Ratings and Reviews by BrettW

Galilee Bones and the Juggernaut of Jordan is Indiana Jones with the serial numbers filed off but goddamn I am here for that. Even if we just admit it's pulp serial fiction of the archaeological persuasion, it still checks most of the boxes and it enjoys doing so.

Being IF, this is a little more quiet and puzzle-focussed with sparse locations with mild reuse. It's more Fate of Atlantis than The Last Crusade, to mix my media. Periodic flashbacks hint at a more action-filled backstory but in the game itself you really only hit one guy. You do kill another by letting him chase you into misadventure and leave another to a grim fate. But it's okay, they are Nazis, so my only disappointment was that you couldn't bop more of them. I felt like the Big Bad probably deserved his comeuppance via the main Macguffin, but that might be too close to Indiana Jones and invoke the wrath of Lucasfilm.

There's a decent variety of puzzles and a solid hint system. I had to keep prodding the hints to get the first pipe puzzle to work. The related translation puzzle threw me for a loop when I didn't read it carefully enough, so Galilee spent quite a while smoking in every room of the ruins that he could find. While there were a few mildly rough edges, the hints worked well.

I was hoping for a bit more in the puzzles. There's reuse of items, which is good, but a reuse of a basic puzzle type, which is less so. You solve them differently, and the second one is technically to set up the finale, but it was still odd to have very similar puzzles so close together. I expected more translation and herbology.

The writing is decent and there's a good bit of banter between Bones and the other characters. I swear there's a little Monty Python reference, but I can't be sure. I enjoyed that in the cinematic parts you were prompted to do actions unusual for normal IF ("You can tell Standartenführer Lockig you're looking for a hotel or ask if we've met before."), but let you play out the scene more fully.

I think it's a solid entry for the comp, although I wished for more. More puzzles, more locations and more dynamics in the setting. I enjoyed the flashbacks to other adventures, but it'd be nice to have been able to play them directly. I'd definitely wait for the next serial!

Last year I admitted that I was aware of Andrew Schultz's oeuvre, but hadn't played any. Us Too was a neat introduction to his kind of wordplay puzzles.

Wait-Our-Way Tower is a continuation or refinement of the same sort of game. This time it comes to us in a bold 320x200 pixel art retro style. I really dug this style even if it was pretty raw.

I happily played with all the hint settings on. I quickly had the walkthrough with me, but I used it as a rough hint reference rather than following it in any way. The story is functional and leans a lot on the straining wordplay, although the straight-faced absurdity reminded me of Kingdom of Loathing. I was happy to lawmower through the game, expanding the map available to me and then later closing it all down. Even though it abstracted the game a little bit, I appreciated the colour text hints and variety of ways to get hints.

I managed to get through the first part without too much trouble. Some of the wordplay was a bit strained and I wish there was a stronger constraint on the answers. Using the parser interface makes me wish that every answer had to be VERB NOUN. The very first puzzle discards that sort of constraint, so it does become pure wordplay. Even if it was ADJECTIVE NOUN or straight two-word NOUN, that'd be good. But I wonder if the wordplay well is getting dry by now.

I got stuck at the Thug Room. The walkthrough suggests something that doesn't work. The Cragne-Manor-coffee-cup-style tattoos suggest "maybe later" and nothing triggers anything. Elsewhere in the game sufficient prodding would yield hints. No luck here.

I thought the presentation and hint mechanics were greatly improved here. I loved how the world could fold back down once you had completed enough. The variety of coloured text was a good way to reduce friction, but I felt there were some extra interactions and puzzles that weren't essential but also hid in the text for eager players.

I'm not sure how to refine this approach any more, but it remains a fun little headscratcher.

Entropy is a measure of a system. It gives a sense of how unpredictable one state is from another. A fair coin has maximum entropy because previous flips do not give you any information about future ones. Turned around, a system with lots of entropy requires a lot of information to describe its state. The more information needed, the more randomness or entropy the system exhibits. This is a little contrary to our intuitive notion that if we get more information about a system, the more rigid and predictable it becomes. This is because we assume a system has a fixed amount of entropy and by learning a little about a state, we can cut down the possibilities of missing information.

Epistemophilia roughly translates to an obsessive desire for knowledge. This is a spot-on title. You start in the classic IF form of being an amnesiac with a strict sense of a wake-up protocol. Usually when I regain consciousness, I start unconsciously doing things before I start knowing things. The one consistent thing about the player character in Epistemophilia is they strictly think before they do. They do have a general sense of wanting to learn about their situation, but for the most part they just pause, do a thing and hope answers fall out.

They don't particularly.

For every step in the game you are given a half-dozen choices of actions to undertake. You choose these following a description of maddening vagueness yet verbosity. Any sense of reality is entirely liquid. At times this is supposed to suggest a virtual reality veil in front of your eyes, obscuring the true situation, although various incongruent markers and signage stab through the scene like exaggerated spears thrust forward in a 3D movie. The protagonist themselves is liquid - one of the first options you can choose is to "woolgather", but adjacent in the choice tree are offhand references to power plants and calzones. The narrative voice shifts in and out of your head, sometimes as your thoughts, sometimes in dialogue as a voice external to you.

I ran through several plays of the game. Many times I'd die seemingly at random to something vague and unpredictable. Other times I'd pinball between scenes confoundingly impossible to visualise, and get to some new scene where again I'd be given either too many choices or not enough and I'd select them at random.

My entire play experience was trying to get any sense of the game. Overall there are hints of being maybe on a space station run by aliens or robots (with signage in English), and some of it is virtual and some of it is not. Whatever felt definite was not useful or actionable. This drove my desire for knowledge to even greater intensity, but I kept being left cold.

Often in these things I try to tell if I can trust the author to lead my dumb ass to eventual salvation. The writing has a sophistication to it, but I encountered numerous spelling or grammatical mistakes. But then they were gorgeous mistakes like "dishearthened" so I wondered if there was a subtle something else going on. But then again, punctuation was occasionally mangled.

The whole game was trying to grab onto sand. I got a sense of movement, but no structure. It was a vast array of coin flips where I thought I was gaining knowledge, but I was just gaining entropy. Replays didn't clarify. Scenes didn't illuminate. It was weaponised "Yes and".

I didn't dislike it, but I don't think I enjoyed it.

See You Around is hypertext fiction about a couple/not-couple of musicians confronting each other about their relationship or lack of one. As far as interactivity goes, this is a straight story where you can choose to not take a diversion. The diversion gives extra context and technically you can choose some of them in different orders for a different experience, but it is reasonably straight text. The side forks are occasionally as long as the whole story, and perhaps provide essential context rather than additional details.

Some of the additional story are in the form of lyrics without music. They are readable, but come across as very literal. They feel like chorus rather than verse to the main story. I appreciate the use of different textual media to expand the story.

The two main characters are initially intriguing. The author clearly has a vision of each. They are detailed, but in a way that is gritty rather than visceral. There are gestures at deeper stories, but we don’t quite get to see them. A third character is a negative space character - never actually present but their presence and absence is felt.

The writing overall is quite competent but lacks depth in what the player/reader can witness. I recognise writing a lot like this in my twenties when I thought long and hard about each and every character, but the actual product that I wrote only projected faint glimmers of the story that lived large in my head. Louwagie suggests this is one part of a larger constellation of stories around the collective, so I can see how over time this world might fill out.

The ending I felt restated the earlier story rather than reinforced it, or recontextualise it. It didn’t feel earned and while the setup was all there, I just didn’t feel delight at the reference to the night at Jasmira’s.

In a way that’s easy for me to suggest but a horrendous amount of work for the author, I feel like I would have liked this game as two smaller games. The omniscient third person POV gave us both too much and too little insight to each character. Too much in that we would get the honest reflections of a character before switching to the other. Too little in that I only felt like I got the surface of the situation. If we saw the story through the eyes of each of the two main characters and really got in there, you might have a really fascinating story. The whininess of Alim might irritate in Jasmira’s mind, but feel justified in his.

I liked how the music in the game was collected as a Spotify playlist. I was hoping music would play a larger foundational role in the game, but it didn’t really. The playlist reveals this - 9 songs and the vast majority are referenced consecutively in a short section. And as a very minor stumble, the game is set in 1995 but the playlist contains versions from 2010 and beyond. But I very much appreciate the extra effort. Song choice is always very tricky... I know this from my first foray into IF with Mix Tape. I think See You Around did a much better job with music and song choice, although I think it had a lot more potential.

I hope to see more from Louwagie – stretching their wings to include more interactivity and more story. This is a bold first game from them, but I think they can go much further.

It didn’t take long for the penny to drop for me that I loved the idea of this. The Rat is an alternative heist story happening more-or-less in and around the story of the IF Comp winner The Bat. I still had some of the happy glow from a recent replay of The Bat. I love heists and I love the trope of seeing familiar scenes from a totally different angle. The protagonist valet from The Bat is the main antagonist in The Rat, which is cool.

The writing is really good, with lots of banter between the characters who all have distinctive voices. The game escalates in a few stages, so you’re not just thrown in the deep end. And there are very many affordances for you to solve the puzzles (parser input, as well as mouse-driven).

I like the idea of the main puzzle - try to distract the valet for long enough so your comrades can break in. The valet takes a certain route between disturbances, so you need to find ways to stretch it out.

The actual experience of the main puzzles wasn’t as good for me. I had a lot of mindless flailing about. At times the solution seemed extraordinarily tight or extremely lax. When you later have one of your crew provide blocking assistance, I managed to completely break the game. You know that little dance you might do if you run into someone on a path, and you both take a step to move out of the way, but laugh because you both did it at the same time in the same direction, and not solving the problem? I weaponised that with an Ultra Canadian-meets-Brit level of polite sidewalk shuffling. I stepped left and right with the butler for about five minutes before I figured it was enough for the game. It luckily agreed, but the lightly-mangled response was a close one.

I really appreciate all the affordances with colour and various optional controls. However I hit the wrong command on the lower controls because they’d change position between turns, and I had to learn over the game to just use the top controls. This was exacerbated by the lovely dialogue, which felt distracted my puzzle solving rather than add to it. The end sequence appropriately has a twist to it, but I missed a line of dialogue hitting a button accidentally and it looked like the game was broken. I managed to figure it out, but it made the ending awkward.

I believe Stelzer got Groover’s blessing to make a tribute to The Bat, but I was disappointed when various details were not quite the same. Characters had different names. The house had a different layout. The ending was quite different. It was an alternate universe version of The Bat and I felt like it needed to be the same, or not at all the same.

I have to admit with great shame that this is my first Andrew Schulz game. I’m aware of the area of IF he had staked out, and every year I’ve intended with my whole heart to play his entry. This year I finally managed it.

Us Too’s main technique is wordplay puzzles about shifting the space in a two-word phrase and finding the right interpretation. This puzzle type took me a while to lock into by perfecting some kind of mental slurring of speech and then resolving into something new.

The whole experience was really quite unique. The wordplay melted my brain a little, having the direct analogue of A-ha moments of other puzzlers, but being something different. The writing is good but in a way not too consequential. The story and location kinda slid off my brain, and even in some way the puzzles too. But I was in a flow state looking for a unique phrase and deconstructing it. The writing doesn’t make this too obvious nor too obscure.

Some time in – after I was locked into the wordplay – I was wondering if the game could instead be a PDF of puzzles. Right then, the game started presenting more involved puzzles requiring chains of interactions.

This gave me the overall impression of Schulz’ expertise at creating puzzle games with appropriate pacing and ramp up. The writing is interesting but not an obstacle. There is significant infrastructure for hints, cheats and guides for the player. Everything is quite fair (although my play through came to an end with the puzzle which was a bit of a stretch for me). I enjoyed the game as an abstract puzzle game although it’s not presented as such. I feel wordplay puzzles have to be like this - embedded in story but slippery in the diegetics.

I enjoyed my time with Us Too. Time for me to start mining through the back catalogue!