Ratings and Reviews by cgasquid
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nicely written but ultimately unfulfilling, April 4, 2024The Ouroboros Trap drops you, the faceless player character, into a ... well, i hesitate to call it a maze, because there's a lot less branching than it seems. there are many instant, unfair deaths and a lot of guesswork, but Trap is written in Twine with an undo command so it's not as obnoxious as it could be.
what is, however, obnoxious, is the massive overuse of pauses, particularly given how many times you're expected to cycle through the pages with the longest pauses. there's only one spot in the game where the pauses couldn't be replaced with some equivalent of "click to continue."
overall, while the writing is fine and there are some good ideas here, way too much of the actual gameplay is just repetition and guesswork. despite Trap's trappings of puzzle IF, it really isn't, and i'm not sure what else it's trying to be.
A horrible, inaccurate presentation of polyamorous relationships, March 17, 2022Coming at this from 18 years of being polyamorous and year 15 of a committed polyamorous relationship.
Okay. I'm not giving this game one star because it's badly coded, or because it doesn't work. I'm giving it one star because it is portraying a relationship type that many people, including myself, find to be a functional, stable, enriching environment -- and it's portraying it in an incredibly destructive way.
NUMBER ONE! Polyamory is not something everyone can do! It is not a "better" or "more enlightened" kind of relationship, it's just a different one. For Sarai to drag a person unsure about polyamory and hurl them into the middle of a complicated, adversarial relationship is absolutely unconscionable; these are things that need to be decided carefully and experimented with, and everyone has to be on board. And it's very clear that not everyone was, not that Sarai particularly seemed to care.
NUMBER TWO! Polyamory is not transitive! If I'm dating Alice, and I'm dating Bob, that does NOT mean that either Alice or Bob is in any way obligated to date each other! (I mean, for one thing sexual orientations are going to interfere; I could be a bi man dating a straight woman and a gay man.) This expectation is one of the biggest RED FLAGS in polyamorous relationships.
The fact that Sarai just DECLARED a change in the composition of the relationship without sitting everyone down in open communication and discussing the addition of a partner isn't polyamory, it's tyranny.
NUMBER THREE! Polyamory is all about communication! One of the very first things that happens is that Sarai tosses you together with one of her partners without saying the slightest thing about what you're expected to do. You and the other partner have to figure it out on your own. That is not something that should ever, ever happen.
In my playthrough, the relationship exploded (just as it inevitably would in real life). But it didn't feel like this was being portrayed as inevitable ... it felt like this was a losing condition in a game I was expected to win.
Sarai isn't the center of a polycule. She's an arrogant egomaniac who takes advantage of a friend's homelessness to drag her into her personal harem. It was absolutely transactional -- Jerri gets to stay with Sarai only if she accepts a sexual relationship not only with Sarai but also with several complete strangers. There are words for that.
Now, if this were just a story that happened to be about a destructive pseudo-polyamorous relationship, that would be one thing. But I really don't get that feeling; this is represented as an example.
Polyamorous people are a small minority that most people only have false, negative ideas about ... if you're going to write a work about a small minority that confirms everything false and negative that's said about that minority ... you bally well need a DISCLAIMER at the front that you're not trying to represent that community accurately! Again ... if you don't ... there's a word for that, too.
Urgh. This story made me feel so strongly I resorted to capital letters.
A one-move game with only a single puzzle, but ..., February 24, 2022everyone is, i think, familiar with the genre of "one move" games, originated by Aisle and followed up on by titles such as Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle and 50 Shades of Jilting.
unlike most such games, this one has a puzzle. you have one move to act. that action, all by itself, a single command, has to completely solve the puzzle.
the puzzle.
that damnable puzzle.
the evil, insidious, dastardly, cruel, vicious, mean, demonic ... incredibly interactive, deeply implemented puzzle.
i mean, i found my experience with this game to be one of incredible frustration, but it was the kind of frustration where the parser is being perfectly responsive and the reactions to your actions make perfect sense and you always feel like you're this close to the solution when in fact you're still another fifty iterations away.
five stars for That Damnable Puzzle. one star deducted because something important isn't made sufficiently clear: (Spoiler - click to show)the event isn't always exactly the same, and the differences are of paramount importance.
absolutely not recommended for beginners or inexperienced players. for all that there's only a single command required, i rank this with some of the hardest IF i've ever played.
Another in an onrush of Aisle clones, February 24, 2022the one-move game Aisle has been endlessly remixed, parodied, copied, and reiterated at this point. most of the copies have ignored the pathos that was the original's intent, instead focusing on the bizarre responses the original provided for more out-there commands that seemed to hint that the protagonist was suffering from dementia.
in this offering, you are sitting at a restaurant table with your lover, and you intend to leave them. you have one move. every response the parser recognizes will print out a joke interpretation of what you typed as a method of dumping said lover.
the key here is "every response the parser recognizes." most of the things i typed after the obvious were not understood. objects whose presence had been established in one narrative were not implemented, and couldn't be interacted with in the next restart.
it's not that this kind of game can't be done well, though admittedly i can only think of two times it worked: Rematch and I'm Having a Heart Attack from the Apollo 13 collection. in both cases the implementation was extremely deep, and you could (and needed to) build on what you learn about the setting from your previous actions to give you ideas for later attempts.
here i ran into too many brick walls of unimplemented words and lost interest.
Unintuitive and opaque, February 24, 2022i have mixed feelings about Spiral. when i first began playing i was sincerely impressed; it opens on a very compelling and intriguing situation, with two people bound and gagged facing each other and occasionally assailed by sprays of insecticide. i was immediately curious about how they ended up in this situation and what the connection between the two of them might be. the ability to swap between characters indicated i might be in for some cooperative puzzle-solving, for instance working out how to get out of our bindings and escape.
this was, unfortunately, not to be.
very quickly the characters find themselves transported into their dreams. in (Spoiler - click to show)eco-activist Ross's dreams, a giant machine is destroying the earth to feed a Beast; in the other, Helen has been condemned to hell (and i've been playing IF long enough for that latter to draw an instant eye-roll from me).
note that i had a single-word tag to describe Ross, but none to describe Helen. that's because at no point in this story did i manage to put together any kind of picture of Helen, who she was, what she liked ((Spoiler - click to show)besides meth), or what was important to her. she was a complete cipher.
Ross is sketched out in more detail, but while we hear about his family and friends and learn (Spoiler - click to show)one of them went past "activist" to "terrorist" I still never got a real idea of what kind of person he was.
the shallowness of the protagonists isn't helped by the hollowness of their dream-worlds. there are puzzles, but only one of them, (Spoiler - click to show)working out how the sticker and sickle work, seemed clever or original (and i can remember another game with that puzzle off the top of my head).
one "puzzle" is self-evident and still needs to be done repeatedly. one character has to gather seven treasures -- that's what they are, so that's what i'm calling them -- and most are either sitting in the open or only require you to search a specific obviously-searchable object. there's a potentially intriguing gimmick, (Spoiler - click to show)passing the items between characters, but it's only signaled by one clue that's easy to miss, and i ended up needing to use the walkthrough to find it.
there's also a softlock for Helen where you must have a specific object to get out of a given location, and if you went there without it, hope you saved. the location is ominous, to be sure, but it's no more ominous than literally everything else in the game.
Ross's dreamscape at least has resonance with his personality and beliefs. Helen's seems to come from being (Spoiler - click to show)non-religious in a Christian family with a Christian boyfriend. that could leave these kinds of scars, but given the events of what the game calls "the fateful day" something more related to (Spoiler - click to show)having her stillborn child removed would have made more sense.
the ending was the biggest disappointment. (Spoiler - click to show)it's completely nonsensical. helen and ross are in a train car; whichever character you collected the treasures for first has to use a weapon to kill a misshapen infant. this obviously makes no sense as a resolution for Ross, and doesn't really work for Helen either -- she didn't have an abortion, she had a stillborn baby removed. that is very much not the same thing. this apparently kills one character, then you briefly play as a wasp, and then all meaning goes out the window for a nonsense ending.
also, (Spoiler - click to show)the connection between the two of them was that there was none, nor is there any hint of how they got into this predicament or what any of it meant.
the writing is good and the initial presentation is terrific. but the characters are ultimately shallow, most of the puzzles are lackluster or completely absent, and the ending makes it hard to care about anything that's happened so far.
Tour de force, February 24, 2022generally, there are two types of hard games. in a game with fake difficulty, the problem is conveying to the story exactly what you're trying to do because you can't seem to figure out how to phrase it so the game will understand you. in a game with real difficulty, you have a wide variety of tools to tackle the situations you encounter, but each puzzle will require a different sort of lateral thinking and creativity.
a game with fake difficulty breeds frustration. a game with real difficulty induces obsession until you finally crack it.
Spellbreaker is absolutely a game with real difficulty. despite the surreal, disjointed landscape you're exploring, it's totally immersive. i never ran into the kind of blank incomprehension you see in a bad game; it was always just a matter of thinking harder about the puzzle and persevering.
this would be a five-star game, but i'm deducting a full star for the bank puzzle. it's derivative, uncreative, has iffy implementation, and even following the best-written walkthroughs i've never gotten better than a 50% chance of getting it right. (unfortunately, the use of stock puzzles would only get worse over time, hitting its nadir in Zork Zero.)
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