Ratings and Reviews by manonamora

This is a Twine styled in a CYOA book format with the WritingFantasy coding format, with hyperlinks sending you to the correct "page"/section. Set in a fantasy setting, you have escaped your hometown being taken over by orcs. During this starting struggle, you cross path with Tent, a strange girl with helpful skills. The two of you try to find a way to survive the coming winter (and maybe more, wink wink).

Even if the writing is a tad awkward or repetitive at times, there is a good balance between text length and choices. The pace is fast and to the point during action moments, while slow and focused on thoughts during low stakes times. The choices are varied, and makes any stake brought forward seem surmountable. And the banter between the characters are quite delightful (Tent, best girl!)

For a NSFW entry, the game gives the player an optional path, leaving more explicit scenes behind obvious choices. It is possible to go through the story understanding the attractions between the main characters, without feeling forced to go down that right. I ended up with the Friendship ending, which was quite nice.

Another smart thing of the entry: the order of the passages are shuffled (you go from passage 1 to 54 to 29 to etc...), meaning you can't piece the story back unless you follow the links on the page... You have to play the game to get to the end!

With a superhero/villain setting, Moonstrike is a relatively long game, both in terms of word count and passage length, in an almost kinetic form with its singular ending and limited choices.

The setting is a bit silly, as you are a vigilante trying to take down a villain that just escape, while trying to keep your identity concealed and your life in checked. But these kinds of premise is fun to explore, especially the balance of silliness of the situation and the more serious aspect of the vigilante reality.

While I liked the premise of the game, I did find some issues with the pacing of the story. Part of it stems from the lengths of the passages (from 3-6 word pages by glance). Without regular break, beats of the story seem to drag on more than they should or goes against the fast-paced actions sequences (like the fights).
Another part would be the relatively restricted interactivity. Because of those long passages (often multiple ones at a time), the available actions for the player are few and far between, rendering us a bit more passive than the setting would warrant (why not have a proper fight sequence?)

Another reason for me was the confusing passing of time. We're told at the start of the game we're hunting a villain, and that time is of the essence, but good thing you are on a short break right now! But some actions to track the villain take weeks to process. Or you seem to spend so much time on random things (the middle section at the mechanic shop felt much longer than it actually was? or the drive before meeting the bad guy). In any case, by the end of the game, it was unclear whether it had just been a few days since the start of the story or months.

I did enjoy the funny moments and quibs between characters, especially between the PC and the villain. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to root for the PC throughout the game, but the villain was my favourite character. So chaotic.

A short cute kinetic(-ish) story about the what are/could/should have been in ChoiceScript. The writing is full of emotion, (unrequited?) feelings, and maybe even a hint of regret. Retrospection is a big focus of the story itself.

A strange thing from it was the choice of the You's and I's here. In usual ChoiceScript fashion, the main body of the text refers to the player as You, while it uses I for the choice options. In this game, You's and I's share the same space. Are we supposed to be the I and reflect on our feelings and relationships? or the You and discover how bad of a friends we probably are?
The ambiguity of it made me a bit confused, but I liked it as well.

This was a fairly basic adventure game, with a combat/inventory/market system. You fight "monsters", get coins, try to balance your health/hunger, and if you're lucky, get to the finish line (or you die). Coded in python, the game uses numbers as inputs rather than your typical parser commands.

Though the fights are randomly generated (in the name of the "monster", attacks felt, and rewards), it becomes repetitive quite quickly. After a dozen of fight, seeing the retro ASCII art bud swing its sword... eh.
I died before reaching the required 100 fights, but didn't feel the need nor want to try to beat the game.

Would be the nice base for a larger project though. The mechanic itself works fine.

M:REU is a large parser game, reminiscent of the old Infocom era, and very much a love letter to the original HHGG game and the HHGG lore. The story follows the event of the second book of the HHGG series, in which the protagonist makes their way towards Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe. It combines puzzles and exploration, and includes hints and a walkthrough.

It can't be completed in 2h. I did not reach the end.

When starting the game, I knew I would not be able to finish it within the 2h mark (I remember the beta call mentioning a 8h-long playthrough...), nor would I have been able to go through the different parts without losing/dying (its difficulty being cruel, one wrong move and you die). But I did not expect the quality of the game to be this impressive, considering this is the first game of this author and the fact that the game had been re-coded a few months prior to the comp.

Through my limited playthrough (I managed to get to the 4th location?), it is clear this was a labour of love for the old Infocom games, and the HHGG universe. The game manages to encapsulate the wittiness of the books so well, from the description of your actions, to the error messages, or the in-game hints. I gladly tried to die, just to see the funny messages, and the game calling me a noob for being a bad player (only saying the truth there...).

Some of the puzzles seem a bit obtuse, and require either knowledge of the story or some trial an error (thank you, walkthrough for the help). They are definitely not meant for first-time parser players. Even trying to understand the hints, or follow the walkthrough, it is pretty easy to make an error and see your progress blocked completely.

Close to the 2h-mark, I stumbled into the Milliways kitchen, tried (and failed) to wrangle with the cupboard and my inventory. At some point, the cupboard just refused to open, and the timer rang. I still tried to play a tiny bit more, undoing previous actions and redo the puzzle, but alas, I could not get it past (it was a bug, it turns out).

Honestly, from the little I played, it is really impressive, and could pass for an official game.
Maybe I'll restart it later and try to play it fully.

[Originally played on 2-Oct during the IFComp]

The Vambrace of Destiny is a dungeon crawler adventure, with limited commands and filled with puzzles. You must go through the different levels of the dungeon, fight monsters, discover treasures, and gather all the spells.

I did not reach the ending. The current review only account for what was played.

Until I reached the second level and was essentially stuck, banging my head against the wall because I could not solve the puzzles, TVoD was quite an enjoyable light parser (especially for a parser-adverse/noob like me). It has limited commands, which are essentially shortcuts; a visible map on the screen (at least in the play online version), which showed where you are and what rooms you discovered, and reasonable logical puzzles (even the one I got stuck on...), and hints (external document).

The logic of the game is relatively simple: explore the dungeon, find a monster but can't fight it, explore some more, find a spell, fight the monster with the spell, go to the next bit. As you advance further, the puzzles require extra steps to be solved, often with combinations of actions or "passing a turn". Even if some puzzles required retracing your steps to unlock further parts, they were quite enjoyable to solve!

I still spent enough time faffing about, pressing the wrong direction on the screen, or forgetting to press a certain command, or just not getting the puzzle, that the clock ran out before I could reach the end. Starting level 2, the puzzles leave the beginner level... I think I managed to visit 1/3 to 1/2 of the rooms of level 2 before I gave up.

Still, I had quite a bit of fun, and breaking through the blocks on the path, defeating the monsters, and finding the treasures, were pretty satisfying! Level 1 is a hoot!
I really appreciated the simple commands (the investigrab especially!) and how merciful the game was (you might not manage to solve a puzzle or finish the game, but you won't die).

I want to revisit this game down the line (aka when a walkthrough drop - the hints are not enough for a noob), because I really want to reach the end.

[Originally played on 1-Oct during the IFComp]

Into The Lion's Mouth is a relatively short game about being stuck in a very unfortunate situation, in the middle of the Savannah, surrounded(-ish) by lions. Lucky for you, you know the ins-and-outs of the region, being an animal refuge guard. You won't be found dead where you stand!

Mixing humour, wildlife facts, and meta commentary, ITLM is, as it calls itself, a lion taming simulator. Though you have multiple paths on how to solve your current situation, it is clear there is only one way to reach "the ending", as the game will nudge you back towards the correct paths. You won't really ever "die".

From the tone of the writing, or the animation and formatting of the text, it is clear the game is not meant to be taken completely seriously. You learn some neat fact, sure, but with a giggle here and there. I think that worked out nicely. Though, it was at times jarring to find embedded videos or pictures that seemed to only partly related, breaking immersion completely.

Not all paths were created equal in this game. Some are quite short (as being the obvious wrong answer), and some seem a bit to run into circle (until you go back to the correct path. I found the cub rescue path to be the strongest bit of the game, as it was quite sweet (who doesn't love petting animals), but the other paths does not really do the game justice.

[Originally played on 1-Oct during the IFComp]

Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head is quite a long entry mixing the heist genre with horror tropes, with a focus on puppetry, and a hint of a mystery. Your job is to recover different puppets hidden throughout an abandoned - about to get demolished - studio. However, the job is not as easy as it seems: monsters roam the corridors... and will steal what you carry.

From the (actual) start, PYHITPH reminded me of Five Nights at Freddie's, not just because of the puppets themselves, but also with the spooky buildings you need to explore at night, and the strange things that hunt you. You need to be strategic in where you go and when you get to it, or you'd cross path with the monsters (the Hints refers to the game as having a Pac-Man sort of gameplay). Adding onto it, you have to solve puzzles to get to certain puppets or bits of information.

I got frustrated losing the puppets pretty quickly (even if I tried to play it smart), so I ended up using the cheat mode quite early on to reach the endings. It is not an issue from the game itself, though. The mechanic and the puzzles pretty neat, I just couldn't handle it [timing puzzles are make-or-break-it]. Were it not for the spooky monsters and tracking their movements…

As well, not being a puppet person, I felt like I was missing context or references when I played the game. I could obviously be completely fiction*, but something about the writing made it pretty believable that something like this happened in real life?
*looking up names left me empty-handed, again...

[Originally played on 1-Oct during the IFComp]

For Eternity, Again and Again is a quite short entry, about love, unbending fate, and rebirth. The entry plays on the trope of immortal lover vs reincarnated mortal, set in a vague fantasy setting. I found all endings.

I thought the game was confusing. Even reading back on my previous choices, or going through the ones I had not picked yet, I found myself wondering what this game was about. I gathered that the story meant to show the struggles between lovers facing their doomed end, but the vagueness and unevenness of the writing didn't quite manage to hit the mark for me.

Having found all ending, I did note that the two paths were somewhat mirroring each other. I think you get to play both lovers, one for each path? If so, that's neat.

[Originally played during the IFComp on 1-Oct]