Reviews by Rovarsson

Baggage is set in a very evocative symbolic setting. You're on an endless gravel road going nowhere. Your only chances of getting somewhere lie behind two impenetrable hedges.

You must dig deep within yourself to make for yourself the tools you need.

This vignette tries to relate to the player the hard and painful work it takes to open a path out of depression or emotional blockage. It gets a lot of things right; the need to hold some cherished beliefs to the light and see them for what they really are, to leave behind painful yet known -and therefore twistedly comfortable- convictions and memories.

The way to deal with these, to mould them into something helpful instead of restrictive is a bit easy. I would have liked to see some more of what a person need to do and what needs to happen to a person to climb out of the darkness, instead of presenting it as a "simple" decision. However, this small story does present the necessary steps one has to take, albeit somewhat on the theoretical level.

The contrast between the player character and the traveller (the only NPC) gives a bittersweet taste to the endgame.

A sincere and thoughtful piece, worth thinking and feeling about after you finish.

This was FUN!

There's really nothing to the "game"-part of this game, but my-oh-my the fun there is to be had by trying to do all the things you can think of in this limited setting.

Actually, this entire game is one big list of AMUSING.

Really, play it. Ten minutes of laughing, out loud or otherwise.

You're a big trucker with a soft spot for the waitress in a rundown truckstop. You'll have to prove to her you can safely take her accross the mountains to take her away.

Looking for ways to accomplish this, you meet a bunch of colourful characters, each with their weaknesses you can exploit to get a step further to your goal. (I was intrigued by Ranbir the shop owner.)

This could have been a fun comedy game, were it not that it's badly executed.

There are a bunch of typos and missing spaces, not enough synonyms, and often there is a blank line missing above the parser prompt, gluing the response to the previous command onto the next command line.

The game suffers from shoddy implementation. OPEN DOOR gets a response that refers to an obstacle that you just got rid of for example.

And I cringed when I saw this:

(In Convenience Store)

>BUY SODA

"Nothing is on sale."

Not only is it an unforgivable oversight not to implement BUY in a store, the author also managed to use the wrong expression.

[Edit: the expression "on sale" has different meanings in American and British English. Only in American English does it mean "being sold at a lower than usual price". I was wrong, the author was right to use "Nothing is on sale." in this way. Since this was the most grating flaw I experienced, I upped my rating by one]

Two or three more sendbacks to the testers and a lot of attention to detail could make this game a fun little comedy. As it is now however, the lack of careful finish got in the way of my enjoyment.

I look forward to a post-comp release of Mean Mother Trucker, where I might dive right into the comedy.

A sick goblin, bleeding from his eyes, is brought into the clinic and dies on the operating table, right before the eyes of Marid, a young doctor in training.

This is how The Weight of a Soul throws you in the middle of the action from the very first scene. Although there are some resting points in the rest of the game, they are few. Most of it is fast, moving from gruesome discovery to action sequence to an impressive and morally challenging finale.

The goblin's death is only the first in a row. Marid is sent out to investigate the cause of the disease and maybe find a way to stop it from spreading. It is the beginning of a journey that will take her deep into the bowels of the Channelworks District.

Into the bowels indeed. The great waterworks installation known as the Hydra Aquifera looms over the district and dominates the gameworld, both above and below ground. Its pipes, channels and canals run everywhere. The city's descriptions conjure up images of bodily fluids, purulent boils and Galenic humours. The city has been laid open on a dissection table with its innards bare.

The writing in The Weight of a Soul is excellent. In most locations, it follows a very standard IF-structure, with a short descriptive paragraph for each location, followed by a list of exits and of notable features. The images in those descriptive paragraphs are however of a rarely seen evocativeness:

---"The suspended mansion echoes with a grandiose hollowness."---

There are tense action-scenes, something hard to pull off in IF. Here they are well guided without sacrificing all interactivity.

The overall story arc was mostly satisfying. It's a great adventure story; I was happy to let myself be swept along. As a mystery however, it did not work so well for me. I was surprised at the scale of the villain's evil plan, but the basic plot, the nature of the disease and the identity of the villain were all clear very soon.

Fast-paced as it is, the game eschews traditional puzzles in favour of story-bound obstacles, conversations and examinations (of the city and of bodies alike).
It rewards the exploration with pieces of character backstory, long and well-written cutscenes and insightful dreams.

During the story, there are many conversations. These are handled with choice-menus. The choices of what you say do not alter the path of the story for the most part, but they do serve as an excellent device for the player to colour in the character of the protagonist in her own mind. The NPCs are many, and they have much to talk about. (I personally found Webster the bouncer a fascinating man.)

Throughout the game, I kept noticing the ambiguous player perspective. Although the story is written in the traditional second tense, I experienced it as somewhere between second and third tense. Whereas I normally use "I" or sometimes "you" to refer to my player character in my notes, here I used "Marid" and "she" almost every time. This testifies to how much I read this game as a book. I must note that this didn't take away from my involvement with the story.

The Weight of a Soul is a great technical achievement. The depth and smoothness of implementation are astonishing in places, so well done that they become almost invisible to the player. In one scene, there are multiple dead bodies in the same room while Marid examines them one by one. The game effortlessly tracks which body she is working on, avoiding many, many disambiguation issues with a graceful ease that must have been a pain in the unmentionables to program.

The polish on the player-help features is so bright it's almost blinding. A beautiful map, a nudge-to-explicit hint menu, a list of the characters Marid has met and the locations she has visited. On top of that there's a journal that keeps track of Marid's discoveries and her current objectives. More than enough reasons to feel safe as a player and trust the game.

When I started playing IF, I always had a strong feeling of excitement when opening a new game. The experience of being there, embodying a character in a strange world and determining her actions was my main attraction to IF. In The Weight of a Soul it is exactly this feeling that serves as the basis of the interactivity of the game. Rather than levering up the sofa to find a bolt to screw into a machine, the interactivity here comes from being a collaborator of the protagonist, looking through her eyes and helping her decide. I found this extremely engaging and immersive.

In the finale, you, the player, must really decide which path Marid will take in a grey moral area. Very satisfying.

This all takes place in a beautifully crafted grimy and gritty fictional world. The phrase alchemy-punk came to mind...

The Weight of a Soul is an extraordinary IF-story.

A big review for a big game.

Finding Martin is an extremely big and extremely difficult game. I would not have been able to finish it without external hints and peeking at the walkthrough.
However, it’s also a very long, complicated and well-conceived story that ties together the lives and fates of many characters. It was a great experience to see this play out over the course of many playsessions.

The intro is somewhat hurried. It pays little attention to character exposition or context, instead just telling you the bare minimum of information. A former college mate, Martin, has disappeared. His sister calls you up and persuades you to help find him. That’s it. No big emotional reminders of what close friends you were or what splendid memories you share.
In fact, this detachement in the beginning of the game is one of the first points of criticism in Adam Cadre’s and Janice Eisen’s podcast about Finding Martin. And I have to agree with them… to a point. Were one to come to Finding Martin empty-slated as it were, it would be very hard to muster the determination to wade through that much pointless puzzles without any in-game motivation. Having read reviews and forum-posts about the game though, as I expect almost any player attempting it now would do, I anticipated this. I was prepared and actually looking forward to these puzzles-for-puzzles’-sake.
And I have to say, it is very much worth it when the story starts unfolding to have bit your teeth hard into these unmotivated puzzles. They turn out to have meaning after all.

Technically, Finding Martin is a monster-achievement. The room descriptions follow the many and varied changes in game-state almost seamlessly. There are some points where a repeated description of a device in motion hints at the cogwheels of the game straining ((Spoiler - click to show)the Fuzzy Room in action), but I believe eliminating this would have been very difficult to program.
There is another point of criticism I’d like to bring up: the huge amount of micro-management. There are a few puzzles where you have to sit in front of a desk or a piano and where you have to explicitly SIT and STAND UP every time. There is also the main puzzle/clue mechanism of the game that requires you PUT X IN POCKET every time. Well, okay, I guess… But then you put on a jacket and get disambiguation prompts the whole time. (“The trouser pocket or the jacket pocket?”.) Maybe there could have been a designated pocket for this object? I’m sure I could have shaven a few hundred moves off the +5OOO I took to finish the game.
Ah well, technicalities…

The map is actually not so big. There is Martin’s house, which comprises the main game-area. This area contains a number of hidden passages that expand the map, but not by that much. Then there are quite a number of small submaps to journey to that are easily explored. Together they give a feeling of possibility, of a wider space than is actually in the game.

Part One
You begin by exploring Martin’s house. I got the impression that a mad genius had been in charge of installing the domotics technology and went all out. “Hmmm, what if I tied opening the oven to the turtle drawing its head into its shell?” (Not a real example, but close enough.)
There are hidden or unknown mechanisms and controls everywhere. An enormous number of the objects you come across come with a puzzle. This amount of puzzles also means that by the time you’ve gone through the house once, you’ve been bombarded with a veritable barrage of clues. Very hard to keep track of.

Luckily, there are some things to help the player. For one, the writing. It is clear, descriptive and detailed, with just enough flair as to not become dry.
Then, there are two in-game hint/clue systems. Unfortunately, one of them (the one that tells you how to do things) takes some intricate puzzle-solving all by itself to activate. The other one tells you what to look for next. It hangs just outside the front door.

By meticulously following these clues and experimenting with everything, the player finds more and more ways to open doors and make seemingly trivial things happen ((Spoiler - click to show)running a bath for instance…). This gradually shrinks down the pile of clues to a more manageable size, making it easier to plan ahead.
Also, I found that after a while, my brain adapted to the bizarre-yet-consistent logic of the game. I came to expect certain kinds of solutions to work.

Part Two
In the second part you find a device for travelling that is reminiscent of a certain doctor’s means of transportation. This allows you to leave the house and pick up objects necessary for solving puzzles in the house (by solving more puzzles of course).
During these travels, the backstory finally starts opening up. By listening to old cassettes and through the cunning use of your sense of smell, you learn more about Martin and his family. In the rest of the game you will get to see how their lives and yours entwine to make a possible future.

You also meet the first people. NPCs in Finding Martin are very unresponsive. But they do have a lot to say and do without you having to ask them to. In a bunch of pleasant cut-scenes you will meet half a dozen or so people that will aid you on your quest. They also provide welcome paragraphs of rest and exposition to ease your by-now-overheating brain.

The puzzles in this part are easier, most of all because you have clearer sub-goals and a clearer course of action. This is also a part where you get to experiment and train with the training wheels still on. You are gently prohibited from going on a trip if you don’t have a necessary object. Not so in the last part of the game!

And last but not least, you get to re-explore your surroundings with a cool new gadget! It will change the way you view the world.

Part Three
And now we come to the third part. A long, dense and insanely difficult buildup to the finale.

Through a series of time-travel trips you have to resolve a number of paradoxes in the desired timeline to make it reality. You will need to coöperate with your past self to set up the necessary conditions for the following time trips, plant objects for your future self to solve puzzles and eventually make the intended future a reality instead of a mere possibility.

Finding Martin’s world and logic are bizarre, unintuitive and twisted. However, there is a strong consistency throughout the game. An unseen interlocking machinery is at work underneath the surface and gives the piece its coherence in tone and style. There is method to the madness, it’s just nigh impossible to grasp it.
Therefore I was disappointed to see the coherence crumble in this part as the game descended into gratuitous zaniness (Spoiler - click to show)(Peter Pan and Captain Hook show up…
It’s only one scene during one overseas trip, but it did break the atmosphere for me.

But soon the game shook off this temporary lapse and continued to a truly satisfying finale. It was a joy to see all those carefully laid out pieces come together, tying together timelines as well as the lives of the characters I had come to care about. The road was long and hard, but the reward is very much worth it.

Highly recommended game!

The width of the map and the depth of implementation are awe-inspiring.
Only War relies on the strengths of the parser-IF medium to produce an experience that no other medium, no matter how strong its graphics interface or how numerous its pages of static text, could deliver.

The old-school adage holds strong with this epic work: the best graphic engine is the human imagination!

This game also has a masterful technical ace up its sleeve in the handling of containers and contents.
Revealing too much would spoil the surprise and the imaginative journey for other players. Suffice it to say that I was baffled when I found out how deep this game actually went.

[Edit: This is a 2021 April Fools' Day joke-game]

The Lost Islands of Alabaz is a fun and energetic travel-adventure. It's aimed at children and has the feel of the "boy's adventures"-books I used to eat up by the dozens as a child. (For all I knew then, girls had books about knitting and princes. Except for my cool girlfriends, who also read the boy's books... Sign of the times...?)

At the beginning of the story, you get to choose a name for your protagonist, which was a great draw-in for my son. We decided on his own name. After that, he let me do all the hard work and asked about status-reports on his quest each evening.

There is a detailed tutorial in the game in the form of Trig, your best friend NPC. He breaks the fourth wall to tell the player directly what to TYPE. Children playing their first IF might not notice, but for a veteran with several dozen games under my belt, having read numerous threads and essays about Player-PC-Narrator-Parser-relations this made me feel unbalanced at first. I concluded that the aforementioned essays were taking things much too seriously...)

One morning, you, a young knight, are called by the king to go on a quest. The ten islands of the kingdom have been separated by a cursed mist for dozens of years now and there is no sign that it will lift of its own accord. The people are suffering under the lack of trade, food and communication with friends and relatives.
The king gives you one magic pearl to guide you through the mist to one island. From there, you're on your own. Find the cause of the curse and lift it, and find your way back home.

Not the most innovative of premises, but an engaging one. I did feel an obligation to fulfill this quest for the good of all the island-dwellers of Alabaz. (And to my son...)

The premise of the ten islands makes for a great sense of space. You're a seafaring adventurer exploring the unknown!
The islands themselves all have small maps (five locations or less, except for the mazy one...) At first, I thought the author was using a Gateway-like technique, each island a self-contained puzzle-space in the bigger whole. The first islands of The Lost Islands of Alabaz are like this. The more islands you have encountered and explored though, the more it becomes necessary to revisit previous islands, making for a web of relations between the islands that has to be kept in mind.

The puzzles themselves are easy to medium difficulty.Most of them are simple fetch-quests and/or straightforward use-appropriate-object-here obstacles. To get them right however, the player needs to pay close attention to the information he's given in conversations and in the out-of-game Almanac.

That's right! With your download, you get an Almanac about the islands and how they were before the mist. It's a nice 15-minute read, almost like an historical tourist-brochure. Embedded of course are many clues on how to solve the problems in the game.
Actually, the Almanac is just one of three hint-systems for the game. You also carry a journal, in which your progress is recorded along with reminders of puzzles you have yet to solve. And there is Trig. You can ask Trig about all the puzzles, repeatedly. He will start with giving you a nudge toward the first step of the solution, and give more explicit guidance after that.

There are a whole bunch of NPCs to whom you can talk. I found them to be well-characterized with a few strokes of the pen. They talk about many things, and to avoid confusion the author puts suggested topics that pertain directly to the puzzles between parentheses. All conversations use the syntax TALK ABOUT, although you can use ASK ABOUT too. I didn't find any differences.

The Lost Islands of Alabaz plays very smoothly. There are many synonyms for nouns and verbs. The descriptions change in tune with the actions you perform on other islands, there are nice responses to "failed" attempts. The player can feel at ease that the game will not misbehave.

This game turned out to be a lot longer than I expected from the first play-session where I breezed through the first two islands. I spent a few evenings on this quest for the hidden magic pearls. Very enjoyable evenings.

Light adventurous fun. Go play.

Oh, as an extra incentive: You can compete in the Zeppelipede-racing Derby on the Island of RazzMaTazz! Yes, you can. In fact, you must!

When I entered the first room in The Adventurers' Museum, I almost breathed a sigh of relief. It was a breath of fresh air to learn that the quest at hand was to retrieve all the exhibits that were stolen from the museum by a thievish imp. Through the actions of my anonymous adventurer, I was going to help restore the historical artefacts of the Necromancer-wars to their rightful place, for the good of future generations of schoolchildren and curious adults. My sociopathic and cleptomaniac tendencies would serve a greater cause.
I'm only half joking here. Although the gameplay of The Adventurers' Museum is the same as any old puzzle-&-looting romp, the task given to me by the old and wize curator of the museum had more importance, more weight than just treasure-taking to kill the Big Bad Bully at the end.

In his review for Baf's Guide, David Welbourn says: "Want to play Zork I again for the nostalgia value, but you've already played that one so many times that it's no longer a challenge? Try The Adventurers' Museum."
I haven't played Zork yet, but I have read enough to know that if you are eaten by a Growl in the dark and if your treasure gets randomly stolen by a thieving imp, I might as well view this game as a rehearsal for when I do tackle Zork.

The technical side of this adventure is more than adequate. There are many synonyms for verbs and nouns. Trying "wrong" things usually gives a response either why you can't do that or just lets you do them and see the funny consequences of your actions (plus it moves the game into unwinnable territory, but hey, save/restore right?)

There are several really oldschool features to this game, but it's as if the author put them in out of respect for past tradition rather than to make gameplay harder.
There's a limited lantern, but there's also an unlimited light source lying right on your path. Your hero gets thirsty, but a river runs right through the cave. You feel hungry, but the curator gave you elvish waybread on your third turn into the game. The imp keeps stealing your stuff, but you can get him off your scent quite easily.
The only thing left that can be annoying to (modern) players is the inventory-juggling, but all that does is make you take a trip back to the museum now and then.
It's probably best to put any frustrations aside and do a few exploratory runthroughs of the cave without worrying about unwinnability or the order of puzzles, just until you get a feel for the place.

Coming back to the Zork-comparison: I have also read enough that I think The Adventurers' Museum really has a special mood of its own. There is a very consistent, almost friendly fairytale-fantasy atmosphere throughout the entire game (except that one room...).

I found the layout and the feel of the map to be brilliant. The cramped cave-crawling of the cave entrance soon gives way to grand vistas of splendid underground halls, a fluorescent flower garden and subterranean pools. A nice big part of the map is accessible from the start, and already in this part the gamespace is layered in three dimensions, with sidepaths leading up and over other areas. Sometimes you get treated to an eagle-eye view of a lower area.

Puzzlewise, there is a wide variety. There's attentive exploring and spelunking, some references to pop-culture, clever time/turn counting,... And yes, sometimes violence is the answer.
Some solutions do require a completely (to me) unmotivated action, and at least one object has a use that was completely unhinted. A bit of let's-try-every-verb and see what happens. That was less fun...

The pacing of the game can be a bit tedious at first. Once you have explored the accessible map though, a nice interaction between puzzles solved, museum-objects in your inventory and bottlenecks opening sets a cascade in motion where you find tunnel after cavern after hall with treasure in rapid succession. Very rewarding.

Conversations are not implemented at all, so you only get to know the few NPCs by their actions and what they choose to say to you. I did find the old curator endearing. (And a bit intimidating. How can he get from his office to the top of the museum stairs to block your way so fast!?)

The Adventurers' Museum may not be innovative or especially creative, but I had a great time playing it.

Return to Ditch Day is a puzzling experience par excellence. Challenging brainteasers/-breakers with an engaging storyline.

It starts with a great introduction. An easy puzzle in an atmosphere-rich environment. It's completely linear (apart from some amusing things when you try to resist the railroading), but it's the perfect way to get acquainted with the mood of the game, the sort of puzzles to expect, your own character and, last but not least, your nemesis. (I swear, you'll wish you had a phaser set to "burn to a crisp" after a few turns in his company.)

Some time later, you are sent to CalTech, your alma mater, as a headhunter trying to get a brilliant student to work with your tech-company. And who shows up with exactly the same purpose? You got it. The need for payback on this character in your PC is great enough to spill out of the computer and into your mind. You want to beat this guy as much as your character does. Excellent motivation to tackle this puzzle-romp of a game.

It turns out this brilliant student has turned the tables on you: instead of a normal interview where you ask the questions and set the conditions, you are invited to solve his Ditch Day-stack. He will sign with the man who solves it first. This task will lead you to hilarious situations, complicated puzzles, and a good amount of science and engineering.

Ditch Day is a CalTech tradition where the seniors leave campus and block their rooms with clever puzzles. The challenge is to solve the puzzles and get in the room (where there are treats as a bribe not to trash said room). This means that the gamespace, CalTech Campus, is bustling with activity. There are stacks (i.e. puzzles) everywhere in the dorms, the students are gathering in the hallways and in front of doors trying to solve them. This lively atmosphere gives the game a lot of energy, making you keep wanting to engage with it.

The campus is a big and complicated place so mapping it thoroughly is necessary. (I read in her review that Emily Short did not and made her way through anyway. I'm not Emily Short.) There are no mazes as such, but especially the dorm-area is twisty enough to lose your bearings. I actually started this game about ten years ago, but I quit halfway through because I didn't know where I was half the time. (That bend through the dorm-library is a cruel inside joke of the author, I'm sure of it.)

There are many NPCs. You can only talk to a few of them, but all the others seem like real persons too, concentrating on the stack of their choice or exchanging hints and clues with each other. The ones you can speak to are mostly limited to the problem at hand, giving you objects or clues. The way they act and talk to you is very personal though, giving them each their own identity. (I really liked Erin.) And although your nemesis doesn't answer any questions, he does have a snide comment ready to everything you do around him.

The writing is practical. It focuses on clarity, describing where you are and who/what is there. There is a lot of situational and action-comedy in the game, but this never becomes the main focus.
The writing is also very, very good at controlling the pace and steering the player in the right direction through clues. The size of the map and the sheer amount of puzzles you encounter on your first exploration can be overwhelming. It's important to know and remember that this is actually a very friendly game. It doesn't want to frustrate you (too much) or deliberately mislead you. If you take it slow and do things in the order the clues show you, you'll discover that there is a completely logical sequence of puzzles that build on each other towards the endgame.
But! Beware! There is a storyline that diverges from this main puzzle-sequence. It is not necessary to win the game, but it is for getting full points. It's also a lot of fun. And you get to search the steam tunnels under the university!

And now for the meat and bones of Return to Ditch Day: the puzzles. I surprised myself by not needing to look at the hints except one time, when it was (to me) underclued how to get a student to help me with an object. And I am not a great puzzler. However, I did what I wrote before: slowly going from clue to clue, without letting myself be overwhelmed by sidetracks. (I did save at a certain point, went on an exploration and experimentation rampage through campus and found tons of fun stuff and fruitflies and a solvable computer-code puzzle. After that I just restored and went on my methodical way.)
Many different puzzles, many different strategies. Some require reading and learning. Sometimes you need help from others in a tit-for-tat way. There's a puzzle where you have to manipulate NPCs by learning a bit more about them. There are gadgets and machinery to be played with. And ultimately, there is codecracking. Glorious, in-your-face-nemesis codecracking...

I spent three evenings captivated by Return to Ditch Day. Hours of reading, thinking, laughing. This game is great.

A Bear's Night Out is a delightful little adventure!

After dark, while your owner is asleep, you climb (or rather bounce) out of bed. You have to make sure everything is ready for the big day tomorrow, and knowing your owner, he'll have forgotten a bunch of stuff.

The map is very small, eleven rooms in total. While exploring these rooms, there are tons of fun stuff to discover and experiment with.(Pssst, the cat is a great playmate...)

Once you have seen all the rooms, experimented to your hearts content with all the funny stuff and start dealing with the puzzles in earnest, you'll see that not everything in this game is fluffy and soft and easygoing. None of the puzzles are fiendish, but they all require thorough examining of the game-space, a good deal of planning and some real-life puzzlesolving strategies. Of course, all of this is made both harder and more fun by the fact that you're about a foot tall...

A warm and fuzzy adventure.