Reviews by Rovarsson

...but apparently your aunt Beverly has gone missing. (She was always a bit weird that way...)
And your sister Emily has been in a foul mood the last few days too. (Even more than usual.)

With these small crumbs of information, Things that Happened in Houghtonbridge starts off as a mystery investigation. During the first few parts, more and more bits of information are revealed, drawing the player deeper and deeper into the suspense. There are hints of family relations grown crooked and darker events in the family's history.

These small but gradually accumulating clues led me to believe the game was about finding and revealing a foul skeleton in the family closet. My expectations were pointing me toward an unsettling but altogether realistic mystery-drama.
However, the way the story was heightening the tension, together with the overall mood of the writing, began to make me suspect that I was in for a twist to another much more cliché genre in Interactive Fiction: the malevolent-entity-trying-to-break-through horror subgenre. Indeed, when I found and read some missing papers, this is what I wrote in my notes: "Yep, there's a monstrous entity involved."

After some adjustments to my perspective as player, settling into the new context, I found that the game more than redeemed itself for what I had perceived as somewhat of a letdown.
The family-drama angle is never completely abandoned, it becomes accompanied by another intertwined supernatural plotline.

Working up to the climax of the game, there is a sequence set in a farmer's field that lifts up the entire game and decisively shows this is not a DIY-L.Craft out of the same old mould. More in line with the scarier bits of Alice in Wonderland, this sequence is desorienting, mesmerizing, and filled with strange out-of-place landmarks and personages.

It is also here that the previously rather calm tempo of the story picks up and leads into a breathless finale.

The writing in Things that Happened in Houghtonbridge is very strong, from the shorter, dry and to-the-point descriptions of the early game to the long fastpaced paragraphs that make up the endgame.

It is therefore all the more grating to see the mechanical object-, exit-, and character-listing clash with the descriptive text.
Sometimes it thoroughly breaks the mood, when the description of the antagonist's location is preceded by "You can also see ..." and "From here, you can go to the west."
In at least one location, the automatic listing spoils a surprise by mentioning an exit that the protagonist (or the player, for that matter) should not know about.

I found the characters to be a bit of a mixed batch.
The protagonist's parents are so underimplemented as to come across almost pathologically cold and distanced given the circumstances. When their daughter enters the living room after being out searching for the mother's sister, they don't even acknowledge her arrival, instead keeping their noses buried in their books until you talk to them.
The PC Olivia, her sister Emily, and her best friend Brianna on the other hand are much more accomplished characters, with their own thoughts, habits and passions.
Lastly, even though we only know her through her diary and through other character's remarks about her for most of the game, aunt Beverly shines most of all. Precisely because of the gaps in my image of her she was the most evocative and engaging.

While I generally liked the setup of the puzzles (standard adventure fare, entertaining but not original), I found that the game often robbed me of the satisfaction of actually solving them on my own.
Because of the menu-based conversation system, any clues that might come up in exploration or other conversations are rendered moot. The option to ask the right character about the relevant topic just shows up in the talk-to menu anyway.
Similarly, when you encounter a puzzle which requires a code or a number, it's enough that the protagonist has seen the clue. The game then remembers it and uses it automatically when needed. This means that the player is not required to do any brainwork or remembering.

The writing of Things that Happened in Houghtonbridge can be engrossing, so much so that one might ignore the graphics above the text. I must urge every player to look up there frequently. The subtly changing pictures add a lot to the atmospheric experience of the game.

Great story, thrilling build-up of tension and an exquisite dreamlike sequence in the field.
Uneven characters, unbalanced puzzles.

I enjoyed playing Things that Happened in Houghtonbridge a lot.

(This review is for the ParserComp version.)

A bouncer looks down his nose at you. "So sorry to inform you, sir, but we do have a dress code here. If you would be so kind to adhere to it or shove off. Please."

Opening Night starts out with a straightforward puzzle: find a way past the bouncer and into the theatre. We meet our player character, who seems to be a somewhat obsessed fan of the lead singer/actress in the play this evening. His insistence upon getting in goes two ways: it garners sympathetic feelings for his obvious and honest admiration for the show's leading lady, but it also verges on the edge of creepiness.

In later chapters however, the need to get a personal meeting with the actress falls away as the prime motivation of the game as it transforms into another story altogether.

There are puzzles, but they serve mostly as a means to get the player more deeply involved with the story.Away to elicit a deeper emotional response as the game goes through its metamorphosis.

In the end, Opening Night is a short and compressed tale centered around the eponymous pivotal night in the protagonist's life. While the game shows us only scenes from the theatre and its immediate surroundings and never elaborates on the player character's personal life, Opening Night still manages to somehow imply the protagonist's entire life story. We are given just enough hints to let the imagination take over and fill in the blank years.

Very strong storytelling.

Your devout and upstanding uncle and aunt probably have nothing but the best intentions for a young boy like you, but being cooped up reading a sermon while the sun is shining and the birds are whistling is hellworthy torture.

How to get out from under your aunt's watchful eyes to enjoy what's left of this wonderful afternoon?

Sunday Afternoon is a very small game if measured by its map. Five rooms total. Two of those rooms however are so chockful of things to examine that they count double at the very least. A lot of souvenirs and books and bric-a-brac, all with a history.

This ties in to the kind of puzzles in the game. Rather than manipulating some machinery, you have to deal with the people keeping you indoors, and the objects in the rooms hold the key. Finding your uncle and aunt's weak spots, their buttons if you will, requires careful attention to their reactions in conversation and a certain knowledge of their habits and character.

While it is (in theory) entirely possible to finish the game successfully in a flawless runthrough, it's actually recommended that you do a fair amount of flailing around and trying unsuccessful actions multiple times. In a framing story flash-forward reminiscent of Spider & Web, the hapless player will discover a bitterweet justification for the unrealistical behaviour that is typical of the protagonist in a text adventure. It's worth taking a moment to let the circumstances of this framing story sink in. Think about what it means for the actual game/story you're playing/reading.

A very clever small escape game with unexpected depth.

Once again, your good nature got the better of you. (You are, after all, detective Good Fairy.) You hide Foo Foo, a suspected "bopper", putting off reporting him to the proper authorities while you investigate the case to your contentment.

Something deeper is brewing here in Fieldtown, and you want to get to the bottom of it...


Foo Foo is a "Fable Noir". All the characters are animal stand-ins for humans in a tale that's ultimately a reflection on human society. The animal characters further line up (more or less...) with the classic personages from a noir detective work. The thick-skinned detective with a secret sensitive side, the heel-turn friend, the louche bar owner/mobster. (Strangely, no mysterious dame with a husky voice and one of those slim cigarette pipes in the corner of her mouth…)

The story in its broad outlines, with its recognizable tropes and familiar pacing, follows the beats of a classic noir work to create and sustain the suspense. This makes it rather predictable in oversight.
However, tropes are tools, and the specific story they are used to tell in this instance is a deeply thoughtful one. Social inequality, money trumping law and a personal romantic backstory all come together.

This game has so many positives going for it. Great backstory and worldbuilding. Nuanced story with a shady morality. No problems with implementation, good and sometimes clever puzzles.

Then why was I left with a nagging feeling of disappointment after playing?

The map.

The structure of the map let me down. Well, the structure of the map ànd the description of the outdoors.

The game takes place on one straight street (alright, there's one bend...) that feels like a cardboard theatre decor. All the houses and shops that are relevant to the investigation are on the north side of that street. During the game, I kept hearing a tv-show host yelling in my ear: "Let's see what's behind door number three!"

(Actually, there is a back alley that becomes relevant later, but by then the tv host had taken up permanent residence in my forebrain.)

Small changes would have made a world of difference to my experience of the game surroundings. A fence and a construction site to block off the south side of the map for instance. Maybe a few streetmice peeping around a corner and a forgotten newspaper on the ground.

Great story, told in a very engaging style. A tad too quiet on the street.

After much consulting of the prophecies and calculating the trajectory of the new, bright star in the heavens, it is confirmed. The foretold King of Jews is born! You must travel west to the land of Judea to lay precious gifts at his feet.

The first part of Following A Star is a puzzleless preparation of the journey ahead and an introduction of the main characters.

Melchior is the wise and knowledgeable one, the natural leader.
Gaspar is a boisterous and forward military man.
That leaves you, Balthasar, as... Well, especially in the first part you're mainly there for comic relief while you try to get on your camel only to fall off again three commands later. No worries, you get to show your true potential in later parts where you are given the responsability of obtaining suitable gifts for the prophecied child.

Melchior, Gaspar and a large number of other NPCs are deeply characterized. Even in the short descriptions and the limited conversation topics, each and every one of them has a few idiosyncratic properties and independent actions to set them apart.

The game hardly ever breaks character in its reponses. Many, many nonessential actions still get a customized reaction, often very funny. (Try walking into a wall in the presence of the camels...)

After the introduction, you arrive in a small town in Judea. This is where the game proper begins. You, Balthasar are tasked with finding three gifts to present to the child who we all know is Baby Jesus. The only necessary puzzles in this part all have to do with obtaining the gifts. These are relatively easy.
However, while looking around the town you will recognize a bunch of sidequests. Part of the motivation for completing these is that you gain points. The real motivation for any adventurer is of course that they're there. They're also more challenging and more fun than the necessary puzzles. (See if you can help the instrument vendor clean out his trumpet...)
I finished a handful of these sidequests and I still only got an endscore of 25 out of 42. Room for improvement and enticement to replay.

Having acquired the gifts, you must find your way through the desert to Jerusalem. To do so, a tricky mathematics puzzle stands in your way. Here, Following A Star is brilliant in wrapping up the puzzle in the context of the journey. You are given an astrolabe and an abacus and must deduce your position by observing the bright star. An otherwise dry calculation becomes an interesting and pressing navigational question that is justified in-game.

Less successful, I found, was a language puzzle where you have to decline the English nouns in your commands to a guard into garbled Latin. I studied Latin and Greek in high school, and the utterly unfunny pseudo-Latin phrases the game wanted me to construct drove me to just copying them from the walkthrough. (Compare constructing "Spanish" words by sticking "-os" at the endos. For realos...)

Fortunately, the finale redeemed the game brilliantly in my opinion. An ever sillier chase through the desert that reminded me of some of Monty Python's finest sketches.

Genuinely funny, some challenging puzzles, very good implementation and characterization. Recommended!

A disturbing letter has come from your old friend Raynard, the blacksmith in the town of Raven Wood. A new lord has come to inhabit the Manor, and sinister events have been happening since. Alarmed, you travel by carriage to meet him...

The Darkness of Raven Wood is an oldschool horror adventure. The two word parser can cause some guess-the-verb problems. Worse however is that the necessary verbs are used somewhat inconsistently. Case in point: the "Instructions" explicitly give the example of UNLOCK DOOR, which can even be abbreviated to UNLO DOOR, since the parser only takes the first four letters into consideration. However, when I found a locked door, I had to USE KEY instead. When at another point in the game I wanted to USE AXE when ATTACK [x] or CUT [x] or HIT [x] didn't work, it turns out I needed to SWING AXE. I feel this is a much more ambiguous situation than UNLOCK door, where USE would actually have been appropriate.
(EDIT: apparently the instructions on the rucksackgames website do specify SWING AXE and USE KEY. Just not in-game.)

These bits of parser wrangling are the only real criticism I can bring up as negatives.

The introduction sets a dark and oppressive mood which the sparse but efficient writing underscores. The frightening atmosphere is further enhanced by beautifully gloomy pixel art, among the best I have seen.

The game demands careful exploration of the map and thorough examining of the contents of the locations (no X, but you can abbreviate to EXAM). Most of the puzzles consist of simple application of objects in the right place. Some however require a good memory of locations previously explored, to make the associative leap that what you have just done here will have changed something there.

There are some areas where you will invariably lose your bearings. While it is necessary to search these thoroughly too, once you have done so there is a simple sequence of directional commands to get you out of the woods.
The cryptic hint list on the game's homepage is very helpful with this and other obstacles.

What started as an inquisitive exploration around the town at the beginning of Chapter I, becomes gradually darker and more frightening, especially when you enter the grounds of the Manor and then the house itself in Chapter II.

A good suspenseful and atmospheric horror game, somewhat hampered by the limited parser. Recommended.

Some SF short stories can leave you numb and exhilarated at the same time as the repercussions of the twenty- or thirty-something pages you just read reverberate in your head. I'll just namedrop the first three that pop into my reverberating head to show off a bit: Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg, Nightfall by Isaac Asimoc, Second Variety by Philip K. Dick.

Now stop to think for a moment. I can't be sure about anyone else, but I must have read hundreds of SF short stories that were less awe-inspiring, brain-shaking or mind-shattering. Less memorable each on its own perhaps, but all of them added up to a pile of more vague or diluted memories of enjoyable evenings and chilling nights and exciting afternoons spent with my nose in this or that SF-collection. Taken together, those less memorable stories have undeniably given me many more pleasant hours than the aforementioned three and their likes.

Bane of the Builders falls squarely in that second category.

It's a competently written and coded adventure. An engaging, if not very original, storyline.

It has a very cool trick where the surroundings shimmer and then things change all around you. (Reminiscent of a glitch in that movie that couldn't decide if it wanted to do magical kung-fu or just shoot everything to smithereens and then proceeded to do both... Not that anything like that happens in Bane of the Builders after the shimmer effect, but... I just got carried a way a bit there, okay.)

I had fun finding my way through the maze. The map is easily visualized, the impression of the alien base hanging in an underground cavern still lingers in my imagination.

The puzzles are not clued well enough, but persistence pays off (or the walkthrough, if you just want to experience the story.)

The end game is challenging but also a bit underclued. I had to fill in some blanks with my own imagination to get a coherent picture of why things did or didn't work.

But, all in all, a well crafted game and a well told story. One to put on the slowly growing pile of enjoyable afternoons playing a SF game while it rained outside.

A title like The Gerbil Riot of '67 makes my imagination run wild and almost overflow. Scenarios of little mammals running the streets, scaring good citizens into their houses and locking the doors flash before my eyes.
But the title isn't used in that way. I'd like to say it's more akin to the great Calvin & Hobbes' "The Noodle Incident", or "The Llama Incident" from Milo Murphy's Law, that is, an event of great import to the protagonists' life that is never explained but often referenced, and obviously casts a shadow over their ongoing existence.
This game tries halfheartedly to make "The Gerbil Riot" an incident of the second kind, but after a short reference in the introduction the whole little-mammalian-uprising is forgotten and left by the roadside.

Disappointing. (I'm not apologizing for ruining this because of all of the things below. The game's just not worth hushing about to keep people's expectations up.)

What follows instead is silliness. I like silliness. But I also like some substance with or underneath my silliness. I didn't get it here.

You're being held in an asylum for the incurably insane, and you want to escape. You have to play into all the other patients' needs or weaknesses to find the means for your escape, and eventually you must get past the guard to walk out the front door.

First off, to enjoy this game even a little, turn off all sensitivities regarding stereotypes of mentally ill or unstable fellow humans. They're funny 'cause they're kraayzzieie, didn't you know? Those crackpots do the darndest things, haha. And if you have to do the darndest things to them to get your mcguffin, then that's all the funnier!

Apart from stereotyping (and that's put mildly...) psychologically vulnerable people, Gerbil Riot seems to get most of its humorous kicks out of self-referential "ironic" jokes (get it? get it?) and insulting the player (in the older DOS version) or at least making fun of the player (in the z8 file I switched to when I entered the Copy Protection Room and found out there was a registration fee of 3 £ for the password.) I actually found the insulting version marginally funnier.

The puzzles would be straightforward but entertaining if the parser would have been a bit more robust ("I would if I could, but I can't!" may seem a nice variation on a default command-rejection message. Until you've read it eleventyfour times in response to completely justified commands...)

The NPCs are cardboard, only good as one-trick obstacles. The map has some redeeming features in the second half of the game, but is ultimately unsatisfying to draw/visualize. There are a few honestly good and clever clues and associated puzzles sprinkled around the game, but not enough to redeem the game as a whole.

But I don't consider the few hours I spent with Gerbil Riot lost or wasted. I had fun insulting it back and imagining that if I had paid for a physical disc version, I would use it as a frisbee aiming at high-voltage electric cables.

"You can't judge a book by its cover."

Yes, you can. I judge books by their covers all the time. And by the size and type of font, the colour of the ink, the amount of whitespace on the page, the texture and smell of the paper, the illustrations if there are any, and any number of sensory details that influence my feeling about a book.

I wasn't able to ascertain the smell nor the texture of Harmonia's pages, but I found it an aesthetically pleasing work in all the other areas.

It has few but beautiful graphics that look like charcoal or leadpen drawings which complement the "old" feeling of the game perfectly.

Specific to the beauty of a mouseclick-driven text, the new paragraphs fade fluently into view, giving the eye half a blink's time to adjust and expect the coming words just before being able to legibly pick them out.
Perhaps my faux-tactile experience would have been even better if my cursor arrow were the nib of a quill pen, or the relaxed finger of a hand following the lines. Small nitpick, to be sure.

But of course, the saying has a point. No matter how prettily clothed and wrapped, the story must stand on its own when abstracted from all these adornments.

Harmonia surely can stand on its own. It is a SF steampunk time travel story looking back to the past. It makes excellent use of foreshadowing to heighten the suspense throughout, and adds a small twist in the end. The main character is a clearly drawn young woman with a strong voice. To talk more about the content of Harmonia would be to tell too much. Let the reader do the reading.

I do want to speak of the craft the author shows. It is considerable, especially in its pacing. As I was reading the first paragraph, I pressed "restart" after only a short while, having been tickled by the text. I sat down properly, took a deep breath and settled into a slow and focused mode of reading.
It's a treat to let the languid, comfortable sentences come over you at their own tempo; they have a musical rhythm that invites mumbling along or even reading aloud.

I should also like to dwell a short while on the form the author adopts in writing this story. In keeping with its inspirations, the late 19th century Utopians, Harmonia reads as a first person account of supposedly real events. In the principal narrative line, several other sources are found, read and discussed. Each of these in turn takes the form of an eyewitness account or a journal entry. Again, first person singular. These accounts are commented upon and annotated by other characters, or in the case of the main line, by the main character herself. The effect is that of a nesting or layering of first persons in dialogue, creating an intricate web of story threads.

Now, all of the above could as easily have been said about an ordinary, "static", work of fiction. Wherein then lies Harmonia' interactivity?

For one, it has choices. At my leisurely but concentrated pace, it took about two hours to complete one reading. In this time, I encountered but a handful of defining choices. (Beware, reader, for these are not accompanied by bells and whistles. Pause before you press.) As is my habit with these choice-based games, I only played it once through. I therefore cannot tell how far the other paths may diverge from the one I travelled.

Far more importantly in my impression were the annotations in the main text that come into view as mere scribbles in the margin upon a press of salient words. Because they are not present at the first viewing of the page before the reader, but only become apparent as one actively presses, it feels as though the character scribbling the annotation is reading along, and, at the click of a word, whispers side-thoughts and elaborations as one moves a finger along the lines.

This technique invites a deep engagement with the text, where the interactivity takes the form of discovering more profound meaning in a joint reading of the story with the characters that feature in said story. A vivid reading experience indeed...

This game written as a first person account contains excerpts of eyewitness novels and scraps of personal journals and annotations in the voices of the characters and whirls around and around... until the game recedes from view and one is truly immersed in the experience.

A superb piece of interactive writing.

Hi, I'm Jacqueline Beautemps. I'm a Canadian journalist working on a temporary visa for the Bolivian Herald. Until now, Ive been mostly interviewing the lovely Bolivan people and writing articles for the lifestyle, media and cooking pages. This morning however, our star political reporter seems to have gone missing. I feel the urge to investigate...

I could just as well have been Randy Froomes from the US of A or Miss Topsy Turvy from England. The game would have remembered these bits of information from the short application form to be filled in at the start, and numerous details and customized responses would have been altered in the game-text. Rarely have I come across a game where entering "personal" information at the beginning had such an impact on the feel of the experience. Most of the time I semi-forget who my character was and just keep playing as "me-in-game". Here I was reminded at numerous small instances of who my character was. This helped in feeling truly immersed in the game world.

The deep implementation runs throughout. There are paintings and photographs and murals and billboards to look at (many with an actual picture embedded in the game), books and newspapers to read. Very few of these are vital or even important, but they add up to a vivid world.

Bolivia by Night is not a puzzle-oriented game. Although there are puzzles, and a few clever and surprising ones at that, they are never meant to be brainstakingly hard. Instead, they are meant to make the player engage with the surroundings more deeply while never stopping the story from rolling forward. Indeed, the game actively nudges, nay, pushes you toward the solutions. By the third chapter, these nudges are given by a certain charismatic Communist leader on your t-shirt...

That is not to say that Bolivia by Night does not pose obstacles. The main challenge is sifting through the huge amount of information about the history of Bolivia and the relations between the characters to find out where the investigation will lead you next.
Who should I ask about what? Where did that character say she was going to be? How does this fit with what I know already?

During the five-chapter-long investigation of the disappearance of your colleague where you learn about ancient and more recent Bolivian history which is sometimes quite depressing, the game alleviates the darker context with many, many jokes (try walking into a Burger King with said charismatic Communist leader and see what happens...), and many beautifully written evocative references to the beauty of the land, the culture and the history of Bolivia.

While the game has a definite happy end (and a bad one), the story in which your adventure takes place concludes on a more open but still hopeful message.

What touched me most about this piece is the obvious care and love of the author for Bolivia that shines through the entire text.

A beautiful, exciting and moving game.