Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

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...

Those Days is a slow-paced and thoughtful piece about life, growing up, friendship. It's nostalgic, a bit sad and a bit uplifting. As I said: life.

The main character reminisces about those endless days of childhood, spent with his best friend.

It's quite a stretch to call this an interactive story. The interactivity is limited to clicking highlighted words now and then while the railroaded story inevitably unrolls.

The clicking does serve another purpose however: that of pacing the story and forcing the player to take in the deeper meaning of the short paragraphs. This is helped by carefully judged timed text that slows down the reading tempo just enough to aid in letting the words sink in.

I really liked the changing background colours. They came across as symbolic of the different stages in the life of the protagonist and of the state of his friendship with his best friend.

A moving story that makes excellent use of the Twine-format to enhance its impact.

First off: Some Space is beautiful. There are background images of stars and nebulas while you play, and a soothing soundtrack.
I quite liked the lettering, but I do think it might be hard for people with certain eye-problems to notice the clickable words.

Playing the game left me with a split experience.

The main body of the game is about your PC who has moved to the Koilan planet for a new job. Unfortunately, the Koilan have a very vague and roundabout way of communicating. Everything they say is interpreted by you as one or other code, even with the universal translation goo you drink at the beginning of the game.

I thought the code puzzles were cool in the way that ten-year-olds playing spies think secret messages are cool. (This is a good thing. I liked playing spies as a ten-year-old. Still do.) I can't elaborate, just be ready to look up resources (very simple recources) out-of-game/on the net.

Throughout the game, you keep getting hints that something's wrong on the home-front. It's a vague but effective method of characterization that the PC keeps ignoring certain messages, without the player having any choice in the matter.

After happily breaking different codes and translating secret messages, the game suddenly changes tone. Very soon after, it comes to a screeching halt, leaving the player wondering about the small but intense bits of backstory that were just revealed.

I really don't know. I liked a lot about this game, but it didn't feel like an integrated whole.

*You'll get it when you play it.

This game was a lot better when I played it ten years ago. Or is it I who have come to expect better?

Wearing the Claw is a very traditional fantasy adventure. It's played completely straight. No tongue in cheek, no subtle (or blatant) irony.

I really like traditional fantasy played straight. A lot.

After "The Testing", you are chosen as the worthy young man to find the Pendant of MacGuffin, ahem, Elinor, to lift the curse beset upon your village by an evil wizard. You are to gain entry to the Fortress where it is held and bring it back. No objections from me here. More than half the fantasy stories and games I know start off like this.

But then the game falls short on many points.

Apart from a longish text dump-introduction and a similarly long epilogue, the actual story is hurried. There's not enough attention to tempo to let the player sink into the story or the character. Everything seems to happen one thing after another at the same just-a-bit-too-fast pace.

The view of the magical island across the sea raised expectations that weren't fulfilled. After a literally linear path (one east-west dusty road) I had hoped for the map to open up and become more complex upon entering the fortress. Instead I found one north-south path.

The first puzzle sets a good theme. It's about deception, and one hopes that this will be explored more fully in the rest of the game. The other puzzles do indeed repeat the theme, but they do not widen it. They're similar variations on the theme without becoming more difficult or complicated. As such, they also do not become more rewarding, rather the opposite.

The story itself has the same problem. If only it had broadened in scope to weigh some of the personal or moral implications of deception... Perhaps by adding alternative ways to overcome the obstacles...
Maybe your character could also have become a more three-dimensional person then.

But these are "if"s and "maybe"s that cannot be changed.

The game as it is still has its good qualities. It's competently written. It has a ton of optional responses to unnecessary actions. You can greatly add to the fun in this game by trying many things that are outside of the main quest.
There is a magical gadget that changes the way you view the world, so there's some fun in re-exploring there.

All in all, this is a fine, uncomplicated adventure. It's just that it seems to promise so much more...

You just missed your tram-ride and now you have half an hour before the next one. What will you do to pass the time?

Misty Hills is a pleasant visit to a quaint imaginary place. There are some people there to meet, some tasks to find and carry out or some small walks you can take.

There is absolutely no pressure here, no score to aim for or objective to reach. You're really just passing the time and letting things come over you.

Each path I took had its own little surprises. Each time I got on the tram in the end, I had a smile on my face.

A short and breezy peek at what should be a really fun game once it's gotten a bit more substance. The author submitted it to the Back Garden of the Spring Thing to gather feedback. It's acknowledged in the ABOUT-text that it is now too short and not fleshed out enough.

However, what's there is certainly enough for a light-hearted and funny diversion. This little gamelet is playable all the way through. It has an intro, a midgame and a conclusion of sorts.

A total of four puzzles are there to challenge you. Of these, the first is a great pointer to what SIWSOCATOAQ or its sequel could become: a fun and slightly off-kilter challenge that does not take itself too seriously.

Good for half an hour of fun.

(I'm particularly interested in the north room on the second floor...)