provides a whole new dimension of immersion to the reading experience. Esther’s uses its new reader format to remind me that even the most tired, hoary cliche’ is going to be someone’s first time and that initial exposure can be deeply revelatory. That came out wrong, I’m not suggesting Ester’s is cliche’d, just using that as a poorly chosen metaphor for IF in general. What I’m driving at is that its deliberate invocation of children’s lit tone, illustration style and whimsical content re-presents the form in a first timer perspective. How magical is that? At least that’s what I got from my imaginary co-pilot.
Scoring this feels like a no win situation. I mean would I criticize the narrative voice in “Hop on Pop?” The graphic compositions in “Hungry Caterpillar?” Like this work, they meld text and illustration into a product aimed at delighting children. That’s really the only metric worth discussing I think. Esther’s stands shoulder to shoulder with its paper inspirations, even before it ups the ante by integrating interactivity. While I wouldn’t say I found it engaging, I did get Sparks of Joy watching my imaginary companion’s delighted introduction to IF.
This review was brought to you by the word ‘delight.’
Played: 10/6/22
Playtime: 10min, finished.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? Maybe to share with grandkids WAAAAAAAY down the road
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Don't Make Me Adult!, November 28, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This is a deeply adult work, and I don’t mean in the sense of “tee hee nudity and devil worship.” I mean actual experiences and challenges relevant to actual adults. You are a digital artist working in a near-future digital art gallery. It's kind of an office drama, and it is crackerjack. The lived in setting of the office, the casual jargon-filled interactions, the constant tension between satisfying your creative urges and getting the job done, the highly specific triumphs and failures that are impenetrable to outsiders. All of this is painted so crisply, so matter-of-factly it is instantly immersive.
The characters in the workplace similarly feel organic. Over time you get enough background to establish with certainty why they are in the business they’re in, and where they are satisfied or dissatisfied with the work. It is insanely lived in. No notes! It also makes the crucial decision to effortlessly establish that it is these common intellectual and artistic passions that provide a baseline attraction, not “ooh, hotty!”
It is all so satisfyingly subtle. The piece builds attraction through dry academic texts and deeply technical dayjob project work, so that when the inevitable “wow those bike shorts” injects it feels like the involuntary chemical reaction it is - as much a result of what came before as “wait, humans can just be horny.” Now I can’t decide how much this resonated for me because I happen to ALSO be deeply interested in the digital issues the protagonist and 'love' interest are. (Which by the way, loved every single detail of the future corporate/online/cultural world building. There is a special place in my heart for (Spoiler - click to show)The Handmaid’s Tale video game being used to hawk makeup) Would someone less fascinated by these topics find this as compelling? Dunno, irrelevant to my experience!
The interactive choices on display here were similarly just perfect. You were choosing small, harmless(?) actions, so small they often didn’t register as choices in the sense of steering the game. The writing in the choices was laser precise - it was clear WHAT you were doing, but the game steered super wide of WHY. Are you flirting up to a tittilating line? Filled with shame? Actively looking for something new? Lying to yourself about your motivations? Only rarely did the game weigh in on any of that, mostly that was between you and your mouse. What a powerfully immersive choice that is, a fragile illusion you are creating that is so easily dispelled by incautious word choice. AP almost never cracked.
I’m gushing here. 3/4 the way through I was already crowning this Transcendent in my head. I was anticipating equal subtlety all the way to the end, where my mental model of the protagonist and dramatically chosen world events collided in a natural and unpredictable way. I was positively crestfallen, when amidst the super slow and organic building of tension, I was abruptly confronted with a metagame choice: (Spoiler - click to show)do you pursue an affair, try to stay friends or cut off contact? This choice was so different than everything that came before: it was blunt and confrontive and shattering of carefully constructed character self-delusions. I could see a scenario where narratively this brutality could be justified in-story and even be rewarding, but that wasn’t the case here. I could similarly conceive the game jumping in and saying, ‘all that subtlety was self-deluding lies, because here’s the reality of all that weaseling.’ Which it kind of was? I needed more text for any of that to land, I’m afraid. Without that, all the work the game had done was discarded with inadequate compensation.
In the end, this was such an impactful design choice it eroded the Transcendental experience I was having. It redeemed somewhat when I reloaded and explored the alternatives, only to find (Spoiler - click to show)it didn’t change the ending! I’d already baked the character and it was gonna be what it was. Adultery is a choice you make for sure, but its not a choice ONLY you make. That was kinda cool. This is a top 5, maybe top 2 game for me. Its application of interactivity and world building was qualitatively more mature and nuanced than almost everything else so far. I wish that one thing didn’t undermine it right when I was soaring but it got me so high in the air, I had room to drop.
Also quick shout out to the phrase “using steamed baby carrots to expore her facial orifices.” That is now just endlessly echoing in my head behind everything I’m doing.
Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 1hr, 1 ending 3 different ways
Artistic/Technical rankings: Transcendent-/Seamless
Would Play Again? Yeah maybe, if I can get past the fear that I’ll destroy the butterfly by looking too close
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Welcome to Notwarts, November 28, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Old School Parser IF, like yr momma used to make! The setup is fun: a lazy wizard student trying to fake his way through finals to graduate from not-Hogwarts. Notwarts? Notwarts. He is 100% a not-Hufflepuff. (sidebar - Hufflepuff is totally the party house right? The other three houses are wrapping themselves around the axle with “evil returns” or whatever, these guys are doing keg stands and bong rips. That’s just canon.) It is super light in tone, puzzle solving and narrative. It’s components are consistently light in a satisfying way - no part seems out of place, it is a unified experience.
There are some really nice touches too. It has a components-based spell system, adding spell component quests (and often creative use of spells) to the puzzle tree. In particular it does what many satisfying puzzle IFs do: (Spoiler - click to show)require you to use an object or spell different ways for different puzzles. That is inherently more satisfying than one-and-done items that just take up pocket space after their only use. There are one-offs as well, to be clear, but I always appreciate the effort when they’re not ALL that way.
The implementation is solid - no glaring bugs, lots of scenery to examine with short, amusing blurbs. Not a huge map, but not cramped either. A character-based hint system that’s a step up from mimesis-breaking commands or menus. It makes some smart gameplay choices too, for example restocking expendables automatically rather than having you slog across the map to replenish every time. The NPC conversation menu tree is effective (and snappy!) and often context aware, adding discussion options as you learn about them. It really is a very complete experience.
So why does it peak at Sparks of Joy and not into Engaging? There are some text burrs to be sure. One spell’s description explicitly notes it will only work on (Spoiler - click to show)people of lesser intelligence then proceeds to work on a character that does not answer that description. The Hinting Jinn who is your sometime companion will randomly beam into the room to say ‘hi’. Some of his ‘arrival’ and ‘present’ text bump against each other in weird ways. Characters will still try to give you things you’ve already got, and seemingly not remember they gave them. The game sometimes thinks you have expendables you have, well, expended. These kinds of things happen often enough that it is notable without interfering in anything. Unlike other Notably Buggy entries though, these present as really minor - either because the light tone of the text lets them slip past without fanfare, or because it does SO much without these glitches that they are diluted with volume. I think I have to split the difference and round up here. Its not mostly seamless, its not, but its Notable bugs somehow intrude less.
That’s kind of dodging the question though. The above paragraph asked about Artistic Response, and answered Technical Intrusiveness. Notwarts just seemed to be missing something. There was a soucance of wit in the text but it was a light sprinkling, not a consistent feature. The setting, for all its interesting map was word-rendered kind of lacklusterly. There is nothing of those crane shots in Harry Potter that pan over the magical majesty of the dining hall, or the slippery stones of the underground rivers. Notwarts is kind of low rent that way.
Hogwarts has classrooms suffused with elaborate antique woodwork, rough hewn stone, iron candelabras and a palpable sense of ancient mystery. Notwarts has a bunch of desks in front of a chalkboard. Hogwarts has sumptuous holiday feasts, magically preparing themselves on the table in a festival atmosphere. Notwarts has an overworked gnome in a cramped kitchen making sandwiches. Now this is actually an amusing contrast, but the text does not sufficiently mine it for laughs, just lets it lay there. I don’t want to imply it was free of humourous Sparks, it definitely was not. The puzzles were fun, the tone was pleasant. But it couldn’t crest into Engaging because it didn’t draw me in. I don’t need Notwarts to be Hogwarts. I actually kind of like that it isn’t. But I would like to enjoy how MUCH it isn’t a good deal more.
This is a rock solid entry I enjoyed spending time with. That’s cool, right?
Played: 10/31/22
Playtime: 2hrs, almost finished, 74/93 pts, 7 achievements
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable rounding up to Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Best Futility Simulator Ever, November 28, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
There is no real graphical flourish to this work, little interactivity, and the few puzzles you need to solve there are no clues to decode to succeed, making it effectively random. I think I have complained about all of these things in other reviews. But here, my reaction was exactly opposed – I unreservedly loved it. The intro text probably is the key to this. It sets the stage with the fruitless grind of the work, the dieing optimism, the modest yet still out of reach goals, and does so unsentimentally and resignedly. Before you know it, you are knocking on doors, really just clicking house numbers, one after another until the time runs out.
And oh my god the neighbors. Many are just not home, and sometimes the text makes it clear that’s a good thing. When they are home, each is uniquely and specifically unhappy to see you, but you still have to engage. Sometimes you inadvertently say the right thing, sometimes you say exactly the wrong thing and they slam the door. It's not that you don’t have control (it seems), it's that you have no way of knowing what motivates or sets people off so you take your best shot. And it's thrilling when it works, and self-recriminations and if-onlys when it doesn’t. But, still gotta get to the next door and do it all over again.
I am kind of in awe at how finely calibrated the game is. Its individual interactions are either disappointingly abrupt, or whirwind verbal fencing matches, but every encounter is exactly the length it needs to be. Neither victory nor defeat is dwelled on, because on to the next. A quick click washes the previous encounter away and is charged with promise of the next one. A pee break if you’re lucky, then your shift ends at what feels like the narratively perfect point, leaving you with regret over the houses you didn’t get to. Text and screen organization within and between encounters pace every step of this experience just so. Until its unceremonious ending, you simultaneously feel “this shift just keeps going” and “I need more time.”
“A Community Organizing Simulator” is its subtitle. Before you start, you would probably be thinking "it's funny because it's too small a game to be a simulator." After you’ve played, including that chef’s kiss of a denouement, you’re definitely thinking, "OMG IT IS THE MOST ACCURATE SIMULATOR EVER MADE." I am saying that this work marries IF interactivity to its subject matter so thoroughly and precisely it is what most aspire to when they talk about form-function synergy.
Frankly, I am only resisting calling this Transcendent due to my suspicion that my recent grass-roots volunteer experiences may be coloring my reaction. Thanks Lauren?
Played: 10/10/22
Playtime: 15min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaged/Seamless
Would Play Again? Sadly, living it
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Murder Most Sweet, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
So right out of the gate, I knew I wanted good things for this game. After the legally mandated Noir-first-sentence-about-rain, and before anything else, it called me a “Bubble Gumshoe.” The noise I made in the privacy of my own home you have no choice but to call laughter because you didn’t hear it. This entry committed to the bit without question. If you have a low sugar or pun tolerance, this is not the game for you.
Gameplay itself is infrequently searching 6 or 7 locations for clues, but mostly interviewing 4 maybe 5 NPCs depending on how you score it. Then trying to piece together additional things to ask others based on the answers. Cycle through NPCs until ready to Accuse. The dialogue and character business is bizarre and fun, like the Toblerone who smokes candy cigarettes without arms. Because, y’know, no arm candy. (badoom-CH) It was fun for a while poking at characters to see what they could answer and how, and often rewarding to do so.
But then there was a turn. When the topic pool started to dry up, you would cycle through, hear the same things again and get nothing new. Then, the fact that all NPCs use the same, generic, “is no reply” when you ask something they don’t know starts to grate. Searching for clues in unimplemented nouns starts to grate. Asking the owner of a candy strip club about their VIP Lounge and having them say “I wouldn’t know about that” is just lolwut? I mean if not you, who WOULD know? Asking a character about the wedding they JUST TOLD YOU ABOUT and having them give no answer… you get it. I got stuck and I redirected my humiliation to anger at the NPCs.
Mystery IF has a big issue to address, what do you do with insufficiently clever players? Tonight, I will be playing the part of the Insufficiently Clever. Y’know, strictly as a public service. If the mystery hinges on the player asking one specific thing to one specific NPC, you have to at least give a thought to your humble servant who just won’t think of it. The tried and true brute force solution is a hint system, either metagame or in-story (Donut could have admirably served this purpose.) Walkthroughs are even MORE brute force, also established technologies. More elegantly, I recently read some insanely well-thought-out RPG advice that proposed always leaving three clues to every mystery story chokepoint. If you want to get super fancy, design multiple paths with intersecting information chokepoints, each with their own trio of entries! The idea being much harder to miss 3 clues than just one. It seems like there could even be some kind of ‘player not making progress’ algorithm out there, just waiting to be discovered.
This is relevant because there is no conceit so amusing, no joke so funny, that it can survive the self-hating stench of player failure. I’m going to head off what you probably all see coming as a deep digression into “what is a game, and can there be success without failure?” Instead let me pivot to advocating for the Insufficiently Clever who are totally not me. Humans forget nothing so quickly as kind service rendered to them. For players that don’t need the hints, they never need encounter them and can enjoy your game as designed. For the IC, your timely help will quickly fade into the delusion of ‘oh yeah, I’da got that’ and they will end up appreciating it as well! Its really win-win for you, the game author.
So yeah, Sparks of Joy right from the start. And while a not a bug, spinning with no way out was an intrusive break into the experience. Speaking for a friend. Ok, review over, the rest of you can go. Author, can you hang on for a sec?
…
Hey, if you did plant 3 clues and I missed all of them, can we not tell the others? Please?
Played: 11/1/22
Playtime: 1hr, randomly accused wrong candy, failed. Allegedly.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusively Unhelpful
Would Play Again? Maybe with a hint system?
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Well I Did!, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Yeah, it’s a maze (maybe procedurally generated?). A very thin dystopia skin on top of a maze. It’s a fair play maze, it graphed on graph paper exactly as you’d expect. Along the way, there is NPC interaction, (limited), items to pick up, a few unique scenery or locations and many more repeated ones, a series of heckling message scroll boards to read. Other than the clear motivation to escape the maze, there wasn’t much in the way of guidance or story. Intellectually, I think I kind of liked that about it. There was stuff, samey rooms, text to read but it was all ancillary to just getting out. If you did more with the stuff there, great. If not, just fine too.
I got the sense that maybe there were a few second level puzzles to suss out, particularly with the message boards. My end stats showed there was at least one big thing I could have accomplished before escaping but didn’t. In fact it showed a whole series of scores, some of which I achieved others I did not. Even the ones I achieved, it was fully without prompting by the game. I just did them, then turns out there was a score involved. That was kind of subversively fun, too. But all that fun was cold, meta disassociated fun. Emotionally there was nothing, presumedly deliberately so.
Without a story, humor or character hook of any kind, you’re really just wandering around, drawing on graph paper, and picking up minimally rendered items to no clear end. Yeah I played with some items just for fun, and game did enable me to do so to its credit, but it was just killing time. My perverse perseverance pushed me through to the end, but if at any time the game crashed I could have just shrugged and not restarted. Only one bug, error message “runtime error p50, empty menu list” I believe, but it didn’t stop the game. Or break any mimesis or even jar the experience. Just kept walking and mapping.
This was really a poster child for Mechanical execution. There is a place for this of course. Soduko still has its fans, picture puzzles relax millions of folks. Find-a-words, pencil mazes, all of that. A solid implementation in that category if that’s for you.
Played: 10/9/22
Playtime: 1.25hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Smokey Burny OH MY GOD I'M NO GOOD AT WORDPLAY, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Wordplay games are so cool. They marry the math and lateral logic of abstract puzzles with the messiness and context of human language. But they also have a slightly uphill climb, in that they explicitly ask the player to break the mimesis of language and consider problem solving at more of a remove. LKLJJ crucially engages this problem the best way possible, playfully and winkingly. The setup is absurdist beat poetry in the best possible way that just catapults you into an extended, lightly-geographic wordplay puzzle.
From there it is all about rhyming placenames with mostly clever cause and effect phrases. The Sparks of Joy were flying so fast and furious it was like a metal grinder, or a daycare class dancing with sparklers. The game is quite generous with problem solving helpers, from a codebreaker feedback item, a limited use “auto solve” item you can earn, a log of useful-just-not-now solutions, options to close off branches when exhausted, and hints. Most of them tunable to personal challenge/handholding preferences. Its a quite impressive array of tools that shows an understanding of the possible sticking points in its loose tale.
The absurdist milieu is a two edged sword. On the one hand it would be almost impossible to facilitate this kind of rhyming wordplay without it. Conversely, it sets up a universe where words and actions may not behave the way you expect them to, or even think of. The tools above crucially help close that potential gap. As does the author’s completely winning use of language. I can’t even imagine the claustrophobic development garret, overrun with yellow-sticky rhymes, linked with yarn like a Qanon war room. The effort to create puzzles, solutions, and locations that all alliteratively rhyme, AND to accommodate snarky responses to guesses that don’t solve the puzzle. Respect.
Its not completely seamless. The game sets a very high standard on good rhymes so you are trained to ignore imperfect rhymes and when they show up, it jars. There are also one or two prompts that don’t adhere to the two-word descriptions standardized everywhere else. Its not unfair, in that you can deduce the two-word pair from context. The problem is, its not obvious you need to do that, given the standard set throughout the game. Yeah, I’m reporting a puzzle that flummoxed me. Those all feel like quibbles though, especially as the helper tools readily power you past them.
LKLJJ is a winning, extended puzzle set in a hilariously Dada world of clever wordplay. So many Sparks I might ignite. Why not engaging? I think the arbitrariness that is part of its joy has a side effect: there is no continuity thread that pulls you back for “oh I gotta know what happens next.” It kinda doesn’t matter what happens next. Its going to be fun and amusing, no doubt, but I could pick it up tomorrow or next month, whenever I want my next fix. This is not a lick on the game - it does exactly what it wants really, really well. It’s like a book of crossword puzzles - not a page turner you can’t put down, but ready to pick up anytime you want a dose of joy in your life. Assuming you can support a metaphor where crossword puzzles are joyful.
Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete, score 29
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Will be unable not to
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Apocalypse Road, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I really dig the Texture “drag and drop” interface, that is what I’ve learned. It feels like you are connecting ideas more organically than a cold click-one-or-other selection (looking at you, Twine). It also seems to open more authorial possibilities by contrasting the connecting ideas, or conveying information about what ideas should be connected (or can’t!) for story purposes.
This story is well-served by the user paradigm. Its an intriguingly imprecise apocalypse tale, focusing on one woman’s reactions in face of impending doom. As she makes her way through a nicely-specific Western Pennsylvania, the interactivity gives us personal and global background and character beats whose ordering and selection (or not) allow the player to collaborate in fleshing out. The whole thing is packed with specific details that really bring the setting and characters to life. It is a short game, but allows multiple endings directly impacted by player choices, and those choices have everything to do with how the player wants to define the character. This is Sparky.
The only unfortunate note, and for me it was an impactful one, was that one ending was arbitrary and unsatisfying and it was the first one I got. It lowered expectations so much for me, that subsequent playthroughs carried a shadow over them. That particular ending was ALSO noteworthy in that the background setting work it did (and was unavailable on other paths) was captivating. I could envision a version where the lead up perhaps leaned thematically more into the ending provided, but I didn’t detect that.
That is unfortunate, because the endings I achieved after that were so much more satisfying and complete. A key attraction to Apocalypse stories is the “what would I do?” question. Here, by providing just the right amount of specifics and back story, the better endings were exploring variations of “what do I want the protagonist to do”? That there were multiple choices leading to different conclusions, and that they still felt consistent with both player choices and the overarching narrative felt really cool. It feels ungenerous to drag down the score due to one possible path. Is a work as good as its best moment? Or as bad as its worst? Or some work-specific function of them all? I dunno man, I’m just winging it.
Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 20min, multiple runs, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
I reference this work in another review. Fair's fair, crosslink to US Route 160.
Emotional Cruise Control, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Thanks to a quirk of the randomizer (also known as “randomness”) I reviewed this uncomfortably close to Chase the Sun. I say uncomfortable because there are enough common superficial details it bends my brain to try and compare them, and I really don’t want to. (Spoiler - click to show)Two Runaway brides fleeing a union their communities endorse but their own heart denies. Two solo roadtrips through unpopulated stretches of road. Strong supernatural elements. Strong religious influence on the narrative. A looping ending, allowing you to explore different paths, but strongly linear outside a few key choices. A common abrupt car crash ending. Um, wedding dress still on.
That’s reductive isn’t it? It feels super reductive. Especially because notwithstanding my manipulative list above, the two are different in the ways that matter most: themes, tone and impact. I hope I got it out of my system above, US Route 160 deserves its stand-alone focus.
This is a very dark work. The mood is overwhelmingly oppressive and hopeless, even before the story starts unfolding. I am put in the mind of a writing exercise from decades ago, where the class was asked to convey someone’s mood only through scene description. 160 would have aced that assignment. Words are used like blunt weapons to convey the desperation of the protagonist. It is often effective but… ends up being a bit one-note. That note is really strong and crescendic (c’mon that’s totally a word, no need to look it up), but without variation around it, it starts losing its punch. It is not helped by some unfortunate grammar or spelling which breaks the spell. One that stood out was (paraphrase) “ultraviolence soothed her skin” Now I’m pretty sure from context, that was supposed to be Ultraviolet. If not it was jarring for different, word choice reasons. And yet elsewhere I was gifted with the phrase “corset of lies” which I unreservedly love in and out of context.
Besides the rhythm of the text itself, the main weapon in its mostly linear runtime is dramatic text pacing. 160 doubles down by using both interactivity and more traditional sentence/paragraph structure to regulate its cadence. Like the above, I think this is done so pervasively that the effect becomes muted by the end. It too would benefit from some variation in intensity and application.
The story being told is Tragic in the colloquial (not Greek Drama) sense. The protagonist’s life as told through flashback is heartbreaking. Their western journey is fraught with the rubble of those ancient battle scars. It is pleasantly surprising to me then, given the relative homogeneity of tone, that the three endings I found were so wildly different from each other and the rest of the piece. One managed to find a whole new level of tragic, one was melancholy and slightly …hopeful seems too strong but that’s all I’ve got, and one was delightfully ambiguous. But only one of them felt like a legitimate result of player choice, the others were kind of arbitrary given the choices that brought you there.
It feels …bad… to talk about “Sparks of Joy” for this piece, how about “Sparks of Appreciation?” When the tone worked it really worked, and there were some excellent turns of phrase. And that one ambiguous ending had me smiling in its audacity. But those were counterbalanced by the unremitting ambience, occasional format or word choice clunks, and some arbitrary-feeling endings.
So, to compare to Chase the Sun… godDAMNit brain!
Played: 10/18/22
Playtime: 40min, 3 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive (lack of variation)
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Heartbreak Simulator, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This one crawled into my head a bit.
IWYWD is a linear character study, where the character in question is a relationship in intensive care. I nearly got bounced off the first page, for what I think was an unintended artifact? The intro screen starts with a dedication to the heartbroken, then flashes the title. Yes. (paraphrase) “to those recovering from heartbreak: I wish you were dead.” Wow, author, just wow. I say with some confidence that this was unintended.
The entire game is a dialogue between the player/protagonist and their lover. (Spoiler - click to show)The player is trying to break up. There is so much I feel I want to say about this entry I can’t even get two sentences in without plummeting into the spoiler pool.
The dialogue is overflowing with very sincere emotion, and hurt, and history. It’s achingly cringy how unprotected the two characters are and I mean that in the most laudatory way. I found the dialogue very naturalistic, which is really the only way this could work. As a modern man, I have been relentlessly taught to flee screaming from this level of emotional honesty. Even the slightest crack in believability would have been an excuse to bolt for the exit. No such luck. I think it was this naked honesty that drew me in so quickly where other linear studies were less successful. In the end, it is a tribute to the writing, pure and simple. Both the character voices, and the specific and compelling shared history that emerges as the game progresses.
It is a linear narrative, though it appears you can make impactful dialogue choices. The act of making those choices felt like a torturous tradeoff of honoring the truth and honestly wanting to minimize pain. I cannot recall a single instance of inelegant post-choice dialogue - even when, as is definitely true in life, what you try to say has nowhere near the effect you intend. God this game is so smart about fraught emotional conversations.
The author makes another important choice, that I’m only mostly aligned with. The dialogue plays on a timer. Meaning the dialogue, hurt and emotional and unsteady, comes completely on its own pace, impervious to the wants of the player. This is such a smart choice. It forces the player to ‘listen’ rather than mash buttons to get to their next choice. When it works, it paradoxically rejects player input, and the effect is MORE INTERACTIVITY. My head is exploding here. It also allows the author to pace the dialogue precisely for effect. There was one sequence burned into my head in response to a yes or no question:
(Spoiler - click to show)
I don’t –
No.
I don’t know.
Reading my non-paced recreation of it you may be unimpressed (you heartless bastard). But how it was revealed on the screen in fits and starts conveyed the pain of the speaker like a bullet to the heart.
Now, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes the pacing doesn’t quite ring true, or is perhaps clumsy in a way that doesn’t reinforce the dialogue. Also, when there is more than a screen’s worth of dialogue, the page does not autoscroll, ultimately forcing the player to interact in a way that defeats the effect a bit. An auto-scroll functionality would have been so much better here. There is a bit of backstory rationing too - two specific plot points get kind of headfaked in one direction (a not very satisfying one) only to be revealed as something much more real, nuanced and uncomfortable. One of those reveals felt at odds with the carefully crafted player/protagonist alignment. The protagonist clearly knows the history, a sudden reveal to the player disconnects them temporarily. I should also mention that while I found the dialogue crackling, there were some narrative descriptions that suffer word choice. A teardrop ‘exploded’, something else was ‘infected’, a second pass editing could have buffed those burrs out.
Not perfect, but between the dialogue and the story choices those quibbles kind of fade away. And that ending. (Spoiler - click to show)It masterfully recontextualizes the “Play Again?” trope as endlessly revisiting what-I-shoulda-said in our most heart-wrenching, emotional Monday morning quarterbacking. Kidding ourselves that all we needed were better words to have made it go any differently.
For me, the ending cemented it as a Transcendent game. Sofia created and conveyed a real and insanely wracking scenario, then used interactive tools to tremendous effect, pacing dialogue for dramatic impact and mimesis and integrating the player directly into the narrative. God do I not want to play it again.
Played: 10/16/22
Playtime: 30min playtime, more than twice that thinking about it
Artistic/Technical rankings: Transcendent/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I’d have to be made of much sterner stuff. But if I’d just said…
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Press 6 for Inappropriate Laughter, November 27, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
The other day, I was just kind of lounging on my couch thinking “Y’know what I could go for? An automated phone service simulator! Something that really captures the tension and mystery of navigating an audio menu!” Of course I wasn’t thinking that. No one has, ever. And yet TPEEP1 (lol, what?) comes along and says “maybe you should!”
This is a quick play. It models a supernatural/emotional support line that is no better at customer service than your cable company. This thing carries off an amazing balancing act, wringing dry chuckles from a first impersonal then somehow VERY personal bureaucracy exacerbating an emotional spiral. See, you read that sentence, and you’re like “what kind of sociopath would get chuckles out of that?” This is the dark alchemy TPEEP1 pulls off.
As you navigate the menu, and there are quite a few paths through, the responses get increasingly personal, unhelpful and belligerent in a somehow hilarious way. The story is almost completely conveyed in phone menu options, both the text of the option and what is an option, which itself is fun and unexpected. My first few paths were giddy with surprise.
But as I navigated a few different paths, there was a common thread that struck me. Somehow, TPEEP1 (yeah, I’m now addicted to squeezing that abbreviation in as often as I can) pulled away from committing to its own bit. Despite presenting menus begging to build on the conceit, instead you cycle through duplicated “no, repeat” responses, and not in a compellingly, thematically resonant way. There are two possible explanations I can think of off the top of my head. Either this was an entry that was pressed on submission deadline, or the impulse was to not milk the joke. “Brevity is the soul of wit” is a bedrock pearl of wisdom, no doubt. To this I say fie! A joke should be as long as it needs to be and no longer. These could be longer! If deadline-bound, should the author decide to expand the entry, I would gladly pick it up again to see where it went.
A note on presentation, though let me say nothing here figures into the scoring as I am speculating on alternate presentations which isn’t fair to the game. I was put in the mind of a phone menu mini-game in Kentucky Route Zero a compellingly odd, uneven and fabulous commercial graphical adventure. In its implementation, you are confronted with a desktop phone, and have to mechanically navigate the audio menu. This is maybe the first Texture game (an engine I am a normally a fan of) that doesn’t really benefit from its drag and drop mechanism. An actual number pad input would have been stronger here, as would an audio ‘beep.’ End of tangential digression which, if you have seen my other reviews, you have probably become pretty inured to by now.
So that’s where I land: TPEEP1 elicits Sparks of Joy, Seamlessly implemented, but wishing it would more fully embrace its strengths.
TPEEP1.
Played: 10/29/22
Playtime: 15min, 6 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? If expanded, sure!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
TPEEP1.
Form, Meet Function, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Of course I’m not the first to observe that interactivity doesn’t have to mean story branching. Interactivity in linear stories can accomplish at least two things: 1) it can invest the player in the protagonist more deeply than raw text and 2) it can carefully manage the pacing of the text to enhance emotional effect. I am saying this to the population that least needs this explained.
Glimmer is very much a short, linear study of depression and to varying degrees attempts both of the above. Because the subject matter lends itself to spiraling introspection and lethargy, there was a particularly nice fit with form here. The player can dive into tangential mental rabbit holes. Scene changes are paced slowly, with small blocks of text where the act of interacting slows down the proceedings. The formula is subtly shifted as the narration proceeds, the interactive pace as much as the words conveying the protagonist's mindset. All of this displays a nicely deliberate marriage of form and function.
As far as protagonist investment, Glimmer didn’t quite get me there. Early game events were fairly dispassionate, showing the protagonist with flattened response to increasingly important events in their life. I understand the intention here, that the protagonist is increasingly withdrawn such that events do not register like they should. It seems that because we are introduced to this mental state before we have built empathy, there is an unnecessary hurdle to our investment. For me, I didn’t get over it until way later and was playing catchup to the narrative all the way to the end. Meaning when the protagonist had a subsequent shift I was also behind.
Stephen King (or was it Alan Moore?) famously said something to the effect of “Horror is seeing your neighbor dismembered through your bedroom window. Terror is when the killer notices you.” There’s gotta be an empathy/sympathy analog to that idea that seems relevant here. While I admire the precise pacing effect of the work, the killer did not see me, leaving me at a remove.
Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 15 min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Collaboration Across Time, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I love how broad the IF domain is, and in turn how foolish I was to think a two-column criteria could possibly cover that breadth. Here is the latest in my frequent review sub-series “What Do I Do With This?” I mean I am just jumping back into IF after 20+ years, cut me some slack! My parents didn’t teach ME to swim by throwing me in the deep end!
This is an experimental work, showcasing the (modern author's) "Stateful Narration" ideas. “Stateful Narration.” I, ah, ok so… hmm. Just play it then? Do I need to be checked out on the equipment first? Am I qualified to run this thing, let alone critically evaluate it? I infer this is an exercise in giving the reader ability to interject feelings and interpretations that the text will conform to naturally, but not fundamentally branch the narrative? That seemed to be my experience with it anyway. There were maybe 4 interactive entry points in the text. One felt pretty seamless, the other two pretty I guess ineffectual? The text effectively characterized my input as “faking it for my friends” which is legit narratively but felt too easy. The last one I think confounded the parser. I wasn’t trying to do that, but I wasn’t not either. I used the word ‘giddy’ and the text said “Who am I kidding? I’m very nervous. That’s why I’m digging into my fingers…” Feels like giddy connotes some level of nervous energy that compromised the answer? I dunno man, I get that this was a unique experimentation slash proof of concept, I hope the author is getting useful data out of this! Let me retreat to something I’m more comfortable with, how’d the narrative go?
My most memorable exposure to mixing Great Author works with contemporary augmentation was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. My overriding impression there was that the original work was SO much better written than the new stuff. Notwithstanding the author’s bold attempt to match voice, it was nevertheless painfully obvious where the stitch lines were. LT instead takes the tack of treating the original text AS original text, then putting narrative around it that resonates with the story. It seems unfair to engage the Chekov portion of the narrative, so I’ll just focus on the contemporary wrapper.
It was good! It mirrored and contrasted Chekov’s stream of consciousness exploration in a fun way, but specific to our modern characters. The interactivity didn’t impose much on that path, and it built to a minor climax and amusing denouement. Even discounting Chekov, there were Sparks of Joy in the gentle mirroring. 3 out of 4 interactive instances were pretty ok, that’s a ‘C’ I guess? So Notably Intrusive? I’m pot committed to this criteria by now, so I guess that’s where I land, but hard to believe rating this thing is even close to the point of it.
Also, Chekov was a pretty good writer, huh?
Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 15min, twice
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable
Would Play Again? I mean I guess I would if my data is helping.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
*Blank Stare, Mouth Agape*, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
And now for my first review sub-sub-series of my review sub-series “What Do I Do With This?” This review sub-sub-series is entitled “What in the Name of a Gentle and Loving God Do I Do With This, It’s Full of Stars, the Horror, the Horror, Rosebud.”
It opens on an 80’s eight-bit graphics rendition of a snowbound station of some sort, with chunky 80’s graphics font. It’s kind of endearing, but quickly becomes surreal, depending on the branch taken.
My first playthrough, I got a quick one room drama of sex and violence over whether one character can leave another. Motivations were only loosely sketched, it was more about the physicality of the interactions. There was little investment in anything going on, Mechanical at best. But oh, that lonely, isolated building took on a Lynchian aspect as the actions described behind the closed door were fleshy and concussive. The impassive snowy facade seemed strained, somehow barely holding its bland, 8-bit face against the raw passions and furies within.
My second playthrough, boy did I step through the looking glass. Making a different choice on how to ‘restrain’ the second character, led to what was likely (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist slowly dying of exposure. This playthrough was so much longer. No less mechanical, mind, but infinitely weirder. There are choices to make, and lots of text to read, but to call it stream of consciousness is like calling Hurricane Ida a ‘brisk blow.’ This was a deluge of consciousness, rapid fire word play, and mental white noise. (Spoiler - click to show)Probably all in the protagonists’ mind as their brain freezes them to death?
Y’know how most people who smoke pot are giggly and mellow, but there’s always that one person who gets super uncomfortable, a little paranoid, and loses all patience with the giggly mellow people around them? I felt like I was that poor buzzkill dude that tried to smoke in good faith and peer pressure, but just totally skunked it for everyone. NO, I CAN’T TASTE COLORS, WHY ARE YOU ALL LAUGHING SO SHRILL??
It didn’t work for me as poetry, as paradox, as surrealism, as Dada, it just didn’t work. In fact it Bounced me so hard I started having a mild panic attack mid-game trying to figure out how I was going to deal with this in a review. I’M STILL WORKING THAT OUT! And that whole time I’m flailing through that crisis of confidence? That damned 8-bit snowbound station is staring at me with its single darkened-window eye (weirdly not the door or lit window), scornfully bemused by both my and the protagonist’s shared sufferings. It just loomed there, quietly displaying its imperviousness to our pain, rather than invite us back inside.
I played it twice more, but at that point, I think I had seen the extremes and these felt … limper? There was another violent episode, and a 4th wall breaking unwinding-music-box kind of ending, but neither had the power of the first two. The station was just a picture. Yeah, this one Bounced me hard. That said, it wedded some truly bonkers narrative experiments that had no business being together into a tottering Frankenstein of mismatched parts. Most especially that 8-bit picture. The result was really singular. It certainly provoked a reaction from me.
:
Played: 11/2/22
Playtime: 15min, 4 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Bouncy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, why would I do that to myself?
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
The Beast is YOU, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
10 word summary: “Your community doesn’t like you for superficial reasons, run away!”
This is a simple, short game. You give your character a name and favorite color(?) which are dutifully repeated back to you later in the text but don’t seem to serve any narrative purpose. This kind of thing is often used to nudge the player to invest in the protagonist, but does it work? Maybe in the early days of IF, but nowadays with the customization available in video games the bar is much higher than two traits, one of which is any random string of characters. Beyond our input, the only additional character fact we are given is the reason for their self-imposed exile so notwithstanding customization, the protagonist ends up being a bit of a blank slate.
The game has a pleasant presentation - a moody forest scene with an appropriate wildlife sonic backdrop. That kind of worked, but the author set a challenge for themself by using artwork dark on the left and light on the right. Meaning the choice of overlaid text color has to be read across the entire screen. The right side of the screen was notably harder to read than the left. They also included a health/status box that unfortunately was too small for the information it wanted to hold! Text often disappeared beneath box boundaries making its utility questionable.
There were writing issues throughout the piece. Descriptions that only kind of worked like “trees bend to create a path of sunshine” Consecutive sentences that start with the word ‘however.’ Descriptions that were insufficient to understand the stakes like “room covered in glass” which from context we later realize should have been “room covered in glass shards.” Those are notably different mental images! There are even descriptions that don’t parse without way too much work like “Luckily the metal was sharp to an entrance punched into this strange metal wreckage.” Proof reader feedback could have addressed a lot of this.
Gameplay was fairly limited, and flouted convention in a key way that made it harder. It was a linear affair first playthrough, the only options were to press forward and every now and then go back. You had health and stamina stats, but were never presented with an option to manage them so just for tension then? However, linearity is not uncommon in IF, but that choice really puts all the Engagement burden on the text and narrative. However here between the writing, the narrow goal (and background) which was crying for but never received explication, and the extreme brevity there wasn’t much opportunity to elevate the forest/site exploration quest. (See, you thought I was being too nitpicky. Dual use of ‘however’ is offputting, right?)
Then there was a wild design choice. After the first runthrough, I was like “I didn’t get to make any choices, dafug?” So next runthrough, I took the only alternate choices the game made available, to go BACK in certain spots. In most IF, if you start in Room A and go north, the assumption is south from Room B gets you back to A. “Ho, ho! Not so fast!” saysTtFwtB. Going back unlocks new paths - not only does it take you in a new direction, there is actually no way to retrace your steps! Thematically doesn’t seem to have any justification (unless its saying ‘you can’t go home again’ just saying it super super low key) and a weird choice when “Left and Right” were still available. When you go back, a few other paths open up to you, and those are marginally less linear. They are some consequential choices that aren’t completely arbitrary, but not super well laid out either. Only one path seemed to offer one choice to manage your health/stamina. And two of them felt kind of samey: find cabin, interact with female head of household.
It was light and quick, but didn’t provide enough meat to really chew into. It’s a reasonable framework to layer a deeper narrative and more fleshed out gameplay onto. Never breached beyond Mechanical for me, unless Head Scratching over Design Choices counts.
Played: 11/7/22
Playtime: 15min, 2 survived, 1 died
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Kvetching Hour, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This work feels more incomplete than the ones I’ve reviewed to date. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but it feels like the work of someone at the front end of their authorship. There are gaps kind of across the board: in concept, narrative, use of interactivity and coding. Everyone that writes has been here, where ideas are clamoring to get out, but the tools are still blunt and clumsy. Using them is the only way to hone!
Conceptually, the setting is an interesting (fuedal?) Japanese, military magic/mutant exploitation jam. Depending on choices, you get more or less of the background and all of it is loosely sketched. The looseness is not a problem per se. Sometimes you accomplish more with detailed hints that allow the reader to do some mental lifting to fill in the gaps. The danger is that if the reader lifts TOO much, and you subsequently contradict their mental image it is jarring. The trick is knowing where to proscribe and where to sketch. For me, the use of swords and historical Japanese vocabulary crashed in my head once guns were mentioned (but never employed?) Or when a prominent character’s name was revealed as (Spoiler - click to show)“Charlie.”
Narratively, the protagonist is initially presented as resisting the call, only to then acquiesce. Of course, this Campbellian Construct is deeply ingrained in popular storytelling. But it isn’t free. In particular, the Refusal is the least interesting part of the Journey and really requires some selling by the author. I mean, we WANT the adventure. The longer and less convincingly the protagonist resists, the more the reader rejects them. Conversely, if their acceptance does not organically refute this refusal, the character comes across as petulant which is not endearing either. There are other unsatisfying narrative choices, like the protagonist having exactly the tools needed in the moment, without foreshadowing or establishing shots. Again, tone could help sell this, but not here.
Interactivity is all but missing. I think there is exactly one narratively important choice the player can make, and one of the alternatives is unattractive and unsatisfying. Instead there are a series of choices presented that at best provide more backstory and at worst have no impact on the narrative at all. Now there are a lot of ways to use interactivity: to align the reader with protagonist, to give the player agency in the narrative, to provide mental and emotional puzzles to grapple with. None of these are at play here. It devolves to page turning, which effectively shines a brighter light on the Concept and Narrative.
Technically, there is a bug where one potentially impactful decision puts the game is a stuck state without resolution. (Spoiler - click to show)If you attempt to buy a slave (to save their life presumedly), you get stuck on a page with a “markup contains mistake, need usable code right of =” error. Elsewhere, a potential choice seems unimplemented and stalls until you make a different choice. With a game this small and linear, it is hard to understand how playtesting the entire decision tree was not done before release.
I honor the ambition of the effort. As a player, this is not engaging, but as a first step there is plenty to learn from and build on.
Played: 10/13/22
Playtime: 15 minutes, multiple playthroughs, 2 endings, 1 game ending bug
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Cancer Cure, the Game, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I sometimes forget about pure puzzle IFs. I do a range of paper puzzles, but tend to be biased to think of IF as narrative, and so scratch different itches. Which is kind of wild, because ‘classic’ IF are so much more puzzle than narrative. Is the narrative framework, however rich or thin, really that important to the experience? Intellectually, shouldn’t have to be, but emotionally I guess it is for me. We are a species of storytellers and some of our most popular media suggests the stories don’t need to be that sophisticated or even novel. Sick burn, culture!
Now, I do like logic puzzles, but the ones that engage me are ones that jump straight to application of deduction and/or knowledge. It is a fair point that no-rules puzzles do in fact require this, they just require the additional prerequisite step of discovering the rules as you go. Puzzles don’t need frameworks of wordplay, trivia knowledge, spatial cues. Nor do they demand hint systems, either buried in clues and prompts or to the side as a reference for the stuck. Cure for cancer is famously a puzzle with no clues, prompts or hint system.
So what does this have to do with Tower? The game is a no clues/no rules/no hints puzzle. You need to divine the rules from literally nothing but experimentation. Like cancer research! It also seems to change its rules with every level (of the tower, presumedly?) It seems to deliberately provide no fail feedback other than the fact of the fail, meaning it becomes a guess-the-verb, guess-the-rules exercise. Your enjoyment will depend directly on 1) how energizing you find that sort of thing and 2) how mentally nimble you are to not drive into a mental cul-de-sac of ‘no idea what’s left to try.’
I can’t tell if the game is buggy or just obstinate in that it doesn’t always give you immediate feedback even with success. For review purposes, I am treating both those cases as Bug - either coding or psychological. In an early notable instance I left a room where I tried something to no apparent success, only to return later and see, “Wow, I guess it did work after all.” Objects have names you recognize, but don’t really behave like their real world counterparts. Autonomous objects disappear from your sight, rather than move through observable space. Reasonably expected functions of everyday objects don’t work. To the point where their names are just familiar sequences of letters whose behavior is its own puzzle. Continued failure is frustrating, and achieving brute force solutions to seemingly arbitrary puzzles provides more “sure, I guess” than cathartic rush.
If opaque, experimentation-type puzzles are your jam I would recommend you join the fight against cancer! If your schedule doesn’t allow that, Tower is for you. For me, a narrative justification would be one way to increase engagement. Medical research isn’t motivated by the super-opaque trial-and-error puzzle solving. Its getting the cure! Narratively, maybe it could be getting the treasure. Or freedom! Love Interest! Magical Rune that apocalyptically eliminates selfishness from the range of human behavior! Another way would be to craft clues/hints/experiment feedback to learn more than simple fact of success-or-fail with each experiment. Without either of those, its too Mechanical an exercise for me.
Played: 10/11/22
Playtime: 1.75hrs, 3 floors complete.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Notable
Would Play Again? Doubtful, not my kind of puzzle
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Make That Space Money, November 26, 2022I’m definitely being challenged with what even is IF. There is a good half hour setup narrative here, that adheres to conversational IF conventions. I’m not exactly sure what story effect the choices have, but they do allow you to establish the protagonist’s character. After a good amount of light but amusing table setting, the main goal is revealed: make enough money to rescue your relative via space exploration, trade and hustling.
If I were being maximally uncharitable, I would call it Space Grind! That’s way too facile, and actually ends up being wrong. Here comes a digression: sit down kids and let gramps tell ya how it used to be.
Back in the 80’s there were things called Microgames - just bigger than pocket sized boardgames that mixed complicated rule sets with small maps and mini cardboard counters. There was one called Trailblazer whose very small font book was mostly tables and tables of d6 planet randomization: goods produced, goods demanded, and market sensitivity. The game itself was explore, and set up trade routes to make space money. Lord was it a chore to generate a planet on the fly (and maintain its markets!) as players explored empty space. A few years later, the personal computer was powerful enough to offload that work. 35-40 years after that, we have Star Tripper. (I understand there was a relevant Palm Pilot event in between, not in my syllabus.)
The genius of every iteration of this idea is that 1) humans love exploring and 2) humans love the smug feeling they get from buying low and selling high. Just love it! We poured hours into that tiny square of cardboard cackling over our pretend space money and trade routes, shuffling page after page of pretend planet markets looking to eke out a better buy/sell chain. Never mind that it was Grind before we had a word for it. Most especially never mind that once you seemed to establish an optimal route, notwithstanding marginal market variations, the most effective thing to do was just repeat it endlessly. Make that Space Money!
There’s a ton of game theory explanations of micro-endorphins that drive engagement, currently being used to let social media turn us into addled ad-slaves. Watching pretend money grow incrementally higher is one of those tools. Here its used for good! Or at least not evil. Which leaves this reviewer in a weird place: the central mechanism is a grind, no doubt. But while I berated myself repeatedly for submitting to the grind, I couldn’t stop milking that sweet, sweet meat->cube->truffle run I found. It is simultaneously Mechanical and Engaging! Right before the 2hr mark, the game does something ingenious. Because the profitability of some trade runs are so obvious, exploration becomes disincentivized. But what if planets revolt with new trader-unfriendly laws? Or they suspect you are scamming their poor population? Or you run afoul of new pretend licensing requirements? The game shuts down your carefully cultivated money runs. No choice but to explore again! I actually laughed out loud at the audacity of this move, and equally recognized it as crucial.
I shouldn’t close out without a word about the graphical presentation. It is attractive, slick and functional, making maximum use of icons, data organization and snarky glue dialogue. There is also generous sound effects integrated which are funny the first few times, but after an hour or so, have run their amusement course. The user interface though, there was friction there. You repeatedly have to click through select-enter sequences to do anything. Meaning it is 10+ clicks to get to a market, 6+ to make transactions, then another 10+ to get to the next when you are trying to accomplish maybe 4 things. Something as simple as single click selects would cut that in half, and often save you intrusive scrolling to boot. Ability to define trade route macros and “sell all” options would make that even smoother.
Scoring this is all kinds of baffling. Do I give the game credit for exploiting human brain vulnerabilities? Penalize it? Do I somehow tease out the narrative portion which feels like endcaps to a massive trading game? Isolate the procedural generation aspects which are kinda impressive? I guess I just have to grade it on what it is, right? Both Mechanical and Engaging; its technical presentation both intrusive and very attractive.
Played: 10/23/22
Playtime: 2hr, 2 ship upgrades
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical+Engaging/Intrusive+Seamless
Would Play Again? My logic says no, but my endorphin addiction says maybe
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
"SOLIS, what are you doing SOLIS?", November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Ah, the classic ‘adrift in space with a suspect AI.’ In my head, I kept calling it ‘HAL.’ I don’t mean that in a reductive way, it is a welcome setting, skillfully rendered. The game shares a lot of DNA with classic parser based IF. There is a map to navigate, items to find and manipulate, puzzles to solve to unlock rooms or achieve other progress. All if this rendered in wry text that spikes to sarcastic or sentimental without being jarring. All in all, nicely textured, narratively speaking.
Graphically, I think I expected more. Early on, the white-on-black presentation is very evocative, when the vastness of black space surrounds you, or when your spaceship is darkened. The glowing blue and green screens pop against this background, and their respective fonts nicely convey different variation of machine interface. I was vaguely disappointed when the lights came on, but the interface didn’t change, making me wonder if I was giving too much credit to the graphical presentation? I still like those terminal screens though.
The protagonist is kind of a minimally rendered space-rogue type that at least so far is an amusing vessel for the player to amble around in. What little opportunity you have for deeper character glimpses are nicely done, really loose sketches that allow you to mentally flesh out your host without derailing the story. Same for the tonal choices in how you interface with your AI partner. Mostly though, its about navigating this puzzle-filled-ship.
I go back and forth on the Twine interface for this game. On the one hand, having highlighted text to navigate and manipulate nicely avoids any hunt-the-noun exercise. It does box you in in a somewhat restrictive framework. Ultimately, I think the writing and design saves it here. While theoretically, highlighted choices could break mimesis by channeling the player in a constricted way, there are enough options anticipated, and enough shiny things to pursue that it never started to chafe. The text is also very clever in sprinkling hints and nudges that your path usually feels organic and not forced, nevermind the limited boxes available to click. Most successful IF must succeed at this (parser or not), and ALWTTNS does.
The object interface was less successful for me, and boy is this a petty complaint. As the game goes on, your inventory expands, but does so one line per item. Meaning if your screen is wider than high (which I presume most are), you have a scrolling list of items with huge black real estate on the right of the screen doing nothing. I don’t know boo about Twine, but if it were possible to put all inventory items in multiple columns - fill the screen and eliminate scrolling I would have much preferred that.
Another petty gripe: the Notes screen captures information it would be tedious to look up separately and acts as a soft hint system. Great idea. Could it have been its own option, and not buried in the scrolling inventory? And also, either quietly drop or separate notes once no longer needed, because you have completed a relevant task? As the notes grew longer, it got more intrusive to skim the list to find what you need, and increasingly jammed with notes I (presumedly) didn’t need any more.
These are petty gripes, I own this. I also never presented myself as above pettiness. Of course in the end this did not block my Engagement. I had a really good time bouncing around the puzzle space with some nicely intuitive and occasionally challenging posers. The central mystery of just how sus is HAL is clicking along at a rewarding pace. Its posed as a 2hr playtime, so maybe I’m getting close to the end? On the one hand I hope not, but on the other I’ve liked the pace of revelations and plot so far and wouldn’t want it to draw out for its own sake. I have no reason to doubt the author has a firm grasp on the length and pace of the story and I’m here for it.
Played: 10/16/22
Playtime: 2hr, incomplete, not stuck
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Likely, though I am developing a backlog…
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Brothers Gonna Be Brothers, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I was really drawn to the conceit of this thing - a merging of historical murder mystery (the FIRST murder!) and alchemical deduction. All wrapped in a classic parser IF milieu. There were a few minor technical and text glitches 2 hrs in: a firepit is not recognized for some actions, while the stones that compose it are; the memory mechanism which I’ll touch on later sometimes lags the player’s knowledge; word choice is occasionally intrusive like a beam that “dissects” the opening of a well when 'bisect' was right there… there’s moments like that throughout.
Those are so minor though I really only included them to show how even handed I am as a reviewer. I really dug this entry. The setup is economical and efficient. In particular, it felt very modern-video-gamey in that it dealt out key alchemical concepts and equipment slowly and interactively, effectively training the player in their use which is crucial to the gameplay. I mean this as a compliment, it was smoothly and effectively done. Too, the map unfolds rather deliberately. Comfortingly linear at first while you are busy learning alchemy, then opening up as you have more confidence in the world and environs.
The mystery solving is also very satisfying. Mystery games have an uneasy tension to resolve: if the player is insufficiently clever, the mystery could go unsolved and that is the opposite of fun. Conversely, if the clues are presented under bright spotlights the mystery solving is unsatisfying as the player feels no agency in the solution. The alchemy mechanism is kind of brilliant in that it integrates ‘find the ingredients’ classic IF puzzles with ‘if A, then not B, and C lives in a red house’ deduction problems. This very much puts the player in the driver’s seat of crimebusting while nicely avoiding “if only I’d thought to ask the maid about the missing dog collar” endings.
The setting itself is also a treat - fleshing out 4 cipheric biblical figures into more lived-in humans. Their characters are well thought out, extrapolated from the relatively little established about them in a satisfying way (so far). The puzzles have so far been tractable and engaging. In general, great time and energy has gone into rendering nearly the entire world as examinable or look-up-able(?) which really makes the game a complete experience. Even the ‘can’t do that’ text often feels like an extension of the world and not an arbitrary boundary the game has imposed. Notwithstanding my obligatory quibbles above it is a nicely polished experience with narrative heft. Dare I say immersive?
And I haven’t yet mentioned the crucial player aids: there is a MEMORIES command which helpfully lists important steps completed, and others not yet complete. As the game opens up it would be easy to lose track of these. This is a welcome and oft-typed command. There is a RECALL command which replays key scenes should you not immediately memorize them, which you won’t. There is the wonderful implementation of your how-big-is-this-book-exactly? encyclopedia the Pharmakon. A stunning array of entries are available, so far avoiding the ‘book is suspiciously narrow as a resource’ artifact. These three mechanisms are deftly woven into the mystery and gameplay such that they become as second nature as the alchemy itself. A central gameplay function, the alchemy mechanism feels to me like the exact sweet spot of complexity between too-trivial-to-justify-the-typing and unnecessarily-baroque. Collectively, these mechanisms put enough spin on the traditional IF formula that it feels fresh. You’re doing chemistry and solving mystery!
Played: 10/19/22
Playtime: 2hrs, incomplete
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? You can't stop me.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Action Princess!, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This was a fun story divided into 7 chapters, that played out in three phases for me.
The first phase was “the setup”, and I found it to be deftly and confidently executed. The stakes were established efficiently and effectively in very few screens. There was a lot of political, magic/religious and historical context to establish, as well as family background. There were three terrific choices right out of the gate: 1) the political/historical complexity was just right for this size game - specific and intriguing with enough breadth to feel lived in but not so much to drown in details. 2) the information was conveyed using multiple different scenes and interactions rather than a single massive textdump. 3) integrating it with player choices that also established the protagonist’s character. It doesn’t seem like the early choices have far reaching implications (maybe barring one), but they do give a chance to establish the Princess’ voice in the choices the player is making. All in all a very strong start.
The second phase was “the escape and journey”. This was a series of moral and physical peril scenarios (ie series of player choices) that would either establish character or set up potential future stakes or both. By and large I also enjoyed these. The fact that I paused to agonize over options a few times is a good indication that I’m sucked into the stakes of what’s going on. Most of them gave you a chance to flex different dimensions of the Princess’ character and skills. One of them though, involving an abusive street performer, added a new twist that I wasn’t crazy about it.
Prior to this encounter, the choices could result in death, or “luck” loss, but you had a few of those to give and if you didn’t hit a death scene, you got info or character established. With the street performer encounter, the game explicitly warns you if you want “success” you need to navigate a magic sequence of actions. On the one hand, appreciated the warning, make sure to save. On the other it changed the tenor of the game. No longer were you collaborating with the author to establish the princess character and story, or even how much backstory you were exposed to. Instead, you were guessing a puzzle sequence. Further, there were no discernible clues in the choices to inform your guesses. It devolved to trial and error where the focus was on ‘beating’ the scenario, divorced from any prior character or goal choices.
Unfortunately, the last “destination/resolution” phase was more in line with this previous encounter than the first 2/3 of the game. There are timed puzzles that lock out interesting story information. More guess-the-magic sequence encounters. But most disappointingly to me, a final boss fight that had little narrative surprise, nuance or complexity. Through the course of the game, the lore was a key underpinning of the quest, gaining more knowledge of the true vs reported history of the realm. While yes, arguably this lore informed the motivations of the final boss, that final battle didn’t build on or modify or subvert anything that came before. Given how strong the world building had been throughout the game, it felt like a let down.
Ultimately, it leaves me with Sparks of Joy where the first 2/3 of the game were that spark. Its always a shame when the ending is a let down, because that final flavor can overshadow everything that came before. In this case I want to refocus on the first 2/3 that were a true accomplishment of character and world building. Here’s the metaphor I am committing to: its like you get so much pleasure from the sound of two lego blocks clicking together, then you suddenly look up and realize you built a scale model of the Parthenon. Even if you smash the Parthenon after that, that is pretty cool.
Played: 10/10/22
Playtime: 1.75hrs, finished w/ final battle walkthrough
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Monster Mash-up, November 26, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I am a big horror movie nerd, and marrying deep genre love to a reality show setting? We’re firmly in catnip territory here.
Billy’s informal writing voice perfectly capitalized on my goodwill. They adopted a confident, playful and straightforward tone that quickly sucked me into this goofy world with a time-honored genre trope, deftly executed. Throughout the game there are just enough winks to keep the wry feel, but not so dense that they erode the narrative tension. It was a nice and consistent tone achievement. I also admired that a broad range of human gender and sexuality seemed to be accommodated in NPC casting and player choices, and done so organically and naturally. (At least for the choices I made)
The playful voice is most evident when engaging the NPC contestants. They are a varying mix of familiar archetypes and archetype subversions. I think this is a crucial choice actually, as the cast is somewhat large and all introduced at once. Without an initial archetype hook it would be impossible to keep them all in your head. I wouldn’t say any of them are truly 3- dimensional but the story doesn’t need them to be. Really the story only needs 1 dimension and still delivers between 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 depending on character.
Billy’s menu-based interactions were also well done. Which is good, as it is the driving mechanism of the game. When I encounter this system in video games it is rare that I don’t chafe under the constraints of responses and reactions I want to give, but the author has failed to accommodate. Or worse, cues that suggest a response I want to make but instead deliver something I NEVER intended when clicked. Blood Island menu cues are refreshingly concise and clear, and at least for me, never betrayed expectations. It feels ungenerous (in a way Blood Island never is) to quibble that missing responses did crop up. I mean it as a compliment when I say this was infrequent enough that it felt jarring when it happened, as my expectations had been consistently raised and met. It was those relatively few times that caused me to “Mostly Seamless” it. Too, the game’s responses to player choices were smoothly integrated into text blocks, both in format and voice, with none of the jarring “<<CHAR_NAME>> heard your answer and is <<CHAR_EMOTION>> at you.”
I won’t talk about the plot, obvi, except to say that it embraces deconstructionist horror ala Scream/Leslie Vernon/Final Girls (the movie) and integrates Final Girl (the trope) critical commentary in an engaging if not completely organic way. At least for me. This is totally my jam. I could see where someone less taken with the source inspiration might find the commentary clunkily intrusive. Let them write their own review, I dug it!
It was also noteworthy that the setpieces had propulsive urgency, twists and shocks and strong feeling of stakes in them, as the best of its inspirations do. Is there an M Night Shyamalan “oh snap no way!” moment? No. But there are heaping helpings of “yeah you did!” smiles and fist pumps. It is an old saw that horror/comedies only elevate when they succeed equally in both. If I assume that would also apply to reality/meta commentaries, Billy is tackling all FOUR of those. They succeed with a thoroughly winning light, wry and generous touch.
Played: 10/4/22
Playtime: 1.5hrs, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? Definitely! So much comfort food.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Tale of Two Tree-Types, November 25, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Mostly polished parser adventure, squarely in my wheelhouse. There is some opening business about a holodeck type setting, but it feels like a bare bones justification to allow you a walking tour of 8 wildly different arboreal climates. That’s a great design choice, actually. It hand waves at the background and quickly ushers you to the main exploring event.
I really liked the ambition of it. 8 different ecosystems, 8 different sets of locations and puzzles, many of which interact with some of the other 7. There is some classic puzzle gameplay in evidence, as well as some nicely novel ones. It's probably not a spoiler to say you bounce back and forth between them to resolve many puzzles. The puzzle text was mostly descriptive. NPCs are minimally rendered which on the one hand feels shallow, but on the other does nicely skirt the “ok this NPC is slowly transforming into a parrot” problem. I liked the “on the right track” hint messages. Still not sure where I land on the parenthetical “you still have the X” messages. Points for clarity, but jarring compared to surrounding text. I was either 1/5 or 1/8 complete at the 2 hr mark depending on how you score it. Right at the 2hr mark, there was what I’m going to call a bug in deceptive text. (Spoiler - click to show)It involves an object landing at your feet at a joust, but the nouns in the text prompt are unrecognized by the game, and per walkthrough the noun you need to use was never mentioned.
Other than that glitch, the puzzles seem capably rendered and satisfying. It feels like the variety and choices of settings are the true showpiece here though. The narration is well up to the challenge of immersively depicting very different ecosystems and geographies. Initial entry also provides a header quote of scientific or cultural interest, in a way that effectively conveys global scope. The variety of settings chosen plays deftly into that as well, creating a really epic feel.
If I scratch a little closer at it though, I’m not sure the 8 chosen settings click together smoothly. Half the settings use the unique trees/ecosystems as background for light puzzle play. The trees themselves little more than scenic/puzzle elements. Hoo boy the other half though. Fully half of them engage deeply dire ecological and/or sociological issues. On first impression I kind of dug it. Since I encountered a few lighter settings first (just by random chance), the heavier settings came as a gut punch. “Look at all the pretty trees… holy crap WHAT!!!” I do wonder how someone who chose differently would react - experiencing a dramatic REDUCTION in stakes. In any case two hours in, the contrast is dramatically jarring in a narratively intriguing way that totally sucked me in.
But but but. I am now petrified. I am petrified that the 4 different very fraught issues are not well served by the puzzle solving mechanic so far on display. That they could be reduced to background setting like the other 4, and effectively trivialized in a way that could be glib and offensive. So far the text has nimbly avoided this to its credit. It has given me no reason to fear I am in incapable hands. But the risk is so large I can’t help but feel trepidation. In particular, confidently invoking (Spoiler - click to show)‘strange fruit’ (google if you need to) feels like stomping your foot on thin ice and boldly declaring “I got this.”
I am Engaged, and also extremely nervous about what lies ahead. Bad time for 2hr timer to expire!
Played: 10/12/22
Playtime: 2hrs, did not finish, 21/100 score with one walkthrough lookup
Artistic/Technical rankings: Engaged/Notable Bug
Would Play Again? Almost certainly, as I chew fingernails to nubs
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Billy Goat Gruff Reboot, November 25, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
A very short mood piece with some sharp if narrow observations to convey. As a web-driven experience I appreciated the integrated mood audio and the restrained but clever use of font (especially dug the protagonists’ ‘voice’) and layout. The art was hit or miss, with the notable exception of the various renderings of the monster protagonist, which I found compelling and evocative.
Taken together with the prose, the whole package effectively conveyed an underlying melancholy behind a handful of setpiece encounters. The experience was brief - in a half hour I completed 7 or 8 circuits and got 5 different endings, with little left unexplored (I think). This tight scope and short duration achieved a slightly different effect than many “Play Again?” prompt games. Rather than a time loop or full narrative reset effect, this rather felt like exploring a multiverse where we are granted a god’s eye view of all possible outcomes of this combination of character and situations. While simultaneously building some larger understandings.
What sparked my joy was how these runs, most especially the endings, played off not only each other, but more significantly off the protagonist and NPC expectations and biases that are revealed across the runs. A single run showcased a moody cause and effect chain. Across all runs, a full and consistent picture of the protagonist, the world, and human society is assembled and contrasted to intrinsic biases. Because this feels like the ace in the piece’s sleeve, I am reluctant to write more clearly about it. Thematic spoilers are real things too! Suffice to say there is more subtlety here than its form and scope would suggest.
I don’t want to oversell it - this is a very brief piece, with limited meaningful choices. It is not a puzzle to solve, or maybe is at its best when it doesn’t have to be. I appreciate that it builds some sharp commentary and effective mood with relatively few moving parts. It is a melancholy short story I was glad to spend time with, but probably won’t need to revisit.
Played: 10/4/22
Playtime: 30 min, 5 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Stop Fighting Me Game, I'm On Your Side!, November 24, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
There is a really great game in here, struggling to get out. The setup: (Spoiler - click to show)You are an amnesiac in a magic city trying to figure out who you are and what happened to you. You choose singularly bad detectives to help you. A lot of the writing is flat out delightful. Your frenetic, bickering partners have character and unique voice, and their banter is often lively and fun, as is the protagonist’s increasingly exasperated or impatient reactions. The Mind Map is a really cool mystery solving mechanism, and the clues provided are plentiful enough that solution is not intractable, but neither is it mechanically easy. The graphical use of color, font, static images and animation is really attractive, functional and appealing. The swinging pull string alone is just an amazing touch. There is also a “scoreboard” that tracks when one or another of the rival detectives “scores points” against the other. I laughed out loud when I realized what it was for. It doesn’t seem to have any other game function, and I kind of hope it doesn’t. What a great detail.
The mystery is engaging (lower case) too! It leverages the fantastical setup, tweaking the premise in a way that builds on the most interesting pieces of the fantasy background. Amnesia is a well worn IF trope, but here it seems to serve a larger plot purpose in an intriguing way. I would be lauding any work that accomplished two or three of the hundred things this work accomplishes. I haven’t even talked about the sound, the graphic flourishes, the hundred delightful turns of phrase (“somehow shriller voice” “Hoboolean coin” “DEFECTIVE AGENCY” so many more).
So why did the game make me fight it to enjoy it?
For everything it does right, the game seems to make equally misguided decisions. The pace of this thing is sooo slow. It took 45 minutes to leave the detective office! Part of this is an artifact of the writing. There is an extended “water drop” introduction that meanders through the city before the protagonist is even introduced. When this is done in cinema, the point is to establish the geography of the setting, and maybe show off the production value a bit. Here, the journey is too narrow both in description and path taken to do either. It’s not helped that the water drop has an insanely large surface cohesion, such that not only does it move frictionlessly through the city, it won’t even merge with other water! And it goes for a bit. As far as I can tell, that entire sequence should be the first thing to hit the cutting room floor. But even initially humorous scenes either go on too long, or are injected into the story as elaborate cul-de-sacs. A briskly paced piece can afford some pointlessly funny side quests, but when you are already struggling to make headway it feels… disrespectful?
The interactivity also deliberately, maddeningly slows things down. You are asked to hit the space bar
for [space]
every [space]
sentence [space]
in the text. Even in long blocks of descriptions. Even in dialogue, when only one person is speaking. It is a maddening choice that slows things down so much. Even when it is used for comedic impact, the effect is so blunted by repetition as to be lost. At a minimum paragraph breaks would be an improvement. “Reviewer,” you might be saying, “chill out! Just spam the space bar, it’ll be fine!” Except frequently you are called on to click a player interaction with the mouse. Many times with only a single option! You are shifting from one input to another for no narrative reason! (Well maybe not “no reason.” There is a difference between affirming protagonist action and ungating narrative. How about “…for narratively intrusive reasons.”)
The mind map also frustrates over time. It is implemented as a small window that you can pan around, drag, arrange and connect yellow sticky clues. It is a delightful idea, except the implementation is inexplicably frictiony. You quickly accumulate a super dense amount of clues, so many that organizing them becomes a slog of click-drag-pan, click-drag-pan, click-drag-pan. No zoom out. No “fullscreen mode.” And even the underlying workspace ends up being crowded despite the pans! Its a virtual desk, why is it so constrained? The graphics and constrained space end up meaning, once the clues get dense, that you grab objects you don’t mean to SO often, introducing more drag. I went from playing with it because I could to dreading when it would be needed in less than an hour. Even ‘solving’ with the mind map has unnecessary delays. If you connect everything right, the mind map itself does not tell you that. You need to go back to the text interaction and click, then be told if you solved or didn’t.
Aaand there’s minigames that don’t serve the narrative. There is a clever gambling word game whose interactivity (again tied to excessive space bar/mouse clicks) impacts its enjoyment, in turn making you anxious for it to be over so you can get back to the mystery. It doesn’t end for a while. There’s a timed ‘avoid disaster’ sequence that requires excessive input after the point of ‘oops this isn’t going to work’ before you can try again.
In the end, the friction in the game overwhelmed its many, many charms and that’s a shame. Fireworks shows have fewer Sparks of Joy than CNDA. But when I hit the chapter break at the 1:45 mark it was almost relief. “Only 15 minutes, no point starting this.” That’s not a great reaction. Its not buggy per se (maybe one - the text attributed a “point to Nomnom” that the scoreboard didn’t score during a coin toss). But the interactivity choices were Intrusively impactful. This feels fixable though, right? Some nip and tuck in the text, some coding changes in the spacebar break points, a zoom/fullwindow for the mind map, tighten up the minigames… It’s like a chunky, craggy slab of granite with Michelangelo’s David patiently waiting to be freed!
Played: 11/10/22
Playtime: 1.75hr, finished chapter 3
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive (frictiony)
Would Play Again? No, too much friction, but would ABSOLUTELY play a greased up update!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Social Anxiety, or Just Jerky Peers?, November 24, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Nose Bleed is a very short work that attempts to use interactivity to bring immediacy to a tightly focused horror story. The impulse to treat social anxiety as a horror premise is really a great idea. Popular media is overrun with social anxiety stories that mine childhood bullying for drama. Few of those are horror stories, despite having truly horrific events depicted, and much more commonly leverage the horror for the cathartic overcoming of it.
Adult social anxiety is a significantly less-trod ground, and a horror focus is even more rarified air. I seem to have slipped into a mountain climbing metaphor, not sure why. The mechanism of a nose bleed as source for that social anxiety is also kind of a genius choice - it is something we have no control of and is plausibly not serious enough to push people past irritated inconvenience to empathy. The choice of workplace was also a crucial one, as it is one of few places adults HAVE to interact with people they don’t want to. Points for really interesting and challenging thematic concept!
The chosen implementation fell a bit short is my sense. For a few reasons. The graphical presentation didn’t really serve the narrative. I couldn’t help but see missed opportunities here. That said, there were two instances, about 2/3 into the game where the graphical choices were surprising and effective. I would have liked a lot more of that throughout the playtime.
Ultimately, the graphical presentation is not a minus, maybe even a minor plus. Choices made to leverage interactivity for this story were harder to get past. Social anxiety works a little differently in 3rd person stories than first person IF. In the former, the trick is to get the reader on the protagonist’s side by making them some combination of relatable, sympathetic and/or rootable. This is commonly done via non-anxiety scenes where we can care about the protagonist to empathize with them when their social group turns on them. Here, the work is aiming to invoke anxiety in the player by having them ‘experience’ it directly. Which is an excellent use of horror IF if it works!
By omitting the shell of a separate protagonist though, you need to craft a narrative that the player buys into. It didn’t come together for me that way. For one, the descriptions of the injury grew increasingly horrific, in a way that made the NPCs ignoring it look decreasingly human, in turn making me less invested in their social pressure. The situation didn’t quite gel for a few other reasons. Often the choices you are given don’t fundamentally change anything except narrative texture. Adding up to a feeling of lack of agency, without clear narrative reasons for it. A lot of early game is interacting with a single other character. Social anxiety is most effective when you feel isolated from the entire community around you. When its only one person, it’s just as likely they’re just being a dick which is a whole different dynamic. Later in the game when the community expands, there isn’t a narrative reason why the PC is with them. Adults have many degrees of freedom to avoid toxic communities, like say Ubering separately to work functions. I’m not saying it's super easy to avoid toxic life scenarios. I’m saying the game didn’t do the legwork to convince me I was trapped.
Without that legwork, I was often thinking “well there are a lot of different ways that could be avoided” which had the effect of me decoupling from the protagonist that was supposed to be me. I started to think of them as willingly submitting… which again is definitely a real thing. The story just didn’t get me there. Instead it actively disconnected me from the protagonist. So that’s how I got to a Mechanical playthrough. Really only the short duration and the nifty graphic flourishes kept it from being Bouncy. I think this reaction is actually a testament to the author in one sense: they attempted a unique horrific experience and while not getting me there, clearly their themes elicited some response.
Played: 10/8/22
Playtime: Less than 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Straight Story? Lost Highway to Mulholland Drive, November 24, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This is a fine example of a work that embraces deeply weird, vaguely sinister and supernatural-tinged narratives. But rather than commit to the well-laid Twin Peaks tracks, instead has the nerve to be its own thing instead! I'm sorely tempted to add a special grading system for this stripe of game. I have a great hook for it too, the pseudo-Lynch scorecard!
Is there cherry pie/coffee? Kind of. There’s (Spoiler - click to show)corn liquor
Is there a Log Lady? Eeh, no but there is a (Spoiler - click to show)Contemplator
Is there a Laura Palmer? No
Evil behind a cookie cutter face? Can’t tell at the 2hr mark, no.
Imagery pulled straight from our collective unconscious? No
Lynch-ledger: 1.4/5, Between Dune and Blue Velvet.
The protagonist finds themselves on an unscheduled stop on their bid for a new life, in a tiny town, just left of normal. Must solve puzzles to resume journey! The presentation is appealing. Crude uSoft Paint geometrical pictures and jaunty music pepper the experience. There is a map to follow, with a unique NPC guardian at each location. The map amusingly changes state with the world in a nicely weird touch. The NPCs range from deadpan, to flighty to just deeply weird, all of it combining to present a deliciously off-kilter vibe. The puzzles have some flair, but don’t seem to match the environment in weirdness. They are oddly pedestrian (Spoiler - click to show)deliver envelope, find matches, buy stuff. The main mechanism is simultaneously clumsy and clever - matching narrative notes or items to characters/places. It has a little more textual flair than TELL X ABOUT Y, but it requires multiple clicks on multiple screens to effect, and can devolve to mimesis-breaking exhaustive trial and error.
There’s a lot to like here, but a lot of it is qualified. None more so than the text itself. At its best, the text disappears and just straight-forward describes the weirdness around you. All too often though, it throws in flourishes that come out of left field in a distracting way. “long and empty like my intestines” “Tall green pillars stuck out their immature cobs like rattlesnakes” “door opened the silence of the room, releasing it right in my face.” See if you can guess what this one refers to:
"However, the snake opened its mouth, and I got out of this bell, as a lost sound finally flies out of the French horn, scrolling and traveling through all its convolutions, bends and nooks."
(Spoiler - click to show)Exiting a series of alleys! I had literally just done it, and took a minute to realize that’s what it was describing. I think it's the snake that doesn’t work there, I probably could have gotten on board with just the French Horn. Between the textual excesses and the puzzles that didn’t seem on the same level as the rest of the narrative, I couldn’t breach into Engaging here, but definite Sparks of Joy. No bugs found!
FTR, the Lynch Ledger scoring system:
0 - The Straight Story
1 - Dune
2 - Blue Velvet
3 - Twin Peaks original series and movie
4 - Lost Highway
5 - Eraserhead
Played: 11/11/22
Playtime: 2hr, Day3 (incomplete)
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, my sweet spot is Blue Velvet+
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Simile Spiral, November 24, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This one feels like an IF poem more than anything else. Mechanically, it is mostly an exploration through a dream/nightmare slice of a world with dream logic attached. The language is doing most of the lifting here in setting this tone. And boy do you get a lot of it.
As a narrative it is, I think the word I want is 'emphatically', overwritten. Metaphors and similes fly fast and furious on nearly every page of text. More often than not, word choice is doing way more than it should, in an intrusive way. For example: “your mouth is eating your heartbeat.” There is a dollop of poetry here, that puts the heartbeat squarely in the throat, and has the protagonist gnawing at their own fear. But that additional active nuance does not play in a resonant way, it jars. I don’t want to just list text here, but this excessive use of doing-too-much descriptions both adds to the dreamlike quality of the place and as quickly pushes the reader away with ‘wait, is that the right word here?’ I cannot overemphasize how pervasive and consistent this use of language is, it is the defining characteristic of this work.
There are bright spots of language in here. Among the bright spots, I really enjoyed the phrase “Maybe every other sunrise was dumb luck” and especially “Sommeliers are liars. Fight me.” The latter was a delightfully unexpected infusion of humor in an otherwise moody game. In other places, there were wild swings in the same sentence. Where my response was “no I don’t think… oh but yeah that works.” What I’m saying is your response to this game will have everything to do with your response to its language rhythm.
There is an underlying reality to the narrative, I think, however deeply buried under language. (Spoiler - click to show)There is a vague sense that this is all going on in the protagonist's mind as they suffer some unnamed physical debilitation in the ‘real world.’ It is only ever a hint, which is fine, but at least my playthrough never developed into anything thematically or narratively resonant. Primarily, this was due to a maddening gameplay choice. There are multiple ways to end the scenario, some blindingly, arbitrarily abrupt and fast, others after lengthy exploration. The end of which auto-restarts at the same entry point. I subsequently learned this was a ‘cycle until you find a different ending’ thing, but at the time I found nothing in the text to hint that this was possible. Instead, the vibe was very much, ‘you are infinitely trapped here.’ Which, if there were thematic resonances could have worked just fine. Instead it just felt like I was trapped in a sea of simile to no clear end, where my only escape was to stop playing.
Scoring wise, I’m in a bit of a conundrum. The overall surreal tone was effective, and there were blocks of text I really dug. There were a lot more that pushed me away, and the looping ending really bounced me out. So I end up averaging Bouncy and Sparks of Joy.
Played: 10/17/22
Playtime: 30min, 1 or 5 playthroughs depending on how you count
Artistic/Technical rankings: Both Bouncy and Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, think I’m topped off with the experience
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Hey, That Is a Thing I Recognise, November 23, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
You’re all familiar with Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yes? Twenty+ years old now, the first comics mini-series assembled a collection of Victorian adventure literature characters into a super-team of sorts, fighting Victorian villains. They were all public domain characters like Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dr Jeckyll, etc. Mssrs Moore and O’Neill then proceeded to jam the limited series with a confounding amount of well-known and obscure story references, directly, indirectly, and in the background of the main plot. I mean JAMMED the frickin thing. There are page by page annotations (Extraordinary Gentlemen+ Annotations). It was considered a critical and sales success (spawned a less-said-the-better movie), and 3 years later we got Volume II. The two were qualitatively completely different works.
Vol I was first and foremost a ripping pulp yarn, as I believe it was called back then. It pitted a team of mismatched anti-heroes against Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty, with a plot that used these pre-existing texts for settings, MacGuffins and motivations. It had surprisingly dark edges but fundamentally was a love letter to adventure tales, taken from mismatched parts of other stories and somehow put into a shining clockwork of its own.
Vol 2 was a slog. It was like the takeaway was “People really love these references! Maybe if we phone in the plot and characters we have room to jam in EVEN MORE!” (It was also a good deal meaner, but I think consensus is this had more to do with Mssr Moore’s contemporary professional dissatisfactions.) It was not a clockwork, it was a jumble and characters and plotlines that contorted more and more wildly to accommodate just one more reference. The linking story was unpleasant and unsatisfying to read, so at its best it was an illustrated trivia contest.
The message here is references in narrative are a dangerous will-o-the-wisp. You can totally lose your way pursuing them and whatever promise you think is in those dancing lightballs is insubstantial. You will need to provide the substance yourself, in the form of how you use those references. LoEGv1 did exactly this. YFLYRTiaB showed us what that could look like too. In the single best moment of the game, the amnesiac protagonist figures out his identity and they’re… warning, this is the biggest spoiler in this game do yourself a favor and assume my point is valid, don’t look until you’ve played it (Spoiler - click to show)The amnesiac protagonist is the Man in the Yellow Hat! Yah, the one with the busy-body monkey!! I laughed out loud at the audacity of that, it was a terrific recontextualization of that particular reference in a surprising and creative way. As far as I can tell, that was the ONLY reference that was recontextualized.
As far as gameplay goes, it is really limited exploration from one referential map location to the next, shuttling minimal objects to unlock other locations then finish. Call it what it was, it was an excuse to usher you across the chain of references. I’d say I picked out maybe half of them? Above I sneeringly called LoEGv2 a ‘trivia contest.’ I’ll take the sneer off that. Trivia contests are fun! If I think of this as an IF implementation of a trivia contest, that’s probably how it best succeeds (complete with ‘answer key’ if you want to grade yourself!). No one says puzzles have to be complicated logic or wordplay. Trivial Pursuit is an all-time best seller boardgame for a reason. Certainly IFLYRTiaB drew from an admirable breadth of high and low literature. But for me? I’m not much of a trivia guy. That one twist was the only time it felt alive to me. It was predominantly Mechanical.
Played: 11/7/22
Playtime: 10min, survived
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Haunted by Font-changes, November 23, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This one feels like an anthology of sorts. The protagonist is walking through a graveyard, interacting with unconnected stories of spectral apparitions. Initially, I didn’t approach it that way, but ultimately, that’s where I landed.
The presentation suffers some issues, one much bigger than the others. A smaller one is palette choice. The opening screen spends some time talking about the greyness of the location (incidentally in a way that could definitely use some better word choices). But the game is presented in tans and browns! That is a real missed opportunity to use the presentation to reinforce the mood of the piece. It does integrate a single picture in one thread, but because it is the only picture ever used it kind of jars. Even graphically, its blue clashes with the tan in a way that gives the page a slapdash look.
The biggest presentation issue by far however was font sizing, an apparent artifact of the Texture engine. As you make selections throughout the game, text gets added to the screen. Distressingly often, the entire screen font size shrinks, often more than one size, to accommodate the additional words. I cannot overstate how intrusive this was to the experience. At first it wasn’t clear that you weren’t seeing an entirely new screen. Then you had to parse an entirely unfamiliar block of text to find the new stuff (which was not always at the end). Then next choice, BAM, new screen of much larger font. It was distracting and off putting all at once. I’m calling this Intrusive. Though not a bug per se, it had the effect of one.
Gameplay was also uneven. I got two end screens in maybe three clicks by choosing not-obviously-wrong paths. This is a personal points-off for me - if I can ‘die’ due to not-obvious choices within two minutes (and there doesn’t seem to be an artistic reason why), I’m already not on the game’s side. It's punishing me for something I have no way of knowing is ‘bad.’ I did dive in again, and trained to go a different way, I did. That’s where the anthology approach opened up for me, which does kind of partially mitigate the quick-death thing. There isn’t really a through line to worry about.
The engagements were uneven. Some felt arbitrary, some pulled with unearned emotion, one dark and personal. All of them peppered with the font sizing issues. But one was notable - an encounter with a spectre who had… niche beliefs… in prior life. The decisions for this encounter seemed varied and impactful, and the decision path I took through was surprisingly nuanced, generous and touching. Definitely more nuanced than the other encounters. If that font hadn’t kept jumping in my face, this could have been a Spark of Joy.
As it was, I found this entry mostly Mechanical and unpleasantly Technically Intrusive.
Played: 10/21/22
Playtime: 30min, 4 different endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Sorcerous Psychotherapy, November 23, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
As an IF setting, "mind palaces" and dreams carry a lot of the same advantages: ability to lean into IF limitations as features, ability to ignore real-world logic, full-on integration of symbology and metaphor. In a way they're kind of the same thing. I mean its not like dreams occur somewhere else.
I liked the central conceit of this one: two (Spoiler - click to show)(or is it one??) witches trapped in one of their mind palaces due to some kind of unnamed real world threat and needing to escape by passing through replayed key events of the host’s life. Escape by solving puzzles! Sure, I’m in.
In practice, I had unanswered questions about the implementation. For example, it seems like the host is at most a middle-aged adult, yet there was an encounter from old age they hadn’t lived yet. There was an encounter as a baby which doesn’t seem like it could be remembered. And in one encounter, it seemed you could effect the past in the ‘real world.’ It is possible, I suppose, that the mind palace incorporated time portals and those were not memories but ‘real.’ There was nothing in the text to imply this, and the unreal nature of the puzzle solving ((Spoiler - click to show)at one point a tiny hand reaches out of a cat’s ear) suggest otherwise. This game doesn’t owe me anything, it has every right to be what it is without my permission. But I felt those choices traded away some of the power of the setting without getting enough in return, dramatically speaking.
Gameplay is mostly puzzle solving, the exploring aspect is pretty limited, maybe 8 rooms. I liked that there were often multiple ways to solve puzzles, that tracked to whether you wanted to be ‘good’ or ‘evil’. The puzzles themselves were a mixed bag. Generally, the text didn’t provide a lot of nudging or feedback on your choices, so solving felt a bit arbitrary. The solutions did not come with that ‘oh, that’s why that worked!’ feeling. I got the sense that either I got lucky a lot, or the puzzles had multiple solutions. Even that is not terrible if the solutions had some kind of thematic through line to draw them together. I did not detect such.
I did like what the final escape implied about the physical fate of the witches, and really liked how understated it was. There was some nice ambiguity about the true nature of the dual protagonists, but the finale only hinted at resolving it which was maybe TOO understated. All in all I think the setting is a strong foundation that would support much tighter thematic construction and payoff. If I awarded points for ‘potential Sparks of Joy’ this would deserve it. Unfortunately, I typically do not.
Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 30min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Gaming for Grades, November 23, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Now that it’s been pointed out to me that a few works here are the product of short-burn IF workshops, the thought rises unbidden when engaging some of these pieces. It feels super patrician to assume this background for any given game and I am actively resisting it. In my defense though, CI is set AT A SCHOOL WITH AN IF WORKSHOP. C’mon, how much do you expect of me? It even implements the IF teacher as a character! IF this was a workshop product and IF there were grades involved, I hope the author’s naked flattery got them an A. There is something bold and admirable to pandering this overt.
As a game it was small, less than two dozen locations and filled with relatively simple puzzles, many of them signposted baldly. “X tells you to give Y to Z” Give. “Z tells you to get Q” Get. There was one puzzle with no signposting, whose solution felt pretty arbitrary, but given the relative shortness of the work was well within bounds of trial and error. There were a few paths that led nowhere. There was a mix of feature implementations which felt as much coding exercise as puzzle, but at least implemented with flair. There was a smattering of missing descriptions, and one puzzle where the game blocked you because you were missing information, but didn’t provide a narrative reason for the block. Frankly, these were the exceptions though. It was a fairly Mechanical experience, but very competently done.
And here is the part where I make an ungenerous observation that makes you think less of me. Not so fast reader! Fortunately for me, Zeno’s Dichotomy paradox famously noted that to get to a destination you must first travel halfway there. Then halfway of that smaller remaining distance. Then halfway again and again, infinitely bisecting smaller distances so you can never actually arrive at zero. The lesser known corollary to this is that to start that journey you must travel halfway. But to get halfway, you must first travel a quarter of the way, after traveling an eighth. Because this distance can also be infinitely subdivided you can’t even START your downward journey of contempt for me! I AM IMMUNE TO CRITICISM AND ACCOUNTABILITY!!!
With that armor in place, I can safely note that this appears to be the work of a non-native speaker. The setting and much of the text hint at a joyfully casual, light and snarky tone. But it rarely lands because of awkward phrasing. Early on, even descriptions took effort to parse, though I think I got synched reasonably quickly. I’m not a monster, I’m not going to penalize the work for this, but it also was just intrusive enough that it defused potential Sparks of Joy before they could land. I guess I am a monster. Fortunately, still armored! Look, if I tried to write these reviews in say Spanish, it would be hot garbage word salad. Ensalada de palabras basura caliente. More so, I mean. But I can really only report on the experience I was having, right?
This was a small, good quality exercise, not particularly complicated, with hints of Joy that couldn’t quite land. Wait. Does Zeno mean I can only give 1’s and 5’s as scores?
Played: 10/30/22
Playtime: 20min, finished.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Grief #^$!s with All of Us, November 23, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This is actually the third full review I’ve written of this work. It is my habit to let a review mature for a few days before publication. The reason I do this is to make sure my thoughts are captured to my satisfaction, and to try and scrub obvious grammar and spelling mistakes. The latter only imperfectly. In Ink’s case, for reasons I’ll cover, the settling process was tough on me.
This one is quite poetic in its narrative, and it deals with the protagonist’s grief. With one exception, I’m not having a great run with poetic verse in IF Comp22. More often than not I end up feeling like the text is trying too hard in what it wants to accomplish and calls attention to itself. I get some of that same vibe here. Like similar works, there are enough ‘hits’ in the verbiage to keep me going, but not enough to pull me into its orbit. Additionally though, the poetry here inserted itself between me and the central metaphor in a way that challenged me.
The setup is this: (Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist has lost their partner, and its every bit as devastating as that can be. While trying to grapple with their grief, they get a mysterious letter, perhaps from their partner before or after death. In fact though, it is an I’m going to say “grief-demon” exploiting their tragedy. So far so good, nothing wrong with any of that. But the choices the game gives you, and how those present are pretty bleak. There are times when you seem to have the choice to (Spoiler - click to show)push past grief, to reject wallowing in it. Selecting those, inevitably brings you back to the same state. (Spoiler - click to show)You can try to reject the letter as unhelpful, or try to embrace it as a loving goodbye, but none of those choices actually play that way - the protagonist inevitably remains in their paralyzing grief. Then the grief-demon starts intruding.
My initial read, and it was strong, was that the game seemed to be showing that there was no escape from grief, and even wanting to push past it was wrong and needed to be punished. Boy did that NOT appeal to me. In a rubbery, conservation of energy kind of way. I found supporting evidence in the narrative where every single attempt the player can make to (Spoiler - click to show)deal in a healthy way is ineffective. Then, given no other alternative, when the player goes down the only road left, the text is unforgiving.
(Spoiler - click to show)
"Something reassuring but altogether cold
Telling you to give in, give up
Unmake your pain in exchange for something that feels like a remedy
Maybe not her but something in between
You know you shouldn’t
But something like selfishness (Spoiler - click to show)takes root in your body
You can’t help but drown willingly"
You see? Trying to find a way out of grief is something you should resist! That can’t be the message of the piece, can it?? Sure, in context this is a (Spoiler - click to show)demon’s seduction but that’s the metaphor! For what, healing from grief? Nooo, surely not. Let’s take a hard look at the word ‘selfishness’ above. The protagonist is clearly suffering here, and has tried multiple times, unsuccessfully, to get out of the spiral. This is selfishness? No, this is hopelessness. That single bit of poetic license muddies the metaphor so much with its Puritanical judgement that I spun for days. One word!! (Well, in combination with the narrative choices.) Is it selfish to want relief from grief? Is endless self-flagellation the only honorable response to tragedy?
So if not grief itself what even is the (Spoiler - click to show)grief-demon then? I mean there are definitely unhealthy ways to handle grief: alcoholism, drug abuse, suicidal ideation. Maybe those are the metaphor? Ok, but then what is the story saying? (Spoiler - click to show)That no matter what the protagonist tries, its gonna end there? Is that better or worse? If this is a cautionary tale, what is the untaken option that the player tragically rejected?
Now, I played through a few times. There is one path where you can enlist a therapist for aid. It is very possible this path could answer everything I grappled with above. Unfortunately, that path seemed to have a bug, where I got stuck on a screen and could not progress. So all I’m left with is a work that consistently rejects or refutes player attempts to deal with grief, and metaphorically casts the effort of trying as (Spoiler - click to show)inevitably (and cravenly) submitting to a demon! If the therapist was the ‘good path’, that was a supremely unfortunate and impactful bug.
There is another alternative. Rather than as a Metaphor for Grieving, this could be read as a simple, tragic character study/horror tale, where (Spoiler - click to show)a damaged protagonist, unable to let go of grief is doomed by that. If so, the poetry and interactivity of the work is fighting against the narrative. Poetic prose with its pithy clauses, unnatural rhythms and imagery is biased to the abstract, actively encouraging a metaphorical read. Character studies live and die by their details, by their lived-in specificity. A tragic character study would have been much better served by spare, concisely-observed natural language, most especially because you need to sell the player on why their choices aren’t working.
I held it up as many ways as I could think of, and none of them worked for me. I welcome reads that show me where I got it wrong. Was it Bouncy? Oh my yes, for several days. Was it Engaging? I mean, technically yes, I couldn’t stop coming back to it, long after I’d played and written reviews of other works. Was it Engaging in the sense I meant when I set that criteria? Not really, no. It wasn’t pulling me into the author’s creation, embracing and delighting in the author’s vision. Is my delight the most important thing though? Where is the place for Challenging? Is a Challenging work without a coherent challenge anything other than hollow provocation? I think I’m left where I started: Bouncy and Intrusively Buggy (both the stuck path, and Texture's in-your-face font resize problem). I’m so sorry work, I tried, I really tried.
Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 20min, 2.5 endings.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Bouncy/Intrusive
Would Play Again? How masochistic do you think I am???
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Murder in Teapot Town, November 23, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Tin Mug presents as a children's book IF, though less like a picture book and more like say Winnie the Pooh. There is some disconnect between the subject matter, text, and presentation that made it hard to conjure a consistent imaginary child-co-pilot. Which is the perfectly normal and understandable thing I do when presented with kid lit. Winnie the Pooh, for all its young child appeal, notably invests in its characters, and is as much character as plot driven, maybe more so. The characters are all quite distinct and relatable to all ages. There are a few very distinct characters in Tin Mug to be sure, but there are as many kind of interchangeable ones. This choice feels younger than the piece’s presentation.
Too, there are narrative choices that skew older. In a world of sentient dishware, the story opens with what feels like a casual murder. (Spoiler - click to show)It is undone at the end, but since it was left to ride the entire time, it can only partially undo the lasting impression. Also the mechanism of its undoing was way younger than a lot of the narrative. I’m not here to poke at ‘plot holes’ in a child-targeted work, that’s a dick move. But I am highlighting that these presentation and plot and character choices feel like they target slightly different maturity levels in a way that keeps the work from coalescing.
Even gameplay has inconsistent notes. There are many points of exclusive choices in the game - A OR B. Choices that determine a course of action or character reaction seem perfectly fair. Choices that force you to choose to only interact with one of two characters, without narrative justification for the exclusion, that feels like it doesn’t reward a child’s natural curiosity. Even though I couldn’t get my child co-pilot to materialize into a specific age, nevertheless I clearly heard a whine in my head “why CAN’T I go talk to the bread basket now? I’m done with the… [other one that I can’t remember right now.]”
I can’t stress enough that these are not ‘broken’ story choices in any way. They just seem less crisply focused.
There are technical issues too, the most notable of which is screen management. Very often, a choice will produce a large block of text or oversized illustration that pushes huge chunks of text outside the window. You need to actively scroll upwards to read the text you missed. In many cases the illustration is too large to be seen in the window, and you end up panning across its height. This intrudes further into the experience in a way that would try a child’s patience, I think. It did mine.
Without a (virtual) child co-pilot, and because I am dead inside, I couldn’t wring Sparks out of this, though I could theorize multiple children could get different Sparks at different times. For this curmudgeon it was Mechanical.
Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 10min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Experimental Parser, WIP, November 22, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This is a parser based game, but the implementation feels like it is fighting convention kind of just to fight it? The attempt is to get the user to type commands more naturally, in complete sentences. I can see why intellectually this may make some sense (and certainly as a hook for voice-based accessibility), but practically speaking it feels misapplied in a keyboard-based IF. The mainstream tradition and promise of IF is to ‘put the player in the story.’ Now, since this form predates VR goggles by decades, it needed to do this in text. Text is already a layer of disconnect though, right? You aren’t ‘walking north’ you are TYPING ‘walk north.’ The more you think about typing, the less immersion you have. (Excepting of course sly little games that integrate typing-at-a-keyboard into its conceit. Those minxes!) This is why one letter abbreviations are so prevalent in IF - ‘examine’ is so many letters to type, it drags immersion, especially when done repeatedly. The more you can do this the better. The power of parser IF of course is that it presents the illusion of limitless nouns and verbs. WE know that’s not true, but that is the tradeoff we’ve negotiated over several decades: type any word, but common ones give shortcuts. I mean, I’ve personally never finished an IF game thinking, “that was pretty cool, but I really wish I could have typed more.”
So Headlights wants to renegotiate that. Sure, why not, no sacred cows, right? I think I tried twice then said, “I’m typing way too much about this,” and reverted to more standard verb-noun and abbreviation conventions. To its credit, Headlights’ parser handled it. To its detriment it put what appeared to be debug messages after every command.
>OPEN DOOR
[I heard: ‘open the door’ → Say ‘as spoken’ to repeat exactly as you said.]
The door is open.
>N
[I heard: ‘go north’ → Say ‘as spoken’ to repeat exactly as you said.]
AFTER EVERY COMMAND. Other than actively berating me for not typing articles, I’m not sure how much MORE intrusive it could be. At a minimum there should be a command to shut that off. So I didn’t care for the new parser capabilities. Sure I could have made more effort to meet the parser on its own terms, but I think I would have chafed as much or more at the extra typing.
It had some issues re-implementing other parser features as well. Objects were sometimes listed via their code relationship, not necessarily their physical description. X GROUND in one spot yielded “Inside a meadow is a physical object, a place, a side, a thing, and an inside.” It aliased verbs inelegantly like when I TOUCH LIQUID, I got “you have petted the liquid.” I think my overall favorite was USE TOILET… “I don’t know what to do with a toilet.” Wow game, your parents REALLY let you down. These gaps were not as common as the debug messages, but still overwhelming.
Ok, so the parser implementation was Intrusive. How about the story? It was pretty bare bones. 4 or 5 chapters of 4-9 room exploration and minimal ‘get X from room2, use in room4’ kind of puzzles. The maps were all pretty linear, the descriptions pretty minimal. Usually a sentence of where you are, then a line by line list of objects in the room. That was useful at least, as there wasn’t a lot of searching. My favorite puzzle was (Spoiler - click to show)letting yourself get bit by a spider for extra strength, leading me to exclaim “I’m Spiderman now!” Honestly, it felt like a test drive for the parser more than a complete work of its own. There is a climax and payoff, but the stakes never really register as more than a dry IF puzzle.
Will be interesting to see where this parser implementation goes from here though.
Played: 11/12/22
Playtime: 40min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience feels complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Roller Coaster (whoo whoo whoo) of Love, November 22, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Holy crap was this one a roller coaster ride. Let me dispense with the non-narrative parts first because this will be quick. The presentation was simple but effective. In particular, the use of background colors and to a lesser extent fonts was tightly aligned to the narrative in a satisfying and resonant way. I wish more games would take the simple steps taken here. There is sound, but I’m not sure if it was infrequent or downplayed, I only remember it registering once during gameplay.
Gameplay? I’ll need a different word. This is a super linear narrative. There are infrequent opportunities to click on internal monologues for additional insight, but otherwise you might as well be turning pages. Except for exactly one choice you get to make. Actually, over two hours I had forgotten I had made ANY choices, until reminded. Other games have had similar implementations for sure, but this one really eschewed any attempt to use other interactive tricks, like using page size and interactivity for narrative pacing, or character-defining but narratively-irrelevant decisions to align the reader more closely to the protagonist. I mean that’s fine, right? Half of Interactive Fiction is Fiction. I hear books can be pretty darn entertaining. Let’s talk narrative.
The plot covers a lot of ground. (Spoiler - click to show)What starts as a hilarious multi-thousand-year sweep of history, segues to a heist and relationship melodrama, to a gritty pan-gender prison story, to a cave survival horror story, to climax in a conversation with Future Adam (but not Eve) and …a dance party. Now, you look at that list and first impression is, hell yeah, buckle me up for THAT roller coaster ride! There’s an assumption built into that reaction though, that the ride is built with tight control over your safety. In this metaphor, the plot is the kinetic design of the ride, how it connects turns, climbs, loops, and drops into a thrilling experience. The characters are the car that carries you start to end. And super importantly, the tone is the track that supports your characters. However wildly the course turns, it smoothly zips you along.
OFPBS really doesn’t do any of that. The coaster design is an early work from the architect that went on to design R’Lyeh, where they were still fleshing out their non-Euclidian geometries. I’m saying the plot twists cross dimensional barriers with their impossible turns. The car is transplanted from some 1950’s Tunnel of Love, earnestly vandalized stem to stern with lavishly ornate “TeeJay loves Sam” adolescent graffiti. Uniquely UNsuited to the kinetic demands of the wild ride, and while adorably sentimental at first, quickly sublimates to “we get it, Sam is dreamy. Can we maybe focus on this insane curve coming up instead?”
Given those two extreme and incompatible choices (plot and character), the only way to salvage the experience is with a perfect tonal track. Unfortunately, the discipline is just not there. In the first few scenes the tone swings wildly from humor, to melodrama, to violent grit, but keeps some semblance of internal in-the-moment consistency. By the time the cast is chasing through caves it does not keep a coherent tone even within a scene. It puts on the reader the entire burden of synthesizing (Spoiler - click to show)starkly cast violent physical peril with porn ‘money shot’ parody with acres of pan-gender John Hughes romantic mooning with origin of man mythology. The text and language does no lifting to spackle the disconnects with humor or whimsy or farce, just presents it all and dares the reader to weather the discord. If the ridiculousness of the scenario WAS the farce, it was a miscalculation not to let the tone cue the reader.
And man, does that first climax take a non-Euclidian turn. It is a complete betrayal of the seriously-cast character deaths, of the mortal terror they felt. Good horror movies know how to manage tone. The stakes of Devils Rejects for example are starkly different than Final Destination. The former wrings tension from raw fear of evil, the latter plays deaths as elaborate punch lines. Both work! They would decidedly not work in the same movie. Sean of the Dead shows that varying tones can coexist with the right narrative grease. That’s what’s missing here.
In the end, despite a strong opening and brief sections of notably effective chase horror, the tonal shortcomings have a predictable if cliche’ effect on our metaphorical roller coaster. The first climax Bounced me clean off the rails.
However, this is conceived of as a long story. It seems my 2hr investment was maybe 1/3 of the overall narrative? I will be omitting my score from the average in deference to the idea that my view of the author's vision is likely incomplete. It's not for me, I'm clear on that, but there seems to be more to chew on here, if this is your taste.
Played: 10/26/22
Playtime: 2hrs, finished one playthrough, 1/3(?) of total narrative
Artistic/Technical rankings: Bouncy/Notable (Lack of interactivity)
Would Play Again? Would take a lot of metaphorical Dramamine
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
City Planning Dont's, November 22, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
A short exploration IF of a tantalizing setting. There are some early nods to a specific protagonist that needs a cane, including one nice bit of business on a bridge. That specificity seems to fade into the background pretty quickly, and doesn’t seem to inform the experience beyond that. Personality-wise the protagonist is a blank slate, which is not uncommon in IF that wants the player to step in.
There are choices to make, both in wandering direction and equipment. In all cases that I hit, there was little to no indication of what effect your choices could have, so they all ended up being arbitrary. None of them seemed character based. That’s not so terrible in the wandering around part. It does convey the exploring-a-new-city feeling of not even knowing where the interesting stuff might be. In the case of equipment it does rankle a bit, particularly when depending on your arbitrary choice some areas of the city might be closed off later.
The setting is really the star here and in concept it's a pretty cool one: a city suspended on ropes and chains between two mountains. The narration that describes it varies from scene to scene. Some scenes are wonderfully painted with vertiginous heights, colorful skies, physically hefty and sagging environs. But there are just as many scenes where details jar to the point of ‘I don’t think that’s how that’d work.’ If your city is suspended by ropes, then torches and holy crap bonfires seem like a REALLY bad idea. Kids play with rocks which, where are they getting those exactly? Most egregiously, the ropes are repeatedly described as fraying and worn. I would think rope maintenance would have to be top priority for the city council. I mean they don’t need to worry about sewer or trash collection right? (Though dear lord the land dwellers beneath them) At first I was thinking maybe it was the poorer sections that suffered neglect, which would have been a nice detail. But no, that was me me adding things.
There is definitely something to be said that nit-picking details in stories is garbage criticism. When you start complaining about the realism of fantasy, what is even the point? (see also incel criticism of Rings of Power race in fantasy races. Actually, that’s a little different. I’m not talking about racism masquerading as ‘realism’ Forget I brought it up.) While I think the prescription to embrace fantasy on its own terms is a strong idea, that doesn’t change that effective use of tangible details helps immersion. Despite the prodding of the angels on our shoulder, tonally inconsistent half-baked details can jar us.
Yes, Sparks of Joy wandering around, but as many ‘I don’t think…’ moments. Maybe more disconcertingly, your ability to wander is limited. In some cases you can’t go back to explore untaken paths. In others, sections are shut off because you took the wrong equipment. And then it ends - practically out of nowhere. In two playthroughs, I went down completely different paths but ended at the same abrupt and narratively unsatisfying end screen. There was no arc to what I’d seen and the end text did not wrap up my experience in any meaningful way. It just ended. I think there is a really powerful nugget of setting here, but for a truly satisfying experience, it should be polished a bit, and some sort of narrative arc applied to it.
Played: 10/16/22
Playtime: 20min, two playthroughs, same ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Speedrun Grave Robbing, November 22, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Extremely short and small parser-based exploration game. Escape the Tomb you’ve been pushed into! The opening is very efficient, immediately setting stakes and goals, then turning you loose. You are piloting a blank slate protagonist, which is fine as this is definitely not a character driven game.
This one feels like a learning exercise more than anything. It is a very small 6 room tomb (not counting connecting hallways). It does have more than its share of objects to collect and to lesser extent manipulate, but almost none of those objects do anything useful even for scoring purposes. You can move them around, admire them in your inventory, and mostly be told “you don’t need to” when trying to apply them to the environment.
The text is serviceable enough, mostly descriptive, although insufficient for mapping. For example you are told there is a crack in the wall through which you can see something interesting, but nowhere are you told WHICH wall, should you want to explore that direction. In the end the map is small enough not to matter, but it does interfere with your ability to hold it in your head. More distressingly, where the room descriptions are more fleshed out, the nouns are not implemented. So you can be told “there is a river here” but when you try to examine it “there is no such thing here.” That feels like a pretty quick and easy rule of thumb: if you mention a noun, have a response when the player examines the noun. It doesn’t impact the gameplay, but definitely adds polish to the product.
There’s really only one puzzle to solve, and it's reasonably straightforward, befitting the scope of the piece. The geometry of the tomb doesn’t immediately suggest the answer, but is imprecise enough that it doesn’t contradict it either. As you progress in solving the puzzle, the descriptive text could be more state aware. (Spoiler - click to show)When water runs through the tomb, only some of the rooms acknowledge the presence, and depending on the room, the volume of water is inconsistent.
As a coding exercise, I would call it functionally complete. No major bugs, no unwinnable states I could observe, consistent object behavior. Would definitely recommend fleshing out the noun space. The most bang to buck would come from polishing the descriptive text to make the thing internally consistent and clear. As is, a Mechanical excercise.
Played: 10/17/22
Playtime: 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Not Alien Enough, November 22, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
This was a small game, showcasing Alien scientists excavating modern human artifacts, and being mildly bewildered by them. It felt like a working prototype in a lot of ways.
It is small, 6 rooms not counting hallways? There are NPCs with limited and unvarying interactions. There are puzzles to solve, interacting with objects the player has (mostly) no issue recognizing, but amusingly befuddle the aliens. They are pretty linear and mostly obvious. It does incorporate state awareness, opening up options naturally as you play through. It is all pretty bare bones though, narratively and graphically.
Graphically, it's not very interesting - the font and color selection have no particular resonance. A lot of sentences and choices are all lower case which is a stylistic choice I assume, but serves no real purpose. Options are stacked vertically, but not ordered so that if an option is not yet available to you it looks like a stray blank line between other options. There is no consistent organization of choices screen to screen - sometimes it is a complete-or-not vertical list, sometimes it is integrated into the descriptions themselves. There are spelling errors, including in the title screen. It incorporates pictures, but incompletely. There is some light humor in the contrast between how the aliens describe the objects, and the academic photo of the actual object. This does bite the game where the object with the most obtuse description does not have a picture like the others. While I guessed at its use, I never did figure out what it was supposed to be.
The text descriptions also left money on the table, as it were. For one, the lab space, hallways and other rooms are described in suspiciously human terms. If there was an alienness to the setting, it would have much better reinforced their bafflement. As such, I kind of pictured Star Trek aliens - one prosthetic but otherwise human - when so much more was possible. There were technical glitches as well - the game did not seem to recognize when you were carrying something and let you pick it up repeatedly. Even your ultimate goal is not well signposted. While its never unclear what needs to be done next, the end screen came as mild “oh I guess that’s it then” surprise.
None of this was fatal, just unpolished. The graphical presentation was unpolished enough that it never really faded from my consciousness, and that feels Intrusive to me. The text could use some rework. The framework is there for a diverting game, just needs a bit more to start Sparking. The introductory text suggests this was a class assignment of some sort. Makes sense - as a time-constrained assignment its completeness is to its credit. The polish can come later.
Played: 10/27/22
Playtime: 20min, finished
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
Bro-Tone, an IF implementation, November 22, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
4 Edith + 2 Niki proclaims itself a dating sim, but this game is not what those words suggest to me. It all feels very slapdash. You enter on the grounds of psychiatric hospital I think. This setting is almost never referenced again. I guess you work there, because you are presented with a corridor of offices to visit. The descriptive text of what is on this corridor does not match the choices on offer. This is a befuddling choice. Twine lets you embed the destinations in the description itself, it’s MORE work to provide two (incompatible) versions! You visit all 6 rooms, barely interact with their occupants, then pick one to date. One of the choices here is a date that was not referenced in ANY of your initial conversations so you kind of have to deduce who it’s referring to. Did I mention one of the interactions has a weird sexual harassment vibe?
Selecting the date presents an end screen. That’s it. No time to build Sparks of Joy let alone Engagement, though the text was really too awkward to supply either of those anyway. Besides its really rushed presentation, the thing that sticks out most is the amped up Bro tone of the thing.
Bear with me while I expand a bit on the genus and phylum of Bro-tone. All Bro-tone comes from the same extended lineage that culminated in the 80s/90s teen sex farces. Its key hallmarks were 1) faintly knuckleheaded cis dumbasses 2) carefree good humor 3) treating women as sex objects to achieve and 4) inhabiting narratives where the world happily rewarded all of those. (There was another gene, 5) Gay Panic, that is not relevant here.) And it was toxic as hell, once we looked at it close enough. Prominent in movies like Porkies, and I don’t know Joy Sticks (deep cut!), but really you couldn’t swing a dead cat in a cineplex and not hit one back then. Nowadays it is most readily identified by its excessive, prejorative use of the word ‘woke.’
There was a key mutation in the late 80’s that forked the line. I’m speaking of course of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. This mutation dramatically diluted gene #3 above, and somehow made the species stronger. Suddenly, knuckleheaded amiability could rise unfettered by toxicity. Subsequent mutations actually flipped the gene to engage women as people, and even modified #5. At first haltingly in supporting characters in American Pie, then fully-fledged in Neighbors or its Final Boss form, Josh Segarra in his roles in She-Hulk and The Other Two. Spoiler alert, this is NOT the Bro-tone phylum 4E+2N showcases.
The Bro-tone main line had another mutation in the last 4-7 years - a new gene of mocking self-awareness. Where the joke is how awful the main line is by subtly amplifying the meanness of the worst if its excesses. A great example of this line is Michael Che’ on SNL’s Weekend Update. He deadpan advocates the most insane, exaggerated Bro-tone behaviors for laughs. Colin Jost’s role here is indispensable - his comedically beleaguered disapproval is vital to the identification of this strain. Superficially it is so similar to the main branch they can easily be mistaken for each other.
And these separate-but-similar Bro-tones are where we are in 4E+2N. My first ending I was presented with (Spoiler - click to show)"Over the years, you realize that she's a little hysterical, but which woman isn't."
My impulse was to hear it in Michael Che’s voice and snorted in amusement. My second ending had a less over-the-top but clearly still Bro-tone blurb that made me question what I was looking at. As I contemplated a third run, I realized I was holding a Schroedinger’s cat box. At this point, the game was in superposition between the two Bro-tone lines. If I opened the box with a third run, it was going to concretize into one or the other. I don’t think I want that.
Played: 10/31/22
Playtime: Less than 10min, two runthroughs.
Artistic/Technical rankings: Mechanical/Intrusive
Would Play Again? I dare not trifle with the quantum superposition.
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
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