Ratings and Reviews by Chin Kee Yong
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A masterclass in science fiction, April 27, 2021Choice of Robots is an excellent, highly replayable SF story about the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on modern society. It's so good that I would buy it again twice over if I could.
At its heart, science fiction is about "what if" questions: what if you could travel back in time? What if androids were indistinguishable from humans? The best SF stories take an intriguing "what if" question and spin it into a gripping vision of a world that could be. The genius of Choice of Robots is that it lets you ask the "what if" question yourself -- through your actions and choices, you write the SF prompt that you find most personally appealing, and the game presents you with the future defined by your choices. The result is a riveting story structure that makes perfect sense for a science-fiction CYOA, full of player agency, surprises, and replayability.
The prose and narrative design of Choice of Robots are consistently excellent. Character and story arcs are vividly elaborated in sharp, elegant paragraphs. The game clearly foreshadows decision points and the results of your choices, resulting in a game that feels responsive and fair. And all the way through the game, those choices are remembered and referenced with staggering fidelity: your robot may develop a lifelong love of computer games or TV programming, depending on the corpus you train it with in the very first chapter.
An abundance of science fiction, IF, and computer science references betray the author's dedication and passion for his work. Turn-of-the-millennium American culture is lovingly illustrated, explored, and lampooned. Perhaps most importantly, the philosophical themes of the work are imbued in every chapter -- the ethics of artificial life, the balance between inquiry and humanity -- resulting in a cohesive authorial voice that resonates from every page.
But enough gushing. The point is that Choice of Robots is a damn good work, worthy of its pedestal in the IF canon; in my opinion, it could even be ranked among the all-time science fiction classics. This is a bona fide interactive fiction masterpiece: thoughtful, funny, heartwarming, solemn, and yet full of joy.
5/5 game, would conquer Alaska with killer robots again.
A ship without cargo, April 19, 2021This is a very basic pirate game where the objective is to steal treasures and bring them back home. I played it to practice reading French, but there's not much "fiction" in this interactive fiction: the story is lightly sketched out in single sentences, and gameplay revolves largely around learning and mastering the mechanical gameplay loop.
La Nageuse Écarlate revolves around randomly generated ship encounters, which hail from one of a variety of nations and have ship classes indicating their combat strength. If you attack and defeat a ship -- a random chance depending on its strength -- you have a chance to loot resources and, potentially, its flag. Once you have a false flag, you can use it to meet peacefully with other ships and expend resources to gather information on the treasures you're stealing.
Once you've discovered a treasure and its location, the actual heist gameplay is remarkably simple: binary success if you learned all the requisite information, and slap-on-the-wrist failure if you didn't. The game thus becomes an exercise in grinding random ships for resources and information until you inevitably accumulate what you need to win. In the late game, La Nageuse Écarlate becomes a chore of clicking through identical prompts until you finally see a ship with the correct flag, or you finally get the right random drop from combat.
It's a shame that the core gameplay is so unsatisfying, because La Nageuse Écarlate's polished visuals are a breath of fresh air in the sometimes staid world of interactive fiction. At its best, it evokes Superluminal Vagrant Twin in its breezy prose and resource-juggling gameplay. Remove the randomness and add some narrative threads and questlines, and I could see it becoming an addictive pirate simulator in the vein of Sunless Sea.
Overall rating: a decent attempt at a game, but nothing special in its current state. There's treasure here, if the author is willing to put in the hard work to uncover it. Until then, you aren't missing much by passing this ship by.
A somber story about dementia, April 11, 2021Growing old is one of my greatest fears. As a young person, it seems nightmarish to me that I may one day be reduced to a shadow, slowly losing control of my faculties and my agency, waiting for the story of my life to end.
This is a text game, but it's not the kind of game you play for fun. Like That Dragon, Cancer, its purpose is to be a certain kind of experience, which takes you on a particular emotional journey. You play Fred Strickland in a series of slice-of-life vignettes, and in doing so, come to understand his joys and his sorrows as well as his ultimate tragic fate.
The most significant thing about this story is its emotional weight. As a reader, I tend to avoid stories set in mundane settings -- I think slice-of-life Americana is extremely difficult to write, because it's such a well-trodden, vanilla setting. In the absence of a fascinating setting or high-stakes drama, it takes a very skilled author to make the reader emotionally invested in the main character. It is therefore notable that Will Not Let Me Go approached its subject matter with such grace that it made me tear up.
Will Not Let Me Go's Twine interface is excellent as well, simple but well-considered with nothing left to chance. The background changes subtly to reflect the main character's state of mind in each vignette, and the hypertext form maps very well to the way that the main character's stream of consciousness jumps between thoughts. This is used to great effect in one emotional scene near the end, when the narration breaks down into fragments held together by hyperlinked threads.
(There's a nod to accessibility as well, with a small button in the lower right letting users switch to a higher-contrast theme.)
On the whole I would call this a memorable work of literature -- for it is literature in the most rarified sense of the word. It uses the medium of interactive fiction to tell a poignant and gripping story about the horror of dementia. It's not the kind of story I would normally go in for, but there's a time and place for these kinds of stories, and in this aspect Will Not Let Me Go is a memorable and beautifully crafted masterpiece.
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