Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

Entering into the world of Andromeda Awakening the player's freedom is purposefully overridden by the urgency of the protagonist's mission. This did not feel like railroading by the author, it genuinely felt like the commands that did not move toward the PC's goal entered into his mind as distractions and were then ignored. This was really helpful in alligning my focus with the protagonist's.

Yes, that road into the city looks inviting, but there are more pressing matters to attend to first. These secret documents must be brought to the attention of the Council first.

It's only when a literal trainwreck spoils the protagonist's goal that protagonist and player are set free in a hellish undergound area, left on the edge of a magma-filled chasm. Every few turns short bits of text remind you that the earth is still settling in the aftermath of the earthquake that demolished the train tracks.

Exploring the map is a great joy. There are not that many locations, but the many hidden passages and the sudden open halls make the game feel very spacious. There is a great balance between the rocky, rubble-filled natural caves and the human(?)-made constructions under the half-molten icy planet crust.

Yes, the half-molten ice crust. The worldbuilding in Andromeda Awakening is sketchy but very evocative. To pull you even deeper into this strange planet's geography and history you are provided with a handheld computer to LOOK UP details about many of the strange devices and constructions you encounter.

The story hints at a much greater and older world than you can experience within the boundaries of this game alone. There are ancient devices, a secret scientific research facility, hints of a thousand-year-old civilisation that came before... The writing succeeds very well at painting a big, almost overwhelming picture.

It does lack clarity in the descriptions of the immediate surroundings. I believe this is partly a conscious decision to make the player experience the same confusion as the protagonist when first seeing these otherworldly sights. Indeed, if you LOOK again, many times the room-description is more condensed and it becomes easier to select the nouns that are actually important to the game.
The other part of the unclear descriptions however is due to the fact that the author is not entirely fluent in English. There are many grating sentences that are hard to parse, and many words that seemed to be picked from a dictionary of synonyms without the necessary feel for nuances in meaning.

As a result of this, I found one of the central puzzles ((Spoiler - click to show)copying the cylinder-pattern onto the soap) very hard to visualize. Because of this, I couldn't figure out what commands to direct at which objects, even though I did feel I knew what had to be done (a look at the walkthrough confirmed this).

Despite this, Andromeda Awakening is impressive in its wide, possibly universe-spanning scope. It can be read as an open-ended story in itself, but I am very curious to see where the author takes it in the sequel.

When a science fiction story makes you think of how the movie Prometheus attempted to tie the Human/Alien mythos together, that says a lot about how ambitious it is. Andromeda Awakening fulfills enough of that ambition to be a great, if not fantastic, scifi-game.

Yes. That's just one of the great things about Ballyhoo: you get to learn circus-lingo.

After overhearing the circus boss talking to an obviously incompetent private detective about the disappearance of his daughter, you decide to do some investigating yourself. No other motivation than your protagonist's whim. Works for me...

So you start the game and soon find that...

Ballyhoo is pure puzzle and comedy gold.

The comedy comes from many different sources.
There is the persistent atmosphere of a somewhat run-down circus. There are mislaid props and animal odours and filthy rags for banners. One of the trailers is off kilter, an old and warped attraction front serves as part of the fence, one of the lions is skinny and shaggy... This atmosphere doesn't get depressing because it's offset by detailed and colourful descriptions.

The prose is really good. The room and action descriptions are clear but also playful, and there are some hilarious cutscenes (I include deathscenes in the "hilarious cutscene"-category...) A lot of the comedy comes from the protagonist winding up in awkward situations and uncomfortable circumstances ((Spoiler - click to show)trying to navigate a tightrope 20 feet up in the air, finding your way through the crowd searching for your cotton-candy). Many times I laughed at the almost slapstick shenanigans needed to complete one or other task.

During your investigation, you'll meet many outlandish characters. When you (the player) stop and think about it, these NPCs are no more interactive or conversational than a cardboard cutout, but they are so well drawn that their stand-offish behavior and reluctance to answer your questions seems perfectly natural in-game. And they are marvelous just as they are. A collection of wonderful circus-artistes to gawk at.

Other funny features were the many, many instances of wordplay and punnery in the responses to "wrong" commands. My favorite was GET OUT OF LINE when exiting the line in front of a food stand ((Spoiler - click to show)the game describes your character raving and ranting and jumping up and down in anger, i.e. behaving "out of line"...)

As I said above, the puzzles in Ballyhoo are really top shelf. Beautifully hinted and clued. Very rewarding, in the searching for clues as well as in the discoveries after solving them.
When I came across a puzzle, I always could picture a vague general plan to tackle it. And it always turned out that I had missed a necessary step or forgot to bring an important object, throwing me off-balance again. Wonderful! And it always made sense in hindsight.

A small criticism: although I loved solving the puzzles for their own sake, and a joy to solve they were, I rarely had any idea why I was jumping through these hoops.
Of course I'm going to try to get in the lion's cage if I find out it's locked. Why? Because I'm playing an Infocom game. Apart from that, there is little to no motivation in-game to do the weird things that you do. Not even the occasional "You think you see a silvery glint behind the grating"...

This is in keeping with the characterization of the PC. Sure, the game-world is a late 1800s circus setting, but if you look at the bare bones of Ballyhoo, you're still a nameless cleptomaniac adventurer solving puzzles because they're there. There are a lot of instances where you find the solution before you see the puzzle. So you wind up taking everything with you "just in case". To be clear, I don't mind that. I actually like it. Just pointing out that we're not far removed from ZORK-gameplay.

There is however a bigger and more compelling story woven around the puzzle-solving hoop-jumping. This becomes evident int the finale. Excellent building of tension, beautifully tying together the narrative strands (in a hilariously off-kilter way, but hey...). The player's expectations are abruptly shaken a few times before finally solving the bigger puzzle that is the disappearance of the boss's daughter.

Really, play Ballyhoo. It's a hoot.

Really. If there was a blockbuster version of this game starring a young Harrison Ford (or even Nicholas Cage, I've often thought the National Treasure movies were text-adventures in disguise.), I'd be standing in line to get tickets.

Run-down scientist with a time machine! A sinister femme fatale for a nemesis! Aliens mingling in human affairs! World War II!

One of those movies where you get a huge box of popcorn (I don't eat popcorn, but you get the image), set your brain to receive-only mode and just munch away. That could be a great cinematographic experience.
Unfortunately, the only way to get a tiny inkling of this experience in the game Time; All Things Come To An End is to have the walkthrough open and just hammer away at the keyboard.

It does a lot of things right though.

First, there's a ridiculously, comically easy intro-sequence. Really, you are fired when your timetraveling prototype device doesn't work, even after years and years of work. The stacks of notes are on your desk to prove it. And then, oops: (Spoiler - click to show)turns out you forgot to charge the batteries...

So after sorting that out, you decide to give your machine a spin. Whoosh! You are stranded in the future where you stumble upon some sinister conspiracy. With his dying breath, a vaguely familiar man asks for your assistance. Coincidentally, it soon turns out that gettting to the bottom of this conspiracy is also the way to get back to your own timeline.

In a big part of Time; All Things Come To An End, you are being chased by the bad guys. Even in the parts where you are not actively pursued, your nemesis (a delightfully sinister femme fatale) is around somewhere, ready to pounce if you should make a wrong move.

In keeping with this chase-theme, the game plays out on a series of small maps. Your objective is twofold: get the objects or information you need, and escape your pursuers to advance to the next map. This should aid in keeping the game tempo up. There are different modes of transportation between maps, giving a feeling of adventure and real action.

The writing in Time; All Things Come To An End is mostly good. Nice descriptions, well-written (if hardly interactive) dialogue, great cut-scenes (and death-scenes). The author does seem to be under the impression there is some sort of prize to be won for "Most uses of the word 'Evil' in a work of Interactive Fiction." I also think the author got tired near the end. The writing drops noticeably in quality, stock-phrases and clichés start popping up more.

All this could (should) make for a fast-paced chase-game where you feel your pursuers breathe down your neck while you try to figure out each area's puzzle and get to safety in the nick of time.

Alas! Time; All Things Come To An End falls flat in this respect. It fails to tie all the good things together in a fluid, fast-moving game-experience.

Some of you may remember a certain groundbreaking game from the late nineties where you had to move through a very specific sequence of moves to advance. (Spoiler - click to show)Spider and Web. If you deviated too much from this sequence, you failed. But! This particular game was framed in such a way that failing and retrying became an integral part of the experience, adding to the tension and the immersion. It also had the mechanics to back up this fail-and-retry design.

Time; All Things Come To An End is not far removed in time from this game. Here too, the player has to correctly execute a sequence of commands in the right order and , more importantly, in a limited number of turns. However, the only way to eventually get it right is to create tons and tons of save-files and restoring many, many times. These are out-of-game actions, leading to completely non-immersive learn-by-dying gameplay. It would not have been a great leap to add some sort of in-game mechanism to bring the PC back to the start of a challenge, given that the timetravel-premise is already in place.

Lack of time/turns is not the only reason why the player should have numerous save-files on hand. It is exceedingly easy to put the game in an unwinnable state without noticing it until one or more chapters later. Failing to pick up an object, or worse, leaving a seemingly unimportant object behind after a spot of inventory-juggling (yes, there's an inventory limit, at least in the first part of the game) wíll leave you at a dead end many moves later.

Now, after getting savvy to this and accepting that this is just how the game works, I managed to make quite a bit of progress on my own. Playing through a chapter to get the lay of the land and figuring out the death-points, then restoring and doing it right got me a good way into the game. But then the puzzles got in the way. And not in a good way. Many puzzles are extremely obscure, very underclued and with no obvious motivation for the necessary actions. Several times, the key to the solution lay in a location that was wholly unmentioned in any description.

Needless to say that after a few hours of this (this game is big, 2500 moves easy), my motivation waned and I started resorting to the walkthrough more and more.

And here I have to refer back to the beginning of this review: I want to see this movie! The story is great in a suspension-of-disbelief-turned-up-to-eleven kind of way. There are cool twists and turns, great locations in time and space, a real sense of mystery...

It's just not that easily playable as an adventure game.

Despite that, I had a lot of fun, and I recommend playing through it anyhow.

Your love is gone. Dead. You wish to see her once more. Maybe even stay with her in the dark... Or say your goodbyes and live...

Eleanor is a very deep atmospheric game-experience. The sound effects immediately drew me into the dark immaterial realm where you are searching for Eleanor. Examining parts of your surroundings often brings up a pop-up window with an evocative drawing or a few paragraphs of text. These are meant to be associative asides, no background story will be spelled out in concrete flashbacks.

The setting is extremely sparse. I pictured myself/the protagonist floating in some intangible black void, with only a few recognizable props. Interacting with your surroundings happens on a dreamlike symbolic level. You trigger memories and sensations within you which make obstacles dissolve and doors open.

The Spring Thing competition version is sadly riddled with misspellings and linguistic errors. I trust most of these will have been corrected in an upcoming postcomp update.
Apart from that, it is clear that English is not the author's native tongue. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It often makes for an unfamiliar turn of phrase that emphasizes the distanced and estranged impression the game makes.

Eleanor is made harder than it has to be by its very idiosyncratic parser messages. The responses to certain commands often do not make clear whether an action is not appropriate in the current circumstances, or is simply not implemented.

That being said, Eleanor is also made hard (and rightly so) by being exactly what it wants to be: a dreamlike journey through an intangible underworld where touching and looking are actions of the mind or even of the soul; where normal physical interaction cannot take place.
It is up to the player to enter into this state of mind. Snippets of text and song lyrics that I had dismissed as atmospheric background are indispensable clues here. You must react to the voices you hear, the images that are formed in your mind's eye. They are not mere spooky mood-setters.

It is also very important that the player use the HELP-command as a real in-game command. It does not call up help from a distinct impersonal help-file, rather it implores Eleanor or an unseen narrator to aid the searching player/protagonist. The responses to HELP are often as evocative as those to LOOK or TOUCH.

I really hope the post-comp version does away with the unintended impenetrability, and leaves the intended opaqueness as an eerie, disconcerting puzzle for the player.

Hopefully, you will never know. Instead, you run indoors and slam the door behind you.

So, you made your way into Dr.Hugo's (yes, doctor hugo in a hugo game called "the hugo clock"...) research facility. Now for the final part of your assignment. Close the portal.

The way The Hugo Clock drops you in the middle of the story adds a meta-puzzle to the conventional puzzles of the game. Why are you here, who is Dr. Hugo, what were you running from at the start of the game?

Frequent intermezzos with two men, one calm and composed, one frantically pacing, enhance the mystery. The men are talking about your progress, doubting if you will be able to finish the task. (These intermezzos are printed in dark red, adding to the sinister atmosphere of these little exchanges.)

The research facility of Dr. Hugo is small but well described,with a definite creepy atmosphere. There is an exhibition of bizarre artefacts and a room full of contorted skeletons of unknown animals. The main puzzle consists of finding out how to operate a strange machine in the lab. Most of the steps needed are traditional adventure fare, finding and deciphering clues and operating the machine accordingly. There is one delightful (and sad) puzzle which requires you to manipulate a cleaner-automaton into handling part of the preparations for you.

How you execute the machine-operating sequence will determine your fate, and perhaps that of the world...

Short. Not too hard, not too easy. Great fun!

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.