Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson

Alien Cat Beings from Extra-Terrestrial Outer Space have dognapped your dearest Tookie! And they have a remarkable propensity for subjecting dog-rescuing humans (point in case: you) to riddles, math problems, and other tests of wit.

Tookie's Song starts off with a brilliant first puzzle. (Spoiler - click to show)A simple and elegant bit of misdirection. Most of the other puzzles are more standard adventure fare, several having alternate solutions, and some requiring a bit of thinking around the corner. An algebra calculation can be solved independently by the player, but in-game resources are available to make the calculation for you. There's a riddle, but its solution is so obviously clued that those who don't know it can easily deduce the answer so it doesn't lead to an annoying out-of-game web-search.

A mostly symmetrical hub-and-spokes map offers four areas of puzzle solving. They're not completely self-contained, so if an obstacle stumps you, just explore a bit more and the answer will be obvious when you find the requisite item. The descriptions of the rooms are short but evocative, appealing to different senses.
The seasonal theme of the spokes seems to be completely arbitrary, but it lends atmosphere and a bit more depth to the different puzzle-areas.
The implementation is on the shallow side, but everything important is well-described. Trying to manipulate irrelevant objects quickly sets the player straight with a funny slap on the wrist.

The cat-aliens you meet have distinct personalities. Especially Gus the Bartending Cat is a pleasure to chat with for a while. And when you have to bend your personal ethics a bit to get past an NPC, it helps if he’s clearly described as a smug bastard (in this instance: Eddie).

The writing is snappy, funny, upbeat. I often got a smile out of some entertaining turn of phrase or an amusing remark by one of the cats.

A fun bit of entertainment, good for an hour or so of lighthearted puzzle-solving. I liked it.

Decades ago, the benevolent and righteous King Serak was corrupted by the foul influences of the Demon Lord Malthazar. Knights and Mages from across the land united to form the White Army. Led by the brave Lord Thaylor, they defeated the dark forces in a great battle. The once-good King Serak was incarcerated in a magical prison beyond space and time.

Recently, the Evil of Serak is rising once again. Escaped from his magical bounds, he has taken the now elderly Lord Thaylor and his daughter Leoria in captivity and threatens to overtake the fair lands of Malinor. This time, the grave task of saving the world falls upon Maddog Williams. An antiquarian. Alone. (Perhaps the knights and mages were on a tea-break?)

The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is a curiously malformed chimera of a game, with elements of various styles of gameplay illfittingly wrought together. Nonetheless, it manages to rise above the awkward joining of its components to form an altogether enjoyable piece of IF.

At heart, Maddog is a traditional parser-based graphical fantasy adventure. In a pseudo-medieval setting with castles and dragons and magic, the player needs to guide the protagonist through a series of puzzles and obstacles to defeat Evil and save the land.
For the most part, the puzzles are straightforward and well clued, unlocking doors and secret passages with a variety of key-objects, figuring out when to use the magical properties of an item. It's a bit dissapointing that although Maddog Williams is introduced in the prologue as an antiquarian and a tinkerer (the opening scene shows his alarm clock to be a watersprinkling Rube Goldberg contraption), neither of these specialities play much of a role in the problems he faces during his quest.
The parser is of in-between quality, adequate and up to the task. It does allow for complex multi-word commands, but in practice it gets easily confused by anything more complicated than LOOK UNDER. Unless there is a clear goal for a complex command, it's best to stick with simple two-word instructions. LOOK and LOOK [object] need to be typed in full since L and X are not provided. INVENTORY, some other game functions and all meta-commands are handled through the F-keys, which took some serious getting used to.

The fantasy setting and Maddog's actions within it are conveyed in a gently mocking tongue-in-cheek tone, poking fun at the tropes of the genre without slipping into outright parody.
The locations are rendered in simple but pretty pixelated graphics, and the pictures are supported with lush descriptions in the text descriptions.
The writing as a whole seems to strive for a mixture of funny entertainment and heroic gravity. Its success at this is uneven, often it comes across as overwrought, but even then it's a joy to see the effort that went into the elaborate cutscenes and conversations.
Many futile actions and failed attempts are accounted for and met with a funny custom response, rewarding the player's playfulness at poking around the surroundings.
According to the Merlin-lookalike who welcomes you to the game, the player takes the role of Maddog's counsel and advisor. In this setup, "You" should refer to the player directly. Throughout the game however, the narrator is often inconsistent about this, sometimes using "You" in the plural for the duo of Maddog and the player-as-advisor, sometimes reverting to the usual 2nd tense adventure narration where player and PC are conflated into one agent, sometimes narrating events from Maddog's 1st person viewpoint, sometimes having Maddog speak to the player/advisor directly. Rather than being confusing or annoying, this adds to the loose and casual atmosphere of the game.
The overall pacing of Maddog's quest towards the inevitable castle dungeons at the end is pleasantly varied. Obstacle-heavy areas where the tension runs high alternate with more relaxed village-exploration with the obligatory visit to the local pub.


Exploration of the world of The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is done by (here comes the first awkward hybrid-element...) walking around with the arrow keys. Typing N/E/S/W is not understood by the parser, the entire world must be traversed by wandering from location to location at a leisurely pace. Contrary to parser-players' expectations that everything in sight should be immediately accesible for taking or manipulating, it's necessary to stroll around inside the rooms too, otherwise PULL LEVER will be met with a dry "I'm not close enough."
This unfamiliar way of moving around was actually very cool. Not only does it give a very tactile connection to the game world, it also opens up a nice tactic to respond to tense real-time threats: you can pre-load a command into the parser and fire it by pressing the enter-key at the appropriate time.
Of course this means some exploratory self-sacrifice beforehand to identify said real-time threats. As a rule, Maddog in its entirety is not averse to unavoidable PC deaths. Sacrificing our curious antiquarian's life is on several occasions necessary to gain indispensable information toward puzzle-solutions later in the game.

On top of the keyboard-movement, Maddog's Adventures are further "actionised" by awkwardly grafting multiple gameplay elements from other gaming genres onto the main adventure trunk.
-On a regular basis, Maddog comes upon an enemy who must by defeated in a fight. This requires the player to press the F1 key to enter combat-mode, whereupon our protagonist and his foe square off toe-to-toe in a 2D fencing match which amounts to stepping back-and-forth along a line, taking turns bashing each other's head in until someone's life points are drained. (Play in EASY-mode and you'll be fine.)
-At a crucial point in Maddog's quest, he'll call the help of a friendly Dragon to cross the mountains to the Evil Castle. On the way there, they must engage in some 2D arcade-style dragon dogfighting, blasting unpredictably appearing hostile dragons out of the air. Lightning reflexes, furious button-mashing, and a good amount of swearing are prerequisites to complete this stage, especially for the player accustomed to the tranquil tempo of parser turns.
-Once inside the dungeons, it must have seemed like a good idea to mix things up a bit by incorporating a platfroming room as an obstacle. Jumping (SHIFT-key) from pillar to pillar (in something resembling 3D this time) with, ahem, less-than-accurate movement control is, ahem, challenging...

Although the jumping and fencing and shooting are clumsy and frustrating, I found these things ultimately charming. They never take too long, and mashing my way through these sequences felt a bit like a throwback to the NES-console days of yore.

I've used the words "clumsy" and "awkward", and I stand by my assessment of The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian as a somewhat illfitting and malformed chimera. Nevertheless, I immensely enjoyed the hours I spent playing the game. Highly recommended for those who wouldn't mind a bit of a disruption of their normal parser-gameplay expectations.

Seriously?

Your first night off in like, forever, one of the few times you have enough change in your pockets to treat yourself to some comfort grease-food, perhaps washing down this fight with Luke, taking time to chat a bit with the nice waitress, and there's one of those bloodsucking hypermosquitoes at McDonalds?

Can't a girl get some well-deserved rest for once?

Halfway through the hour or so I played 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds, an old math joke I heard once resurfaced:

>If an engineer wakes up because the trashcan in her hotel room is burning, she'll get the fire extinguisher and put out the fire, then call the fire brigade.
If it's a chemist, he'll cover the thrashcan with a tight lid, trusting the lack of oxygen will take care of the flames.
A mathematician will scan the room and go back to sleep once she sees the sink, assured that a solution exists.

I felt like the mathematician after a while in 16 Ways. I had successfully killed the vampire in 4 ways ((Spoiler - click to show)UV-light, Plunger Stake, Machine Gun Scripture, Holy Squirt Gun). While I was searching my surroundings and setting up preparations for these four (and a bunch of less prepared other attempts which resulted in death...), I saw many glimpses and clues for a bunch of others ((Spoiler - click to show)I think these would work: Call the Cavalry x 2, Garlic Fries Poison Bait, Holy Bucket Door Gag, Frame the Vampire, Close-up Cross Necklace). After going through the game about a dozen times, I put it aside, content with my four confirmed kills and satisfied that solutions existed for the rest.

After going around a few times, starting anew to get each kill-method set up just right began to get tedious. Exacerbating the situation was the feeling that I was being punished for being playful. I feel this game sorely lack an UNDO-button. A bunch of times I chose an obviously *wrong* option, just to see what would happen. While the resulting death/failure scenes were nice, their entertainment value didn't balance out the chore of restarting, even with the option to skip the intro.

About that: I feel the intro is by far the best part of the game. The narrator's voice, part internal monologue, part half-annoyed explanatory grumbling at the player, is funny and hints at a complex character. Add to this the glimpses of background worldbuilding and the fragments about the PC's relationship with her friends/colleagues and her mother, and the short intro proves to be an impressive and effective piece of writing. It does a lot of heavy lifting, placing just the right images and associations in the player's mind to create the impression of a full, real world and a rounded PC personality.

Fun game, good writing, nice for a quick dip, great for completionists.

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A XYZZY award for Best Setting and several nominations in other categories for an author otherwise unheard of? Intriguing, but in no way unique. Still, worth a bit of sleuthing...
Keanhid Connor... It does have a familiar ring to it, no? Juggling the letters around gives us, among a list of other rather amusing possibilities, none other than Hanon Ondricek! A quick click of the author's name in the end credits confirms this by unscrambling the letters.


1) Structure and relations:

Cannery Vale is an interactive experience consisting of multiple layers of reality. While I was sitting in front of my computer screen actively playing, I was deeply engaged with the twisting and turning story, clicking links and options to see what would be the result.
Most of my time away from the game however was spent thinking about how this thing actually fit together. I found myself analyzing the ins and outs, the different levels of agency, the way the influences of the various real and imaginary characters intersected and clicked into each other. Allow me a moment to try and untangle my thoughts.

-Our clever sleuthing has uncovered that Hanon Ondricek wrote Cannery Vale under the pseudonym of Keanhid Connor. A first obvious, albeit mostly inconsequential, layer of fictionalisation and obfuscation.
-Keanhid Connor (let us assume the reality of this personage, if only for entertainment value) has written the game software. It defines the outer limits of the work. All the different story elements and how they affect each other, the characters, the plot-twists, the overarching structure. The entire collection of potential events lies in wait in this piece of software.
-Inside the IF-piece, we come upon a layer of "Real": A writer (let's call him Inkhorn O.D. Cane) has secluded himself from all distractions in a hotel room. This, he hopes, will help him in finally finishing his novel. This fictional writer introduces characters and landmarks, writes and deletes events, activates possibilities and enforces boundaries for the protagonist to act upon. In general, Inkhorn O.D. Cane tweaks the setting in the hopes of finding a breakthrough to bring his novel to a satisfactory ending.
-Underneath this, we encounter a layer of "Fictional": The novel's main character (One Nick Hardon, if you will) is set loose in the setting created during the most recent writing session, free to poke and flail around. He is not under the conscious control of the writer, who experiences these sequences only through dreams while napping. Often One Nick Hardon escapes or derails the forward progression of the plot to get lost in pointless activities or hurl himself into unforeseen deathtraps. These pointless exploratory shenanigans and dead-ends are necessary feedback for the writer to get a grasp of behaviour and mutual influence of setting and protagonist.
-Finally, of course, we come full circle back to our out-of-game reality: The player (S. Von Rasor, in this instance) sits in front of his computer screen and interacts with the IF-piece. He engages with the game at multiple levels:
a) During the writing stage, he steers Inkhorn O.D. Cane in creating the setting, opening and closing options and pathways to take advantage of inside the world of the novel.
b) During the novel stage, he inhabits One Nick Hardon while exploring the most recent iteration of the setting in detail, looking for ways to get further in the narrative. Much like the protagonist himself, the player is flying blind here, especially for the first half of the game.

Ultimately, the player is looking for a Win-condition.
S. Von Rasor does this by taking control of both the writer's conscious decisions about setting and plot and the subconscious investigation of the consequences of the writer's choices as the protagonist in the dream-sequences. The fact that the two sets of circumstances do not easily flow into one another is exemplified in Inkhorn O.D. Cane's frequent complaints about One Nick Hardon's taking the narrative into his own hands (and dying for the twelfth time...)

2) Gameplay:

When disregarding the story content and looking at the form of the game, Cannery Vale very much resembles an elaborate puzzlebox where actions on one end have causally related consequences on the other end, sometimes predictable, sometimes unexpected. In fact, I was often reminded of games like Chasm, Archipelago, or Myst. Pulling a lever, pressing a button, entering a combination makes something happen in a distant location, and it's necessary to investigate the game-world to find out exactly what has changed.
Here, the writing stage consists of flipping switches, quite randomly at first, to make things happen in the novel-world. Investigating these changes requires slipping into the novel's protagonist and descending into Inkhorn O.D. Cane's imagination through his dreams.
Interestingly, and in keeping with the writing process, One Nick Hardon's actions in the novel feed back into the conscious mind of the writer, resulting in more switches to flip to tweak the setting in subsequent iterations of the loop.

This last observation is related to another characteristic of the game. It has a similarity to that genre of games where the player controls doppelgänger PCs, or parallel-universe twins, where the actions of one in their domain/time help the other progress. On various levels of reality in Cannery Vale, characters have the power to cooperate with (or work against) eachother/themselves.
-Above, I have described the mutual feedback loop between Inkhorn O.D. Cane and One Nick Hardon, wherein writer and protagonist work together towards further understanding and exploration of the novel's narrative. From another viewpoint one could say that the writer does a bunch of preparation and then trusts his subconscious to bring the story to life and feel out the details, meaning that the writer is cooperating with himself.
-One Nick Hardon works together with other iterations of himself. Some objects or pathways are only accessible with certain narrative passages turned on or off, while later in the story those same passages need to be the other way around. Therefore, the protagonist must explore the world in one loop to acquire a cetain objective, which then is remembered and passed on to his next incarnation in the following loop, even though the passage which made that objective possible has now been closed off.
-S. Von Rasor, too, is cooperating with himself. Through the actions of both incarnations he controls in both layers of the game-reality, and the repetition with variations throughout the writing loop, he aligns Inkhorn O.D. Cane's and One Nick Hardon's choices with his goal: getting further in the game, seeing more of the story, approacing closer and closer to the Win-condition.
-(And let's not forget to tip our hat to Keanhid Connor, who made this all possible with his creation of the universe.)

3) Game/Story:

Despite my abstract comparison to mechanical puzzleboxes, Cannery Vale offers a deeply meaningful narrative experience once you drop down into its world and become involved in the story.

An unnamed man suffering from adventure-induced amnesia (a fact humorously lampshaded by the writer), regains consciousness on a deserted beach. His search for himself leads him to the end of the road, the top of the island. On his way, he must overcome obstacles, convince others to help him, escape dangers. Pretty archetypal, right? Maybe even a bit (IF-)cliché?

Well that's the point. Here lies the brilliance of the layers, the writer/novel framework. The player engages with both the writer-persona and the novel-protagonist to shape this archetypal narrative template into an interesting story full of discrete, personal events.

Once the form of this story starts to come forward, within the boundaries set by Keanhid Connor, it's an exciting, surprising, sometimes scary mystery. Threatening atmosphere lightened by funny and romantic moments, detailed conversations with believable characters, a bunch of rather explicit sex-stuff, a naturally flowing progression of events to their inevitable conclusion.

Inevitable conclusion?

I have to admit, I don't know. It felt like it when I finished, an organic whole with a natural flow.
As I only played through once, though, there are certainly many secrets and pathways I did not see, corners and roads I did not fully explore. That probably means there are many more endings, and certainly more ways to reach an ending, than I experienced.

The ending I did experience was fulfilling, sad, enlightening, thought-provoking. Much like the feedback-centered mechanics of the game, the story twisted back onto itself, spitting me out where I started. Not in any way does this take away from the insight I gained along the way though.

I felt emotionally drained and refilled, newly aware of the circle of losing and loving, having and giving.

Very strong.

Exhausted after a long drive through the desert, you and your girlfriends pull up to a dilapidated motel. A good night's sleep will get you ready for the next day of driving and visiting the sights.

But then the neon cactus flower blooms, and the Cactus Blue Motel proves to be very enticing. Maybe you'll prolong your stay. Just for a day or two...

The visual presentation of this game is spot-on. Clean white-on-black text with a clear layout, and the links presented in a neon-blue, like the billboard out front. It keeps the player aware of the closed-off location that is the motel, with nothing but dark desert surrounding it.

When the plot took a turn into supernatural thriller territory, I was unimpressed at first. I liked it, sure, but it was a bit too reminiscent of Stephen KIng's The Shining to get me deeply involved. Creepy motel with a mind of its own doesn't want the characters to leave. Check. Age-old guests and employees assure you that the motel is the best place to be. Check. Mirages of inviting amenities luring the guests to while away their time for just a bit longer. Check.

The tour of the rooms where you meet the other motel-guests was very promising, with a few memorable characters and scenes. The conversations did get a bit repetitive over time, and I found it hard to distinguish between personalities when their answers to questions about themselves and the motel were so much alike.

The unlocking of a previously inaccesible room provides some much-needed forward tempo, when a talking Jackalope (yes, a talking Jackalope,) asks your help with his investigations into the nature of the motel. It turns out he's sending you on a series of undisguised fetch-quests. I like fetch-quests, but when solving them amounts to a sequence of overclued clicks, my sense of urgency and agency is quite diminished.

Fortunately, Cactus Blue Motel is saved by its heartfelt and (for me) relatable finale. Wrestling free of the Peter Pan fase, refusing to keep clinging to childhood certainties, facing the adult world with all its complexities, dangers, and scary opportunities can be a painful process. The metaphor of steeling your will to escape from the soothing motel (or refusing to, and staying behind...) landed true with me. It helped me remember the 20yo kid I once was, and helped me assure him that it turned out not so bad after all.

In Heretic Dreams, the protagonist is a "Pathfinder", one who can, through meditative sifting through the void inside, find the luminous threads that lead to the precious ores, salts, and minerals needed for the tribe's survival.

But she has been greedy in her past, biting off more than she could chew. She has eaten of the Deceiver, and part of Him now fuels her powers.

He didn't like this. And He has her scent...

Heretic Dreams shines with beautiful prose. A handful of sharply evocative sentences per page, flashes of lightning illuminating vivid scenes or locations. The brightness of these paragraphs leaves the reader in darkness, inviting the mind to fill in the blanks, triggering the imagination.

Demanding too much from the imagination, perhaps.

Despite the broadening understanding of the backstory and the setting provided by multiple replays, I found the sparsity of the information offered too scant to grasp enough of the context to fully engage with the story or its protagonist. The fragmentary nature of the narrative left the thread floating free, unconnected, too unjoined to achieve true depth.

But perhaps this does serve the theme of the story. The protagonist's as well as the player's choices are subordinate to Fatum, Hubris leads to downfall, there is no escaping the Word and Pledge of the Dark God.

I never knew that when birds speak English, they sound like the lovechild of HAL and Spock!

Bridget's counting the days until the end of summer camp. The people are okay, but phones are not allowed, the food sucks, and she's never been one for all this physical nature activity sports stuff.

Also, she's been having these really weird dreams lately...

On the other hand, that girl Bell Park seems nice. Maybe more than just nice...

Through the slow escalation of the tension in Bridget's dreams, the horror of the bodysnatching bird-people infiltrates the reality of camp-life. The organic, off-hand incorporation of the magic realism drags the player along unnoticed, until it becomes clear that the "reality" of this teenage story has become quite unreal.

Birdland masterfully achieves a balancing act of realistic teen drama and creepy horror.

The core story is funny in its over-the-topness, while remaining easily recognisable. It acknowledges the importance and sincerity of the feelings and priorities of its teenage characters. Some of them are there to fill predictable roles, others have more depth, all of them get space and freedom to breathe, not squeezed into a mere caricature.

The horror slowly seeping in could have been a liability to the earnest depiction of the characters, threatening to disturb and overshadow the gentle and detailed approach to their relations in the story. It isn't. Instead it presents a carefully crafted narrative opportunity: to fade out the NPCs into mindless birdslaves for the second half of the game so the budding relationship between Bell and Bridget can develop more freely. Once they are they are left alone, the mind-enslaving bird-people trying to take over the human race offer the necessary obstacles to overcome together, allowing the romance between them to grow.

Almost the entire story is in direct conversational (theatrical) writing, with the surroundings and immediate events described in "off-stage" cues between brackets. This means the diversity of the characters' personalities is related to the player solely through "show, don't tell". The words and actions of the characters themselves bring them to life, not the author's descriptions of them.

The player interacts with the story through clicking options. Some may have hidden consequences (I played through only once) or are there only for flavour. During the crucial dream-sequences however, the choices very clearly do matter, and feedback on the results is given immediately after. Increases or decreases in stats are explicitly, proudly displayed, and later in the game some options are labeled as available because of a stat being high enough, or greyed out for too-low stats.
Still a relative newbie to choice-games, I found this overt "gaminess" quite jarring in the otherwise emotionally/socially involved narrative, a true-to-life (except for the bodysnatching-bird bits) exploration of a developing teen romance. I quickly got used to it though, and it was a helpful realisation that my choice of path was completely up to me, that there were no right or wrong options. I learned to follow my personal preferences, not worry about closed-off options, and work with the choices I did have.

I am very impressed with how Birdland has an effectively scary and alienating horror subplot that serves as a means to put the romantic main story in the limelight.

Great story, endearing and life-like characters, warm and romantic bodysnatching horror.