Reviews by Sobol

The PC is a yeast cell.
Who practices a religion.
And saves the Universe.
And the game takes place inside a large bottle.
And UP and DOWN are the only directions.
And the game's title is one of the very last words in English dictionaries.
What's not to like?

So, you have 7 moves to thwart an apocalypse. That's not much time, not enough to leave the building you are in. You explore the building for a very short while, learn something about the game world, then you die, and start anew; it resembles, for example, Rematch.

But, unlike Rematch, which is a parser game, Save the World in 7 Moves is choice-based. Therefore, you don't have to invent some complex and unobvious actions in order to win - all the options are explicitly given to you, and at first it seems that you can solve the puzzle by simple "lawnmowering": just go everywhere and try all the links - sooner or later you'll find the winning one, right?

Wrong. This game experiments with the choice-based format, uses a few rather unusual ways to conceal information from the player and makes you do things you rarely need to do in a Twine game.

Also, it's funny, light-hearted and somewhat absurdist.

I'd recommend (Spoiler - click to show)listening to The Song right after you finish playing.

1) The puzzle is neither too easy nor too hard. You can beat the game in several minutes - but it gives you a surprising amount of satisfaction for such a short playtime.

2) The sequence puzzle perfectly fits the choice-based format. When all the options are laid out openly in front of the player and they don't have to guess the right actions - how can you make the player think, create the element of surprise? By making them guess the right sequence of the given actions, of course.

3) The choice-based format perfectly fits the xenobiology puzzle. Imagine if you had to type commands you need here - like DISENGAGE CREMASTRAL HOOK - again and again in a parser game; Twine mercifully lets us just click the links.

4) The game gives you interesting feedback when you do things in a wrong order. There are 7 different ways to kill a pharate; there are 94 losing paths through every game cycle and only one way to win. But when your plan goes south, you always learn something new and put together a new plan in the light of fresh information.

5) The game's horrific nature is not just for the sake of horror. It suits another purpose: the creatures are so monstrous, evil and repulsive that the player isn't likely to feel sympathy and get attached; so they can experiment freely and sacrifice as many pharates as they like while trying to understand the logic of the puzzle.

6) It's well-written. Laconic phrases and preteritions let the player's imagination run wild; that's one of the strengths of interactive fiction, an effect which is hard to achieve in a graphic game.

Black Rock City gave me the same relaxed feeling as did Beautiful Dreamer by S. Woodson.

The PC doesn't have any clear goals, they just have some time to spend at Burning Man festival before a dust storm hits. There are no right or wrong choices, no pressure; you explore different branches of the game, learn things about the bizarre city and its inhabitants, feel free to try even ill-advised actions like (Spoiler - click to show)jumping from a flying carpet.

The game has 2^6=64 endings and a considerable variety of possible actions across the branches; in addition to standard adventure verbs like "examine", "talk to" and "kiss", sometimes you can choose "believe", "sass", "admire", etc.

Currently the biggest, most complex and most polished game by the author, Superluminal Vagrant Twin is a space trading simulator - an old and noble genre including such classics as Elite, but tragically underrepresented in IF until now. There's a huge universe waiting for you to explore with lots of different planets to visit, people to meet, goods to buy and sell, side quests to complete.

You can rush through the main plot fairly quickly, but there are many other things to discover (even after getting all the achievements) - which I naturally won't spoil here. And, of course, rushing through this game would be completely missing the point, because the best part of it is not making the money but savoring the wonderful descriptions - terse and colorful, poetic without being pretentious; closing your eyes and trying to visualize all the various worlds you travel to (Spoiler - click to show) (there were 53 of them in the beta version I played).

My favorite character was the deep space explorer on Splinter. I instantly imagined Ursula K. Le Guin.

Far less known than its namesake from the same SpeedIF competition, this easy one-puzzle game may still prove a pleasant bite-sized diversion. The way the PC moves through the game world is of a particular interest; and "ASCII" of the title plays here a somewhat bigger role than in the game by J. Robinson Wheeler.

After figuring out how to win, for an additional challenge, try to win in as few moves as possible. I managed to find a solution in 42 moves; I wonder if there's a shorter one.

A peculiar and amusing approach to the Twiny Jam constraints.

The game has a relatively substantial story set in a vivid futuristic world - but tries to tell it in as few words as possible. Believe it or not, it has 11 different endings (see: time cave structure).

Like all games by this author, it's well-planned and well-written - but, first and foremost, it's just fun. You always wanted to be a member of a jetbike gang, didn't you?

Worth the (extremely short) time it takes to play it.

Ka is a puzzle game; as the other reviewers pointed out, its overall aesthetics are quite close to some works by Andrew Plotkin.

And the puzzles are good. The last one felt particularly satisfying: "Oh my, a riddle. What the answer could be? Is it some common and well-known thing? Something specific to Ancient Egypt?.." - and then it dawned on me. (Spoiler - click to show)Kudos to the monster for not eating me up after the first wrong guess - like the Greek Sphinx used to do.

But the best thing about playing Ka is not the puzzle-solving, but the mood - and in this aspect, I think, it sometimes even out-Plotkins Plotkin. The familiar feeling of solemn loneliness, being surrounded by indifferent mechanisms, the calm and melancholy dream-like atmosphere - are mixed with a strong sense of transition, of leaving everything behind, untying all the bonds, abandoning your past and your earthly possessions which don't matter anymore; standing on a threshold of some new spiritual life.

We don't get to see this new life of the protagonist: that's left to our imagination. But we get a wonderful finale, in which, for one move only, the soul gets to interact with non-mechanical characters - and is no more alone. A short glimpse of divinity; making it longer would have marred the experience.

There are many interesting details along the way. The rhymed sestains are well-written and in the general vein of spells from the real Egyptian funerary texts; and typing >WEST in this game always feels special because of the symbolic significance of the West in Egyptian religion.

Weird City Interloper is a fairly small conversation-based game.

Perhaps "conversation-based" is an understatement: there is literally nothing but conversation here. No conventional IF narrator telling you what is there, and how it looks like, and what is happening: only the direct speech of the NPCs. No "examine", or "inventory", or "go north": all you can do is talk.

And yet there is wonderful scenery in the game, and eventful journeys through the strange and colorful city of Zendon, and exciting adventures. Playing it reminded me of Elizabethan drama: no stage sets in the theater, almost no stage directions in the text; and then somebody says something like "But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, / Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill" - and you get the picture.

Above all, the game has vivid and memorable NPCs. I think even Gun Mute, another work by Pacian with a magnificent NPC cast, in this respect pales before Weird City Interloper. Each one of the fantastical and amusing characters would be enough to make a whole game centered on them. You could write an entertaining game about Lissa Ratdaughter, our trusty streetwise guide - and I would definitely play such a game, because I found Lissa interesting. You could write a nice game about Zook Spiralhouse, an innkeeper (who also happens to be a gigantic snail), charming in her grandmotherly way. And here there are not one or two, but a dozen of them - funny, mysterious, grotesque, different, each with their own unique voice and world-view.

There are no difficult puzzles (I don't think anyone can get truly stuck in this game, even without hints from (Spoiler - click to show)the rat queen) - just exploring, going through different topics of conversation, discovering things about the city and yourself; "lawnmowering", if you wish to call it such. But I never thought "lawnmowering" could be so enjoyable.

Half-humorous, half-sad, half-fiction, half-autobiography, half-silly, half-serious, half-trivial, half-profound; hard to categorize, hard to point what exactly makes this little game so good. Sincerity, perhaps.

A must-play for those interested in LGBT themes in IF (and especially for teens considering coming out to their parents), Coming Out Simulator 2014 also touches a lot of other topics: art as a mode of communication, truth and lies... The author's approach to interactivity is quite clever; the characters do remember everything you say, and the game cunningly traps you in more and more awkward situations.