Reviews by manonamora

Coca-Cola Presents: 🥤 Fuck Capitalism Jam 2032 🥤 is a short bitsy/bipsy game, set in the very near future of 2032 (oh this review is not going to age well soon…), at the dawn of a new edition of the Fuck Capitalism Jam. You are an excited little sprite getting ready to leave your oppressing little room to join the event, held in person in Madrid, ad the IFEMA centre. This year, as with a couple of years now, the event has been sponsored by a big corporation! Because, they too are looking to defeat capitalism, and make the world a better place!

So, funny thing, expecting a bleak dystopian future, from the start of the game, seeing a very anti-capitalist unranked jam being not only turned into a competition but also sponsored by capitalist ventures, I misread the location as FEMA centre and thought “Yeah… That checks out.” as if in the near future the US would take over Spain or something. I didn’t question it one bit, because it weirdly still fit. xD (it’s actually the IFEMA Convention Center in Madrid, a very real place hosting very real conventions).

Back to the game.

It’s a pretty humorous jab at capitalism (duh, from the title), with tons of references to real companies and their mode of work (ex: MLM Herbalife, I actually expected more of those xD), and events growing so much so quickly it loses its original purpose (become the thing you swore to destroy). A bit of a cautionary tale, based on real events, where things meant “for the people, free, in aeternum”, turns into a for-profit and ruins everything…

Now, it’s obviously not very realistic: the timeline is maybe a bit too short for this to happen, I don’t believe the organiser is going to be a capitalist stan anytime soon, and I would be super shocked if Godot was bought by Roblox (please, let this be a nightmare). But it does remind us not to take the good (free) things in our lives for granted. Because it could be gone in an instant…

With little (and made in a very short amount of time), it is pretty impactful. I enjoy checking out the “submitted projects for the competition”, and how they clashed with their respective sponsors. That was really funny.

Pear Party is a short conversation between two uni students at a party, where you attempt to do some small talk and hopefully… not nerd about about pears. Why pears? ¯\ _ (ツ) _ /¯

It’s a silly little conversation, filled with second-hand embarrassment, quirky responses, awkward silences, and pretty funny lines. I chuckled more than I would care to admit. And I learned new stuff about pears too! Would you like to hear about–

Poetic Justice is a short poetic and logical game made in Dendry, where you play as a legendary unnamed (at the start) poet on trial for plagiarism. On the bench, sit your peers, other iconic poets, ready to judge you. Will you manage to refute their arguments or face justice?
Worried about fairness? You get to choose one of those judges are your poet representative (though it ends up barely mattering... but you get to learn a bit more about them with a Wikipedia snippet).

Because it is also a fair trial, you get to review the evidence against you, before refuting each of the poets' arguments (I'm not sure why you need to fight your own lawyer, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). It's pretty much a breeze. But your own arguments are not enough, you need to trick them to see the idiocy in their thinking.

Which leads us to the main interactive element of the game: a logic puzzle. Each poet writes their own version of one of your poem, and your must choose the right order and combination so they all end up criticising each other. I ended up writing down all the options to get it.

The puzzle was neat. I wished I had more to do in the first half of the game, especially when refuting the arguments of the different poets. Or maybe even lose the trial (I don't think there is a bad ending?).

Thank You For Your Inquiry is a short game from hell, forcing you to endure the nonsensical exchanges with a customer service representative from Simplicity Transportation Customer Service that is either overworked or doesn't care about your claim (or the company is just trash ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Trials and tribulations awaits you as you try to get a refund for [undescribed event that cost you a lot of money]: from the request of very private information to their unbudging offers of a pitiful refund, hardship is the only thing you will gain from this.

Though it is played for laugh (or horror) here, these exchanges are not that far from reality: exchanges that go nowhere, pathetic amounts refunded (if any at all), complete disregard for rights (big deal in the EU!), unresponsive representatives, strict and just plain terrible procedures... There is only so much sanity you can have with some of these companies before you want to pull your hair out and set everything on fire.
Thoughts for the cool customer reps that try their best to help!

I hated every single exchanges with the customer reps.
Would 100% torture myself through it again! I've already done it multiples times (the endings are so funny), but I still would do it again!

😱🔤😱 is a short and wordless interactive game, that relies only on emojis to tell a story. What story? Well, it is for you to figure it out!
Because I certainly didn't...

There is something so interesting about using a "language" that is know to all (emoji), but used so differently depending on people. Is 🔣 unknown words or insults? What does 🔤 mean to you? Is 💨a wind, a sigh, a fart???
When combined in a string, how do you decipher it into a proper sentence? When a whole page is full of them, how to you turn it into a coherent sentence?

As a whole it's a very fun puzzle! A very confusing one, and a very novel way to tell a story.

Have Orb, Will Travel is an old-school style parser, where you play a wizard tasked to find an elusive orb somewhere inside a quaint cottage, to gain back the Council’s trust. With its custom system and Interface reminiscing of old Minitel pages, the game is a puzzle fest. Though you will not really reach a failed state, the puzzles are fairly difficult. The game includes hints and a walkthrough, both of which I used extensively.

Old-school style parsers intrigue me, in their implementation (often confusing for new parser players), their sometimes convoluted puzzles, and the sheer amount of work needed in the back-end to make things work. They require a lot of attention, out-of-the-box thinking to solve puzzles, and knowledge of the codes in interacting with elements. Reaching the end feels like an achievement.

But I struggled with it so much. I didn’t even exited the first room before I ended up opening the hint sections… which weren’t actually helpful in my case. Turns out, keys are not the only way to open a door. Who knew? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Still, I persevered, because I am not a quitter, and ran around the cottage, trying to interact with anything in my path. Sometimes it worked well, and I could unlock things just fine (and feel so darn smart about it), sometimes… it was a frustrating disaster (;-; mazes yall… that one broke me.).

For how interesting and new some puzzles felt (actually, the maze, as strange as it was) or how reined-in the clues were (not always helpful, but fun anyway!), there were quite a lot of friction when it came down to playing it. For examples: you’d need to type a very specific command to get things, not just take item; even if a thing is mentioned in a description (especially an item), the program might not let you examine it unless it is in your inventory, pretending even it does not exist; one of the first items available to you is a book, but you can’t read it completely unless you turn each of its pages… All of these little frictions do end up adding up, making the game maybe a bit more frustrating than it could be.

Most of the latter part of the game (which I reached only because of the walkthrough), revolves around manipulating different machineries that affects other bits of the map. So you end up going to some part of the map, interact with one thing, walk around the map to see if it affected it correctly, walk back to the machine (which is sometimes going the long way round because of one-way passageways), pressing some more buttons and doing it again… Damned if you enter the wrong combination, because the game has many rooms.

While you are supposedly a wizard, and can learn 3 spells in-game, you surprisingly use very little magic to solve puzzles - the spells being used at most 3 times in total. You spend more time walking around the cottage or manipulating buttons, dials, and handles. You do end up getting a wand at some point though…

For all the text the game has, it answers surprising little in why you need to find the orb, how it got there, what it does, or how important it is to the Council. The game is so focused on the puzzle, you mainly learn about the setting or context of the story at the start, with the quest of finding the orb handed to you. Just a little bit of nudging and framing would have helped.

I still found the game fascinating - even if it may have broken my spirit a little bit, resulting in finishing the game with the walkthrough opened next to the game instead of solving it all by myself. The interface is very playful and colourful (though the timed text gets annoying by the second use of the ring), and the use of background noise gave the game a lot of charm. The ding notification when solving something and gaining points was so darn rewarding!

This game might be short and concise, but it is quite well-written, impactful and heartbreaking. From the start, there is something not quite right with your son's interruption of your sleep, even if it is a yearly occurrence. Things just don't quite fit all to well, especially when your daughter appears or when the mother is mentioned (in hindsight... 🥴). But is is not clear until the end what is truly going on here. What seems at first like a slice-of-life with some spooky halloween aspect, turns downright terrifying. The reveal is not only depressing to internalise, but the implications are frankly hitting much harder than what you'd expect from the blurb and warnings. The final choice is, again, heartbreaking, whichever way you choose...

Meritocracy is a fairly linear story, where you play as a first-year university student taking their first class in a Philosophy course, whose subject is based on the topic of Argumentations and the concept of merit. You also come across a strangely relevant debate outside of class…

From the premise, you'd expect an epic discussion about merit - the good, the bad, and the eh - throwing arguments back at your professor, doing the absolute most to get your points across, and coming on top (or failing miserably, because you're just a student). You may even expect a wide-branching path, with choice at each corner, to counter your professor's points... where one wrong choice could lead to your embarrassing defeat...

What you get, however, is a more... muddled and railroad-y approach on that promise. More of a philosophy lecture packaged into a simple interactive form than an player agency-driven gameplay. The promised "battle of wits" is nowhere to be found - as the professor mainly lectures and you listen, or you answer his prompted question before he just leaves the room. The closest thing to an argumented debate I found in the game happened between two unnamed NPC, neither of which require the MC's help - even then, it is more framed as an example of the lecture*. Finally, as you have little space to convince anyone of your idea(s), you end up just trying to convince yourself of your "choices".
*the MC even points out they could interject at the start and question the orator, but doesn't which :/ is a shame! It would have made for a fun debate gameplay!

When it even comes to discussing the concept of meritocracy, which is sandwiched between a lecture on ad hominem fallacy and a weird tangent about the Trolley Problem, I found myself wandering where the depth of the philosophical thoughts were. The topic is approached on a very surface level (ooh meritocracy bad because too much expectations and it's unfair, oooh actually it's good because more creative drive and the alternative is unfair) without much discussing the intricacies of it all (e.g. muddled by a person's status/education/wealth/identity/etc...). Which is a shame, as one could question whether meritocracy truly exists considering certain class advantages some have over others OR whether it can truly be fair (how is merit defined? who defines it?).

Granted, the topic itself is quite complex to begin with (and also somewhat ironic considering the IFComp is sometimes framed as a meritocratic competition), but the point does not manage to quite land either, which ever side you take on the debate. And often, the debate is not won with rational arguments...

One potential cause for this may be found in the writing of the game.
The pacing is not quite there, dragging a bit too much at time - with the fairly long and superfluous introduction taking precious time/attention from the reader, or the fixation on the surrounding, which does not really amount to anything - and glossing over moments which should probably have been pushed further - the whole debate between you and the professor essentially.
Though the writing wants to be somewhat humorous (it felt at time it was trying to make fun of it all?), the frequent repetitions and sloppy prose both undermines this element, the setting of the game (university) and the MC's characteristics (you are a student of higher learning with intellectual capabilities*).
*but also... I've graded prose like this from uni students so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Speaking of the MC, it is made abundantly clear it is a distinct person with drive and wants and needs*... but also very much of a Mary Sue. The MC is just so good at debate, they can take on the professor on the first class BUT they are so bad at finding their class. They seem like those pretentious high school students who think they know everything, even better than experts. It's exhausting...
*I don't really get the point at the start about the MC not being customisable? It feels a bit off-putting and unrelated to the topic itself?

The concept of meritocracy isn't the easiest topic to grapple with, and the thought of turning it into a debate-like gameplay to explore its definition(s) or philosophical schools of thoughts was a good framing for it. It's a shame it could not quite deliver to what it had promised...

The campfire is the beggining is a short branching story, where you find yourself before a campfire, with no recollection of where you are or even who you are. Will you just wait and see what happens to you? or will you adventure out? There are 6 endings to find - some humorous, some meta, and some a bit nonsensical.

While I didn’t really connect to the story or the humour, I do need to give props to how smooth it ran in Google Slides. It created a nice ambiance through its visuals and background SFX.

yet another planning doc is a multi-medium epistolary/chat interactive story, centred around three students, from Passerine Hills Academy, an elite university in an unspecified region (but most likely non-American English-speaking), trying to organise the weekly student party. Through a series of Google Docs and external emails, the trials and tribulations of Ana Vitória, Emmeline and Izzy, after their usual processes unravel, are entangled with the peculiar life at the Academy.

The Academy offers an interesting setting for the story, with its three-tiered organisation of its student body (the poor scholarship students, the extremely privileged students, and the majority middle-ground), which is both discussed in the conversation and displayed through the group dynamic (Emmeline belonging to the first, Izzy to the second, and Ana Vitória the third). The difference in class is reflected in how they behave and communicated with one another (familiarity vs. deferential - what they share or keep secret), present themselves (visible name and pfp, language and tone), and how they handle their changing plans. It inevitably adds layers to the depiction of a fairly mundane task (organising a weekly meet-up) and to the personality of each student.

Though you’d expect these kinds of exchange to happen more in a chat software (your Slack/Discord/other), using online Google Docs/Gmail allows each character to privately communicate without the other knowing, go on tangents without disrupting too much the main discussion, and adds to the school group project vibes happening.
But, as an external reader, it gives too an intimate look into private conversations that no others should have access too. Gossips feel extra juicy to learn, even if you have no real knowledge of those other students. And, secrets hinted in the personal emails most impactful. It’s a fun take on the epistolary format.