Reviews by JJ McC
IFComp 2023
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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
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