Reviews by Rovarsson

A band of Cro-Magnons has raided the camp and killed most of the group. The Neanderthals must run and find a safe haven elsewhere.

Shanidar shows an impressive amount of research into the time period of its setting: western Europe around 40.000 years ago. It’s clear that the author is invested in learning about this age, whether as a student, professional, or an interested layman.
A lot of information gleamed from archaeological evidence about the people living then is included. Travel routes, boat/raft building, burial habits, cave shrines,… Different species of homo walked the same region of earth in that time, and must have interacted.
Atop these mostly verifiable facts, the author builds and expands the inner world of the characters through plausible, believable speculation about religious rituals, a shared mythology and oral history, the nature of relationships between individuals, tribes and across the homo-species of the time.

Although the amount of research is impressive, it’s also a bit overwhelming, and it doesn’t always serve the story the author is trying to tell. The insistence on giving every bit of present-day knowledge about the then-living humans a place in the spotlight hinders a clear focus for the story, and for the reader to latch onto.
The pace and focus of the story would be sharper if some details were left vague, mentioned in passing, implied instead of explicitated, left to the imagination.
Less intrusive details help in building a convincing world through an engaging narrative. In Shanidar, I sometimes felt as if the author was giving a lecture, a recapitulation of our present knowledge of humans around 40.000 BC, superficially disguised as an adventure story to hold the attention of those students in the back row.

I liked the overarching structure of the narrative. It’s divided in three chapters.
The first has a tight focus on a small group of people during a short period of time. The survivors of the hostile raid, frantically trying to save their lives and at the same time regroup, to reconnect with other survivors.
The next chapter opens up, with the main group having found each other and taking time to get their bearings. This chapter covers months, with meandering and branching storylines for different individuals, encounters with other groups of people, and boats/rafts (+1 boatiness).
In the final chapter, a newly formed tribe has found its balance, and the story becomes more focused again, with the destination, Shanidar, in sight.

Each screen has the text overlaid on top of a line drawing (white on black) of a subject or character from the description above it. These are beautiful and resonating in their simplicity, capturing the flowing lines of a lion’s shoulders, a woman’s hair falling over her shoulders, or the expression on the face of a shaman with only a few precise lines.

The evolution from a core group of characters, meeting others, joining with, intermingling, and splitting from other tribes means a lot of personalities play a part in the story. All of them have their own background, often sketched in but a few lines that succeed in giving a clear picture. All of them have a definite role in the narrative as it unfolds.

Among all these individuals is Haizea, the “You”-character. But the reader doesn’t need to follow her closely, and in the overall story she doesn’t get more attention than many of the others. Maybe the author felt the need to include some sort of PC, to make the person interacting with the story an engaged player more than a distanced reader.

In fact, there is no, can be no true player character. The position of the player with respect to the events in the story, the kind of choices presented preclude the player from entering the world.
Shanidar; Safe Return consists of a fully pre-existing story, a narrative set in stone. No choices the player makes can change anything about the occurrences, nor give the illusion they do. This is because there are no in-game character-driven options. All choices are instead directed at the player, commanding the bird’s eye narrator to zoom in on certain events or characters.
Within the pre-existing set of events, the player chooses which character to focus on for the next story-bit. She can opt to follow one character for a long sequence of links, or hop around and check in on the circumstances of separate individuals.
Time moves forward with each choice, meaning that the exploits of the others will go unseen in this playthrough, and can only be inferred later from descriptions after the fact. (If the player chose not to follow a certain character on the hunt, she will see the kill being dragged into camp at a later time.)

This is a brilliant idea, allowing the player to direct the narrator to recount events that she thinks are most interesting at the time, while the rest of the characters go about their business, have their own adventures outside of the immediate narrative.
The execution of this idea in Shanidar lacks precision though. There are often gaps where storylines don’t meet up, or assumptions of player knowledge about occurences the reader didn’t see.

Nevertheless, a very interesting experiment in interactive storytelling at the reader level, allowing exploration or the narrative lines themselves, instead of finer grained control of a PC’s choices and actions.

Flawed, but very interesting.

I used the term “story-bits” above. I might as well have said “story-bullets”. Indeed, the text is divided in very short, compact paragraphs, two or three per link. A summing-up of bullet-points in distanced descriptive sentences.

This works well a lot of the time, as it reflects the narrator’s bird’s eye view, giving a dispassionate account of the goings-on in this place or that. In some places however, when especially emotional or violent events are happening, I would have liked for the author to unpack the compact paragraphs a bit further and give the content of the text more breathing room.

The story as a whole is a traditional yet engaging travel account. A hurried start, a time of preparation and exposition, the final trek to the promised destination. It’s an archetypal narrative structure, one that echoes and vibrates within humans.

A captivating work, a great gameplay idea. Full of potential and possibilities for greatness that didn’t fully come to fruition in this case. Shanidar; Safe Return is part of a series, so I’ll be sure to follow up on it and see how the author develops this vision.

Ruby’s riding the bus, on her way to the hospital. Her father’s not well at all, and Ruby’s struggling, wanting to see and hug him as fast as possible but at the same time reluctant to see him sick, postponing the confrontation with her dad in a bed in a too-white room.

There’s been a rise lately of a new genre or side-branch within IF: Works where the main game is embedded within a frame-story which opens a perspective on the protagonist and the (fictional) writer, which colours the player’s interpretation of the events. In Repeat the Ending and LAKE Adventure, what would have been a rather standard text-adventure on its own gains a more complex meaning and narrative depth by the player’s experience being informed by the frame-story.

Hand Me Down's prologue introduces Ruby and her father, Miles Walker, in a slice-of-life choice-based manner. The choices have no immediate consequences for the rest of the game, the player can choose to rush to the hospital room, or go with Ruby’s reluctance and opt for a number of delaying activities without special punishment or reward. The simple presence of the choices as a depiction of Ruby’s worries is enough to put the player in the right mindset for what follows.
Once Ruby is with her father, he is quickly wheeled off for medical tests. Before that, however, he offers her a much-belated present: a game he has written in TADS3 for her sixteenth birthday.

-A Very Important Date-
The main game, considered outside of the frame-story, is a straightforward treasure hunt. There’s a party going on in the back garden of the manor, but no one, not even you, the birthday girl, is allowed without an invitation, a costume, and something to share with the other guests.

The manor has an expansive map which is almost completely open for exploration from the start. There are outdoor and indoor regions, some rooms with unexpected functions, and loads of stuff to examine and investigate.
Simple (but thorough) exploration will yield a great harvest of objects, some necessary to gain entrance to the party, some apparently just stuff lying around, either on its own or as left-overs from finding another object in or under them. The inventory can become quite unwieldy if you should choose to hang on to everything. Leaving items behind might mean that you lack a crucial object for a puzzle you have yet to encounter… I picked a convenient central stash-spot to dump everything I didn’t regard as useful at the time.

Puzzles range from simple lock-and-key to clever physics to fiendishly difficult multi-step decoding, and even dating. (In the historical sense, that is.) This latter variety absolutely requires the use of outside sources to solve, something generally frowned upon in IF. In A Very Important Date however, with its game-within-game setup, it’s not only justified but could even be leveraged to deepen the player’s engagement. (More on that below.)
The “fiendishly difficult” puzzles could be brought down to simply “perplexing at first” by a scrupulous pruning and streamlining of the gameplay relating to those puzzles. More gentle nudges toward a solution when the player is flailing around aimlessly, cleaning up some of the clutter in rooms with such a puzzle so the pertinent parts are more readily visible.

In fact, the implementation as a whole is rather uneven. For most of the game, it’s more than adequate, splendidly surprising even in some instances where examining bits of scenery returns a beautiful reverie about the sun’s rays, or in one memorable instance, a not entirely shabby freestyle rap. In other parts though it seems the author fell victim to a heavy bout of implementation fatigue, leaving all but the most immediate objects undescribed and thus dropping much of the moodsetting scenery descriptions aside. At one point I joked with the author in a PM that I could read his state of mind through the depth of implementation, whether he was in the creative flow or stressing against time, playful and free or distracted and worried.

The same criticism holds for the writing. Here and there the descriptions feel cluttered, grating sentences and elegance lost. This actively works against clear visualisation of the surroundings by the player. It makes me suspect that the author too did not have as coherent an image of the room as he wished, or that more time was needed to sort the important and unimportant bits.
This said, there are true flashes of brilliance too. The Vegetable Garden with its compost heap, or (my personal favourite) the Statue Garden with its intricately carved figures are a beauty to imagine, and made a lasting visual impression on me.

For any other game, I could close the review here, concluding that I had fun with this challenging and satisfying treasure-hunt puzzler, and that it might benefit from another run through the testing mill. With Hand Me Down however, I have only laid bare the superficially obvious. The game-within-game approach deepens the emotional response I had, widens the range of interpretation considerably.

Synthesis

Throughout A Very Important Date, there are reminders of the “real world” of the prologue. The author, Miles Walker, Ruby’s father (!), has left pictures, notes, letters, all kinds of information about his own life and that of his father, Ruby’s grandfather, around the manor. Perhaps these started as little Easter eggs for his daughter to find, little tidbits about her family’s history to discover in her birthday present. Along the way, however, Miles has begun using his writing of A Very Important Date as a way to capture intimate lost moments, ventilate anger and grief, remember or break down turning points in his own life.

The PC-Ruby in A Very Important Date remains a typical underdescribed player character in an old school adventure game, frozen in excited exploration and casually conversing with funny animals. Miles Walker understandably wrote her like this, expecting his real-life daughter to project her personal feelings of joy and discovery onto this digital placeholder. This PC-Ruby shows no emotional response to her father’s sadness and frustration evident in the notes he hid in the game. But, with the Ruby from the prologue still echoing in our minds, we can only imagine the effect this all has on that girl sitting in the too-white hospital room with the laptop on her lap…

This is where the intense emotional impact of Hand Me Down lies for me: In keeping in mind that I am not playing A Very Important Date, I am playing Ruby who is playing as herself in this text adventure her father made for her as a deeply personal gift. I’m channeling this girl in the too-white hospital room, shaken by worry about her sick father, learning intimate details of her father’s life she didn’t know or realise. My mind’s eye kept flashing back and forth between the manor, where my PC was doing all this fun and frustrating stuff, jumping through the hoops as we make our adventure PCs do, and the too-white hospital room where Ruby is typing commands onto the keyboard, worried about her father, maybe crying…

This invites further speculation about this tangled web of of relations. If the player is channeling Ruby playing PC-Ruby, then what of the fictional author? Miles Walker, Ruby’s father, is a character in Hand Me Down. He’s the in-game writer of A Very Important Date. While he was struggling with TADS3’s containers, was Brett Witty channeling Miles Walker as he is seen by the player?

The continued tension between levels of reality, the juxtaposition of the girl exploring the manor and the girl crying in the too-white hospital room, lift Hand Me Down to a degree of sophistication, a height of complexity above and beyond the qualities of the surface adventure. The characterisation and emotional weight set by the prologue reverberate throughout the game-within-game, the father’s intimate intrusions serve as a bridge, feeding “real-world” feelings into the imaginary adventure, regularly jolting the player’s realisation of the wider story in which she is taking part.

It is here that I think there is a great opportunity for the puzzles requiring out-of-game resources to play a significant role in leveraging the identification of the player with Ruby, and in more closely entangling the text-adventure with the frame-story. The father, aware of the fact that his daughter is an adventure-novice, could break the in-game fourth wall to leave little encouraging remarks, explaining to her that she might need to look up some information in an encyclopaedia. (“Hey Ruby-doo! I’m glad you’ve already made this much progress. If you found this note in the skull, you might want to open up Wikipedia.”) This would strengthen the in-game father-daughter bond, and it would also alert the player to do what Ruby’s father says: prepare to do some out-of-game research.

Bugs and momentary lapses in implementation aside, Hand Me Down had me deeply engaged for more than five hours (fortunately I remembered to enter my rating at the 2h-mark).

Remember: The player is not you. The player is Ruby, the girl in the too-white hospital room, worried sick about her dad, crying over the “treasures” of her father’s intimate revelations her adventure-counterpart discovers in the family manor.

Very moving.
----wipes dust speck from left eye----

Mwoohahaa! The time and tide of the blood moon is there. A moon of power, the only time when a disembodied spirit becomes strong enough to perform the art of Spectral Shifting and reclaim the physical body you need to have some real impact on the world.

Hallowmoor's opening screen with a red-on-black drawing of a medieval stronghold immediately sets the tone. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a puzzle to get from there into the game proper. The player has to take a detour via the "Load/Save" button to find the "Play" option.

It took some getting used to the gameplay. There are a lot of links in the short descriptive paragraphs, many of which lead to exposition text or more detailed descriptions of scenery. At times, I got the feeling I was in an unintentional labyrinth of links, especially with the various words leading to the same passages (justified by the need to maintain the flow of the prose.)

After stumbling through the first handful of screens though, I developed a nose for navigating these connections and play began to feel more fluent.

Hallowmoor is very much an old-school game focused on exploration, experimentation and object-manipulation. To accomodate this in a choice-engine, the majority of fine-grained actions like TAKE or USE are automated. The parser-like hands-on touch is preserved by requiring the player to be in the exact passage of text before succesfully using an object. (For example, opening the cupboard with the crowbar won't work in the kitchen. The player first has to click the link to the cupboard description for it to work. Note: there are no cuboards or crowbars in the game.)

The most notable feature of the game is the aforementioned Spectral Shift magic mechanic. It allows the player to switch PCs with different skills and sensitivities. To complicate matters, the two characters come from opposing sides in a battle between their peoples, meaning they must never be in the same location together lest they kill each other. This adds a layer of spatial puzzle-solving to the basic text-adventure obstacles, forcing the player to consider where and when to move which character with some planning and consideration.

A surprising addition is the incorporation of a game-within-the-game. In a certain location, the player can play through a mini-text-game. I strongly suspect that this is where that lousy last point is hidden. (I never found it...)

An engaging and challenging puzzle-choice game.

Immediately upon pressing any button to start, Marika the Offering throws the player into the suspense. A meticulously described room, an ever so slight hint at a backstory, and a pressing sense of urgency.

>"The air is musty and offends my nostrils. My remaining life can be measured in heartbeats. I must act!"

As is evident from the quote above, the game is written in the first person. Readers/players may differ in their interpretation of this. For me, whereas the second person invites a feeling of complicity or of teamwork, the first person elicits a dramatic distance from the character. More like an unseen co-author or even puppetmaster than an agent within the story. In IF, this makes me experience the text more like an engaged reader than an active player. In this story, I found this worked very well, as it focused my attention on the emotions and the internal struggle of the character Marika.

On the opening screen, the player is told she can access the backstory to the game at any point by typing STORY. After a few exploratory moves, I decided to do so. I was treated to several pages worth of exxposition. Those opposed to reading long chunks of text in their games might want to skip this. I'm not, and I enjoyed it. A rather standard horror/fairytale setup which doesn't do anything too original, but it's engagingly written, it sheds some light on the protagonist's background, her relations with other people from her village, and it offers some insight into why Marika came to be in her present situation.

The game itself consists of a clever inversion of the standard escape-room genre. Other reviews will provide more information for those who want it.

I want to draw more attention to the incredibly high standard of craftsmanship involved in the making of Marika the Offering. The gameplay is so smooth that it might not be immediately apparent how finely tuned some of the design decisions actually are.

--There is no TAKE. Justified, since this is a one-room game. After careful examination of the surroundings, all necessary objects are visible and available for manipulation. Likewise, INVENTORY is unnecessary. The response to this command stays nicely within the flow of the story by pointing out that you want to keep your hands free for any unexpected events.
--The entire game revolves around changing the state of this one room you're in. The opening screen immediately gives the player a rather lengthy and detailed description of the space. What is remarkable, at least once one pays attention to it, is how seamlessly alterations to the game-state are incorporated into this description. All the changes still result in a spontaneous text, without stutterings or hesitations when reading. Again, this is done so smoothly that is is hardly noticeable, until one compares the quality of Marika's evolving room-description with some less-successful examples.

A good horror story, not original in content but nigh-on perfect in execution.

In a bid to outperform the silliness of the classic SciFi B-movies from the era of "The Attack of the 50ft Whatever From Outer Space", The Underoos that Ate New York brings you, yes, an assortment of clothing, mildly to lethally disgruntled (depending on the piece of clothing) by passing too close to a meteorite the day before. Slobby bachelor that you are, you probably wouldn't even mind hanging around naked in your flat, were it not for your date with Cindy.

Time to hunt down your clothes!

TUTANY brings us: "My Crappy Apartment"... FROM SPACE! And it relies completely on the over-the-top zaniness its premise provides. A miniscule map (5 rooms), 5 items of clothing to subdue and put on, simple but rewarding puzzles. All of it driven forward by a breathless sense of urgency.

The locations are sparse but adequately implemented, there is a bunch of gratuitous silliness, and before the chuckle dries up in your throat the joke's over, you're dressed and ready to go out with Cindy.

Quick fun!

A good while ago, while sipping frothy ale in a local tavern, I got into a conversation with a large and manly man of the barbarian persuasion. From what little of his loudly bellowed and deeply soul-felt exhortations, I deduced his name to be Edgar the Hoity, although I cannot pledge to this. I felt sympathetic to his plight and offered to join him on his quest, for it was obvious that while he was certainly well-equipped in the brawn department, some assistance in the more, erm..., intellectually challenging portions of his pursuit might be warranted.

Indeed, in the words of the narrator of our quest (of whom I shall speak more later): "You consider the doxy's words, and furrow your brow in mild discomfort, for there are many syllables."

Having recently escaped from the undergound pits of the Slaver King, Edgar the Hoity (or some other fittingly barbaric name) had vowed to release the other slaves from their shackles, and to vanquish the evil Slaver King himself.

During our travels, it became apparent that it was well that I had volunteered to offer my aid to this fearsome warrior. Fortunately we encountered not many obstacles requiring deep thought or logical analysis, the most difficult being figuring out giving which of the many objects we found to whom, or at which time to revisit certain locations.
Rather, the most puzzling aspect of the quest for my barbarian friend was to choose the order in which to confront the many enemies that stood between him and the Slaver King himself. You see, as is to be expected with those proud and manly members of the barbarian tribes, Edgar the Hoity (or some other fittingly barbaric name) routinely overestimated his own physical prowess and battle-readiness, lunging forward barefistedly at the throat of any foe that stood in his way.
My greatest contribution therefore was observing the weaknesses of my barbarian friend's adversaries, suggesting to perhaps wear some armour and equip a weapon stronger than his fists, working out the order of the enemies from weakest to strongest. After this preparation, it was mostly a matter of pointing him in the right direction and releasing him.

It took some pains and patience to find the correct way in which to adress Edgar the Hoity (or some other fittingly barbaric name), for he only responded to sufficiently dramatic and action-laden verbs. For example, a simple suggestion to TAKE THE SWORD would be met with condescending grumbling. I had to propose that he SEIZE it instead. In the end though, once I had grown more accustomed to the heroic mindset, this narrow set of verbs greatly simplified our exchanges, eliminitating as it did the need for nuanced and detailed wording.

Among the many dangers we encountered on our quest, we were fortunate to also meet various helpful people, willing to trade information or equipment for simple services or needed objects. Indeed, my cheeks still blush at the recollection of "trading" with the very helpful town doxy, especially when we, thinking she might be hungry, tried to offer her an ear of corn which had lain abandoned on a farmer's field...

There is a surprising advantage to travelling with a questing barbarian. All our exploits were recounted aloud by an unseen narrator-voice as we were in the middle of the action. Rather than a dry account of events, this narrator had a flair for the dramatic, sweeping me along with the high-stakes heroic importance of our adventures, emphasising the historical impact of the battles and the far-reaching influence our actions would have on this realm.

It was with pride in my heart and tears on my cheeks that I saw my barbarian friend, Edgar the Hoity (or some other fittingly barbaric name) ride away on the Royal Road in search of new adventures and slaves to free.

This game is a very traditional fantasy quest played completely straight. Lots of classic tropes in there, none of them subverted or turned on their heads. I really like this sort of adventure, eschewing the irony or satire that is often added. It plays on my nostalgic tendencies.
(Mind you, I love reading more complex greyshaded fantasy too. And classic fantasy can be filled with some problematic tropes that are not sweetly nostalgic at all. But that’s another discussion. This game does none of that. Well, almost none, depending on your view on (Spoiler - click to show)dragon-slaughter)

The Fantasy Dimension is beautifully written. The locations get long paragraphs bringing the surroundings to the player’s mind’s eye. Fantasy has its solid collection of go-to settings, and this story does not try to get away from them. Indeed, it embraces those settings and draws them with a loving pen.

I particularly liked the descriptions of movement between locations, giving you a sense of real travel instead of zipping instantly from forest to castle.

I hesitate to call this a game. Rather, it is a near-puzzleless journey through the setting to fulfill the objective of your quest. Almost a walking simulator. As such, it is sorely lacking in depth. To hold the player’s attention and engagement, the world in such a work must be meticulously detailed. It is, in The Fantasy Dimension, but only in the initial descriptions. It would need much richer layers of implementation and perhaps some randomised scenes to bring more life and depth to the woods and the ruins.

I enjoyed this a lot, but a lot could be added to make it so much better.

A masterly example of sparse efficient writing. free bird relies on adjectives and nouns alone to paint the setting and the elements of note within it.

Without elaborate (or even short) sentences and turns of phrase, it highlights only those words that are crucial to the game. However, the game world feels rich and open because of the very clever choice of words and particularly of adjectives. An adjective-noun description of a sickly iguana reviving when its warm light is turned on triggers an entire story and a sequence of rich images in the mind in a lot less words than this paragraph I just wrote about it.

The puzzles are clever, it took me some time-outs to get the solution worked out in full. Because free bird is a click-based game, it would probably be possible to mechanically brute-force the solution a bit easier than it would be in a parser. But then, why would anyone play just to take the fun out of it…

Very clever use of language, nifty puzzles with limited resources.

A great protagonist accompanied by an interesting cast of supporting characters too. Again, despite (or thanks to, depending how you interpret it) the self-imposed language limits, their personalities are clear, with a few poignant details shining through to mark their most important traits.

I liked this very much.

What could be more comforting than sitting in front of a crackling fire, reading a book, sipping from a cup of steaming hot cocoa…

But it feels like something is behind the metaphorical curtains…

Very effective juxtaposition of atmospheres. Both the writing and the visual presentation draw the player into the intended moods, preserving a lingering taste of what the surroundings felt like before while submerging her into the present situation.

Some links could be elaborated upon a bit more. ((Spoiler - click to show)The effects of the drinks or the books for example.) On the other hand, having the choices not have much causative power does fit the premise.

It would be ruinous to divulge more. This is one to experience, eyes and ears and imagination wide open.

This game is based on an idea of mine that had been lingering in the back of my mind for a long time. SeedComp seemed like a perfect opportunity to put it out there and see what might come of it.
B.J. Best took the intro/starting room I wrote and ran with it, expanding my vague outline to a full-fledged puzzle game that far exceeded my expectations.


I loved it. I was teetering on that fine edge between challenge and frustration the whole time, without (and this is the brilliant bit) ever slipping into desperation. A feeling similar to playing MarioTM and falling from an unstable platform into a spiked hole for the sixteenth time, but still being convinced you’ll get it next time.

The puzzles require very careful observation and very thorough experimentation, but they follow a reliable cause-effect chain and are perfectly fair.

There are a bunch of independent timers and turn-based puzzles to tackle, lots of buttons and a myriad of levers and wheels. The more I discovered during playtesting, the more I stood in awe of the complex technical mechanisms under the hood.

I felt like I could completely put my trust in the game, and that any blockades I encountered were logically solvable. The pleasant frustration I had during play came from the feeling that I could almost touch the solution with my fingertips, almost grasp the mechanics underneath, but not quite yet.

----One more test, one more variable to check...
What happens if I pull this lever first?----