Reviews by BitterlyIndifferent

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Slugocalypse, by Charlotte Blatchford
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Giant Slug Attack, December 2, 2019

I enjoyed the fiction of Slugocalypse very much. It’s like an upbeat Day of the Triffids or a less gory Living Dead installment. It’s the end of the world, with slugs. It introduces you to an environment, introduces conflict into that environment, and then keeps things moving until the conflict is resolved.

I enjoyed this game’s presentation and interactivity, as well. It uses images and music, and I was quite happy to see a Twine game that hadn’t gone with the default white-text-on-black color scheme.

There are a few options for exploration in the game (and maybe this is a branch-and-bottleneck structure?) that allow you to carefully examine your environment for clues about the disaster or just run like hell and try to survive. In my playthroughs, there seemed to be far fewer jump scares than you’d experience in something like a Resident Evil game, and I appreciated that.

I didn’t need anywhere near an hour to get through it, although I only found two of the three endings

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Arram's Tomb, by James Beck
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Things you don't notice until they are absent., December 2, 2019

This entry reminded me of the little pain-in-the-ass details that are necessary to fix a game’s presentation. After you spend so much time actually writing your story, and then the effort of coding and testing the interactive components, it feels like going back to change up paragraph breaks and whatnot is one of the least useful things you can do.

Formatting is a tedious, thankless job, but it’s essential if you want an audience to connect with your work. I understand the author’s choice to cut that particular corner, but it undermined the final piece.

If you're willing to work through the presentation issues, it's a competent story about a group exploring a dungeon.

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The Legendary Hero Has Failed, by Tom Martin
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Kept at a distance, December 2, 2019

This game’s genre is “grieving fantasy,” but it’s a specific kind of grieving. Nobody has died yet. They’re all about to die, making it similar to being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

The character reactions all seemed plausible; they react differently to their collective death sentence.

This game is interactive, allowing you to change some things in the brief amount of time you have left. I was happy that the author pushed beyond Twine’s basic “choose your own adventure” functions to use a range of features that included images and text boxes prompting you for typed input.

The challenge is that the setting actively discouraged me from investing in the story. It was tough to care about people and places when I knew they would be destroyed, especially when the game has warned you that there’s not much time left. The time limit also discouraged me from exploring and trying to understand the different characters, or the nature of their friendship.

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The Milgram Parable, by Peter Eastman
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Spend less time telling me how I'm feeling, December 2, 2019

This game left me bristling with indignation, and I can't tell whether it was the subject matter or the way it was handled.

The fiction is competently executed. The writing is clear, and the author evokes specific themes and moral challenges without descending into bloated, over-wrought exercises in highly detailed tedium.

Interactively, it's a friendly gauntlet structure. The player has some agency to affect the story outside of key decision points that will always be used to set up specific dilemmas. And that's a great structure! It is often used to effectively provide interactive opportunities while confining a game's scope to a manageable size.

My major grumble is the way that The Milgram Parable works to present pairs of flawed options (or in one case, no options at all) before scolding the player's choice. It kept reminding me that I was in an exercise contrived someone else, reinforcing that the easiest way to win was by not playing. The repeated references to the Milgram experiment, and its concerns about justifying terrible things by "just following orders," undercut the idea of questioning my morality.

I especially resented the way that the game kept telling me how to feel. “What are you doing here? What have you gotten yourself into?” The game does not need to ask me these questions. Reading “You wish you knew more about what was going on” was irritating; there’s a subtle-but-important difference between me wishing I knew what was going on and the author telling me that I wish I knew more. Lines like these kept reinforcing the idea that me, the guy at the computer screen, was not the same person as the character in the adventure.

(Spoiler - click to show)I was exceptionally annoyed when I was told “You have no choice. Truly no choice at all,” after shooting the kid. I was quite aware that the choice was taken from me by the author, which circles back to my earlier point about this game spending too much time telling me how I was supposed to feel.

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Mental Entertainment, by Thomas Hvizdos
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Tell me more about yourself., December 2, 2019

I enjoyed the plausible and coherent fiction that held this game together. The environments were detailed and immersive, exploring three different realities that appeal to different characters. Each one is recognizable as “the kind of place you’d want to visit online,” but they have all been given enough description to prevent them from feeling washed-out and generic.

The game encourages you to talk with the characters to learn more about them and their motivations. Those conversations gradually reveal details about the world outside the simulation and why the characters have been flagged for being at risk of addiction.

In my opinion, the interactivity and the fiction worked well together. It gradually presented different parts of the story and allowed me to piece things together at my own pace. There’s no massive info-dump that screams “HERE IS THIS WORLD’S STORY.” Instead, you pick up on keywords and encourage the characters to provide more detail about those concepts.

If I was going to grumble, I’d say that it didn’t feel like I could *change* anything. I walked around, I looked at things, and I asked questions. And that was an appropriate stylistic choice! (Spoiler - click to show)All the characters were frustrated by the feeling that their actions in the "real world" couldn't make any lasting change. My powerlessness put me right there alongside them. And I questioned whether the assessor should actually be trying to change these characters — they might need to decide on their own that they have to change.

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Flygskam Simulator, by Katie Benson
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The events before the main event, December 2, 2019

This takes place in an environment that is familiar to anyone who has undertaken long-distance travel, especially across national borders. It’s the “adventure before your adventure,” looking at the things that happen in the space before a vacation starts.

I enjoyed the fiction because it was conversational and observant. It was like getting an email from a friend talking about their travel experience, or like writing that email to someone else.

It gets two thumbs up for interactivity. There’s a nice mix of cosmetic/immaterial choices alongside significant choices that trigger specific events. (Or maybe not? I played through the game a few times, and I’m not entirely sure I saw which choices linked with distinct outcomes.) (Spoiler - click to show)I made some conscientious-but-boring choices on my first playthrough, and I felt like my diligence was rewarded with a successful arrival in Hamburg. Things were much different on subsequent trips.

I was going to grumble, it would be that it was tricky for me to pick up the game’s full context without doing some additional research. The blurb establishes that I’m trying to ride the bus from London to Hamburg, but the opening of the game just drops me at the bus station and expects me to know what I want to do. I also needed to look up what Flygskam meant, because I missed that cultural conversation.

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Eye Contact, by Thomas McMullan
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
It had to be samosas., December 2, 2019

I read through Eye Contact pretty quickly, which was nice because I was able to zip through it several times to gain a full understanding of the story.

It recreates the experience of meeting up with a close friend who needs to vent. I thought that the story was skillfully delivered, realistically leading up to the part where you and your friend realize why she needs to vent.

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Iamb(ici), by Jo Lourdez
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A game about being online, December 2, 2019

It took me a shameful amount of time to recognize the wordplay in this entry’s title, but now I understand and I am here for it.

I did a quick playthrough as hoeforpoe and I thought it was a competent entry. The chat exchanges felt like real transcripts between people online. And they were applied sparingly; I appreciated that the game provided summaries of the discussions instead of trying to simulate lengthy poetry workshops.

On my second playthrough, I hit a blank screen and wondered whether I was doing it right — was there much interactivity in this story, and could I influence how it unfolded?

Then I opened up the walkthrough to see whether I had missed anything. OMFG, I did.

So, strong fiction, strong interactivity, and bonus points for adding interactive elements that played with the fourth wall. It was my own fault that I missed these features on my first two attempts.

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