Reviews by JJ McC
IFComp 2022
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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
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