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!

Interactive fiction spans a wide plain of different content. In some games the author slams down a puzzle box in front of you and cracks jokes as you attempt to solve it. In others, the author beckons you into their car and then locks the door muttering, “Let’s go see some trauma!”

The Little Four is nothing like these. It is a handsome box of chocolates that you sample from as you take your time tidying your study. Some petit fours, so to speak.

You are the author, Captain Arthur Hastings, offsider to the great Hercule Poirot. The game itself is a gently-nudged exploration of a set of flats occupied by the men and Hasting’s children, each examination accompanied by a reminder of past exploits with Poirot or little character details. You run into other supporting characters from Poirot.

The writing is charming and lovely, with great attention to detail. I’m only mildly familiar with Poirot, but I felt there was an admiration of the books and general character in each little flourish. I was especially touched by the description of Cinderella; I had no idea of the character and walked straight into the sad backstory which was quickly but excellently captured.

I really enjoyed the story of the relationship between the author and Poirot, how things changed when they took on “The Big Four”, and how they intended to spend their twilight attending to “The Little Four”, Hasting’s children. I felt there was a queer undercurrent, which I don’t know if it’s in the original, but it works well here. I could imagine someone desperately explaining away “No, no, they’re just good friends!” even despite caring descriptions of what Poirot looks like when he’s asleep.

There’s no murder, but there is a tiny mystery to solve. Anything greater would have been a distraction.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Little Four in all its craft and warmth.

I am a sucker for a certain type of terminal computer aesthetic. As a kid I enjoyed watching disk defrags in MS DOS 6.22. Nowadays I can’t help but be a little fascinated by every Docker image build or Linux boot diagnostic cascade. whoami uses this aesthetic to tell a story about a scientist at the end of the world who uses a quantum scanner to save their self digitally – mentally but not physically.

The Twine game is presented like a Linux system, which I’m very comfortable with. You could present the same system with a bespoke graphical interface which would help those not comfortable with Linux, but would miss out on that aesthetic. The actual interface is cut down to just what you need, although there are a bunch of contextual clues that someone unfamiliar with the interface might miss. For example, to unlock a capability you have to remove a bash comment marker.

It’s all done with mouse-clicks, but it straddles a tricky line of using the structure of bash, but interfacing it with dropdowns. I think that might be the best solution for a wider audience, but it can be alienating for the expert and non-expert alike.

The presentation in whoami is really great. It’s not just the terminal aesthetic, but does a very good impression of a Netscape Navigator-esque web browser, and some beautiful sciencey displays when you get into the puzzles. Some of it you could nitpick. For example, mixing a terminal CLI interface with cool, high-resolution mesh diagrams. But I didn’t care. It’s the vibe not the verisimilitude.

The writing is very pruned back, but I liked the occasional detail like finding your body on the cameras after the mind upload. I feel like it could have paid dividends if there was a little more investment into the world-building and exploration of, say, the social simulation used to calibrate the mind. As it is, you get the impression of these things but it is a bit hollow. Which is a shame because the presentation is so lovingly crafted.

Other reviewers have noted with a groan the Towers of Hanoi puzzle, and the Nick Bostrom reference. I appreciated the attempt to frame the Towers of Hanoi as a staging puzzle for a compilation, but yeah… At least it was only 4 rings. I was less worried about the Bostrom reference. It’s an apt thing to mention as texture given the themes of simulating minds.

I think n-n should be lauded for the technical aesthetic feat they pulled off here. I was hoping for something at least as meaty in the story, but acknowledge that would be an extra huge amount of work on top of an already substantial investment.

I thought the writing task of “you’re a rock” would be a tough one to get much mileage out of, but I was wrong. You find yourself cursed in the form of a rock, yet one that can talk. This is about the limit of your agency, but with time on your side, you can talk to passers-by and interact with their quirky lives.

The gameplay loop ends up fairly straightforward: wait for a random encounter with an NPC, talk to them to uncover their quest, and match NPCs up against one another to solve problems. If this was all it was, it’d be just okay. But I quite enjoyed the layers of discovery shining light on the many mysteries. What initially came across as goofy ended up having a meaning, or at least a puzzle to uncover. It’s not hard work, but it pays careful reading.

I found the writing delightful. Each character felt far from being cookie-cutter and all had a part to play in the overall setting. Solving problems for the characters unlocks one of twenty different endings, which is impressive given they are all fates for a sentient rock. Some of them had a gentle transcendence to them, even though the game doesn’t take itself too seriously.

I accrued about 15 of the endings when I accidentally hit a slow text reveal that was also a link. Clicking impatiently sealed my fate by choosing one fate as the canonical one. This was the only rough edge I felt in the game.

So while the game didn’t shake my understanding of the world, it was oddly a lot of fun to just sit, and be patient and observant.

On the tin, this looks to be a weird beast: a puzzly mix between Total Recall and The Hobbit. Now I’m the last person who should worry about weird genre mix-ups, so I gave it a go.

Would you believe this is my first Gruescript game I’ve ever played? I was delighted by the IF presentation, which is near-but-different to games like Monkey Island with the set of verbs and then objects to click. Here the objects tell you what commands you have available. I ascribed a bunch of the novelty to JD Bardi, but half goes to Gruescript. I want to see more using it!

JD wasn’t absent though - there’s clearly a lot of love poured into the game and its presentation. It’s nicely colourful and with many neat embellishments. However, I could tell that JD Bardi is a relative outsider to the IF Community. It’s the little tells --- the IF Comp blurb is long and a discussion rather than an attempt to woo a reviewer to play their game; the game is described as inspired by ZX Spectrum text games and point-and-click ones; there’s AI art even though that’s quite unpopular around the IF Comp-adjacent community; there’s an advertisement for the author’s web design job mid-game... These all felt a little awkward but were understandable.

I played the game and got stuck at the same place many others did ((Spoiler - click to show)the hospital). Unfortunately the comp blurb suggested that they had bug-tested the game and it was completable. The walkthrough peters out before this point, so perhaps it wasn’t able to be completed. An awkward mistake, fixed by the monkey patch suggested by the forum, or at least a bugfix release. I’ve been in the same position and it sucks.

There were a few elements in the game that I felt you get one free mistake, and every time thereafter is a bit of a ding. The less egregious one was the old trope of solving unmotivated puzzles blocking your progress. For example as you are trying to get ready and out of the house, you need to find your house keys. There’s a hedgehog who needs to be fed food scraps from a nearby bin, and once you do, you find your house keys. Weird puzzle, okay. But then soon after there’s a similar situation in the same location with a cat on the shed roof.

The element that put me off the most was the casual misogyny regarding the character’s wife. I could allow the looks-like-Andy-Capp’s-wife characterisation as a nod to the era, but there is a laundry list of little injustices the game lobs her way, for no real reason. The casual cruelty sucked a lot of energy from the otherwise fun presentation. I’d be happy with a growing progression of some earned animosity over the game — as a nod to Sharon Stone’s character in Total Recall — but that’s not what the game seems to worry about. As a result, it feels like a game not of modern times.

In the end, I got to play a bunch of a slice-of-life, limited puzzle game, but missed out on any deep Total Recall/Lord of the Rings content. I’m okay with the former, but was hoping for the latter.

I enjoyed the enthusiasm of the game and while I wouldn’t want to dampen that, I think it could have done with an external barometer of some testers, both for completion and tone. I hope to see more from JD Bardi.

I’ve never really been keen on Western courtly intrigue. There’s always been something blunt and stodgy about it, like a beef wellington of ideas. But the Eastern version, oh man, I am there with bells on. you are are an ancient chinese poet at the neo-orchid pavilion captures that style of Chinese political machinations really quite well. Different characters and factions are captured by a single but intricate philosophy. The court is sacred, yet everyone in it is in some way profane.

You are an unwitting poet dragged into the middle of the intrigue and have been tasked to speak the truth as an outsider and a wordsmith. Your explorations and responses to the philosophies of other people you meet prepare your mind for the task of creating a poem that will change the very fate of the kingdom.

This reminded me a bit of Imprimatura, although you are.. is more direct with regards to the gameplay loop, but more indirect in terms of the poetry/art. I enjoyed the poetry and it felt very in-theme and there were a few delicious plums of poetic lines throughout.

I got endings 5, 7, 8 and 16, and could tie the final story with the choices I made, although less so with the final poem. I feel like that’s on me, though, rather than the author. I did manage to get the elusive fifth line option once.

I loved the visual change of gradient and image with different scenes. It felt like a careful, evocative choice.

Throughout the piece are occasional anachronistic-sounding lines, which signal modern allegories and criticisms. For example, the cult of poets arranging themselves in a vast array in a polo field is a sly discussion about AI generation. In general, the writing was poetic yet down-to-earth --- a great embodiment of the protagonist.

I had minor troubles with the UI, but once you got the rhythm and standards for cyclic vs non-cyclic links, it was fine. I felt like the main text box could have been larger, but that was no big deal.

I’d like to see behind the scenes to know how the endings worked. 23 endings is curious to me as a mathematician, but maybe various options collapsed into one.

I quite enjoyed the game, although I may not be dedicated enough to find all 23 endings. The clockwise/counter-clockwise choice at the end seemed rather strong.

In Final Call, you play a down-on-your-luck con man. But unsympathetically so: you've seemingly ditched your partner Mike at a previous job, and your long-suffering girlfriend Roxy - aren't they all called Roxy? - is dragged through yet another mud puddle of your failure and she's had enough. I imagined a slimy but somehow likeable jerk like Worm from Rounders. Out of guilt or a chance at redemption, you've taken on one last job with Mike: a simple little trick to flog money from a casino. No problems.

Of course it's a trap and Mike has gotten his revenge. You wake up and your casino job has become something like a Saw movie. Abandoned buildings, cracked mirrors, mysterious corpses and a feeling that you're being watched.

I have to admit the setup was pretty obvious, which is A-okay for horror movies. It's a warmup for anticipating worse things. But the setup was drawn out. Several paragraphs said pretty much the same thing and there was quite a lot of tell, and not a lot of show, in the old writing parlance. Each character was sketched very loosely and you are given a chance to name yourself, but it doesn't pay off in any way that I could see.

The main horror gameplay involves exploring a thoroughly unsettling building to find some clues to type on a typewriter. Why? Not sure. Why is Mike and the casino dropping you in a place like this? Not sure. What do they get out of it? Not sure. If you were to be carved up by Jigsaw, they gave you a hell of a lot of latitude to just walk about. There were hand-waves towards a chilling message by the organizers, but it never really pays off.

Some of the bite-sized set pieces are dripping with atmosphere. The secret found on the body is properly chilling, for example. But others are just sorta creepy rooms with nothing more going on. You are encouraged to return to rooms, but this does something meaningful once, maybe once-and-a-half times.

There are a few instances where you can choose to do something different and get different information, but none of it is exceptionally enlightening. I managed to smash through the story in maybe 15 minutes and got to a "nice ending". But it was an ending like a dead end - it just kinda stopped. I played through again, doing things slightly differently and seeing different details, but nothing radical. I chose a completely different ending which attempted to explain the backstory for the creepy building, but didn't really.

In horror you want to dunk your audience into a deep vat of questions. Unsettling questions that they might not want answers to, but are driven towards. Final Call had all the aesthetics trappings of horror, but didn't quite fulfill it in gameplay or writing. With the same attention to atmosphere and perhaps a longer polish on the writing, future games from Emily and Zoe could do well at Ectocomp.