Ratings and Reviews by BitterlyIndifferent
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Choice-based exploration of a novel fantasy environment, March 31, 2024The author’s note describes this as a chill game that players are meant to enjoy at their own pace. The implementation supports that experience. (Misty Hills also received an audience award for being the “most relaxing” Spring Thing entry.)
The player is returning home after completing a quest off camera, and a clock on the side of the screen tracks the time while they wait for the next tram.
I enjoyed how Misty Hills provided a low-stakes opportunity to explore a fantasy environment that was engaging mix of the familiar and the magical. Although I wanted to catch the next tram, it didn’t feel like a life-or-death challenge that determined the fate of the world.
I also appreciated how there weren’t any unpleasant surprises or unfair traps. These structures have been described as confirmation-required choices — you might end up missing the tram, but it will be the result of deliberate decisions that you made while exploring.
Misty Hills is an inviting, complicated world that holds the potential for (mis-)adventure without antagonism.
A few puzzles in a small, well-implemented environment, March 31, 2024The strength of this work comes from its simplicity. Descriptive details add depth without confusing or distracting from the major challenges.
This story establishes its stakes immediately — the early text and graphics show what will happen if you miss the Day Train. It quickly transitions into the game’s main environment, which is serene and natural, but the introductory sequence adds a feeling of tension that keeps things moving.
Although the train platform is only a short distance away from the player’s starting point, not much time is left before the train departs. The countdown felt like it was managed effectively, leaving me with just enough time to work through challenges while still feeling like it would be a close call.
Playful thievery, February 11, 2024This is an intricate heist story where the player navigates branch-and-bottleneck structures to conduct a series of thefts. Strong writing supports the narrative while disguising the code running behind the scenes, and it feels like there are multiple ways to achieve your objectives.
Most of the player’s time is spent Getting People to Do What You Want — the main character flinches at describing it with a crass term like “manipulation.” It feels like a combat system for conversation (Convat? Combersation?), and success reveals useful information. In the evenings, that information helps the next heist run smoothly.
Lady Thalia is confronted with a few puzzles during her adventures, but players who find them too difficult can use alternate solutions. I especially liked the scoring mechanism, which is embedded in playful banter between friends.
Additional excitement comes from the interactions with Thalia’s nemesis, a consultant with Scotland Yard.
The overall enjoyment of this work is going to depend on personal preference; I may not be the world’s biggest fan of cucumber sandwiches, high tea, or drawing room repartee. However, those sequences were nicely offset by nighttime skullduggery and daring escapes from the law.
Atmospheric exploration in a responsive environment, February 11, 2024Foreign Soil starts strong, with effective writing that clearly establishes the main character’s situation and how they feel about it. Narrative details provide hints about a backstory, and environmental threats offer a sense of danger.
A substantial part of the gameplay involves figuring out what to do next, which makes it tricky to discuss Foreign Soil in a way that doesn’t ruin the experience. I liked how the environment changed around me, creating new locations and updating descriptions as various objectives were completed.
I also appreciated how in-game deaths were handled — the setting is supposed to be harsh and unforgiving, so it needs to show appropriate consequences for risky decisions. The game struck a nice balance that encouraged experimentation while showing how dumb choices will get you killed.
Unfortunately, I got stuck in the middle of the story because I wasn’t willing to take enough risk. I knew where I was supposed to advance the story, but I was reluctant to try different commands that might move things along. After overcoming that hurdle, things flowed logically through the endgame.
Foreign Soil was fun, and my only complaint is that I wish it was a longer experience.
I chose to take this entry at face value: a sweet collaboration where an 8-year-old’s work of interactive fiction has been implemented by a skilled programmer.
Emily Short described this approach to game development as writing the through-line first, starting with an ideal walkthrough and then building out a larger experience from there. Daddy’s Birthday includes an extra feature that lets people read the original walkthrough to see what the writer had in mind.
It’s interesting to see the mainstays of interactive fiction interpreted by a younger author. While there are familiar mechanics at work, some design choices have gone in novel directions. (The house is laid out along diagonals, with most of the passages heading northwest and southeast.)
Some of the writing is understandably awkward — one description says “A few rooms go different directions, but you decide to go down the stairs” when a different phrase might have worked better — but that’s largely because the implementation remained faithful to the source material.
The complete project feels like a thoughtfully negotiated compromise. It’s an interactive experience that maintains the spirit of its original ideas, and I hope that the creators continue to build on those ideas to explore new frontiers in game design.
Short and enjoyable, January 6, 2024This choice-based work is beautiful.
Maybe it’s not technically beautiful — MGIAF uses Twine’s basic Sugarcube format with default font colors — but I really enjoyed the writing. Your gender gets stolen by a magpie, and you make a sequence of choices on the path to reclaim it. Each playthrough sees the same choices, but the story is short and the text changes enough to make it worth playing more than once.
I'm reluctant to call My Gender Is a Fish an allegory. For one thing, it doesn’t take itself seriously. Also, I’ve never clearly understood what makes an allegory. But that word feels like a good fit for this entry's affirmative message about being okay with ambiguity.
My Gender Is a Fish asks thoughtful questions and makes sharp comparisons: How much of your life is tied to your gender identity, and what would you do without it?
Difficult to access, but maybe that was intentional?, January 6, 2024I had difficulty engaging with this work because of implementation issues. The pale gray text was difficult to read, most of the passages included spelling errors, and then it ended abruptly. (Right after I asked to be pointed to my room, everything stopped.)
The Daughter’s blurb makes it sound like The Children of Men meets The Eyes of Heisenberg, but its focus was uneven — some details were described exhaustively while other information felt like it was missing. This might have been translated from another language, which could explain some of its unusual phrasing and descriptions.
If not, there were some bold style choices that failed to resonate with me.
Overall, I couldn’t find enough relatable context to understand the forces at work in The Daughter’s far-future setting. Yes, there were some jokes about the broken culture of the twenty-first century, like our fixation on true crime podcasts, but they were used to emphasize differences, not to build empathy.
The Daughter might be waiting to be discovered by the right audience, but at the moment I think it could be improved with more thoughtful editorial decisions.
Fun for two people, probably tricky to implement, January 6, 2024This entry is meant to be explored by two players who communicate with each other outside of the story. The strong characterization of each role (the Dictator and the General) sets a different tone for each perspective, offering vastly divergent interpretations from the same sequence of events.
It’s also a very lopsided experience. One player starts from a position of strength, and the other gets the rough end of the pineapple. If that was meant to be an intentional message about different types of government and their relative strengths in a crisis, I ignored it.
I was entertained by this work's descriptive writing and the historical depth of its setting.
I was also fascinated by the unfolding meta-game in Last Night of Alexisgrad, which asks whether the player/reader wants to consider their own motives and the motives of their partner as something separate from their respective characters. It was tough to avoid sharing my reactions while the story unfolded.
However, I felt much more distant from the story during the direct interactions between General and Dictator. As the players pass messages outside the game, their impassioned arguments and pleas for mercy get reduced to flat combinations of letters and numbers.
This entry was fun, and I can only imagine the work that was necessary to correctly implement different branches of the narrative while keeping them hidden from half the audience — the hard work paid off!
Declaring that there are no new ideas feels simultaneously correct and tedious, December 16, 2023Smart Theory encounters a common problem in game design: How do you simulate an unpleasant experience without driving away your audience?
The previous year's IFComp entries included Savor, which described repeated, excruciating pain, and Accelerate, which expected you to actively participate in atrocities. Smart Theory is following a similar path by asking you to endure a training session that blends all the worst aspects of motivational seminars and religious cults.
The writing is smoothly implemented and effective. It was fun to see how the “first rule” of Smart Theory was applied in the story. This entry works as a kind of power fantasy — you can mock transparent nonsense and criticize sloppy thinking.
However, the whole thing felt too plausible. A shamelessly inflated sense of self-importance is part of every management training course; they all discuss overpriced-but-revolutionary new paradigms. Attempting to debunk their transparent nonsense is just as futile inside Smart Theory as it is in the real world.
If you view it without irony, Smart Theory is interchangeable with a lot of the overpriced self-help literature that currently exists. That can be read as a declaration that there are no new ideas in this space, but it feels simultaneously correct and tedious.
An ambitious work with implementation issues, December 16, 2023I loved the premise of this game — it puts you in a short, repeatable scenario as an accretive PC (something similar was used for The Copyright of Silence in the previous year's IFComp), and you use your knowledge to make predictions as a fortune teller.
After three runs through Unfortunate, you have enough information for completely accurate predictions. It poses an interesting question: should you predict misfortune and then passively watch it unfold? Or do you want to take action for more positive results?
Unfortunate is an ambitious work, and that ambition may have created some implementation issues. I played the IFComp version, which had exits that became inaccessible and descriptions that referenced non-existent objects. And I couldn’t predict misfortune and passively watch the results, because two characters completely disappeared from the game.
I would have appreciated it if Unfortunate set out its initial expectations more clearly; I approach puzzles differently when it’s clear that they’ll be a repeating sequence. This entry was fun, but more playtesting would have improved the experience.
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