Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

IF has its fair share of unfinished trilogies and abandoned series.This can be disappointing (or, depending on the quality of the piece, a relief...). Anyhow, it 's a shame to plogger your way through such a work, getting to know the characters and learning the puzzle-saviness you need to end at a brick wall with a sign that says: "No closure to see here. Move along please."

I have found a sure way to avoid the sense of despair that can overwhelm a player's heart when coming across such a piece, whether they notice it during play or beforehand. The player must get into the mindset of the archeologist. He must rejoice at unearthing a rare fragment of text that has survived through the ages to at last land in their hands.

I have unearthed such a magnificent fragment with The Duel That Spanned the Ages. Others have gone before me. I knew from another review that it was an uncomplete adventure, a single chapter of a larger story. Undeterred, I pressed on and found this a true original gem.
(There is an entry in IntroComp 2010 that is set in the same storyline. Since then, all has been quiet about The Duel That Spanned the Ages as far as I know.)

In keeping with the incompleteness of the work, there is a long, mysterious and seemingly disconnected introduction. The game proper puts you in the character of a mercenary on an asteroid in the ass end of space. Soon he is sent on a mission where the rest of his squad is killed and he must fend for himself.

I have never seen an IF-piece that is so chock-full of adrenalin. The player is warned in the ABOUT-text that there are some timed sequences and that it is possible to die. A grave understatement if ever there was one...

Your mercenary finds himself in fast-paced chase scenes and brutal battles. He has to explore an abandoned underground facility while under attack from all sides. If I had tried to explain the game to a friend, they would have wrongly guessed that I had played Doom or one of its offspring.

Despite all this mayhem, the game really tries to be friendly. For example, it allows multiple UNDOs (six in my experience, but the ABOUT-text says this can vary according to interpreter).

The puzzles, while challenging, are not of the endlessly-tinkering-and-experimenting kind. That would hinder the neck-breaking tempo. Still, it takes a good eye, some thorough exploring and some working out the physics of the situation to get at the correct solution. In fact, your mind may be biased toward the wrong kinds of solutions by the action surrounding you, making the puzzles harder.

Fittingly for a fast-paced game such as this, the action takes place on several small straightforward maps. The writing conveys the danger and tension all around. I for one was deep enough into the action that I didn't relax in the knowledge that I had a saved game to fall back on. No, I had to get to that elevator before I ran out of bullets. I was worrying about the damage to my mercenary's body, wondering how long the armour would hold and how long it would take to bleed out.

There are cutscenes where unknown entities talk about our mercenary, wondering if he is up to the greater task. Unfortunately, we will probably never know what task this is or who these entities are.

But do play this piece of an incomplete story. It packs an impressive punch all on its own.

A lonely bedridden father... His son gone down the well to seek demonic assistance in avenging his mother's death...

A statue of Baluthar, their self-erected god of Vengeance.

In a wakeful moment, the father realizes he does not want his son sacrificed in the name of revenge. He must bring him back from the underworld.

Baluthar is a well-written dark-fantasy game. The descent into the caverns under the well, infested with carrion-eating beetles gets under your skin as you explore the rooms. The introduction does a good job of describing the elderly and weakened father. This does not really play a role in the rest of the game though. The son remains a mystery until the very end of the game, and even then the player has to deduce his character from vague clues.

The map is small but very efficient. It serves as an atmospheric backdrop to the few rather easy puzzles.

I really liked the ending, simple as it was.

An hour, maybe two, of light horror cave exploring.

The nuns of the nigh impenetrable Nunnery of Blood have taken your mother. Against all odds and the other demons' advice, you will infiltrate it and free your mother.

First off: a bit of tech stuff.
The adjustable interface is pretty nifty. You can toggle all of the player conveniences. Old-fashioned purist that I am, I chose to turn off the side panes (which show exits, inventory and interactive objects in the room), the auto-map (which is cool, by the way) and the keyword links (I find the blue highlighting distracting and hey, I'm playing a parser game!)
The room description-layout is very basic: first a dry list of exits, objects and characters, followed by the actual room description. Any special action taken is listed even before the exits-and-objects list, but the circumstances and consequences of that action are only described after the room. This basic (default Quest?) layout cuts up the flow of the narrative into discrete chunks.

The writing itself is very good though. It captures the locations efficiently (a dank cellar, a smelly cottage,...). The NPCs are very nicely characterized. As they are mostly means to be used for solving puzzles, the attention mostly goes to their relevant physical features, but there's always a hint at their deeper personalities.
Overall, a playful and mischievous tone pervades the game.

Basilica de Sangre takes place on a small, condensed map, making the most of the limited number of locations and avoiding to send the player on long unnecessary walks.

The puzzles hinge on an original main mechanism. The author has struck a good balance between using this mechanism and incorporating some more traditional text-adventure puzzles to support it.
I mustn't elaborate too much. Suffice it to say that it's always a good idea to take note of where the NPCs are, what they are carrying and to read the (short) conversations attentively.

A very pleasant little game!

Night after night you sit awake, waiting for your superhero-boyfriend to come home so you can patch up his injuries. It's hurting you. It's hurting him that it's hurting you. But you can't stop. You need to be there for him. With him...

Medicum Veloctic presents itself as a twist on the superhero genre. The protagonist is a doctor who has to heal Veloctic's wounds and repair the damage caused by the brutal fights.

If you are patient enough to read through the medical handbook that's available from the start of the game, you'll have an idea of the gruesome injuries you might expect. There are also notes on how to treat these injuries, and consulting the handbook does not cost you any game-time. If you could call these puzzles, they are very easy indeed.

But rather than puzzles, the wounds serve as an externalization of the fractures in Veloctic's mind, your mind, and your relationship.

Underneath the superhero-story, this game is about a destructive relationship, self-hate and guilt, biting through pain for love (and wondering/refusing to wonder whether it's worth it).

Some of the descriptive paragraphs would benefit from another round of editing. There are some overly long passages that seem to be thrown in because they sounded so good in the author's mind, but they distract from the reality, the concreteness of the story.
The short sentences that let you follow the protagonist's inner thoughts are poignant and direct. The conversations convey the love of the characters for each other, the sometimes grim humour they share, the need they have for each other.

A deep and touching read.

Picton Murder Whodunnit is a short and sparse random-perpetrator murder mystery. I played through it only once, so I can't really comment on the mechanics of the random assignment of the murderer.

The setting of an upper-class mansion with its inhabitants (and a butler!) is something that inspires high expectations in me. There are many opportunities for drama and/or humour here, in the story/plot as well as in the characterization. Unfortunately, the game let me down on both counts.

Storywise, Picton Murder Whodunnit is just too sparse. There is no background on the murder or the victim. The family's affairs are given naught but the faintest of hints. Even within the constraints of the randomization, a vague account of the events leading up to the murder would have been very welcome.

An upper-class mystery-game of this kind stands or falls, in my opinion, by the pointed characterization of the people involved. There is a lot of room for either a deep psychological profile or a funny charicature of the well known rich family trope-characters.
In the game however, there is only the highly prejudiced opinion of the PC, which I found rather unprofessional for the expert-investigator the introduction claims he is.

Perhaps the randomization mechanism would blow my mind upon replay. I will not know because I will not replay. There just isn't enough there.

This is more an experience than a game. Sovereign Citizens lets the player look over the shoulder of a homeless woman while she's exploring an abandoned mansion.

The choices involved (in my playthrough at least) amount to nothing more than choosing which room to visit next. Once in those rooms, the only thing to do was let the text draw me along in the woman's thoughts, feelings and memories.

Fortunately, the writing is good. The loneliness and abandonement of the house is clear, as is the held-back desperation of the woman as she wanders through empty room after empty room. The relationship between the woman and her husband (I think) is one of mutual comfort, their being together might well be the real home in the story.

The experience is vivid and immersive, and in the end it lets the reader draw their own conclusions. There are political, emotional, psychological themes that are touched upon, without pushing them into the reader's face.

A good click-through read, not much of a game.

After three weeks as a guest of the Northland Empire, you've had it with these carefully guided official visits and tours designed to show you absolutely nothing of what is really going on in the land. Fortunately, due to a small mishap during an elephant tour, which you had nothing to do with of course, you get an opportunity to search around your lodgings and sniff out the secrets they do not want you to know.

And soon you find the entrance to a cave...

The Meteor, The Stone and a Long Glass of Sherbet sets itself firmly in Zorkian territory. It's a classic and very well done cave-crawl with some explicit references to the caves of Zork.

As soon as you enter the cave halls, you are welcomed by an overwhelming view. Truly one of the most surprising cave-descriptions I have read so far. From here, you explore a small but exquisitely crafted map. There are many differences in level, and you have to be very resourceful to get up or down from one to the other. I prefer this over a 100-room NESW sprawler any day.

The puzzles are clever without being too hard.
A few depend on unusual object-manipulation, many need you to learn a simple magic system with spells that just happen to be tailor-made for the problems you encounter.
I had the strong impression that the author did have a particular order of traversal in mind. If you should skip one of the early locations, choosing to explore deeper first, the puzzles become a lot harder to understand.

The intro and the first part of the midgame are very relaxed, getting the player to trust the game that they can explore and experiment at their leisure. And then Zarfian cruelty strikes. I won't elaborate, but just watch you inventory, okay?

There's a nice shift in pace in the endgame, where you need to make your escape by making a mental *click* to know how to behave under the new circumstances.

A cool game that leans on the cave-crawling tropes and uses them in fun and surprising ways.

[PYG]MALION*'s intro sets up the scenes for a murder investigation among beings of the 4th and 5th dimension, gods if you will. They are the suspects and you, the murdered god/godess are the investigator, having been reanimated in a marble statue.

I found the setting refreshing. No cloudy mountains or temples from antiquity. Instead the gods have gathered in a stately mansion that would fit well in a Poirot-story. The characters too look and behave like upperclass humans (with a tad more power and influence) from that era.
You are to investigate the mansion, question the suspects and make an accusation at the end.

Unfortunately, there was not much interrogating or investigating to be done. Your efforts are mostly just dismissed by the higher beings you're trying to question, and I found no material evidence when searching the scene.
I really enjoyed the diverse scenes playing out (coins in the fountain), but I never came across something that looked like a clue or a false alibi or anything that one would expect in a fictional murder investigation.

The accusation at the end was therefore just a baseless guess. The author probably had a definite reason for making this choice, maybe something about being powerless against the whims of fate.

At any rate, I didn't get it.

Don't let this stop you from playing, it's an enjoyable read.

Damn! Your old partner got themself in a pickle again. Of course you'll go and save them from the "Big Bad Plotting Schemer and the Henchmen". (Hey, is there a band name in there?..)

The further you get into the convoluted and twisting storyline though, the more obvious it becomes that something is off here...
As a secret spy in an arctic base surrounded by enemies, how else could this end but badly?

Fish & Dagger has a very high production-value. The stark black-and-white cover art, the cinematic backgrounds, the chilling soundtrack and the sound effects, everything works together to suck you into this dark spy story.

Or is it a spoof?

Or something else entirely, something that engages the reader in ways no other spy story has before?

Aye, there's the rub. Fish & Dagger tries to be all of the above.
When taken on their own, these narrative angles work. They work quite well actually. It's just that the framework is too small, too short to accomodate them all next to each other. If the story were longer and the shift more gradual, if each angle had the space to develop on its own pace, I think this could be a great narrative experience.

As it is now, it feels more like a proof-of-concept game, and a hurried one at that.

Still, a remarkable experience. Well worth playing.

I pressed play, a pleasant melody started playing in the background and an in-game version of the author of Budacanta, Alianora, started explaining her circumstances to me:

She's going on a solo-trip to Hungary for a motorsports event and she would like your help.
Oh, and she's autistic.

In the introduction, Alianora explains a number of important concepts to you, like "passing", "spoon theory" and having to use a mental emulator to run a neurotypical brainsimulation to avoid a pass-fail.
This may sound like a bunch of technical jargon, but it's explained so patiently and with so much humor that you will understand easily.

Now, the game-part of Budacanta is a spoon-management challenge. Actually: preserving energy by soothing Alionora so she has enough energy to take on the challenges that are so important to her. Like talking to strangers, taking the bus in a foreign country with a very basic knowledge of the language and eventually going to the motorsporting event.

This game was a great learning experience for me. In fact, I think it would be good learning material for anyone who interacts with neurodiverse people regularly in some way.
Heck, I don't regularly interact with anyone who's on the autism spectrum (that I know of. they could just be good at passing...) and I found it immensely interesting to get this guided tour around a foreign brain.

This is also the comparison that Alianora draws in the game: visiting a foreign country (alone) most resembles what she does daily.
There are weird rules that everyone expects you to follow as if they're self-evident, but as a stranger to this land/mental state, you cannot see what's so obvious about them at all. So you do your best to pass as "normal" and not break the rules too much.

It's very important that Alianora doesn't want to stay in spoonsaving mode all the time. She wants to live life to the fullest, take on challenges and enjoy them and learn from them. It's just that the way her brain is wired means that she has to be extra careful what to spend her energies on and when to reload her batteries.

Alianora's enthusiasm throughout the story is contagious. She tells her story in a bright and friendly way. What I found most touching was her completely straightforward honesty, the very direct and explicit way she reports changes in her emotional state or talks about her weaknesses.

The Spring Thing version I have played ends after the first big challenge. If the upcoming full game is anywhere near as good as this introductory excerpt, I'll be jumping up and down to play it.

Very impressive and funny and interesting and bright and sparkling...