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.)
A big step forward, February 18, 2022first, we need to look at 9:05 from the perspective of when it was created. certainly, there had been stories that concealed crucial facts from the player as a part of their structure, ranging from the clever (Photopia) to the merely frustrating (The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). but the standard expectation of the time was that you could trust what the parser told you implicitly and assume you knew everything you needed to about the protagonist (most often there simply not being anything worth knowing).
a game like 9:05 challenges these impressions. the parser and protagonist are (Spoiler - click to show)telling a lie of omission. this is, obviously, a Generic Protagonist just going through the dreary opening moves of a typical slice-of-life game. (Spoiler - click to show)no, it isn't. you're not the Generic Protagonist, you're the person who robbed and murdered them.
9:05 is a very brief game that only rewards a handful of playthroughs before being completely explored. but those playthroughs have something very important to say about the nature of IF.
while i wouldn't exactly call a game that can be finished in three minutes and completely exhausted in ten a masterpiece, this is definitely an important work that signposted some of the narrative techniques used in many later games.
One of the VERY few pieces of AIF worth playing ..., February 18, 2022... assuming you have a thing for Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
you're dropped into the uniform of William T. Riker and the quarters of Deanna Troi. (it's not clear whether this is happening before NextGen or after Star Trek: Insurrection, because they were never a couple during the series' actual run.) within very short order, you will also be dropping said uniform and, ah, initiating docking procedures, so to speak.
the main thing that distinguishes Deanna from other works of adult IF is that it gives Deanna agency and active participation. most works of AIF present one's prospective partners with all the detail and implementation depth of the wrench in Zork I: the item is there for a purpose, it doesn't particularly matter what it looks like, and until you start applying verbs to it it's not going to do anything, either.
in other words, this feels like a sexual fantasy, while most AIF feels, at best, like a still photograph.
now, i did still have trouble with it, but that's probably because i'm not personally well-versed in how to use the implement Commander Riker will be relying on. but it was still fun reading the dialogue, which rings remarkably true, and exploring the various Trekkian room features.
i'm still not sure parser is the best way to go with AIF -- it's always going to be somewhat on rails, and using Twine would save the player some verb guessing and the like. but honestly, this is a short erotic story where no one's being manipulated or taken advantage of and two consenting people get their nookie on. that's worth celebrating.
A difficult but rewarding one-room puzzler, February 18, 2022you are a college student (male by default, though it switches to female if you type (Spoiler - click to show)HETERONORMATIVITY OFF, something i'd give my left arm to be able to do in real life). you've been making practically no progress on your paper because you keep allowing yourself to be distracted, and your girlfriend is fed up with you. now you have an ultimatum: write 1,000 words by the deadline or she's leaving you forever.
as a point of stark realism, your college dorm room turns out to be a horrible place to study. there's no quiet, you're surrounded by minor irritants, and there's a MAJOR irritant who i'd think was trying to sabotage your relationship if there was any way she could know about the ultimatum.
in a very clever design choice, rather than being personality-free (or pointlessly sarcastic like the default library), the parser's voice is what you imagine your girlfriend would be saying if she was watching your situation right at that moment. it gives her a lot of character, and goes a long way towards redeeming her in my eyes (really, it's not fair to issue an ultimatum about something the protagonist can't really help).
that said, i did not even come close to completing the story without hints.
the puzzles in Violet are eminently logical, but still entirely brutal and require a ton of experimentation. so many things are happening at once that it can distract the player, as your problems aren't kindly enough to line up one at a time. the few means you have to fight back are counterintuitive and in some cases plain ornery (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)the bizarre way you operate the radio).
but "it's hard" doesn't equate to "it's bad." we need IF for all levels of player skill and creativity. the only reason i don't refer to this as a hidden gem is that it's not at all hidden -- it's extremely well-known.
probably also says something that i was feeling depressed after writing a few negative reviews in a row, i wanted to review something good, and i came here ...
An attempt at a point, February 18, 2022+=3 was intended to make the point that a puzzle can have a perfectly logical solution and still be virtually unsolvable.
it does not make this point, as the puzzle does not have a logical solution.
for those not in the know, the goal of the game is to pay a troll by handing it three items. this is the first puzzle and the only puzzle, and you encounter it immediately. however, there aren't three items in your inventory, nor are there any other items to be picked up. so, what to do?
the solution presented is to (Spoiler - click to show)think of objects that have been implemented but that are never mentioned in any descriptions at all, that are omitted from your inventory even though you possess them, and that can't be found by examining yourself -- specifically, clothes.
unfortunately, as too often happens when an author is trying to lecture the audience, it just doesn't hold up.
first, regarding the response to EXAMINE ME. (Spoiler - click to show)you're described as the adventurer from Zork. there was an object that said adventurer possessed that wasn't implemented -- the compass, mentioned only in the Alice-in-Wonderland area in Zork II. but it couldn't referred to. this conveys the information that you're a fantasy adventurer -- yet the words BOOTS and ARMOR aren't implemented. thus, even if someone does think of trying to obtain items by undressing, the first words they're likely to try won't work, and they'll give up on the idea!
second, regarding the game's tiny nature. (Spoiler - click to show)you're said to have just conquered a dungeon, but the game won't let you retreat to gather more items. in the games of this era there was always detritus left over -- the adventurer from Zork would at least have a lamp and sword. there's no logical reason to block this area off; the game is just refusing to allow you to go there because it isn't the intended solution.
and lastly, regarding the shallow implementation. (Spoiler - click to show)a handful of different words for specific articles of clothing -- modern ones -- are available. given the esoteric nature of the solution, again, someone isn't necessarily likely to keep trying clothing nouns unless they happen to hit on one first try. trying to remove my dress or shoes and being told the game doesn't understand would cause me to discard this way of thinking. this game needed a LARGE vocabulary of garments -- and given how little game there is otherwise, there was absolutely time to implement it.
overall, the reason that this puzzle is "logical but impossible" is because the author's rigged things up that way. all this proves is that IF authors are able to write puzzles where the only way most people can proceed is to read the author's mind or guess the right word, and buddy, that ain't news.
I may have liked this a little too much ..., February 18, 2022one of the problems with IF erotica is that it's generally written in a vacuum. minimal descriptions of anything but sexual acts, shallow implementation in general, and heaping helpings of read-the-author's-mind. even when the writing per se is good (e.g., Deanna) there's an inherent feeling of artificiality; much like bad porn, it just kind of starts at the sex and ends after it.
in order for an erotica game to work for me, at least, i have to understand what the characters are like, how they feel about each other, and what this means for them. to put it another way, i need the backstory.
(i acknowledge that there are some people who do prefer their porn to be storyless and characterless. to this, i reply that they are free to howl "get on with it" at my kind of erotica, just like i'm free to be bored and mildly revolted by theirs.)
"And the Robot Horse You Rode In On" is unapologetically a work of erotica; the author has even acknowledged that it began with a mental image of (spoilered for sexual terminology) (Spoiler - click to show)predicament bondage and expanded from there.
but for a work so short, it does an excellent job of characterbuilding and worldbuilding. you can understand your character. you can understand the other character. you can understand how this arose and where it might go.
well-written, engaging, and very, very hot.
Gone from the internet, but not from our hearts (?), February 18, 2022first to note, the provided link no longer works; the author appears to have taken the game down.
i mean, inasmuch as this is a game at all. much like many political games it has a point to make, and it doesn't want you messing around with things like choices or alternate story paths that might not lead to the desired horror.
this game accurately portrays the American police from the point of view of those minorities that are victimized by it. i'll give it that, which means it gets one extra star than most of the on-rails political IF i've read.
but honestly this isn't really much more effective than plain text would have been, and much less effective than a well-written essay containing documentation and interviews and providing proper citations.
which is to say, this kind of thing isn't going to convince anyone; it'll get a laugh out of the people who already agree with its message, anger those who disagree, and get a quizzical head-tilt from the rest.
yeesh, February 18, 2022i can understand the desire of art to be transgressive, and that this piece is intended to start as erotica before abruptly diving deep into what is, to me at least, (Spoiler - click to show)serial-killer horror.
i realize that (Spoiler - click to show)vore is a known fetish, it has its adherents, i've had furry friends who were into it, Your Kink Is Not My Kink But Your Kink Is OK As Long As It Only Remains A Fantasy.
but as something to spring on a reader without any warning, in a game presented as ordinary porn, it's a little on the extreme side.
if the (Spoiler - click to show)serial killer stuff had been accurately signposted in advance, i would probably have given this game four stars ... from another room ... using a long pole to click the mouse. it's very well written. but the fact that this incredibly triggering content was provided without warning forces me to reduce the rating considerably.
A beautiful gory palace, built on sand, February 15, 2022i'm going to come right out and say it: the writing in this game is gorgeously disgusting. the horror is real and visceral, and as you begin investigating it things just continually splatter from bad to worse. even images that might otherwise be comical (like the (Spoiler - click to show)laundry chute) have a cleverness to their descriptions that causes the gorge to rise and the eyes to be averted.
you are a test subject in an experiment run by a (Spoiler - click to show)corrupt and evil corporation ((Spoiler - click to show)really, did i even need to spoiler that?). as such, you've developed abilities beyond mortal ken, used with the new CONCENTRATE command. it takes some time to get the idea of how it works, and i kept finding new wrinkles in my powers as the story went on.
in terms of dream-logic, the horror is consistent and makes sense. you can never be quite sure if what you're dealing with is some kind of magic or merely a branch of science that humanity is better off not exploring. you find many diary pages and journals written by the doctors and others involved in your care, and it's very easy to start to care about certain ones (and to want to bring certain others on charges of crimes against humanity).
so, why three stars instead of five? well ... One Eye Open was clearly not adequately tested. there are constant issues with disambiguation any time you're in a room with multiples of the same object, and there are so many objects with the same noun. the notes your character carries are concatenated into a single object; why not the keys? and why isn't there a better way of navigating notes, possibly using the Invisiclues-style menu system that doesn't seem to have been used at all?
there are also cases where there only seems to be a single command that can accomplish the task. i knew exactly what to do in the (Spoiler - click to show)Autopsy Room but I couldn't get the parser to understand any of multiple phrasings. disambiguation stuck its oar in here as well, because (Spoiler - click to show)any attempt to refer to parts of the corpse, including the vital corpse hand, is redirected to the corpse's mouth instead. a situation like this, where you're locked down and being carefully timed, shouldn't have these issues.
finally, while it's possible to get a good ending, getting the correct ending is basically a matter of luck. throughout the game, you'll experience (Spoiler - click to show)flash-forwards to members of the staff dying in assorted horrible ways. in all but one such situation, there's nothing you can meaningfully do. but that one time, unless you ignore the chaos around you and take an unclued action, you're locked out of the true ending. you can't even replay the sequence to try again. this is not fair to the player at all!
overall, there are so many good ideas here. such a good story, albeit one firmly within genre conventions. clever puzzles. but One Eye Open needs more testing and debugging to fix the disambiguation errors, make your notes less of a chore to access, and to fix that one burst of deep unfairness.
Yep ... that's what it's like., February 15, 2022this is not a piece of interactive fiction, or even really interactive at all. it's a completely linear narrative that uses some hypertext tricks to good effect.
like many similar works, this is an attempt to generate empathy by putting the player in the shoes of someone from an oppressed minority, then relating a very painful and very accurate example of how crushing and damaging that oppression is.
it's cathartic to read as a trans person. but i don't know if this kind of project can ever really have the desired effect, because the people who truly hate us want us to suffer. they don't experience empathy for us. a TERF would read something like this and probably laugh.
but maybe i'm just too cynical and old.
five stars for the writing, but again note, this is not a game or even particularly interactive. it's an essay in hypertext form.
Very lightweight, February 15, 2022There's not much to this one. A small number of rooms, shallowly implemented, many of them either empty or containing exactly one object. There are no real NPCs (there's one other character, but he seems completely unreactive). You can easily access the "waiting room" location (the place where objects that are not placed in a room are found) despite the game not otherwise being "meta."
Most of the puzzles are obvious, repetitive, or completely unmotivated. The shallow implementation can be a headache, with objects that are very different having no disambiguation.
It's a lot like someone's first IF, the one they write to learn how to code and only share with their friends -- a random layout of rooms, a paucity of interactive objects, and a few very basic puzzles.
There isn't anything specifically offensive about it, though; it's just a very basic work without much to it.
Short, sweet, and somewhat lacking, February 15, 2022a very short treasure hunt in which you, the angel Gabriel, must return to heaven but cannot until you have collected the seven colors of the rainbow. you are assisted by Demeter, your (presumably?) mortal lover. (it is clearly not the Greek goddess Demeter.)
the writing is snappy and the relationship depicted is sweet. Gabriel is an adorable nebbishy type and Demeter -- you know, i mean i could describe the character, but looking at the author's name and the apparent resulting self-insert, i'm not comfortable describing a real person i don't know.
if this were a longer piece, perhaps spreading the colors out further or adding more tasks, i'd feel better about it ... but it's only two rooms, and while the colors are kind of hidden, they're not hard to find and the game is over in less than ten minutes. i don't have enough time to really understand the characters.
aside from its length, which is auctorial choice even if i don't agree with it, i had three problems with this game, all spoilers:
1. blue. (Spoiler - click to show)while i have seen pants that are the kind of bright, pure blue called for by the scepter, i've never seen a pair of jeans that were that kind of Platonic blue -- manufacturers tend to go for a light blue or a very dark one. i'd very much assumed my jeans were an "off" color like the burgundy furniture, and found they worked while looking for an Easter egg.
2. indigo. (Spoiler - click to show)the sky can appear indigo at sunset at high altitudes under very specific conditions. there's nothing in the game to indicate that those conditions are present. the clue is "what would you color with a blue-violet crayon," which i'd think would vary by child. also, you're supposed to have to touch the object, and the indigo light is scattering in the upper atmosphere.
3. (Spoiler - click to show)the game cannot be completed without getting at least two suggestions from Demeter -- both yellow and violet involve items that are only gained by asking him. under normal circumstances this would be good ... BUT talking to Demeter is presented as the game's hint system. it does not make me happy when a game is only solvable with hints.
but overall it's sweet and sappy and adorable, and being this length and this easy makes it a kind of like a Christmas card to send to someone you love.
It's heartbreaking that THIS was the last real Zork., February 13, 2022Zork Zero, i hate you.
i hate your massively overblown size, mostly full of empty rooms with no purpose. i hate the excessive copy protection, with many promising puzzles (including the game's central puzzle) turning out to be "do you have the documentation" checks.
but the reason why Zork Zero feels like such a cop-out, such a zero-effort mess?
Towers of Hanoi!
fox, chicken, and grain!
Hi-Q!
Nim!
measuring liquid using two vessels!
true and false statements written on doors!
the executioner's paradox!
a freaking rebus!
what in the heck are all of these ancient bewhiskered cliches -- many of them extremely belabored and move-intensive -- doing in a game produced in the twentieth century? let alone in a Zork game, a series known for the cleverness and wry sense of humor in its puzzles?
the worst part is that these old chestnuts make up the game's better puzzles. the original ones, like catching the flies, breaking the couple's curse, and the fungus puzzle, are utterly half-hearted. there's no depth to them; frequently they're mostly just hauling the right objects across the bloated map.
about the only puzzle in this game that felt truly satisfying and Zorkian was breaking the hunger curse. i had to use a variety of objects in weird ways to achieve a completely loopy goal.
but everything else ... this is just a miserable slog of busywork and cliche. i understand making a game this huge is difficult, so there's a temptation to just fill it up with junk so you can boast about the number of puzzles ... but you know, you could just have made the game smaller and actually good.
Ugh., February 13, 2022wordplay games have always been a tough genre to get right. on the one hand, you want to have consistent rules for word manipulation, so the player isn't just sitting there guessing words. you want to have the puzzles actually fit together into a larger picture, whether that's a treasure hunt (Letters from Home) or a detailed plot (Counterfeit Monkey). you need to make sure the game is tuned to the language, not to pop culture references, to ensure the game doesn't become incomprehensible five years from now.
out of the short stories that make up Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It ... one, perhaps two, fit any of these criteria.
the general pattern of these stories is to recognize the kind of "wordplay" at work in the story, then just examine items and type every example of that wordplay you can think of. in "Playing Jacks," you have to know a lot of words that have "jack" in them. in "Shopping Bizarre," if you see an item, you type its homophone. the biggest offender here is probably "Eat Your Words," which is just see object, type cliche naming object, continue.
there is a single highlight here: "Manor of Speaking." it's a haunted house game where each ghost has a different obsession, and you play them off against each other and solve actual puzzles riffing off wordplay. it's brief but delightful.
by contrast, the worst of the lot is "Act the Part," which requires the player to be familiar not only with unfunny gags from downmarket 1950s sitcoms, but also to recognize a phrase that is as opaque to me now as it was back then ((Spoiler - click to show)"better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"). this stuff was dated when it came out. (ironically, the opening-move puzzle in "Act," despite being incredibly frustrating, is one of the few that's stood the test of time.)
similarly culture-specific and extremely difficult are "Buy the Farm" and "Shake a Tower." "Farm" is at least well-written (most of Nord and Bert has nothing but short, terse responses) but some of the expressions in it are already passing out of English parlance. "Tower" uses spoonerisms, but it's also very cruel, utterly nonsensical, and nearly impossible to get a perfect score on.
people talk about the Oddly Angled Rooms from Zork II being too culture-specific. at least there there are at least three countries whose inhabitants should get the joke.
if all of this were beautifully written, or tied together in a coherent fashion, it might be another story. but it's just checking off disparate scenarios until you're allowed to go on to the last one, "Meet the Mayor," which is basically the same as "Buy the Farm" but with much more obscure language. (some of the phrases in "Mayor" are so obscure that even now, almost thirty years later, i've still never heard anyone use them.)
most of the games that Nord and Bert inspired did the job better. i was a huge Infocom fad, to the point of a fault, but there are still a couple of their games that i just can't defend. this is one of them.
There's almost nothing here., February 13, 2022i think i managed an impressive 75% on understanding the game's ... creative vocabulary. but having the ability to read this doesn't change that it's a three-room game with a single self-evident "puzzle." there are a few other things you can do to produce additional text, but that's all. the only reason i didn't solve it immediately is that i kept looking around trying to find something i could actually do or interact with.
there is a resonance to be found here. the game is about masochism, but the act of playing it is masochism. it's actively painful to read. while that is clever, it's still all in aid of nothing much in particular.
the sad thing is, i've seen people who actually talk like this out of the belief that it makes them sound "intelligent." for anyone who's tempted: it does not make you sound intelligent, it makes you sound like someone who's trying to sound intelligent and utterly failing. (the author, on the other hand, appears to be doing it out of whimsy.)
A nice old-school adventure, February 13, 2022a small number of locations, many of them containing nothing but scenery and background.
an NPC who follows you around and can be asked about things, and whose presence is necessary in certain situations.
a small number of objects to be collected to solve a handful of puzzles.
The Temple is very consistent with commercial IF in the late 1980s. it's a short game, with a couple of "read the author's mind" moments (it would never have occurred to me that (Spoiler - click to show)the translated book changes the descriptions of other items when carried, instead of it being an object i could CONSULT or READ) and lucky coincidences, but nothing truly awful. the prose is better than average, and i got at least moderately attached to the NPC by the end of the game.
a good way to spend a couple of hours. with a little polish it would be a classic short game.
A snappy but linear excursion, February 12, 2022Beet the Devil primarily shines in its writing. nearly every sentence is bursting with the PC's personality, from his individual judgments of the goings-on around him to his phlegmatic reaction to very extraordinary events.
that said, Beet the Devil is essentially a long, linear corridor, with the useful items front-loaded in the first few locations. you never have more than one puzzle to work on, and most of the solutions involve using vegetables for purposes they were clearly not intended for.
a small amount of lateral thinking is needed in some places, though if you WAIT at a location for a few turns you can usually get some kind of indication of how to proceed. the final single-turn puzzle is so obvious yet so difficult to think of that it's probably a masterpiece (on par with Madventure's).
on the negative side, the implementation is a bit shallow. TALK TO would have been nice, given the extraordinary number of puzzle NPCs, and many reasonable solutions to problems didn't work because the parser had trouble with prepositional phrases. as noted, the game is linear, so if you're stuck on a puzzle you're going to stay stuck. the few places that it seems the game is about to open up, it turns out only one exit is usable. you can get hints from the PRAY command, but they only tell you which object to use, not how.
overall, the writing is worth the half-hour of your time it'll probably take to make it through. i'd love to see something more elaborate from the author.
A small introductory game with one tricky puzzle, February 11, 2022this is your basic "you wake up on a spaceship with amnesia" game. the game is small but not cramped, and the puzzles are mostly easy. oddly, while the game has four (technically five) NPCs, you have very limited interaction with any of them; they either give you items and information or they're shallowly implemented obstacles.
the bravura puzzle near the end involves (Spoiler - click to show)rewiring a circuit board with limited and outdated information. it's a complex bit of coding and requires some experimentation.
all in all, this isn't a bad game, and it's a good introduction to IF in general. there are no unfair puzzles and you're never expected to read the author's mind. i wouldn't recommend it to experienced players, who can probably whip through it in about 20 minutes.
A stunning feat, February 8, 2022(this is a review of the original game, not the remastered Steam version)
now, i'm not the type who tends to get through games without resorting to at least a FEW hints and walkthroughs. there are different kinds of puzzles that a person can get stuck on. sometimes a verb must be guessed. sometimes there were non-obvious inventory items that were missed. sometimes a game is unfair. and sometimes puzzles are completely logical and even intuitive. there's really nothing like the feeling of being stuck on a puzzle for a couple of hours or overnight and then suddenly having the light dawn: you try it, and it works.
Anchorhead gave me that last feeling many, many times.
i believe i only had to resort to hints a couple of times -- once early on when i was having trouble tripping a specific flag to advance the day, and the later sequence (Spoiler - click to show)in the mill that many had problems with.
more to the point, the horrifying story kept me riveted. there are games where one kind of trundles along, hits a puzzle where any progress seems impossible, and gives up (frequently because the author put their e-mail address under HINTS instead of giving a link to actual hints or a walkthrough on their webpage). but there are games where you hit a brick wall puzzle -- in this case, (Spoiler - click to show)sabotaging the summoning at the lighthouse -- but you're so committed to the character and so immersed in the world that giving up is simply not an option.
i solved that puzzle myself. and it was the greatest feeling.
that said, there are some things that bear warning about and could potentially trigger people's PTSD. the plot relies heavily on (Spoiler - click to show)the villain's history of incestuous rape and, while figuring that out yourself is a wonderful puzzle that gives you that slow, creeping sense of dread as you realize what's been going on, people who've gone through the real-world equivalent may not react well.
Learning to follow directions, February 8, 2022little breaks immersion more than when the protagonist of the game refuses to follow your instructions.
there's a reason why so many people dislike stock parser answers like "Violence isn't the answer to this one" -- if i'm dealing with a padlock and holding a heavy rock in my hand, and i type BREAK THE PADLOCK WITH THE ROCK, i at least want to be informed of why my action failed. the stock response mocks the player for attempting a logical action. immersion break.
in a game like A Matter of Importance, half the actions you try are refused by the protagonist, often for the silliest of reasons. the protagonist is such an egotistical coward that they refused about half the actions i was able to give them, and examining almost anything comes back with a snotty message about it being unimportant.
the first move - third move, actually - puzzle is a guess-the-verb that makes no sense in context. i was only able to solve it (after multiple logical actions were "irrelevant" or "wouldn't help me") when the game gave up and told me (Spoiler - click to show)"maybe it would be better to ignore the cars," which clued the bizarre IGNORE CARS.
i tottered around a bit in what seemed to be the main game area, being informed that despite being a burglar i was not interested in any aspect of the building i intended to break into, nor in stealing anything else, nor in interacting with NPCs. and sometimes when the game informs you that something is irrelevant, it's lying, but you have to use exactly the right verb on the right specific detail to proceed. anything else would give you one of the game's stock "that's irrelevant" messages.
it's an aggravating feeling when the solution to a puzzle is right at your fingertips but you can't work out the correct phrasing to get your recalcitrant, obnoxious player character to do it.
there's a strong suggestion in the INFO menu that all of this is in aid of something: that this is supposed to be a difficult, frustrating game with some kind of manifesto or major twist at the end of it. but i've spent too much time beating my head against this game already.
Twine pseudo-puzzler with engaging characters, February 1, 2021this one's a real gem -- it's IF in the "existential crisis/surreal location" genre, but for once, the location isn't deserted. the characters in Cactus Blue Motel are interesting people, most of whom one might actually want to get to know, and despite the Twine structure and limited interactivity they come off as nuanced and deep.
there are no mysterious machines, trophy cases to fill, and so on. the "puzzles" in Cactus Blue Motel are generally explorative in nature; where do you go, in what order, and what decisions do you make? they lead carefully and organically towards a single dilemma, and while i feel like the author has a solution in mind, i'm not actually convinced it's the one i'd choose.
just overall fantastic. great writing and pushes Twine to its limits.
a well-crafted mystery, February 1, 2021the premise is simple: you're a ghost, you were murdered mysteriously, and by going through the minds of the suspects you're able to unearth memories that will either clear them or convict them. the central mystery is very well-crafted; all six suspects are viable and most are interesting characters in and of themselves.
i do regret one thing, though. while the protagonist is obviously tightly focused on figuring out who just killed them, there are things he's clearly not aware of that it's possible to infer from the "red herring" evidence. while i would definitely not call the suspects' relationships "mysteries" -- honestly they're none of the protagonist's business -- since they are presented to the reader, it does feel sort of disappointing that there's no apparent way to confirm them.
it's also the case that i solved the mystery much more easily than i was expecting to just by following the obvious breadcrumbs. i felt like i was just getting warmed up when it was over. of course, "there wasn't enough of it" doesn't really count as a negative, does it?
two narratives in search of a pun, February 1, 2021SCREW YOU, BEAR DAD is a pun-filled jape, full of jokes, slapstick, and a small amount of interactivity. there's no branching storyline, no puzzles, and no deeper meaning; you start the story by crashing through the skylight and landing in a remote, isolated (Spoiler - click to show)toy factory. the story is divided between your experiences as a bear and the antics of the factory's dysfunctional crew. this part of the story is hilarious.
SCREW YOU, BEAR DAD is a very serious exploration of the relationship between a son and his abusive father. it begins with a more recent memory of the father's inability to understand or relate to his son as an adult, but later goes on to a childhood memory where the father has a completely inappropriate reaction to (Spoiler - click to show)his son going missing in the woods and almost drowning. this part of the story is emotional and deadly serious, and shows how things between the two of them got so bad.
i have no idea how these two stories can coexist in the same place, but somehow it works. it feels sort of like the main story is the comic relief for the flashbacks, showing that the son grew up okay after all, even if his choices landed him in a ridiculous and dangerous situation.
a message lost in analogy, February 1, 2021the game is divided into two parts: first, a brief "orientation," where you play through a short mockery of The Stanley Parable. (mockery, not parody, because it doesn't really have anything to say about Stanley.)
you're set up with the familiar electric-shock button of the Milgram Experiment, but given absolutely no information about what's going on, why you're doing what you're doing, and so on. it turns out (Spoiler - click to show)it's intended to make you think Stanley is good and right for obeying orders without thinking, since that's what the military wants you to do in the field. it does this in an obnoxious and manipulative way, but given this is supposed to be an in-universe software program you're playing, that's obviously intentional and indicates the kind of organization you've signed up for.
the second and longer part has the player as part of a sci-fi military. while they have joined up intentionally, they know nothing about the organization, its goals, its mission, what they'll be doing, etc., etc. the military is authoritarian and delivers orders that are to be immediately followed. (Spoiler - click to show)it is logical that such an organization would offer the previous orientation, because they want you to think that your orders are always for the best, like Stanley's were.
unfortunately, during this second portion, (Spoiler - click to show)you really only have one meaningful choice. everything is binary; either follow orders (or implied orders) or disobey. disobeying just gets you yelled at before the thing you refused to do happens anyway. the only actual choice you have is whether to keep fighting when the enemy surrounds you, and these choices amount to "get shot in battle" or "get shot because the other military is as authoritarian as yours."
so, what is the message here? is it saying that we are wrong to obey blindly and follow authoritarians? hard to credit when it makes no difference either way. is it saying that we should obey, since the results will be the same regardless and obedience is the path of least resistance? that's a little hard to swallow, but i suppose it could be the intent. many people do think that way (or end up thinking that way after brainwashing). but the milgram experiment is usually cited as a rebuke to that line of thinking.
the lack of clarity or any real interactivity would usually merit one star. however, the writing itself is so good that i'm bumping it up to two. it's just too linear to be interesting, and the meaning too muddled.
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