Ratings and Reviews by autumnc

I think this was one of the more underrated games in its IFComp batch. The game is crawling with bugs, and contains some rather bizarre design choices, but I still enjoyed the game for what it was.

"A Final Grind" belongs to a similar genre as games like The Forgotten Tavern from its year, and The Cursèd Pickle of Shireton and Tavern Crawler from 2020. It contains dungeon-crawling RPG mechanics built in twine, and its story is a parody of typical RPG tropes.

I was surprised at how compelling I found it to be. Part of me wants to say that this game is the inverse of Undertale, but that would be only correct insofar that every game is the inverse of Undertale. It’s hard for me to describe what makes this interesting; perhaps all the grinding got me addicted. The quality of the writing was good throughout, especially given that this was gameplay-heavy.

The game has a sparse aesthetic, and takes place in a standard Dungeons and Dragons-style fantasy setting. The protagonist is an adventurer trapped in a mine, the last survivor of their party after a cave-in killed the rest. He is a death seeker for unspecified reasons, who wants to go down in a blaze of glory saving other people. The mine is the domain of monsters; they’re just living there peacefully, and you humans had the gall to invade their space, and when they attack in self-defense, you massacre them. Even more so, humans constantly “dehumanize” the monsters and treat them as an unintelligent, uncultured, indistinguishable mass, regardless of their reality. Eventually you have to kill their king. As you approach the king, the monsters are terrified of you and run away. I've never played the "genocide" route in Undertale, but it's familiar from what I've heard.

Much of the game involves mechanical combat, where you can choose to use attack, parry, or magic. Using the ‘parry’ action involves solving math problems randomly selected from a pre-written bank, from “5 + 5” to derivatives. The game says don’t use a calculator, but most of the problems were solvable in my head. Does using pencil and paper count as cheating? The only confusing part was that it required decimals instead of fractions. So I just used parry every time, so I never took any damage or exhaustion. Given how many random combat encounters there were, it got tiresome, but I memorized the answers.

Problem: I ran into a bug fairly early on. After visiting the foreman’s room and trying to break the safe, I was unable to continue - there was a “Continue” link, but it wasn’t clickable. After restarting, I worked around this by just skipping this room, and continuing onwards. Going back to that room after I got the key worked. There are also a bunch of other bugs in this game, mostly syntax errors with incomplete passages. Also literally the last line of the game is “Double-click this passage to edit it.” which is... surprisingly apt given the path leading up to it.

Like with a lot of Twine RPGs I’ve seen in IFComp, this game is not really “balanced” in any way. My level got ridiculously high, but it didn’t really mean anything. I never knew what exhaustion does because I only ever used parrying.

Translations of the goblin text:
(Spoiler - click to show)
Shrine:

MONSTERS HAVE BEEN DRIVEN FROM EVERY LAND

BUT GHIDORAH UNITED US INTO ONE TRIBE

WE PRAISE HIM, LORD OF THREE FIRES

MASTER OF THE WORLD BENEATH EARTH

MAY HIS REIGN BRING PEACE TO THE WORLD OF MONSTERS

AND IN HIM MAY WE FIND A HOME IN WHICH TO THRIVE

Password prompt:

WHO IS GHIDORAH, KING OF MONSTERS?

Final text:

I WISH IT COULD BE DIFFERENT, HUMAN

Superlunary is one of the coolest things I've seen in recent-ish twine. I love the look of the interface, the art, and the way different forms of interactivity are mixed. The story itself is pretty interesting; it takes place after a revolution that brought a government which seeks to end wars by destroying all remaining weapons. You play as a team of three people, led by a member of the disarmed military, who go around space trying to dismantle old weapons and help random people. Much of the story focuses on the team members' complicated relationships with each other, and their personal histories.

This game uses both the twine and bitsy systems. Bitsy is a simple game engine which basically allows for 2d walking simulators. Through bitsy, the game includes visually navigating around outer space and walking around a planet. In twine, the game includes clickable images, dialogue, and messages. Since apparently twine and bitsy don't share variables, the only way the content between the engines is shared is via passcodes provided in bitsy, which are then entered in the twine UI when they are learned by the player. I just thought it was pretty cool.

I don't know if it would work well from an accessibility standpoint though. Is bitsy usable with things like screen readers?

One complaint I have is that there isn't really much interactivity in the sense of making "meaningful choices". The dialogues are all click-to-advance, and the bitsy portions are basically linear corridors. The player choice basically consists of deciding which order to visit the planets. But I don't really mind as long as the story is interesting, which it is.

Anyway, this is apparently the first chapter of a hopefully greater story. I'm really looking forward to it.

So. Homestuck is a webcomic by Andrew Hussie that ran from 2009 to 2016, and is in some ways still ongoing. It was very interactive-fiction-inspired, for example with the page-advancing links in the format of parser commands, and text adventure-like descriptions of room objects. In addition, there are interactive segments in the comic. So it makes sense that there will be fanfiction of Homestuck written as IF (although this is a twine game, not a parser game, there are other parser homestuck fanfics). Among the relatively limited world of Homestuck fangames, this is one of my favorites.

This is a story taking place from the perspective of Jane Crocker, one of the main characters of Act 6 of Homestuck. She has just been mind-controlled by the Condesce, an insectoid fish alien who is the empress of the mostly extinct troll race and is also Betty Crocker, Jane's adoptive ancestor (it makes sense in context, sort of). Now, Jane serves the Condesce's will, doing her bidding in her plan to recreate the old troll empire. She's forced to hurt her friends and do stuff against her former interests.

The story is about Jane's existence under mind control. There are always multiple options on each screen, to try to get free or fight back, but clicking on any but the "correct" one, the options that commit harm and are forced by mind control, causes the screen to shake and flash red. Clicking on these links too much will cause Jane's brain to explode. "Denial of agency" and "player complicity" are pretty common techniques in IF, but I think this game works particularly well. Also I enjoyed the writing which captures the flavor of the darker side of the webcomic, while having its own distinct prose style.

I've started to wonder what would have happened if Hanako had stayed in the IF community rather than move to visual novels, and if Porpentine had moved to visual novels rather than twine. What if a twine version of LLtQ was submitted to IFComp 2012, and a visual novel version of Howling Dogs was published at Steam? How would the gaming world have changed?

The author apparently participated in the IF community in the early 2000s as Papillon, creating One Week among other games. One Week is a time management game with visual novel/dating sim-like mechanics, where the choice is of which action to perform each turn. LLtQ follows the same genre. The main choices involve time management: what to study each week, and where to spend your free time. There are also CYOA segments for major events. The ultimate goal here is to help Elodie (the titular queen) survive until her coronation, and hopefully become the kind of person who would be a good queen.

LLtQ is a difficult game. The "cruelty scale" doesn't really work for choice-based stories, but basically it is possible to die in a copious amount of locations, and there is no forewarning of death. There are unlimited save slots, but it is difficult to pinpoint the exact point at which your failure has become inevitable, and trying to avoid that failure could lead to a different fail state. Helpfully, the stat checks are explicitly given on both successes and failures.

LLtQ has a *lot* of stats, and a lot of little branches based on these stats. However, most stats will only be used a few times; some are only useful once (but that one time will save your life). The time-management gameplay is an optimization problem; how do you best allocate your training time so that you'll pass the key stat checks by certain events? Like in a lot of visual novels, it basically boils down to making a plan of which choices to make at which times, except there is a much larger space of choices than most choice-based games. This often requires replaying, which is encouraged by a fast-forward mechanism. By replaying, you learn the important moments where death is inevitable unless certain checks are met, the "bottleneck" part of the branch-and-bottleneck structure.

Oh yeah, there's also the art, writing, music, setting, etc. LLtQ is a visual novel with anime-esque artwork. The setting is basically a medieval fantasy with rather detailed worldbuilding around its history and politics. Most characters have hidden sides to them, but only some of them are plotting to murder you. There is a dating sim element where you can potentially find Elodie a partner, and there are a lot of interesting character moments that can be missed by not passing the relevant stat checks.