Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

A traveller arrives in “Les Idylles”, the most splendid city in the realm, intending to spend the night in an inn and find passage on a ship out of port the next morning. Instead, he gets caught up in a mysterious affair, at the centre of which is a magical harp…

I imagined the protagonist of La Harpe de Dieu-Rouge as a young man,although this is not specified in the text. He reminded me of so many young men in romantic adventure novels leaving behind their dreary lives and running away to sea.

Following an unfortunate encounter on the night of his arrival, our main character finds himself imprisoned. Even after escaping, he remains trapped in an expanding web of riddles and secrets. The more he explores, the more new avenues of exploration open up, seemingly without bringing him closer to any answers.

A gift from a character he meets early on grants him the power to return to the same place and time whenever he finds himself in enough trouble to put a stop to his investigations (our PC has a habit of walking into the arms of some prejudiced guards…)

In effect, the player guides the protagonist through a time-loop where memories are preserved, but the daily routines of the city around him start anew from the same point.

Although the game takes place in a rather small number of spatial locations, these can be visited at different moments during the day, making the number of combinations of location and time-of-day that can/must be explored quite large indeed.
Since progressing through the plot requires being in the right place at the right time, I would have liked the option to simply wait around for a while, perhaps taking a nap on the rim of the fountain in the Place Luna. As it is now, you are sometimes (especially nearing the end of the story) obliged to revisit a location you already know simply to pass the time.

There are a number of loose ends. Some of these work well as part of the mystery, giving a sense of circumstances outside the protagonist's reach, or simply the city's inhabitants having their own preoccupations that don't concern our main character.
Others feel like unfinished features that may play a role in an expanded version of the game. In particular, you can pick up a number of items near the start of the game that are never mentioned or used again.
There is also the looming presence of the castle of the founding nobleman of the city. It is very tempting to try and find a path to its gates, but unfortunately the game never acknowledges the possibility of going there. The Chateau with its Mage's Tower remains looming in the background, forever inaccesible.


Apart from the central mystery to be solved before the protagonist is free to continue on his way, there are many glimpses into the history of the city and into the backstories of various intruiging characters. These, combined with the vivid descriptions of the city streets, the buildings and squares, and the surrounding landscape, give the impression of a wide-open living world much larger than any character could explore in a single game (or lifetime, for that matter…)

A captivating mystery-adventure, well-written and ingeniously structured. A joy to explore.

With the snooping detective work at the start and the hyperactive battles later on, I felt as if I somehow ended up in a Pink Panther/Powerpuff Girls hybrid. The musical introductions to each chapter greatly enhanced this feeling.

Great tempo, fast action. Funny side characters (Sir Ponyheart: “Swift Justice!”)
And I always knew those llamas were up to no good, with their spitting and their deceptively lazy eyes…

The game does a whole lot of stuff on its own, often responding to a simple command with an entire sequence of actions. I like my parsers a bit more fine-grained.

While Anastasia is obviously super in every imaginable way (imagine a pony picking up a coconut!), in a game this short it wouldn’t have hurt to have the possibility of losing. Let the super pony take a beatdown, it’s an opportunity for a funny failure scene.

Fast, straightforward and funny. A quick pick-me-up. I liked it.

Oh but this is clever! Deux pages avant la fin du monde employs a very original mode of interaction with the text to progress through the story.

The story itself is simple, almost childish: A grand, universe-spanning civilisation has put a plan in place to survive even the death of the universe itself.

You (an unnamed academic on the supernatural) come across this story in a folder which has only two pages of writing in it, accompanied by a letter from a friend and colleague saying that they have found this in the old archives of the library.

Upon perusing the text, you find you can manipulate certain sentences of the text, thereby expanding (or contracting) it, revealing different meanings and more chapters. Those seem to contain riddles and problems which you must solve in order to bring the story in the text to a universe-saving conclusion.

All very mysterious. I found the way Deux pages… expects you to directly, almost physically alter the words and intervene in the text to get the manuscript to reveal its secrets very satisfying. The only thing I would like to see different is the font of the main text. Something that fits the “old ancient alien lore”-theme a bit better.

Very intruiging. Very much fun to solve.

This has got to be one of the zaniest IF-games I’ve seen yet. And I’ve played Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla!

A weird robotic-looking character solves mysteries by the cunning use of his superior … intuition !
Too bad this time he actually has to prove his hunch.

This is where you come in. During a few encounters with some off-the-hooks NPCs, including the main suspect (you know, the one your … intuition … snagged right away), you have a variety of chances for conversational choices. Really absurd ones, in some cases.

The end consists of a scene where you confront the culprit with the proof you gathered. Depending on which topics you raised in the conversations, you may have enough of the right evidence to close the case.

There is not much deducing or sleuthing possible in one playthrough. It’s mostly a shoot-and-hope affair. The only opportunity for real deduction I saw happens out-of-game, where the player can keep track of which combination of clicks leads to which result.

The drawings add to the silly atmosphere, and the music keeps your brain hyped. (A bit too much. I turned it off after a few minutes.)

The focus of the game is clearly the nonsensical humour rather than any serious investigation. And it succeeds. It’s short enough to avoid a complete silliness overdose, and there are a few moments of jaw-dropping absurdity swooping down out of nowhere.

Fun.

Sometime in the 4th millenium, you uncover an ancient computer. Buried in its databases, underneath layers of password-protection, is the account of a chilling juridical/moral experiment.

DOL-OS falls into the genre of games where you investigate and hack your way into the deeper security-layers of a computer-system. It does this in a very engaging way, with a creative take on the genre.

First off, the user interface is extremely well-polished. The program boots up slowly (but not annoyingly so), there are loading bars, the colour scheme suggests a retro-futuristic aesthetic. Some files are corrupted, the letters shifting and blinking ever so slightly to make the text harder to read, thus adding to the sense of investigation and decryption.

The immersiveness of the UI coerces the player to let herself be cast as the PC in the encompassing narrative. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Babel, where you roam a scientific base to uncover the intruiging backstory. DOL-OS has a similar narrative end-goal, but it eliminates the intermediary player character and incorporates the player directly into the narrative.

Of course, regardless of the aesthetics of the UI, the most important thing is the substance of the story being unraveled underneath.

The general story of DOL-OS is not that original. It takes well-known SF tropes as its basic elements. It does however take an intersting and original viewpoint toward the usual conventions of this type of story.
Rather than explicitly point out the adverse effects on humanity of the experiment, this game lets the player draw her own conclusions. Instead, DOL-OS heavily focuses on the personal impact of being part of such a scientific endeavour. Through journals and expert reports, the personality and history of the characters are uncovered piecemeal.
One character in particular, Théophile, shines through as the tragic protagonist in this slowly emerging drama. The player gets tantalizing glimpses of his life-history, his relation to his family, his weaknesses…

Progress through the game is gated through a number of password-protected transitions deeper into the database. Especially the first puzzle is brilliant. It takes careful attention to detail and an associative leap across several documents to construct the first password from the scattered clues.
After that, the gateways are less strongly protected, serving primarily as pacing mechanisms.

DOL-OS succeeds admirably in casting the player as a technological/archeological investigator from the far future. It conjures up a world of morally ambiguous advances and of potentially chilling consequences that seem to lie perhaps only the metaphorical five minutes into the future from our present point of view.

Engaging, thought-provoking, tense,… A very strong piece of IF.

(This is an expanded version of my thoughts on Les Saisons de Pippa as I wrote them on the intfiction.org Forum. Especially the last part has been heavily rewritten to transform my initial dissappointed rant about Pippa being an incomplete work into some more constructive and, hopefully, helpful suggestions. This last part is only based on my playthrough of the version entered in the Concours FI Francophone 2023.)

Magical. Truly enchanting.

Les Saisons de Pippa gives the reader a glimpse of the history, culture and mythology of a detailed imagined world through the lens of the everyday life of a resourceful little girl.

This piece is an impressive feat of worldbuilding. A mysterious setting with lore, mythology, flora and fauna. You get to discover this world through the curious, innocent eyes and questions of Pippa, the adventurous 5-year-old protagonist.

Ask questions, listen to grown-up conversations, explore on your own. There are three main stories set in three different seasons. Each allows for a number of choices and side-explorations in this engaging, familiar-yet-mysterious world.
A truly well built world made even more real by the magnificent drawings.

There are a number of aesthetic flaws that could easily be polished out. The buttons for returning to a previous page are labeled "Back" or "Return", in English. Similarly, the "Inventaire" displayed at the top of the screen show empty pockets for objects as "undefined". These small shifts of language break the flow of the intended French-language narrative and pull the reader ever so slightly out of the immersive world..

In the three main stories, the author paints a detailed picture of the life of a tribe inhabiting the sides of gigantic walls, overgrown with lush vegetation, riddled through with dark tunnels, atop of which eternal channels flow.
The reader gets to experience glimpses of the daily life and customs of a layered hiërarchical society. There are references to enemy tribes, to the religious teachings of wandering druids, and to the culinary preferences of the people.
(In relation to those culinary preferences, the animal life seems to consist mostly of insect-like beasts of all shapes and sizes. Imagine a pig with a chitinous exoskeleton roasting on a spit...with an apple in its mouth...)

The end-screen contains a list of numerous topics of investigation that have yet to be elaborated upon in later episodes of this project. Even these shorter incomplete observations on aspects of Pippa's world serve to further paint the colourful and detailed setting.

*
*


EDIT: The author has put out a new version which adresses a number of issues quite elegantly. The following paragraphs do not apply to the current version.

At the end of the story, the reader is presented with some paragraphs of text where the author explains that the history of Pippa's world is an ongoing project. There will be new additions, either in the form of expanded version of this particular game or as brand new installments building upon the groundwork laid in this first one. There follows a list of topics that the author still wants to incorporate and write more at length about.
This text steps out of the story and has the author directly adressing the reader. As such, I found it to be a disappointing end-note for such an engaging and ambitious work.

I think this could be resolved quite elegantly if the author were to maintain the pretense that this is a "real" ongoing archeological/historical effort. The short summaries of topics still to be written could be explained as incomplete records, too fragmented to dedicate an entire work to. The author/archeologist could announce that with further research uncovering more details, these topics will be adressed in following additions to the work.
This way, instead of an admission that Les Saisons de Pippa is an incomplete piece, the incomplete topics could fit into the illusion of a fictional archeological effort, consistent with an in-game framing story which presents the author as a researcher of Pippa's society.

*
*

I enjoyed the adventures of Pippa immensely, and I would like to thank the author for letting me float in this imaginary world for hours.
A magnificent piece of worldbuilding coupled with a truly compelling account of the adventures of a charming child-protagonist.

A whack in the gut. This is a hard story. Brutal even.

A soldier is broken. He succumbs to his obsession. Treason means nothing to him anymore. He must obtain what he needs.

Four short linear chapters are all it takes to leave the reader gasping for air, as if his lungs were ripped by the PC’s bayonette.

Very powerful writing, pulsing drive, evocative sparse descriptions, haunting imagery and theme.

Traversing the game is a very linear affair. The only physical direction is northward and up, up that hill that the war command has designated as a strategic target, and thus worthy of throwing men's lives at. This is mirrored in the focused single-mindedness of the PC, who has only his obsessive goal in mind amidst the mayhem and death around him.

There are opportunities to examine the surroundings. Doing so provides nothing to hold on to, just the bleak battlefield with its corpses and artillery holes. And the men running with you, northward, up that distant hill.

At a few resting points in the game, you can converse with your comrades and commandant. These short menu-based conversations go a long way in building the characters of PC and NPCs alike, and they provide glimpses of backstory in precious few lines.

Since there is not much of anything the player can do to stop the relentless pace of the game (or the assault on the hill), the interactive element comes almost exclusively from the experience of complicity with the PC's actions. The player feels strongly responsible for the actions undertaken by the protagonist.

This is the most impressive feat of Entre les lignes de feu: the power with which it grounds the player in the situation, how it draws the player ruthlessly down and deeper into the protagonist's obsession.

Very strong piece.