Reviews by Rovarsson

>"Weightlessness, wonder, a rare smile as the planet descended below you, a brilliant viridian marble swirled with soft white clouds."

Despite the protagonist of Protocol having left her lover to go live among the stars, high above/below the planet, this quote is on of the few instances where the space outside is witnessed directly from her point of view.
Protocol is an inwardly oriented game, both in its surface quest and in its more abstract layers.

The protagonist wakes up alone on an abandoned Space Observatory Station, a mighty telescope pointed at the tiniest pinpricks of light from the farthest, earliest moments of space, suspended in its ring of service modules and living quarters for the necessary living staff. The station is damaged. An urgency more felt than understood presses her to do all that is necessary for the repair of the station.

During the exploration of the station, wounded and confused, weakened and alone, a relation of mutual dependency/support/survival develops. The station needs/coerces/forces the woman for healing its wounds, for saving what is not yet irreparably lost of its memories while she struggles to remember herself. The woman uses/grasps/wills the station for a purpose, a reason. The only purpose left, empty and meaningless as it may be.

The desperate crawling journey of the woman through the station to its core systems, to the exposed and damaged vital technologies mirrors a descent deeper and deeper into the body and mind, into psyche and soma, to the wounded bleeding sarx itself, the flesh and bones that need repair.

However intimately connected, mind and body undergo an unnerving disorienting dissociation/distancing during the journey. The station becomes a distorted mirror for the woman. It reflects her broken dreams and yearnings and regrets back to her, reminiscent of the Nietzschean abyss. This is often expressed in physical, external circumstances and actions.

The painful state of the woman's mind is made apparent in her personal monologue/narration too:
>"Delusions of grandeur lost in the summer winds of her laugh, the comfort of a fire in winter in her embrace. Who could blame you, for turning your gaze away from the sky? You were enchanted by the stars, enamored with them. Who could blame you for leaving her, when the stars in her eyes shone no longer?"

While the premise of Protocol is well-known, and could be tiresome in a lesser game, it succeeds in using that premise as a means to search deep into the human condition. The sense of loss, the inevitability of choices, the impossibility of what could have been.

An important factor in making this work is the impressive writing. The author employs stylistic techniques to press the gravity of the situation on the reader. For the most part, this works very well. A bit more prudence might be in order as to the frequency with which one or another technique is used, as they do lose efficacy along the way.

Mesmerising, haunting repetitions, both of phrases and entire paragraphs (with small but telling differences) draw the player deep into the bowels of the story.

The juxtaposition of two major themes resonates throughout the story and appeals to different aesthetical and ethical value systems, perhaps loosely associated with the Appolonic and the Dionysic:

There is the beauty cold and austere of inevitable, ordered, lawful physics, geometry, even biology, juxtaposed with the messy hot-glowing spell of yearning, purpose, will of life and love and consciousness.

Both sides are reflected in the careful delicate writing. In the same passage of text scientific precision and sense of detail conjoins with poetic style, rythmic prose, flowing structure.
>"This is how it always ends; falling the mechanism of your demise, her demise, both the guilty Daedalus and foolish Icarus, too close to the sea, too close to the sun and always doomed by gravity."

At other times, the rhyme and rythm take center stage, as in this challenging and delightful lingual language game of leapfrog:
>"Where she walked the shores of a shallow salt sea, followed the tree-lined lanes dappled in light through the thin apertures of leaves to a home with knotted hardwood floors and open windows through which the wind whispered."

Protocol has few choices. The ones it does have are posed with appropriate gravitas. Each choice is a commitment, the player's role and responsability in seeing this narrative to its inevitable end. Whatever end that may be. It is still inevitable.

Very, very impressive.

(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 version.)

In this tense and fast-moving thriller, Marie must escape her mysterious captors before the bright lights kill her.

This was a very fast-paced but smooth ride.

Marie Waits is a time-constrained turn-optimisation game.

Fortunately, it’s also a game that emphasises letting the player get on with it, quickly scanning the scene and picking out the important items (along with unimportant ones and currently inaccessible ones, of course.) No futzing with intricate machinery or 8-move back-and-forth puzzles, but obstacles that must and can be dealt with fast.

The writing is inobtrusive, it mostly keeps to the background and focuses on conveying the necessary practical information. Precisely this makes it so effective. It reads fast and pulls you along. Even though I started the game thinking I would take it easy, letting my PC die and learn for the next restore, I wound up captivated and tense, feeling the urgency of getting the hell out of there.

Here and there, the author does take the tempo down a notch to show some shreds of backstory through found notes. Very intruiging, and a good reason to play the other Marie-games. (One already out, one upcoming, I believe?)

Of course my testing instincts kicked in at a certain point. I tried to sneakily cut some corners and squeeze some commands in before my PC ought to be able to perform those actions. I was impressed that the author caught almost all these instances. I managed to smuggle one minor shortcut past the radar, shaving two moves (I think) off my total.

In the end, I was out of there by quarter past ten. Time to spare for Marie to take a shower and meet her friends for brunch.
Escaping mysterious kidnappers and avoiding a mid-day burning blast? All part of the morning chores.

Lots of fun!

(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 version.)

Well this is something else!

I Am Prey is a tense pursuit thriller where the PC is free to parkour around the map. If you can find the routes in time…

What the player would normally think of as scenery is transformed into accessible passages and back-ways in this game. Furniture, pipings, machinery,… They’re all available for climbing, jumping, crawling to find alternate routes and handy shortcuts around the map. Good thing too, the normal hallways are patrolled by a monstrous unseen entity looking to find you. (The fact that the kitchen pantry has been empty for some time does hint at the reason why…)

I tested this game in its bare-bones parkour proof-of-concept incarnation. It felt like spotting some rare and beautiful lizard in the branches of a vine-overgrown tree. A flicker of colour and movement that I could not quite make out yet.
What a treat to see it now in its glorious splendour!

The commands will take getting used to, as will orienting yourself in relation to the passages between locations. Read the manual and take your time to learn the game. You will be rewarded.

There is an anxiousness-inducing stealth element to the game, where the PC needs to locate certain items before being able to escape. All the while the presence of the Predator is felt and heard, every corner might be lethal.
Sounds play an important role. First of all the voice of your pursuer taunting you through the intercom. I found this actively stressful, distracting from the task at hand and paralysing me with indecisiveness.
Second, sound betrays where you and the pursuer are. Used with care, sound can be your ally…

Along with being a stealth game, I Am Prey also rang a lot of platformer-bells in my head. Jumping, climbing on surrounding objects to find hidden routes? My days playing SuperMarioLand on the SNES revolved around all that.

A parser-based text-game is turn-based, almost by definition. (Real time parsers will exist, no doubt. I shudder at the heartattack-inducing experience playing them would be for typing-challenged me.) Movement between locations is not the point, the game’s about what you do once you are in the next location. Contrary to that habitual room-based gameplay, I Am Prey succeeds in drawing the player into the movement-system as the key-feature of the game.

Remember the resting points on the platforms Mario could stand on relatively safely? You had just completed a precise jump onto a reassuringly broad platform and now you can breathe and plan the next move. Maybe there’s even a questionmark-block to investigate or some coins to pick up. But the focus is on the next jump, the next climb.

The rooms in I Am Prey felt like this to me. Places of temporary relative safety, for catching your breath and quickly searching. But you gotta move, man… You always gotta move…

Very exciting, very inviting to replay. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it.

(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 version.)

Once again, Scotland Yard is baffled and comes knocking on your door for assistance. A locked-door murder mystery! Nice to have something to sharpen your sleuthing mind on.

The Victorian-pastiche writing force runs deep with this one, mostly in a good way. Even when it goes a bit overboard sometimes (thesaurus anyone?), it still bundles the player in a nice and comforting hearthfire detective mood. (Pipe optional.)

Despite the captivating writing however, I felt like this game could be a pitch for a rather predictable detective movie implemented in HTML/Javascript. All the twists and turns of the story are there, as well as the characters and their relations, but they’re only sketchily filled out.

There is definitely something bubbling beneath the surface with regards to the relation between the witty detective and the grumpy Scotland Yard Inspector, but it never gets deeper than the exchange of funny witticisms and insulting remarks.
I had hoped to see a bit more of Detective Sergeant Bixby’s personality. A few links seem to suggest more personal questions, but these are quickly deflected.

The game-information warns the player to take careful notes, lest the game become unwinnable. In the end though, I didn’t feel I (the player) had done much sleuthing and deducing at all. When looking over my notes, I realise that all the clues I needed would fit on the back of a small grocery list (“eggs, milk, ham, alligator dental floss”). A concise walkthrough would consist of . Instead of the result of my deductive skill, this seemed more like having to prove to the game that I had read the previous paragraphs.

The investigation of the crime scene and the interrogation of the witnesses is fun, but the actual detective work of putting the clues together into a coherent whole is done by the game. My little grey cells felt a bit disregarded.

Still, an entertaining detective story.

(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 version.)

What a welcome surprise! I expected this to be an elaborate joke game, where you die in various hilarious/gruesome ways a link or two removed from the start-screen. The fact that the intro-screen already offered a bunch of non-official endings strengthened my belief that this game was going to be a riff on unnecessarily complex choice games that tap into the human brain’s tendency to collect-'em-all.

And yes, Insomnia does that. It does it extremely well, with various bonuses and achievements handed out as you reach more endings. (I liked being able to change the subtitle!)

But!

I’m actually very impressed by the depth, detail, and variety of the stories. The author obviously was invested in treating the branching narratives as interesting premises in their own right, following through on the player’s choices to their ultimate, sometimes extremely zany, sometimes thriller-serious, consequences.

The writing is engaging and considered, another sign that the stories are a serious matter (silly as they may be), not just a way to get the player to groan at the next failure. I found myself strongly captivated by a few of the pathways through the piece. Among the other well-written storylets, these stood out for me as blueprints for exciting short stories or games on their own. ()

If I may add a small nitpick, even the more serious storylets () are told in the same fast-paced humorous voice as the zaniest ones. These more tense pieces might benefit from a shift in tone to reflect the actual sorrow they cause the protagonist. (2 cents to be picked up or ignored, of course.)

A great ending-hunt with hidden depths.

(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 version.)

But… but… I only wanted to play a game. A childish little spooky sleepover game… And now… She’s just…

This game starts out innocently enough. The youngest of the girls must take a tour through her own subconscious, aided and guided by her big sister’s voice. Soon enough, things take a turn into creepy territory.

The map of this game is splendid. It enhances the hypnotised-disoriented feeling of the little sister wandering through her own dream-world by looping back on itself in unexpected passages. Some locations are obviously dream or nightmare stuff, while others seem like minimalist doubles of familiar rooms. I don’t know which is spookier…

The hypnosis-game setup invites the player to enter in a sometimes confusing web of player-PC-agent-narrator relations. The different girls’ voices add to the confusion as each responds in their own way to the traumas that gradually come forward out of the shadows of the dream-world.

There are a few gaps in the implementation, mostly a synonym unrecognised or a reasonable but unnecessary command not understood. Nothing too worrying or distracting.

Very moody, in places actively scary. There are happier endings to be found, but the one I got feels just right (in a horror-story wrong way…)

(this review is for the IFComp 2022 version)

Your backstabbing fellow archaeologist/explorer/graverobber pushed you down a catacomb. Find the exit and grab all the loot.

This game brings back the classic text-adventure tropes: explore and steal. Apart from the framing story I summarized above, there is no plot or character development. This means you are only limited by your own conscience (and let’s face it, adventure players haven’t got one) while you unleash your kleptomaniac and grave violating tendencies in the poor old King’s tomb.

The descriptions are rich, they capture the gloomy-tomb atmosphere very well. There were several rooms with vivid and memorable images, emanating an old and foreboding feeling.

Until the very end, puzzles are nowhere to be seen, except maybe looking in a few less obvious places. The final puzzle is simple but nifty, providing a nice little >click< in the player’s head.

Unfortunately, The Hidden King’s Tomb is woefully underimplemented. In a creepy crypt like this, it misses so many opportunities to reward the explorer with detailed descriptions of the ominous scenery to establish a bit of backstory (the murals and reliefs are a first obvious example). Customizing the responses to unnecessary actions would also help in bringing more life to the game world.

Indeed, I would love to see this game expanded into a near-puzzleless exploration of the history of this long-buried mysterious King. The focus could be not on the gathering of loot (which will always be cool, come on, it’s a text adventure, right…), but on the slow and gradual unraveling of the tale of how the King came to be buried here, and of his great or horrible deeds during life.
The medium of IF is extremely well suited to such piece-by-piece discovery of a backstory.

A nice exploration/looting excercise. I really liked the final puzzle. The first atmospheric layer of the tomb is nicely painted. The author just needs to go down a few layers beneath that and implement all the juicy details.

(This review is based on the Spring Thing 2023 comp version.)

Such a warm and homely starting situation! Your witch is feeling a bit under the weather. How better to help her than to brew a cauldron of heartening medicinal soup?

Soon, though, it becomes apparent that something darker than a simple cold is amiss. Your mistress has been hexed, and she’s going to need something a bit more potent than hot soup.

Fran the crow is a lovely protagonist. Even though her ability to express herself verbally is limited to CAW, her kind-heartedness shines through in all her actions, and in her thoughts as they are relegated to the player through the author’s empathic penmanship.

As enthusiastic and full of life Fran is, even in these dire times, so is the author’s writing. Eager to share the wonders of this world, be they light or dark. From the cosy cabin to the oppressive vine-tangled forest, from the stately Opera House to the cute girl in the window, the joy of inviting the reader into this world sparkles on the screen.

You have been flying through the western forest as dawn begins to extend its frilly tendrils across the sky, and warm late-summer winds filter through your feathers. Streaks of green and yellow paint the landscape with fresh vibrancy.

Sometimes it’s a bit too enthousiastic, to the point of near-selfcombustion:

“The mammoth governmental building looms ahead, its single golden clocktower eye and teeth-like arches looking more bestial than ever.”

A simple but delicately drawn map with just enough twists and turns in the path to feel organic guides you through the forest to the city of Gennemont, where the nub of the adventure lies.

One particular puzzle-and-narrative sequence here is so heartwarming I’d have gladly played the game for the joy of it alone. ((Spoiler - click to show)The girl in the window's love-letter.)
Being aimed at beginners, the puzzles are quite simple. Most hinge on winning the trust of a human. The wing-and-beak gesturing CAW-ing conversations this entails are rich, the characters are people in their own right, and it gave a a real sense of connection to bond with them on a deeper level than just carrying out their associated fetch-quest.

During these conversations, and through the limited memories and understanding Fran has of the goings-on in the wider world, we learn of the broader circumstances in which the story plays. A war is going on between the powerful factions of the setting, and it reaches down to influence even the lives of Fran and the other characters.

The entire tale is enlightened but not overshadowed by moody grey-blue pixel graphics, emphasising the atmosphere of the text-descriptions.

At the end, the author hearkens back to an early meeting in an almost fairy-tale fashion, bringing the story around to a satisfying close.

I came across a few bugs and sent reports of them to the author. I’m confident those will be squashed in a following update. Nothing that should hinder the enjoyment, perhaps even providing an extra laugh or two.

A very warm and inviting game.

*HONK*HONK*HONK*

Nevermind that blaring alarm. Just a final dusting of the Director's door sign and she'll make her way outside to the Plaza in your own good time, thank you very much.

Oliva Mirram is a cleaning maid in the Lab. And now it appears she took a little too much time to respond to the evacuation alarm. Best to sneak out before anyone notices, especially the scientists responsible for the alarm...

There is a lot to like about Nothing Could be Further From the Truth. There's also a lot to complain about. Since I don't like doing the latter, and also since this review is based on the 2023 Spring Thing comp-version, I'll just briefly list the negatives here. I can still reference them as needed in the rest of the review.

-Inconsistent directions: I have absolutely nothing against an idiosyncratic directional system. Do make it consistent though.
-Synonyms, or the lack thereof. In a tense situation, I like many words to be recognised for the same object.
-Alternate commands, or the lack thereof: A bunch of solutions rely on precise input, where I would have liked the game to respond to more ways to phrase the same command.
-Unhelpful and actively misleading responses, or the abundance thereof: I skimmed accross the surface of a solution without grasping it on multiple occasions because of this.

Particularly the latter two can make progress difficult. There are hints available, but I found that persistence and patience work just as well.

So, a few naggles up front.

But man this is my jam!

A long and engaging parser puzzler set against a dystopian SF backdrop.

-->Writing:
Big, eloquent text dumps for introduction, cutscenes and outro. The author chooses to emphasise the "writing" part of a text game with verbose and detailed initial room descriptions. These make for very evocative first impressions of the various locations, although they could be trimmed down to more utilitarian length when the player types LOOK or enters the same room a second time.

The tone of the game is hard to place. It's a mixture of the commonplace cruelty, humiliation and snitch-encouraging culture of an authoritarian state, and scenes of relieving, even cathartic humour. I was particularly impressied by the juxtaposition of the horrible treatment(Spoiler - click to show) of citizens who broke the rigid rules in some low-level way in one corner of the Plaza, and the slapstick demolition of a vendor's stall in the opposite corner.

During the game, tension rises with the stakes of the puzzles increasing, both for the protagonist personally as for her fellow citizens.

The first acquaintance with the protagonist was very impressive. She made a well-rounded and realised impression, with references to her hopes and dreams and fears. She even comes accross as somewhat naive and innocent while at the same time being purposeful and strong-willed. The layering of these personality traits made her feel believable in the context of the setting.
As the game progresses however, I felt Oliva Mirram's character flattening out. The puzzles took center-stage and Oliva's personality was overshadowed. She became more and more a vessel for my commands instead of her own person where I could look over her shoulder.

-->Puzzles:
The majority of the puzzles are traditional adventure fare. Manipulating machinery, finding ways to unblock passages,... Many are of a larger scope than usual though, requiring the player to connect pieces of information found in different locations and in different times during the exploration of the map.
I found all of them very strong conceptually. A big part of my playtime was devoted to not-playing while letting the importance and connections of items simmer in the back of my brain.
The game also uses distractions and diversions very effectively to send the player looking in the wrong direction. On several occasions, I realised after taking a break that I had been trying to solve a puzzle with the wrong object or in the wrong order. The feeling of this realisation clicking into place in my head was great, the main reason why I love puzzle games.
Unfortunately, the inadequate implementation of alternate commands and helpful responses to failed commands introduces an extra layer of confusion that interferes with the intentional complexity. It makes it hard to differentiate between legitimate false leads or red herrings on the one hand, which I deem crucial to the compelling experience Nothing Could be Further From the Truth offers, and clumsy unintended responses or oversights that obscure the game proper with clutter.
The game is quite harsh and unforgiving when it comes to killing of the PC when using a wrong approach to solving a puzzle. Expect many premature endings with well-written humorous death-scenes, and a lot of try-die-repeat. I like this, but it's probably good to know beforehand to anyone wanting to tackle this game.

-->Map:
As an avid map-maker, I enjoyed drawing the Lab and its surroundings. I also saw deeper meaning in the map organisation. The setting of a Science Laboratory Complex in an authoritarian society was reflected in the organised and orderly layout of the facility, while the underground crawlspaces on the fringes of the map were associated with the more chaotic rebel elements.

The author assures me that there will be a post-comp version which will be more polished.

In the meanwhile, Nothing Could be Further From the Truth struck me as a diamond in the rough. Wholeheartedly recommended.

Impressionistic prose bordering on poetry. Sensuous associations brought on by a gently touching finger. Images of kissing lips and dripping blood.

Footnotes. A second voice. Harsher, more direct. Longing too, silent confessions of love and yearning. Tenderness in the face of fate's inevitability.

The gun or the knife?

But beauty prevails. Beauty offset by pain and secrets. Still, beauty. Enhanced by the acceptance of the ugly things. The things unspoken yet known.

The silver lining of the shining blade-edge.