Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

“We’re too young for nostalgia, sparrow.
Go live a life worth reminiscing about.”

These are the final lines of the introductory paragraphs. An incitement to explore the nooks and crannies of this narrative urban maze.

During the first dialogue, I was immediately drawn to the protagonist and their companion. The little inklings of their hidden personalities dropped by the author made me thirsty to learn more of their personal histories and their place in this world.
The setting their meeting takes place in is equally intruiging. There are precious hints of a sprawling city with simultaneously mystifying yet familiar inner workings. Technomagical engineering seems to take the place of our cogs and gears, but the story remains vague about the ratio of familiar cause-and-effect and magical interference. There is mention of storm-powered “jolt” resembling static electricity but also of a crystal with strange workings.

During the story, the player is presented with several situations which increase the narrative tension. There is ample opportunity to shape the personality of the protagonist through the choices of which action to take, and in doing so, to determine the future, the outcome of the story.

I took a conservative path on my first (only, so far) playthrough, choosing to lay low and let the big problems and mysteries be handled by those perhaps better suited to heroic interference with the powers that be.
I learned a lot about the people of Conduin, the great city, and about the power dynamics that drive their society. I survived to live perhaps not heroic, but content with my role.

No point reminiscing about the time you got killed for poking your nose too far where it doesn’t belong…

Very good speculative fiction. I’m gonna go exploring more now, perhaps indeed poking in some darker corners…

A mysterious light
Burns all through the night
In that house where some people say
An alchemist dwells
With books of his spells
And a cat who scares children away

The game's mood is firmly set with this poem by Gareth Owen. The author picks up hereafter with a well-written introduction reminiscent of late 1800s Gothic Mystery stories.

You received a letter from your alchemist friend. (I want to rename our black cat after him. Ezekiel Throgmeister is a very cool name!) He had to interrupt work on an ongoing experiment for an urgent meeting with his colleagues in the arcane arts. The fact that apparently he did have the time to organize a scavenger hunt around his mansion, scattering clues all over the place instead of leaving everything in the lobby where you would immediately find them necessitates some fastening of the suspenders of disbelief. But this is just a flimsy frame for the true point of the game of course.

The Alchemist takes place in one of the most visited and beloved of adventure settings: the abandoned mansion. Despite the gloomy atmosphere, I felt right at home. Cozy almost...
Befitting the setting, the game is basically an old-school loot-and-drop quest. You need to find all components of an alchemical experiment and gather them in the laboratory.

Once the game proper starts, the writing leaves behind the elaborate Gothic stylings of the introduction. It becomes stark and sparse, efficiently describing your surroundings and the objects of note in them. The author mostly drops any unnecessary clutter, while still retaining the gloom of the shady mansion.
He accomplishes this by incorporating poignant details in the rooms, and by augmenting the descriptions with some random filler text and some rare and surprising timed sound effects ((Spoiler - click to show)I loved the purring cat!).

There is a large number of varied clues and puzzles. Common sense will get you started. There are devices to transform stuff, magical barriers and potions. A book found early on has a few rhyming riddles to figure out. None of this is too hard, and there is a good in-game hint system should you get stuck.
There is a clever trick the author pulls which creates a puzzle-barrier in the player's own mind. He gets you so used to a certain routine to follow and progress in the game, that the hardest puzzle for me was recognizing when to break that routine and try something else than I'd been doing. Very satisfying to break out of that box.

The map is large but not overwhelmingly so. It's subdivided into clearly alineated areas with their own collection of puzzles. I liked the click in the endgame when a part of the geography fell into place in my mind.

The Alchemist is a large and fun old-school adventure. Trustworthy and solid.

What can I say? I was grinning ear to ear the whole time.

I went through a goal-oriented first playthrough, making choices that I felt confident would bring me closer to the mice’s objective. Meanwhile I marveled at the pretty pictures and the smooth writing. (Writing in little-children-sentences is not an easy feat.)

Then I doubled the fun. I began behaving like a tricksy recalcitrant toddler, purposely choosing to stuff everything in my mouth instead of moving toward the goal. And I laughed…

Heartwarming and funny.

An elaborate worldbuilding accomplishment, with a touching story shining through. The glimpses of the Elven city we are granted through an unknown narrator’s tales are beautiful, soothing almost. The Elves’ dependance on words and trees to make their home moved me deeply. A literary-historical-creative society.

We are give even sparser details of the alternate earth human city, perhaps because the asker of questions who represents us is an inhabitant of this city, accustomed to its peculiarities. Short descriptions mention strange machines and hard-to-imagine energy-production. An alchemical-technological counterpart.

The traversal of the story I experienced was wistful and nostalgic, with overtones of hope. I encountered themes of destruction and renewal, the young born out of the old.

The delicate treatment of language and its role in retaining a stable sameness throughout history while allowing a shaping anew of older forms into the future resonated deeply with me.

I will read this story again and again to catch more glimpses. Beautiful.

(This review is based on the IFComp 2022 version)

I’ve been on a most adventurous journey through Dream World. I visited enchanting islands and got lost in a murky swamp. I mined the mountains for rare crystals and had some dealings with a shady Thief. I visited a town where the dead are buried under the floors of the living. A city full of lights of all colours mesmerized me.

Lost Coastlines is a procedurally generated sandbox RPG implemented in Adrift. It eschews the normal parser commands in favour of a choice-based approach. This means that the granularity of actions is far coarser than in your usual parser game, instead focusing on higher level commands to choose, for example, PLUNDER THIS SEA STRAIT, or MINE FOR CRYSTALS. The results of your choices are calculated based on your strengths and weaknesses. In turn, they affect those stats, giving you better skills or lower tolerance for your next adventures.

I cannot begin to fathom the switches, buttons and dials that this game juggles under the hood, the amount of variables that work in concert to make this a smooth exploration experience, but they work.

There are still minor issues, capitalization of place-names and the odd typo being the most noticeable, but as a whole, the game runs smoothly without any major glitches I could notice.

The writing is fit for such a large scale enterprise, giving grand visions of lost continents and sparkling fantasy cities, and introducing intruiging characters in a few pointed sentences.

I enjoyed it best by playing in shortish sessions of fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, as the gameplay of “visit an island, perform one action, maybe have a meaningful encounter, and then repeat the cycle” can become repetitive. Even then, the game sucked me in and had me mumbling “Just one more turn before I quit…” more than once.

I feel I’ll be returning to this game many times long after the Comp. I’ll also study the PDF manual ànd the in-game help more closely, so I can make better sense of the character information viewed by the STATUS command. This way, I’m hoping to set up a more focused long term expedition with self-imposed quest-objectives.

A large-scale journey of discovery in a vast enchanting world.

The aptly named Arborea starts off as you enter a simulation of a Vast Forest. Setting a game in a simulation is a great IF trick that immediately circumvents certain common hurdles in text adventures.
It easily explains away the immediate proximity of the fjords to the desert and other geographical oddities for one.
Placing the protagonist in an obstacle-filled simulated world unknown to them mirrors the player's motivation in solving the problems in an oldschoolish puzzle romp such as this game. Just tackling the puzzles you encounter because they're there gets an extra layer of explanation (or a slightly more believable handwave) as "This is what the simulation throws at you. Now deal with it."
And of course, a sim offers a great opportunity for a short but nice (Spoiler - click to show)XYZZY joke.

The simulated geography is convenient for the in-game traversal of the terrain as well as for the player's out-of-game map making.
It's a compass-based hub-and-spokes design, where the spokes are subdivided in a limited number of locations (usually no more than three or four).
The different areas are not self-contained. Puzzles in one area often need wisdom and objects obtained in another. This necessitates several traversals of the map. At least one exploratory round to find and research all available obstacles, pick up anything that is not nailed down, and take notes about how to approach the different puzzles and in what order. A lot of associations and ideas for a strategy will pop up in the players head during this stage.
Solving the game will require a few more rounds of going back and forth as new locations open up. I never felt completely lost, as repeated exploration gave me new ideas, and there were always a few spokes I could try these ideas in.
Although many of the puzzles are tightly interconnected, the game is not completely linear. Several of the spokes contain loose objects, with nothing restricting the player from taking them. These can all serve as that first loose thread to start pulling and get the ball rolling.

The puzzles themselves are varied. Some use of machinery, some manipulation of NPCs, plenty of variations on the classic lock-and-key theme.
The difficulty will probably depend a lot on how the player's brain is wired and their experience with oldschool games. The hardness of the problems mostly relates to the level of associative thinking is needed to intuit the solution. Many times straightforward application of real world knowledge will prove successful, other times the player might let their mind drift and use a certain kind of "moon logic" to make the necessary leap of imagination.
I found that there were plenty of clues available in the text. However, recognizing them does need the player to tune in to the game's style. As the pointers appear in the natural flow of the descriptions, the evocative writing can sometimes obscure a clue hidden in the middle of a descriptive paragraph.

The descriptions produced some very vivid images of the surroundings. I was impressed with how well each spoke's central theme (Serengeti Plains, Caribbean Island,...) was brought to life in just a few locations, implying a much broader world than was accessible to the protagonist. Very strong writing in this regard.
Arborea's writing is less successful in maintaining a consistent atmosphere. There are several voices present in the game's text, and the discrepancy between their respective tones felt somewhat jarring at times.
There is the simulation speaking. It welcomes you as you enter the sim and consequently introduces each new area as you discover it. I imagined this as a pleasing, soft-spoken and caring voice, even poetic.
There is the somewhat more distanced game narration, which provides the colourful, evocative and immersive descriptions of the landscape.
And there is the fourth-wall-breaking voice of the author. Sometimes this is a justified interruption to clarify game mechanics, but often it jumps in unannounced (in the same font as the narration) with a "funny" aside to the player (or is it to the PC?). This broke the atmosphere of the game on several occasions for me. Perhaps a nod to the snarky comments to the player in old Infocom games, but not so well placed here.

Overall, Arborea carries a gentle ecological message about the beauty of nature. In particular, it tells of the wonder of trees, and of mankind's varied attitudes towards them in different time periods and different cultures. There are depictions of careful, even reverent co-existence with trees, practical use of them for our daily commodities and also the destructive use of them in a mass-production way of life.
This loving attitude toward trees is frequently at odds with the oldschool adventurer's amorality toward the NPCs. It's impossible to solve Arborea without behaving questionably toward the other people you meet. Sometimes in a mostly innocent and funny trickster manner, other times actively misleading them and abusing their trust, or even drugging them to get what you want. I couldn't bring myself to comfortably reconcile this behaviour with a peaceful problemsolving exploration.
All I could do was think: "Hey, it's a simulation." And this got me questioning what this simulation was actually for. Is it a educational program about our planet's history? Or just a game people in the future play for their amusement?

The game characters are basically beautifully painted cardboard cutouts. They're great to meet in their intended role, but once you start interacting with them, there is not much substance to them. I would have liked for them to bit more talkative or even gossipy. It would make them feel like more rounded characters in their own right, and it would be an opportunity to add to the sometimes hard-to-pick-up clues in the text.

The endgame feels like the game does one last loving nod back to its precursors. It's essentially a condensed old school puzzle romp; an almost carnivalesque obstacle course with all kinds of puzzles strung together in the final straight line to the exit. A great way to bring such a broad and sprawling game to a close.

I spent about six hours in Arborea, and I loved the ride.

(this review is for the IFComp 2022 version)

Your backstabbing fellow archaeologist/explorer/graverobber pushed you down a catacomb. Find the exit and grab all the loot.

This game brings back the classic text-adventure tropes: explore and steal. Apart from the framing story I summarized above, there is no plot or character development. This means you are only limited by your own conscience (and let’s face it, adventure players haven’t got one) while you unleash your kleptomaniac and grave violating tendencies in the poor old King’s tomb.

The descriptions are rich, they capture the gloomy-tomb atmosphere very well. There were several rooms with vivid and memorable images, emanating an old and foreboding feeling.

Until the very end, puzzles are nowhere to be seen, except maybe looking in a few less obvious places. The final puzzle is simple but nifty, providing a nice little >click< in the player’s head.

Unfortunately, The Hidden King’s Tomb is woefully underimplemented. In a creepy crypt like this, it misses so many opportunities to reward the explorer with detailed descriptions of the ominous scenery to establish a bit of backstory (the murals and reliefs are a first obvious example). Customizing the responses to unnecessary actions would also help in bringing more life to the game world.

Indeed, I would love to see this game expanded into a near-puzzleless exploration of the history of this long-buried mysterious King. The focus could be not on the gathering of loot (which will always be cool, come on, it’s a text adventure, right…), but on the slow and gradual unraveling of the tale of how the King came to be buried here, and of his great or horrible deeds during life.
The medium of IF is extremely well suited to such piece-by-piece discovery of a backstory.

A nice exploration/looting excercise. I really liked the final puzzle. The first atmospheric layer of the tomb is nicely painted. The author just needs to go down a few layers beneath that and implement all the juicy details.

"♫♪♫...tum te dum te dum... ♪♫♪"

While you're waiting for this airlock to cycle open, you take a look at your task-list. "Repair microwave oven. Fix cabinet door." Should be an easy job, getting this crew's living quarters in order before going home. The crew are all in the space station, so you can take all the time you want, you've got this starship all to yourself.

For no reason but my own imagination I thought of the PC in Crash as a middle-aged guy with a two-day stubble and a cigar butt stuck behind his ear, doing this one last job before going home for the night and watching a far-future version of Jeopardy.

Of course, before you've set more than a few steps inside the SS Ugati, all hell breaks loose. The space station explodes behind you, propelling the ship you're on into open space. Darn! Looks like your task-list just got a bit bigger.

A few questions to the ship's computer quickly reveal a backstory of a system-wide rebellion, rivalling factions and opposing planets/moons. I really like this plot dynamic, a normal guy unwillingly thrust into circumstances with far-reaching consequences and no choice but to rise to the challenge.

The protagonist is weakly characterized, making it easy for the player to project herself onto the role or to invent a character of her own liking (the stubbled cigarsmoking guy I mentioned above...)

The build-up of tension is very well-paced, several times raising the stakes and increasing the urgency of the situation. The puzzles follow this arc of tension nicely, with a few simple preliminary obstacles leading up to two more complicated and challenging endgame problems.

All the puzzles are of a mechanical/physical/chemical nature, requiring obtaining and studying information (the ship's computer), and implementing cause-and-effect relations, all the while taking into account the fact that you are in a spaceship.

There is a lot of optional material for those with completionist/optimalizationist tendencies, although doing menial chores while your damaged vessel is hurtling through space does strain the suspenders of disbelief somewhat...

About midgame two NPCs come into play (albeit never personally, you can only talk to them on the comms.) Both are well-defined, they have a definite personal voice. The transition to the endgame requires you to put your trust in one of them. A frustrating dilemma with limited background information, adding to the tension of an already distressing situation.

There is much satisfaction to be found in figuring out the two main puzzles by yourself, perhaps with a nudge from the step-by-step hint system. Do give them a chance before running to the walkthrough.

Great puzzles against a strong but elegantly downplayed backstory.

This is very good.

The gruesome horrors a sanitary inspector must endure on the job may be exactly what you needed to face what awaits in "Nikolai's Bar & Grill".

The further you penetrate into this foulest of restaurants in what is already the foulest part of town, the more gag-worthy the anti-hygienic offences become. But there's something else lurking... Something older and bloodier...

Afflicted hits the ground running. Immediately the player finds even the simplest of commands (X and NOTE) garner great rewards, in the form of detailed and creative descritions of just how disgusting this restaurant really is. This was so much fun I purposely held off on triggering the second part of the game to open yet another pot of stinking stew or examining another grease stained grill.

The first part of the game is so packed full of hints that the genre-turn in the second part doesn't come as a surprise. This was a great source of anticipatory pleasure for me, as I was imagining the unholy things I would have to do in the endgame.

The player gets a lot of freedom in the endgame (and even before that, if she chooses to leave early). There are multiple endings, good or bad depending on personal taste. I chose to go for a dark-good ending.

The characters don't have much to say, but they are lovingly (ahem) described and play their role well.

Although Afflicted has a small and constrained map, there are a few surprises duriong the exploration. The surroundings are also so full of things to look at that the map feels bigger than its number of rooms.

Apart from some disambiguation issues I found the game to be very nicely implemented, having layers of foulness on top of buckets of gellified grease.

Lots of fun, very well written.