Ratings and Reviews by Rovarsson
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Keys and cuffs., December 4, 2023(Review based on the IFComp version of the game.)
Without reading the blurb, I had expectations of a SF or fantasy work in which Lunium could be the setting’s rare unobtainium used for magical potions or as fuel for FTL-travel. Perhaps it would be mined on a distant moon of an uninhabited planet, or it could only be activated when mixed with dewdrops under the light of the moon.
Not so. Lunium is a combination detective mystery/escape room game. You wake up in a securely locked room, chained to the wall. Your memories are vague and confused, your vision blurred. You must have been drugged…
No points for originality, but it is a solid opening, a staple of IF.
You do remember, aided by the first few objects you find, that you are a detective on the verge of solving a series of horrible murders. Now you must get out and stop the murderer.
Searching the surroundings yields keys and combinations. Unlocking drawers and safes yields clues. Investigating, analysing, combining those clues yields information about witnesses and suspects. This information can then be used to start the cycle anew.
As with a lot of escape games, the puzzles felt forced. It strains the suspension of disbelief that everything you need to escape the room and solve the crime just happens to be lying around (more or less hidden/locked away) in the very location where you’re imprisoned. In this case though, this is justified in the (rather transparent) twist ending. Still, the ending cannot negate the impression of “Oh! How convenient. I’m finding keys all around.” that I had during the game.
Many puzzles do share a common theme (hinted at in the title) that ties them together and gives a nice sense of consistency. (Except (Spoiler - click to show)the colours on the back of the painting associated with the coins in your pocket. Come on, really?)
The character sketches of the suspects/witnesses were intruiging, but too fragmentary to hold my interest in the end. I would have liked more exposition on the relationships between them, and of the circumstances in which my PC came to interrogate or investigate them. Perhaps in some more elaborate flashbacks?
Lunium is aesthetically pleasing, with beautiful and detailed pictures of the room and the details within it. The option to view and enlarge the items in the inventory is well handled and very player-friendly.
A pretty and puzzly Twine to keep your grey cells pleasantly occupied for about an hour.
Murder-solving amongs the Gods, December 4, 2023(Review based on the IFComp version of the game.)
This title interested me because it brings together two elements that I would not have expected to see connected so closely. An ancient Egyptian god as a Detective.
Since I was a child, I have been fond of mythology. The story of Osiris and Isis always struck me as particularly dark. The victim, murdered for power, brought back to life through love, has lost something in the process and chooses to not return to the light but rule the underworld instead.
In Detective Osiris, you awaken from death in the glade of Thoth. Previously King of Egypt, the ritual performed by your wife Isis has brought you back as a god.
With my expectations formed by my memories of the source material, I was in for a big surprise when I started reading Detective Osiris. The playful tone of the story clashed hard with the sombre atmosphere I had imagined beforehand. A pleasant surprise, I must stress, as the first conversation with Thoth, god of writing and judgement, brought a big smile to my face.
The lightheartedness continues in the meetings with the other gods. Maat, goddess of justice and cosmic order, comes across as an ever-enthusiastic fangirl; Ges, creator of earth and humanity is a stoner who can’t stop bingewatching his favourite show: life on earth.
The investigation becomes a bit more serious once you start interrogating people down on earth, where at least some of them can empathise with the fact that being murdered isn’t fun.
Although the lighthearted tone and the detective-story twist held my attention for a while, the game ultimately couldn’t live up to the quality of its playful tone.
The most impactful choices the player can make are where to go first, the order in which to interrogate witnesses. This would juggle the sequence of the conversations around, and maybe give a different impression depending on the order.
While the witnesses, like the gods, are fun to talk to, the conversations basically become a chore of link-hoovering. There’s a riddle (can’t have an Egyptian story without a riddle now, can we?) and a number-puzzle thrown in, but nothing resembling a real obstacle, be it a puzzle or a difficult choice.
The author did surprise me again with the ending, twisting the source material around once more in a way that I did not see coming. I’m still not sure if I like the direction in which the original story was changed, but points at least for shaking it up.
A fun read to begin, but loses its freshness.
Hide-and-seek for your brother's life!, December 3, 2023I had a dream: The Doors were performing a sweaty, breathtaking drawn-out version of Riders on the Storm when David Suchet’s finely mustachioed Poirot appeared onstage and pointed accusingly at Jim Morrison. Jim jumped off the stage, right into the arms of the waiting Hastings.
It’s safe to say this title intrigued me, while at the same time expert-fingeredly tickling my funny-bone.
In reality, Death on the Stormrider has more in common with Poirot than with The Doors.
Your brother has found passage on the cargo-airship “Stormrider” for the both of you, provided that you make yourself useful onboard. The ship’s cook is found murdered and your brother is the only one who had the keys to the mess at the time. He’s locked in the brig until the ship boards at the next harbour.
It’s up to you to find evidence of your brother’s innocence.
Since your brother’s locked up for murder, you yourself are eyed with some suspicion. Nevertheless, you remain free to roam most parts of the ship. A number of passageways and rooms are off-limits, and you are severely limited in what you are allowed to carry around with you. (Or so the game keeps insisting. You are limited to items small enough that they could conceivably be concealed in your hand or clothing. However, given the amount of small stuff I was carrying by the end of the game, I suspect there’s a limitless hammerspace somewhere under your character’s suspenders of disbelief…)
The ship left the harbour in a hurry , running on a skeleton crew (which was also the reason for your hasty recruitment). Even then, with the cramped spaces between the cargo and the crew all having their own rounds and routines, having to do several duties at once, it’s hard to conduct a thorough investigation.
You do need to get into the off-limits spaces and carry around pieces of evidence, so you have to find ways to get past and around blocked off entrances and working crewmembers unnoticed.
The objective of the game is finding evidence. The core of the gameplay is hide-and-seek. Get to know the crew’s routines, find hiding spots on their routes or hidden passages around their locations. Time your actions so you can slip through the gaps between the other crew members. It gets even more complicated and exciting once you try to manipulate the others’ circulations through the ship to create your own opportunities for espionage and investigation…
The many independently moving NPCs, the different consequences of open/closed containers, the machinery of the ship having sometimes far-off effects,… These things are dependent on a great number of moving cogs and chains and toggles under the hood. I found some hiccups, but mostly the gears interlocked as needed and turned smoothly. The bugs I did encounter were minor, and the suspense of the game was good enough that I could overlook them.
This gameplay of hide-and-seek had the effect that the considerable suspense I felt was aimed at my own (the player’s) success, rather than being directed at the protagonist’s troubles or the fate of his brother. While sneaking around, I felt tension about finding a hiding place in time. I wasn’t very concerned about or emotionally engaged with the characters though.
The mechanics of the gameplay have their consequences for the writing too. It’s important that the player has a good idea where the NPCs are relative to the PC’s location at all times to be able to avoid them or hide in time. In the desfriptions, the bottom few lines are reserved for a list of distinctive footsteps the PC can hear. A single line of text has information about which character’s steps they are, how far that character is away, and which direction the character is going.
“Just forward, you can hear sharp, measured footsteps approaching.”
These lines are actually very well-written, condensing a lot of information into smooth prose. They are repetitive though, and when there are several characters within earshot, there are also several lines of this in the location descriptions. For a while, this can be a bit annoying. Soon however, my brain just started glancing over this text while filtering out the necessary information.
For an unavoidable trade-off between pleasant prose and indispensable game information, I think this solution found a good balance.
I absolutely loved finding my way around Death on the Stormrider's map. The (beautifully drawn) map in the feelies already gives an impression of how much rooms have to be crammed in a small space on an airship. It was only by exploring the decks myself during play, drawing the map room by room, with all the barriers and hindrances in full effect, that I became aware of the whole complexity of the game world.
The author employs a simple yet effective tactic for avoiding conversations with the other people on the ship: they speak another language and can’t understand you. Also, they’re busy working and wave you away if you interrupt them. Talking to them is not necessary to get a good impression of their character though. Everyone has distinct mannerisms (evident in the way they walk), their attitude toward you is quite obvious through a mixture of body-language and unintelligible-but-clear-in-context speech.
For each character, the X command also prints a beautiful drawing, which together with the text-description gives a good picture of their personality.
All these drawings, with the accompanying text, can be reviewed at leisure in the wonderful tablet you find in the very first room of the game. It serves as a notebook for clues, a reminder of tasks to do and places to visit, and a recapitulation of your investigation so far and the people you encountered.
Great addition, and well worth taking a number of turns near the end of the game to look back over all you’ve learned.
The endings (yes, there’s more than one!) felt a bit luck-of-the-draw to me. It’s not clear (ar least not to me) what the consequences were of showing this or that piece of evidence to one of the various crew members. Their behaviour toward the PC, dismissive, neutral, or halfway friendly, didn’t offer enough (any) clues as to how they would react to my revealing of the evidence.
An exciting investigation, with some unexpected complications and a bunch of different endings, depending on how meticulous your search is. Good game!
Woodland Wonder, December 3, 2023A very intruiging title. I didn’t know what to expect. The “tricks” part made me think of magicians or wizards at first. The game certainly has a magical air, albeit of a more realistic nature.
My parents’ house is surrounded by farmlands in all directions. A mile or so down the narrow road is a small forest. There were no children my age in the street where I grew up. My favourite passtime after school was exploring nature around my house, catching (and releasing) spiders, crane flies (we call them horse mosquitos), grasshoppers, etc… And no, my best friend is not a tiger…
Lara wakes up before sunrise and heads into the woods near the village with her sample box. She’s looking for stuff she might take to school for show-and-tell, and also just out of curiosity and wonder.
At first, Tricks of Light in the Forest comes across as a slice-of-life walk in the forest. Your sense of touch, smell, taste, are as much part of the experience of your surroundings as sight. Nature in all its forms is described in loving detail. Trees and flowers and moss in terms of their fragrance, colour, soft leaves or hard and brittle bark. Bugs up close with shiny beetle shields, dew-glistening spiderwebs, larger animals mostly heard instead of seen.
During the long walk, more and more images and memories and stories about Lara, her parents, the village’s history are triggered by the surrounding forest. These are personal to Lara, showing just a small part of her life here. Put together however, they lead to a fragmented realisation in the player of the broader setting. ((Spoiler - click to show)Twenty, maybe fifty years into the future. Global warming is in full effect, though not in a dramatic post-apocalyptic way. Trees are dying in the drought and uprooted by sudden rainfalls. Species have disappeared and others have migrated into the area. The cities are partly abandoned, skyscrapers are crumbling down.)
The subtle and gradual introduction of these elements into the story has an unsettling effect on the player, but for Lara they are part of her life in this place. She is aware of the changes through stories her parents tell her, and through events during her lifetime, but these things are simply part of the natural flow of things in her experience.
We get to share her view on the woods through an intimate first person viewpoint, with her fears and delights intertwined with her observations of nature.
Later in the game, some puzzles are introduced in a spontaneous manner, blockades and obstacles one might reasonably expect in a forest that has been returning to its wild state for many years now. Their solutions are not that hard, they serve more to force Lara off the beaten track and penetrate deeper into the forest where she witnesses more of the changes to the environment.
Tricks of Light in the Forest is beautifully illustrated, with drawings reminiscent of images out of old natural history books. When Lara reaches notable landmarks, a handdrawn map pops up and shows her progress on the forest path.
Most impressive and impactful are the subtly changing colours and intensity of the background, depending on the lighting of the location (bright sunlight, overshadowed by the canopy,…), or reflecting the time of day (early morning fog, noon sun,…).
A deep, slow, thoughtful piece. Beautiful and detailed descriptions of nature. Themes of loss and wonder and inevitable change. Nature in all its flowing resilience.
Ancestral Haven, November 29, 2023A 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.
Infiltrate the Witches' Castle, September 29, 2023Mwoohahaa! 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.
Count down..., September 24, 2023Immediately 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.
Atomized Inzanity!, September 22, 2023In 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!
>Z 'You pause in manly contemplation.', September 22, 2023A 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.
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