Reviews by Ivanr

An anthology of spooktacular short games, with charming interstitial material. Some classic Veeder themes are revisited - the (Spoiler - click to show)twist in (Spoiler - click to show)the last game is a gimmick first explored in (Spoiler - click to show)Craverly Heights, frex - but that is not a downside. This collection felt much meatier than the first Tales from Castle Balderstone, although that may be simply because I had adjusted my expectations.

Light in difficulty, if not always in content (although never shocking or mean), I found this a delightful hallowe'en feast.

"No Sign Should Remain Inert" has a great title and some interesting writing, but it's hobbled by a stilted vocabulary (I suspect that English is not the author's first language) and a somewhat abstract and hackneyed premise (amnesia, paralysis, some sort of implied abduction(?)).

The game comes with an elaborate map, which suggests that there's more to the game than what I experienced (I couldn't really get past what I guess is the first couple puzzles; in particular, I can't figure out how to (Spoiler - click to show)get out of the bed, even applying all the obvious verbs to everything I can find). However, it's pretty unclear how to proceed, and the general hints provided were not enough for me to figure out how to make progress.

This has the feel of a first game, and I want to applaud the author's enthusiasm and express my wish to see more from them, especially if they're able to connect with a good editor of native fluency.

Also, if anybody knows or can figure out how to get past that first section, let me know, since I'd be curious to see the rest of the game.

I generally have a policy of not rating or reviewing games that I haven't played to completion (and worse yet, this game famously has a big Twist Ending of which I am totally unaware), but Sub Rosa is so difficult and yet so enjoyable that I feel compelled to break my policy, so that I don't have to wait until 2050 or whatever to express my appreciation for its writing and worldbuilding.

Because those are really this game's main strengths. When I first played Sub Rosa during the 2015 comp, and got about a room and a half in, I was practically buzzing with joy at how fun, how original this game is. A couple years later, I've calmed down a little, but it's still an absolute joy. As others have mentioned, the library is a particular highlight, but really there's great stuff all over.

However, it is an old-school hard if-puzzle game. I keep losing my save files, not because of any extraordinary technical issues but just because I'm not used to sticking this long with a game that makes you save. Normally I give up on puzzle games pretty quick, but I like the writing in Sub Rosa enough to stick around.

I do wish that the walkthrough was a little bit more comfortably spaced, or that there was a more robust in-game hint system, so that I didn't have to deploy cat-like reflexes to avoid spoiling half the game when I just wanted to get unstuck from one puzzle.

Anyway, excellent game, good enough to convince me to bend my typical preferences and practices in order to stick with it. Like For A Change, this is worth playing even if you're not really an old-school IF type. I'm certainly not, and I'm enjoying it anyway.

Overall, "An Evening at the Ransom Woodingdean Museum House" is a very effectively spooky ghost story, which deftly builds up suspense and manages a delicate atmosphere.

Uncharacteristically for Veeder, the map is a little bit hard to navigate, especially outdoors, and I thought that (Spoiler - click to show)getting back into the cupola from outside was seriously underclued; it wasn't even clear to me what I was supposed to be doing at that point, and I had to really run down the clues.

Worse, right at the climactic ending of the game, the author sees fit to suddenly insert a really direct explanation of the game's themes into the narration, totally killing both atmosphere and subtlety. It's like dropping a grand piano on us labeled "HERE'S THE SUBTEXT BY THE WAY, IN CASE YOU MISSED IT". This is especially puzzling since the game deploys and refers to a lot of traditional elements of Gothic literature, which sets us up to expect some more sophisticated handling of these well-worn themes, or at least not to expect them to be hollered explicitly at us. Oh well.

Also, for the "tricks that only work once" file, this games makes freakily effective use of (Spoiler - click to show)deceptively pretending to undo. This mechanical trick fits perfectly with the game's spooky atmosphere.

So, a good campfire story, although with some avoidable hitches. Worth a play.

I'm normally not a fan of toughie puzzle games at all, but "The Lurkening" managed to draw me in, and had me keeping a notes file and drawing increasingly elaborate maps on notebook paper as I struggled to map out the final steps of the solution. What fun!

Ryan Veeder's characteristic light touch of cleverness suits this game perfectly, making the map pleasurable to traverse again and again; there were even a few genuine laugh moments, like when (Spoiler - click to show)the grimoire in the department head's office turned out to be in Swedish.

For what it is, this is practically the perfect game, and it's just the right length for a fun hour or so of play.

This game is in a style that I usually really enjoy, and I thought the main puzzle mechanic was really neat, but for some reason I started to find it kind of a chore after a while. Aside from one or two fairly ingenious ones (particularly (Spoiler - click to show)getting into your twin's apartment), the puzzles tended to require something like extensive brute force, and unfortunately, as a result of how the puzzle mechanic works, brute forcing things becomes very time-consuming (a silly cheat code can speed things up a little, but you're still just trying the same operation on a bunch of objects and trying to do random things to them to get things to progress).

Again apart from one good one, the puzzles are all totally unmotivated object manipulation, and the plot just progresses seemingly randomly whenever you complete one of them. After a while it was pretty dispiriting and I just read the second half of the ClubFloyd transcript rather than go through the motions of finishing the thing myself. (I had to resort to this "walkthrough" relatively early, because in my infinite ingenuity I (Spoiler - click to show)pushed the dummy all the way into my apartment before ever setting foot in the neighbor's yard, thereby making it virtually impossible for me to discover the game's central mechanic. This is not the author's fault, since I did something really weird for no reason after cluelessly missing a room that most people probably discover right away. Still, once I had the "walkthrough" I felt somewhat less motivated to complete the game.)

I am still giving this game three stars, however, because in the end there are a lot of things I like about it: The central mechanic, although it was mainly used in service of tedious puzzles, was a joy in itself and pretty fun to play around with for a while. One of the puzzles was very thematic and clever, and funny, a rare combination in any game. And the extensive janus-face symbolism in the first room -- (Spoiler - click to show)Benjamin Harrison and Nostradamus as metaphysical, liminal figures, the past and the future, the two Clevelands, the two Johns on the poster, playing hangman with yourself -- was the most fun I've had examining scenery in forever.

The writing was very shrewd and funny. The ending was thought-provoking and the whole thing had a kind of surreal, Veeder-esque tinge. It's a pity that large parts of it weren't that fun to play.

...but based on the ABOUT text, probably the former.

Not much else to say. I'm glad it exists.

I haven't played enough of this game to give it a star rating, so I won't, but I wanted to use this space to ruminate a little bit on the design idea(s) behind this game -- what the ancients called "IF theory", I believe.

The idea behind "Hard Puzzle", as far as I can tell, is to generate both horror and puzzle difficulty through an atmosphere of absolute uncertainty. While the actual prose attempts at Horrifying Detail ((Spoiler - click to show)like your skin sloughing off or whatever) struck me as pretty hackneyed, you'd be shocked at how spooky it can be to have no idea how many objects are in the room, for example. The author has deliberately omitted a lot of the helpful or clarifying responses that modern Inform games typically have, and the result is something like having your eyes stricken out. Actions that provoke no response text can dramatically change what objects are available or the structure of the location. Some things are implemented in lazy ways that produce unintuitive behavior, and (maybe?) some things are implemented in a way that's designed to look like a lazy shortcut, but behaves very differently under special circumstances.

This is very spooky. The very obtuseness and inconsistency of the interaction is carefully crafted to create a sense of disorientation and dread, as you're always unsure even what *kind* of thing might happen in response to certain actions. The tone of the worldbuilding confirms that this kind of existential spookiness is the goal (even though I didn't think the worldbuilding itself was very effective at achieving that effect).

This is really interesting, and like a lot of IF experiments one of the principal questions it raises is whether this kind of thing is at all repeatable, or whether it's more of an "only works once" kind of thing (as people say of "Deadline Enchanter", say, or the (Spoiler - click to show)PC-protagonist-parser stuff in "Slouching Towards Bedlam". Certainly, I think that the effectiveness of a disorienting interface at this extreme level of minimalism is kind of a "works once" thing. But I think that, if you telegraphed correctly when it was starting, you could have (say) a spooky funhouse room in a larger game where things obey different metaphysical rules that are only conveyed to you very obtusely, by unreported changes to the world model that you have to discover accidentally or systematically (like through the use of "take all"), building towards a larger sense of horror. I think there are a lot of possibilities for this kind of thing, since there are a lot of bizarre facts about a world or location or power that a parser could strategically fail to remark upon.

One example that comes to mind of this kind of technique being employed effectively on a small scale was the game "Dinner Bell", where (famously?) (Spoiler - click to show)the PC's profound physical mutilation is only mentioned in one error message, that many players probably never see at all. Hard Puzzle is like an entire game that's trying to be scary in that way, and I think it's an interesting and clever experiment. Since I'm not much of a puzzle buff and don't have ERR:NaN hours on my hands, I'll probably never finish it, but I thought it was interesting.

The title of this review sums up roughly 90% of what I have to say about Open Up!; it's a particularly cute and satisfying coda to Birdland. Of course, I could say something about how the characters in Birdland are sufficiently well-executed that it would make me happy that they are happy; but that would really be the domain of a review of Birdland. Play this after playing that one, of course.

In sum: Cute!

...I mean that kindly! Most parser comp entries these days are notably "new school" or newer, but How to Win at Rock Paper Scissors is of some other, earlier school which I will not pretend to taxonomize, since our periodizations seem to change constantly.

What I'm trying to say is. How to Win at Rock Paper Scissors is a fun and funny chilled-out get-X-use-X jaunt, with various lock-and-key puzzles that involve some clever lateral thinking and some notably uninteractive NPCs. It's a relaxing style of game, good for a lunch break, rarely seen in the wild these days. Like its 2007 counterparts, HTWARPS is a little unpolished, but it doesn't much affect one's enjoyment, and the clever error messages are of the more amusing kind.

So, nothing hugely substantial, but good fun. I'm glad that such things are still being made.