Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

Exile's Rose is set in the world of Fallen London. I have scarcely scratched the surface of this lore-filled setting, so there are bound to be many references that I couldn't place.
Without more intimate knowledge of the mother-setting, it's also impossible for me to discern which parts of lore and worldbuilding are present in Fallen London and which are the author's own creative additions.
To me though, it can confidently stand on its own.

>ABOUT
"This is a simple demonstration Fiction game."

This message raises some alarms. It could indicate a flawed and/or unfinished game. I'm very glad I played on, because there is a beautiful and complete story to be found.
However, it is clear that it is not truly finished. A lot of stuff mentioned in descriptions is not implemented, flashbacks are not as neatly separated from the main text as I would like (a slightly different font to emphasise the dreamy-reminiscence quality of the memories would do wonders for the feel...), the pacing is too loose.
Nevertheless, this is a wonderful and captivating read.

You find yourself on a dark underground quay. Docked before you is the Smuggler's schooner, deserted. Your lover's ship. Your lover, whom you cannot find.
You board the ship, the Kyparissos. Alone, free to explore the decks unaccompanied, searching for your lover. Or at least a trace of where he might have gone...

This is a puzzleless piece. A few hidden passages provide some pacing to the player's progress, but there are no real obstacles to solve.
Rather, in exploring the ship's depths, you unlock flashbacks that gradually reveal the fragmented backstory of the Smuggler and the protagonist.

Although the main character has been on the Kyparissos before, she was always either inebriated at parties or carefully blindfolded when her lover brought her to the lower levels.
Now is the first time she can wander around the lower decks with a sober mind and clear sight. Descending into the dark bowels of the ship and unveiling secret rooms is mirrored in the descent of the protagonist into her own emotions. She finds a clarity in looking at herself, her lover the Smuggler, and their relationship.

The writing is elaborate and very evocative. The newly discovered rooms, as seen for the first time through the eyes of the PC, are lovingly detailed. Coloured walls, little ornaments, nautical maps draw the player down with the protagonist in the game's atmosphere.

Oftentimes the reader will encounter an image perfectly encapsulated in a precisely tailored sentence:

>"A ballroom without revels is an eerie, dancer-haunted place."

That is not to say the penmanship is flawless. The prose teeters on the purple cord, and sometimes falls off into murky plum long-windedness.
Overall though, the writing serves well to submerge the player in the dark mysterious mood of the piece.

It's unfortunate that Exile's Rose was published in this not-quite-finished state. One more pass through the tester's mill, one more round of editing would have lifted this game to great heights.
A few simple pacing-mechanisms (not even true puzzles, just some locked doors where the search for the key forces the player to explore all the rooms before being able to unlock the next staircase down) would make the story flow that much more naturally.

A compelling journey down through the Smuggler's schooner, and through the protagonist's memories and emotions.

An invitation arrived. What a horrendous prospect! To spend the Christmas festivities in Penrose Hall, your exasperating Aunt Allison's domain...

Fortunately, upon arrival two glints of silver lining present themselves. Your old school chum Checkers is also present, and the lovely young lady Julia will be joining the family for the duration.

Less fortunately however, those silver linings soon conflict, as your chum and you find yourselves in a not-so-friendly cockfight over the attentions of the endearing young lady...

Deck the Halls, Gieves consists of four short vignettes, four scenes prsenting one obstacle each. The puzzles are easy but pleasantly askew. It may take some poking and prodding getting into the right frame of mind.

The true strength of the game lies in its splendid writing, a spot-on parody of 1920s upper class British English.
The author obviously delights in writing elaborate winding cutscenes, filled (but not overstuffed) with quaint turns-of-phrase and idiomatic expressions.
The delightful language permeates the descriptions of locations, characters and actions. The tone of the piece is beautifully supported by having this use of words and expressions extend even to the reports of failed actions.

An interesting player-PC-narrator dynamic flows throughout the game. The main character, commonly filling the role of PC, is also, especially perhaps, the narrator of his exploits in Penrose Hall. This leaves the player, who habitually gives orders to the PC, more in the role of an interested listener. Her commands in this game are reframed as suggestions, nudges to urge the main character to continue the story. Here too, the customised in-character responses to failed commands do a lot of heavy lifting to maintain the illusion of the player being told a tall tale by the main protagonist.

Deck the Halls, Gieves is an acutely humorous work. It does not rely on a barrage of jokes and puns to attain this mood. Rather, bit by bit it calls forth a rising tide of ridiculousness and awkwardness, piling silly situations one atop the other until the player can't help but snigger and giggle. I for one had trouble relaxing my smiling muscles by the time the game was finished.

Very well-written Wodehousean comedy.

A word to the wise: when you’ve been holed up in a security bunker for months, it’s not the best idea to read the “Survivor’s Guide” that came with the purchase of your bunker. Apparently it goes on and on about adopting a new routine and focusing on your breathing and nutrition, to settle into life on 50m² of habitable (under)ground.

It’s like listening to the idiot on stable ground yelling at you not to look down while you’re in the middle of the tight-rope above the 400ft ravine. It can make you a bit nervous.

Except…

In Retour vers l’extérieur, changing the PC’s mood is a prerequisite for progress. As the player, you need to rile up your character, stoke the fire and re-awaken the lust for life on the outside.

For a game that attempts to put the player squarely in the PC’s shoes, I found there were some severe gaps in the experience. You have to search the bunker and the database of the computer for passwords and secret compartments. But the PC themselves installed those security measures, only a few months before.
Presumably, at the point in time where the game begins, the PC has already entered a state of such apathy and mental detachment that adventure-related amnesia has set in. But that is me as the player trying to fill in the gaps…

Ignoring this, the game has a seriously claustrophobic escape-room vibe going on. The writing is clear and descriptive, the puzzles are well-balanced. I found the pacing through the different stages of the PC’s mindset very effective.

The UI is well-designed, a natural addition to the themes in the text. It smoothly draws the player into the game-world without distracting you with too many bells and whistles. The bells and whistles there are (background noises, a customisable musical theme you can find in the database, a few pictures in the appropriate places,...) are nicely integrated and add a great deal to the atmosphere.

A good game. I enjoyed working out the mechanics and the passwords of the bunker. I did not feel emotionally connected to my character, but the overall atmosphere made up for that.

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.

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.

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.

This is interesting. A sort of slice-of-life with a ghost protagonist. It has a simple but versatile game mechanic: subtly manipulating other people’s minds.

On the evening after his own funeral, Victor appears as a ghost to his best friend Guillaume… who asks him to be a sort of invisible go-between to find out more about a girl he likes, Marie. (Because, well, that’s the sort of thing you ask your best friend to do, right? Even if he’s just come back from the dead…)

Unnoticed, Victor can listen in on the conversations between different groups of friends at the remembrance party. He can intervene by inhibiting or reinforcing them spiritually to speak their true mind (or not), and steer the conversation somewhat in the hopes of getting more info on the love life of Marie.

In doing so, the group dynamics could get shaken up a bit…

Very relatable stories of a group of teenage/young adult friends and their relationships, their worries and interests.

Way too much clicking (or pressing spacebar) involved. to. advance. to. each. new. sentence though.

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.