Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

I had a total blast with this one!

A nifty one-room parser puzzler escape game where you transform objects by manipulating their names. Lots of devices to experiment with, leading to tons of funny and unexpected consequences. (Which all worked smoothly, no bugs to be found.) A moody sidekick/help-system on your shoulder. A satisfying chain of logical/intuitive leaps step-by-stepping you closer and closer to the exit.

I have to admit, it took me quite a while to find the first loose thread, poking and prodding at the weird magical machinery, and I was stumped a few times along the way. Nothing that a thorough round of re-examination and experimentation couldn’t fix though, and it was great fun the whole time.

Oh it’s ever so dreadfully negligent of me to never have read that pinnacle of children’s fiction when I was but a boy. I’m positively trembling with shame at such an oversight on the part of my young self!

In the paragraph above I tried to hit Anne’s excited and overaffected tone. It’s hard. And it’s true, I haven’t read the source material upon which this game is based, so I don’t have a basis for comparison to see in how far Anne of Green Cables manages to be true to the original.
I can say however that I read Anne of Green Cables as one coherent whole, with the contrasts and juxtapositions as an inherent part of the piece, and not an artefact of just stronghanding an old classic into a flashy new coat. And I mean this on all levels.

Anne’s excited chattering, her big emotions, her unbelievable eloquence and sparkling presence all testify to her origins as a late 19th century character, almost to the point of caricature. (I mean, I could picture her affected swooning gestures every time something dreadfully tragic happened.) She made me smile when she was happy, and I cared for her when she was sad. That’s because, underneath the endless blabbing and the exaggerated mannerisms, she’s a girl full of honest love and enthusiasm for life and all its surprises.
I also had no problem at all picturing her as a techno-whizzkid hacker with a deep understanding of machines, robots, and computer code. The 19th century literary character and the far future SF protagonist flowed effortlessly together, lifting her above stereotypes of girly girls who love dresses or tomboys who want to get their hands dirty. Anne soaks up those aspects that are her own, and she is just Anne. (With an “E”.)

On a broader scale, this seamlessly flowing together of the futuristic and the old happens with the setting too. The vision of rural Avonlea as a green enclave trapped among towering skyscrapers works, not in the least because of the technological marvels that are present in Avonlea too. Farmland is replaced by floating agricultural pods, windmills and farm equipment by smart(ish) robots. These techno-tools don’t get a chance to overpower the green village setting because there are… cherry trees!

The reader is first introduced to Avonlea through one of its inhabitants, and it’s in this character that all the merging juxtapositions of the setting and the characters are beautifully exemplified. Mrs Rachel Lynde is the nosy neighbour lady of the village. But instead of poking her nose between her window curtains to spy on the villagers’ coming and going, she’s connected to an electronic web of cameras and other data-feeds, instead of whispering her observations and her opinions to others in the village store, she controls a far-reaching gossip/influencer network. I think that first chapter is a genius move for pulling together all the seemingly contradictory elements of the piece and melting them together, preparing the reader for the rest of the story.

I’m saying “reader” instead of “player” because there is a lot of text compared to the number of interactive clicks. I also found it quite hard to discern whether my choices had a long term effect. But I think that my choices may have gotten Anne in a good deal more trouble with her new mother-figure Marilla or Mrs Lynde than was strictly necessary, and perhaps I also got her in some embarrasing situations with a certain boy PC.

After navigating the story with mouse-clicks, it’s an unexpected challenge to descend with Anne into a hacking scenario where you need to rearrange connections on a graphical interface. A pleasant surprise!

A beautiful melting pot of pastoral delights and small village concerns with futuristic technology and the threat of faceless corporations with dictatorial ambitions.

A final remark:

I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoiling things, but the relationship between Anne and Matthew is my favourite part of this story.

Beautiful.

(Based on the IFComp 2025 version)

A precious few moments to yourself. Some stolen time to wander round the valley and take in its beauty. Maybe even reminisce about the previous times you tried to leave…

valley of glass is a peaceful and quiet walking simulator, with no specific goals or puzzles. Just explore the enclosed valley and look at things, enjoy the pretty descriptions, maybe get a hint of backstory.

And here-in lies the difficulty of this sort of game. Without puzzles or adversaries, without a goal to fulfill or even a definite storyline to follow, all the weight of making the game engaging falls upon the depth and detail of implementation. And Valley of Glass fails this single prerequisite for an effective walking simulator.

With nothing specific to do, I want to do be able to do everything. I’m here to explore and enjoy the surroundings, so I want to experience everything. With all my senses.
If there’s a breeze, I want to feel it, if there’s mention of crisp morning air, I want to smell it. I’m surrounded by trees, so I want to climb them and look at the view from above and listen to the rustling leaves. I want to drink from the river and sit on the ground and rub the rocks.

valley of glass blocked me at every turn. Default dismissive responses everywhere.
“You can’t do that.”
“You can’t go there.”
“You can’t see that.”

To be fair, there are beautiful views and intruiging memories to be found in the valley of glass. The sharp cold when wading into the river, the glittering village with its silverreed roofs,…
For the most part however, I felt like I was wandering around an unresponsive collection of cardboard theater props. Pretty to look at, but no depth or life.

(Based on the IFComp 2025 version)

Finally! A breakthrough that could turn this war around. Your side has captured an alien gravity cannon. Think about what we could learn about their technology, not to mention the fact that we can shoot one of their own spaceship-shattering guns at them!
Unfortunately, we can’t figure out the controls. And it’s not like this thing came with a manual in French, Korean, English, and -Ayiq-, right?

Enter you, brilliant xenolinguist. Decypher the button-labels on this cannon, ASAP.
(Something small but grating: although the entire game is written in second person, always adressing you as “You”, you, the player, sometimes have the power to choose what other characters are going to say. So suddenly, I’m not choosing what “You” is going to say, but what the colonel will say to me.)

The setting and premise of The Tempset of Baraqiel are interesting.
-A far-future intergalactic war lends itself to exploring future space-bound battle strategies, or the futuristic high-tech gizmos-that-go-boom and the massive destruction they wreak.
-Contact with an extraterrestrial highly intelligent civilization brings up questions about their culture, their social organisation, the way their specific biology shapes their intelligence and their interaction with the world.
-Exolinguistic research of a foreign artefact makes me think of an intergalactic Rosetta’s stone, or the (im)posibility to find common ground by delving to the bare foundations of communication, understanding an alien mind through the way its language is structured.

And The Tempest of Baraqiel touches upon all of those. It just never bores down beneath the surface to get at the heart of these hard questions. In its defense, it’s a war scenario taking place in the outreaches of both races’ territory, and except for shooting at each other and intercepting broadcasts, both sides don’t have the inclination nor the opportunity to get to know each other more closely (except for information about how to kill each other more effectively, I assume). There’s also a hint of [Top Secret] material that simply isn’t available to our research team.

The one thing that is undeniably, tangibly, 1+1=2, at our disposal is this version of a Rosetta’s stone, the cannon with its labelled buttons. We know what the buttons on a weapon should do, so that gives us a strong lead on how to interpret at least the minimal set of words or instructions inscribed on the controls of this weapon.

Alas! At least in my playthrough, the deduction of meaning through research of the script’s features (frequency of sounds/symbols, colour of syllables, onomatopeic structure, all very interesting) never led to a breakthrough. Instead, when the -Ayiq- spaceship was right overhead, I was given one random guess and then reduced to erratically smashing all buttons in the hopes of hitting “SHOOT”.

The story leading up to this finale felt similarly promising but ultimately unsatisfying.
-You’re the appointed leader, so gameplay allows some management of your relation with the members of your team, mostly coming down to choosing between a casual or a strict leadership style. On the other side of the hierarchical scale, you need to manage your relation with the bosses, prying loose as much information and privileges as you can while not appearing too disrespectful. Unfortunately , I kept feeling the characters as empty actors, there to say their lines and step back behind the curtains.
-Kel Shem, the protagonist, is poorly sketched, promising more substance at first than what is ultimately given. There’s mention of some angst about your militarily decorated (and dead) mother, and your choice to work far away from the army’s attention on your exolinguistics research as a possible consequence. Even so, while it feels like this might be a big deal later in the game, it’s skimmed over without bearing any weight later in the game.
-The character I did enjoy coming alive was Martov. With her, backstory and behaviour and style of conversation did come together to form a separate individual. (Dramatic details like being legless in a wheelchair(I’m leaving this in because I think it’s funny. I completely fused Martov with the legless character Billy Reston from House of Leaves, which 'm reading now.) limping around with a cane ready to knock some heads should the occasion present itself certainly helped…)
-Another character that I found very intruiging was the assistant drone XC_7A04. There’s a brief mention of its consciousness/intelligence being shared in a ship-wide datacloud with all the other AI-s present, raising questions of individuality vs hivemind, subservience of such a powerful intelligence to the humans who control them,…
When first meeting the drone, the protagonist even asks whether it has a name.

The drone pauses just long enough for you to notice the hesitation, and then continues on.

“My previous assignee was not of the view that service drones should have designations. My serial number is XC_7A04.”

And then… nothing. It just hangs there. Sure, we proceed to call it XC for short, but there is no more acknowledgement of the profound implications of this statement by the drone.
A balloon of narrative promise carried away soundlessly on the breeze.

I found the writing to be adequate, not more, but certainly nothing less either. The descriptions allowed me to clearly imagine the surroundings and other characters. I also enjoyed the tension in the scene with the Captain’s shuttle approaching the -Ayiq- spaceship while we were frantically trying to get the cannon working.
In general though, I couldn’t shake the disappointment over the many underdeveloped opportunities.

The fact that I’ve written at length about The Tempest of Baraqiel testifies that I truly feel there’s a great game, a great story, a great backstory in it. This version (or first installment?) just promises too many things that it doesn’t follow up on.

(Based on the IFComp 2025 version)

A dark downward inescapable journey into the bowels of a grisly dungeon…

The player is confronted with a decidely enigmatic protagonist in PURE. While the PC and the main NPC have knowledge of past events, and refer to them frequently in veiled terms, the player is left in the dark. This creates an intriguing tension between player and PC, and through the PC, between player and NPC, and player and surroundings. Some unspoken backstory hovers in the air, some chain of events that would explain the protagonist’s current predicament, it pervades the weird and threatening rooms you encounter, but the player is shut out of this understanding shared by the characters.
It’s rewarding in this regard, but ultimately unenlightening, to observe the attitudes and behaviours of the NPCs towards the protagonist as they evolve throughout the game.

The surroundings of the game-world are dreadfully sinister. The entire game is one linear descent into deeper and darker spaces where revulsion and adoration overlap. The further into the game, the more any notion of an outside world seems to vanish, leaving nothing but room after room of gloom and twisted moral decisions.

Puzzles are present but trivial, their true purpose is to put pressure on the protagonist, and via the protagonist the player, to decide whether to push onwards, deeper. Progress in PURE means commiting to cruel and gruesome actions. Combined with the unknown but ever-present backstory, this enhances the tension between PC and player, and also the curiosity of the latter. The curiosity then conflicts with the player’s growing disgust, placing the real difficulty outside of the game, in the hands of the player who must decide whether to stomach more of the moral complicity and oozing gore that keeps coming.

PURE deviates in some important features from the standard approach of parser games.
–Whereas movement between rooms is instantaneous in most parser games, or described in a single easily missed sentence ( > N --“You plod onward on the muddy road.”), in PURE the descriptions of travel from room to room, the behaviour of the NPCs during that travel, elements of the dungeon noticed in passing, account for at least half the text of the game, drawing the attention of the player to this ongoing downward journey.
–The rooms themselves are elaborately and evocatively drawn in the initial description, but almost no deeper layers of implementation are provided. Instead, keywords are highlighted in colour to indicate objects accessible to interaction or to suggest actions. It feels like an agreement between author and player to treat the parser environment with its prompt and typed input as analogous with a click-based interface.
I’m normally a sucker for deeply layered implementation, hidden nooks and crannies, and details only revealed after thorough use of X (and SEARCH, but that’s another discussion…), but I could appreciate the appeal of this approach. It provides a clear view of the important objects and it lessens deliberations about what commands to try. It also strengthens the overarching driving thrust of the game, to push onward and downward relentlessly.
But…
The parser-as-click-interface is sorely lacking in execution.
For starters, the bits of scenery that are not implemented (and thus not highlighted) should nonetheless have a general customised response along the lines of “That’s not important.” instead of saying to the nosy player who decided to examine an uncoloured noun “You can’t see that here.” (Cue player shouting at screen “But it’s right there!”)
Secondly, and more importantly, the author does not follow the agreement! I found several interactable items that were crucial to progress but not highlighted in the text, and at least one highlighted object that was not interactable. With such gaps in what should be a straightforward rule, I became suspicious, and ended up examining a whole lot of unhighlighted nouns because “You never know…” This kind of broken trust made the gaming experience somewhat uneasy, with doubt always in the back of my mind.
In fact, I often felt that although the parser medium is a traditional fit for a dungeon crawl, this game would benefit from pushing the highlighted-keywords approach that extra bit across the medium boundary and just go for a full choice-based approach.
–Another idiosyncracy of PURE compared to standard parser conventions is that it denotes directions in terms of left/right/forwards instead of NESW. Okay, this can enhance the player’s feeling of groundedness in the game world, feet firmly on the ground. But once I noticed that the body-centered directions were mapped one-on-one onto the usual compass directions, I couldn’t help imagining my PC sidling leftward into a side room while taking pains to keep the right side of his body oriented to the east side of the compass rose…

The writing is very good. As I wrote above, the elaborate presentation of movement pushes the player into this unavoidable journey. The vivid descriptions of the horrible rooms, the NPCs changing behaviours and attitudes, and the protagonist’s devolving physical appearance shown through interactions with the main NPC frequently made my spine shiver. (Sometimes they also elicited a chuckle, at times the text suffers from a light touch of adjectivitis in its striving to be maximally evocative.)
On the whole, the prose does effectively draw forth a moody and dark atmosphere, with some shudderingly evocative, beautifully gruesome paragraphs at its best.

So come… Take the journey down these stairs, spiraling into dark catharsis, horrific elevation,… or more gore.

Your human’s sick. Or rather, judging by the smell of her, cursed. (Which, in the world of this game, amounts to about the same thing.)
Normally, a cursed person would need the help of the village wise-woman to redirect the curse and stash it somewhere out of harm’s way. The problem is, your human is the village wise-woman!
Fortunately, you’re an experienced and well-trained helper to her medicinal ministrations. With your keen senses and magical affinity, you have a good chance of helping her.

The Wise-Woman’s Dog is a marvelous game. One of the very best I’ve played.
Partly, of course, this is because it ticks so many of my subjective preference boxes.

There’s the non-human protagonist. Playing as a dog naturally limits your abilities to manipulate the surroundings or carry stuff with you. (Somehow, whereas a human adventurer with a bottomless inventory merely gets a shrug and a chuckle out of me, I would not accept this for an animal PC.) These limits form an intuitive framework from which a lot of the puzzles flow naturally. Finding the clever workaround solution to these puzzles, realising that you’re engaged with the game in such a way that you’re thinking like a four-legged, one-mouthed, magically intelligent shaman’s pet is a real thrill.

The story is set in ancient history, 1280 BC in Hittite territory, during those short few decades when the Great King had his seat in Tarhuntassa, before it was moved back to Hatussa, to be exact. (Yes, I’ve been diligently reading the footnotes.)

First off, let me say that it’s definitely worth it to turn up the sound and listen to (an approximation of) the music of the Hittites while you play. It deepens the engagement with the setting a lot.

The locale where the story starts is a small bronze-age farming village. The details of living are portrayed vividly, the irrigation works and the large variety of crops, the hustle-and-bustle of bringing the taxes on board the barges, the houses with their differences in size and the differences in social stature connected to them. And of course the people. They’re all so lifelike, going about their daily lives, it’s only natural that you would want to help them with the small or large mishaps and problems they experience. It’s only once you find yourself juggling magic spells to help a slave fix the pipes that you might realise that you’re solving adventure-puzzles.
The city, where you must travel later on, stands in stark contrast to that cozy village. Large and imposing behind its iron-reinforced gates, bustling with commerce, the loud and busy market areas, the cramped alleys and hidden back-passages where surprises wait… (I love the mention of small-scale use of iron. It shows that we’re on a tipping point of history)
The historical setting is supported by copious footnotes, it feels at times as if the author has incorporated a beginner’s encyclopaedia about the Hittite era in the game. Despite a gentle nudge not to get lost in the notes after you’ve read three or four at a time, I must have spent around half an hour of the allotted two hours reading about pithoi, Tarhunt, and the Great King.

More generally, what makes this game perfect for me is that at its core it’s an unabashed oldschool puzzlefest, almost seamlessly enveloped in this lush and living world.

Outside of those personal preferences, The Wise-Woman’s Dog also boasts a lot of technical know-how and writing craft.

When I said “oldschool” earlier, I’m talking about the style of puzzles, the way of interacting with the surroundings (TAKE and PUT ON being the most important actions). The Wise-Woman’s Dog is decidedly modern in all the quality-of-life features and mouse-activated shortcuts it provides. Actually, it’s perfectly possible to play the entire game without using the keyboard, solely clicking on keywords in the descriptions or shortcut links in the status bar. After a while I settled on a half-and-half method of issuing commands. Engaging with the people and items around the village and city, I opted for the freedom of parser typing, while for slightly out-of-game commands like getting a list of spells or objects I just clicked on the relevant button.
In those lists of spells or objects, you find an incredibly helpful pair of shortcut commands that make your faithful dog protagonist cross the map in the blink of an eye and acquire or deposit the intended spell or object. The first, FETCH, is just wonderful. Say you’re standing before a locked gate and you remember the thing you need to open it. FETCH will go and pick up the thing wherever it is, and return you to the location of the locked gate where it’s needed. Its twin, STASH, does the same in reverse, dropping off something to free up room for other stuff in your limited inventory. In my opinion, STASH is too powerful as it is now. Just like FETCH, it returns you to your previous location. On many occasions, I would rather have had the action stop at the drop spot, ready to contemplate my next actions.

The map of the game world had me wondering for a while. I like large and twisty maps that give me the feeling that I’m truly exploring an unknown place. This is one of the only times I had that feeling in a game which uses only cardinal directions, and a few well-judged instances of up and down. Especially in the city, despite only ever going N, E, W, or S, I could imagine crooked alleys and looping back passages.
For the purposes of navigation too, the mouse-interface is very useful: just click on the location of your choosing and you will make a beeline there (barring any critical obstacles or events). And for the typing enthusiasts, GO TO is available too.

The writing in The Wise-Woman’s Dog is evocative enough to transport you to ancient Hittite civilization, while delegating the finer points to the footnotes for those hungry for more elaborate details. The location descriptions, aside from providing all the necessary practical information, always have some distinct feature or two to keep the mind grounded in the historical setting.
For me, the art and craft of writing stands out in the meticulously scripted and enthusiastically written events and NPC monologues. It was a true joy to just stand around typing Z while Iyali told the story of the God and the Dragon, to watch the boy on the market’s ball-and-cup game, to listen to the High Priest’s explanation of the concept of Purity inside or outside the temple…
(A special mention in this regard goes to the conversation between two farmers in the village, a quarrel between Zuwa and Mahori about a lost bronze sickle. Congatulations to Ada Stelzer for the hilariously over-eloquent words of Mahori in his attack on the bumbling and mumbling Zuwa.)

(Based on the IFComp 2025 version)

Well, perhaps the itty-bitty ground floor of a tiny mansion. No nooks and crannies here, no attics nor cellars, just a straight hallway with a few rooms branching off.
Within this simple map lies a simple text-adventure. One which could use a generous lathering of polish (spelling, synonyms, articles,…), and which would even then be no more than a means to while away an hour or so.

But it would be a fun hour, and even in the state it’s in now, Willy’s Manor shines with the effort and enthusiasm of its author. Keep up the good work!

-> "You are a rock. You say nothing."

And if repeated a few times, this makes for a perfectly respectable playthrough with a legitimate ending:

-> "You decide that this is not so bad."

I loved this.

Of course, you might be tempted to try and greet one of those random walkers-by. In which case you find out that a) apparently rocks do talk (or at least you are rock-hard proof that at least one rock does talk), and b) that there’s a whole intricate web of potential interpersonal relations between all these characters just waiting to be laid bare, and that you, this particular talking rock on this particular path are in the perfect position to be the go-between.

In a sense, A Rock’s Tale reminded me of last year’s The Apothecary’s Assistant. A number of apparently haphazard encounters, each a small and pleasant scene in its own right, builds and tangles until a larger whole of connections and relations comes into view.

Sweet, funny, sincere. I liked A Rock’s Tale a lot.

Is it unjust to stand up against a wrong when one has profited from it in the past? Does past complicity rule out present resistance? How hypocritical must one be to partake in the benefits of a horrible situation only to rebel once it intrudes too far into one’s own interests?

Grove of Bones does not zoom out in such a manner as to explicitly ask these questions. Instead, it creeps inwards, to the heart of a mother who doesn’t have the luxury to consider ethics. When confronted with this, she must act.

Of course, on the other end of the screen is a player who gets to choose at their leisure how precisely the distraught mother will direct her action. This created a strange sort of internal division within me, where one part strongly sympathised with the protagonist, and the other was disconnectedly assigning ethical values to the options. This feeling was strengthened when I saw that reaching an ending (any ending) was called an “achievement” in-game, and that I got points for them. But they all got the same amount of points…

I’m not certain how much of this ethical critique was intended by the author, but I for one found it thought-provoking.

(Review based on the IFComp 2025 version)

A misunderstood scientist sets out on a dangerous expedition through frozen wastelands to discover the source of the saltsnow apocalypse that happened some 250 years ago, riding a mechanical spider, accompanied only by a mystically gifted oracle and an experienced ice-and-snow-walking pathfinder.

I mean, everything about that setup is screaming “Yes!” to me. And it’s really well-accomplished too. The writing is exciting. A long, slow, and tense build-up to the confrontation with the anomaly. A nightmarish descent into otherworldly darkness. A frantic flight back to civilization, low on time and rations.

The gameplay is unbalanced though, to the point of introducing gaps in the story and wrecking my suspension of disbelief.
From the start, I had a hard time making out what, if any, difference my choices made. I didn’t mind this in the first half, choosing whether to camp by a lake or build a campfire were simply atmosphere-setting options as far as I knew or cared.
Once I got to the Lovecraftian city at the center of the frozen saltlands though, I started to feel that I had no input whatsoever at critical moments. When I found an entrance to a dark tunnel, the available options were [go down] or [don’t go down]. At least let me sit down with my team here and discuss the possibilities. One is a hardened pathfinder who has traveled these icefields on foot for ages, the other is a paranormally sighted psychic. You’d think they might have some input on the “go down or not”-question.
Another moment like this happened when we were fleeing back to safety (?). The party was low on food, it was mentioned in the text that we had rations for a week left. And just like that, the game proceeded to dictate that we were now on half-rations. Meaning that we were sluggish and cold all the time, having trouble thinking as well as moving. Given the consequences of cutting our intake of calories in half, I (the player) would have liked some say in that. Actually, given the choice, I would have probably kept eating full rations and made a heroic dash for it.

Thwarted agency is better than no agency. I wouldn’t have minded if my choices led to a quicker death, or were vetoed by the other team members, or prevented by some external influence. But at several important moments in the story, I was not given the opportunity to make a choice at all.

I have to say that there were plenty of instances where there was indeed a meaningful choice, like whether to wait out a storm (and lose time) or travel through it (and risk freezing). I ulimately died because I wanted to take a faster route and disregarded the danger. So, pretty impactful choice there…

It’s just that the few times where I was not given a choice that I would have expected felt to me, if this were a movie, like the times where I would have screamed at the protagonists for being dumb.

Despite the flaws I pointed out above, the invasive cold atmosphere, the rising tension in the first half, and the ever-looming threat during the second half pulled me into the game-world and had me shivering.

Imbalanced gameplay that undermines some of the impact this story could have had.

But still:
Great premise, wonderful worldbuilding, good writing, promising characters.