Reviews by Sobol

Besides being amusing, absorbing, excellently written, cozy and generally making you warm inside, the games by S. Woodson also demonstrate an interesting approach to branching in an interactive story.

There's a sort of contradiction in choice-based puzzleless IF. On one hand, linearity is usually considered a drawback; most players want to feel that their choices really matter and substantially affect what happens, want the game to be truly interactive. On the other hand, in a significantly branching story the player will only see a small part of what's written by the author, can easily miss the best bits; the ratio of the player's enjoyment to the author's labor is low.

It would be great to make the players restart the game and explore all the various plot paths; but motivating them to replay many times and read different variations of the same story requires some serious stimulation.

In the games by S. Woodson - this one, ♥Magical Makover♥ and Beautiful Dreamer - different story branches entwine and interact with each other to form a kind of higher unity; some paths throw light on enigmatic elements of the other paths, make you see your previous game sessions in a new way - and even revisit them because, as it turns out, you didn't pay proper attention to something curious. They are all different elements of the same picture, and you want to see the picture whole.

(Narcolepsy by Adam Cadre utilized the same idea, though less effectively: the crazy guy in the university plaza always gives you hints referring to other storylines.)

In both ♥Magical Makover♥ and Beautiful Dreamer, there's one "main" branch - the one which is central to the picture and which the player is most likely to find first.

In ♥Magical Makover♥, it's the one featured on the cover art - the only one where the protagonist's initial goal is reached. If, say, the player tries three different random products on their first playthrough, they get this branch with the probability of 60%.

In Beautiful Dreamer, it's talking to Cephiros about the moth - which has the highest priority among all the topics the protagonist may discover.

Get Lost!, which is much smaller than the former two games, lacks the "main" branch: all the paths are of equal importance.

A curious mix of Russian folklore and American humor. Being a Russian, I was delighted to see familiar fairytale motives and phrases like "speedily a tale is spun, with much less speed a deed is done" (скоро сказка сказывается, да не скоро дело делается), "are you here to shirk a task or to find one?" (дела пытаешь аль от дела лытаешь?), "three times nine" (тридевять), etc.

The game is rather old-school - even for 1998. The world is sparingly implemented, there are some minor guess-the-verb moments - but it's funny and light-hearted, the puzzles aren't hard, there are multiple solutions (be sure to check the AMUSING section), and the "good" ending really has a naïve fairytale charm (while the "evil" ending - the one where you (Spoiler - click to show)side with Katschei the Deathless - is, um...). There's a big maze in the game - but you won't need mapping it.

P. S. I was able to kiss almost everyone from the bear to Baba Yaga without anybody protesting. Well, I suppose being a prince has its benefits.

A series of scenes from the life of an opera performer (or a backstager, if you choose so) in an alternate reality version of the XIX century where doing opera is traditionally a female occupation - like in Shakespeare's time acting was a male-only profession.

I didn't find the overarching story about your theater's relations with the authorities really exciting, but the writing, the atmosphere and the richness of detail were good; the city of Tristendesande felt alive and interesting.

On the whole, the game was rather relaxing. There are some things at stake for the PC - your performances may prove more or less successful, the Opera may even be closed down - but you mainly go around eating delicious and well-described food, wearing elegant and well-described clothes, riding in carriages, singing in aristocratic salons, talking with mostly pleasant characters (there are no "villains" here, although there are conflicts of interests), casually seducing people and generally having a good time.

Since prehistoric times, people loved anthropomorphic animals; one of the reasons is a huge potential for generalization.

When watching movie actors with certain facial features, hair color, skin color, this human concreteness of detail somewhat impedes seeing in them our friends, our relatives, ourselves - and, thereby, somewhat hinders our understanding of universal things the movie is trying to say. But Judy Hopps, an anthropomorphic rabbit, looks like many and many different young girls from different parts of the world.

Aesop's fables are always about humans - but not about specific humans. Even when they feature human characters, those are always extremely abstract figures with minimum individuality: "a shepherd", "a fisher".

House of Wolves is a very short game about a young human who is being raised by eponymous talking canines. The wolves fit here especially well: on one hand, they're dangerous predators, long feared and associated with cruelty; on the other hand, there are many stories of wolves adopting human children. And they are similar to dogs, so familiar to us and so capable of loving us... in their own way.

I personally find wolves wonderful and beautiful creatures, but it doesn't really matter in this game - because, in truth, it's not about wolves at all. It's about humans, just like an Aesop's fable. About parents abusing their children and trying to shape them into something they could never be. There are many ways to understand it; you can read it as a fable about being transgender, or about being vegetarian, or about many and many other things. There's a huge potential for generalization.

The story mechanics is of a particular interest. (Major spoilers follow.)

(Spoiler - click to show)The game gives you an illusion of choice and then takes it from you. It's a technique used in several classical games such as Rameses. Although it may seem to make a story resemble static fiction, it's actually a powerful twist that only IF can manage. Never having freedom of choice from the start and having freedom forcefully taken away are two completely different experiences.

"The Little Match Girl 5: The Hunter's Vow" is the tenth game about the titular Match Girl overall. Being familiar with the previous nine, I correctly expected it to be smooth, pleasant, gripping, and take me to some more interesting times and places.

What I didn't expect is to be genuinely surprised. Come on: it's the tenth game on the same subject.

It surprised me. Then again. And again.

P. S. "Goroshinka" means "Little Pea" in Russian. That's another Andersen reference.

A small, silly parody of Suspended where you turn dials and observe, via monitors, how your settings affect the planet.

I think Admiral Jota's SpeedIF output is worth serious scrutiny for those who want to learn making very short but entertaining parser games. Being so brief and written under strict time constraints, his SpeedIFs don't offer deep stories, complex game worlds or clever puzzles; and yet they are fun to interact with.

If you liked young detective games by Brendan Patrick Hennessy and Felicity Drake, you should probably also try Sixth Grade Detective. It's in the same genre, but with younger characters: the children are around 11 years old, and reading about their fluffy crushes is as sweet as watching Chico and Roberta dance. The mysteries you investigate are accordingly tamer - like finding a missing book in the second episode.

The characters are likeable and have some curious hidden depths; I was particularly surprised by Kyle, the leader of the bullies. And the fifth "case" was really heart-warming.

A concise, effective story with a couple of twists and interesting narrative mechanics akin to Common Ground.

It wouldn't work as static fiction. The player has to make choices without having full information and not knowing what to expect next - this experience is important in presenting the character of Nora Curtis. The plot structure doesn't just serve to tell a punchy zombie apocalypse tale; States of Awareness is also about personal relationships, and our current pandemic, and other things.

On my first playthrough, I got the most positive ending - but didn't realize it was the best for the characters until I replayed the game.

Those planning to participate in the recently announced Emily Short Anniversary Contest might be interested in this 2001 mini-tribute - a SpeedIF by Admiral Jota. Emily is the villain of the game, disrupting the XYZZY Awards ceremony. There's a reference to Metamorphoses and some other in-jokes.

In reality, the next ceremony went without incidents (you can read the transcript here); Emily won the Best NPCs XYZZY for her Pytho's Mask.

I had a dream based on Grimnoir after playing it. Don't really know what made this game so engaging; I guess it's just an interesting story, deliberately filled with recognizable clichés but humane and absorbing. It would make a good TV series.

After exploring and interviewing witnesses, at the end of each chapter you are faced with a diagnostic puzzle (in the vein of When in Rome). These puzzles make you read the previous text carefully, searching for clues, and not just skim through the links - which, of course, adds to the experience and makes the game world more vivid in your imagination. The bestiary guidebook you are given is well-researched and, in addition to unavoidable vampires and basilisks, features some rather unusual monsters; I was pleased to see it starting with Alkonost, a lesser-known creature from Russian folklore.

The owners of the house are gone; they will not return. But the housekeeping robot still continues to clean dust, make food for them, trim their lawn... Sounds familiar? Yes, the melancholic first part of the game is basically Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains. But then the author takes the premise in a new direction.

They Will Not Return is a short science fiction story in the classical spirit: you should play it if you like Bradbury and Asimov. It's the third game by John Ayliff that features an AI protagonist; and his AIs are wonderful - not too humanlike, not too machinelike, touching and sympathetic. (When playing Seedship, I cared about the player character as much as about the success of its mission.)

On the first playthrough, I was having fun and experimenting and enacting a fireman fantasy. Then I died. Then I thought about the game for a while, replayed it and adjusted my rating up a star.

The Volunteer Firefighter is probably the most realistic ChoiceScript game I've played. It's set in our present world; the events and characters described are much more mundane than, say, in SLAMMED!; there's very little of extraordinary, over-the-top; no striking plot twists, no clever narrative tricks; you don't even have a chance to do many "heroic" deeds. It's a simple and honest game and it has some simple truths to remind you of.

I've been waiting for this game for a while. Since the promotional text specifically mentioned the Miller and the Wife of Bath, two of the most larger-than-life Chaucerian characters, I expected The Road to Canterbury to be a light-hearted merry romp through the comical version of Middle Age England - perhaps in the general spirit of Tally Ho and A Midsummer Night's Choice by Kreg Segall (based on Wodehouse and Shakespeare, respectively; Kreg Segall is also one of the beta-testers for The Road to Canterbury).

As it turns out, the game is rather serious, and political, and often reads as an encyclopedia of medieval life and thought. Your character stats, for example, are traditional medieval virtues and the four Hippocratic humors. It isn't particularly light-hearted: some important things are at stake. And while there are some gently amusing moments, the main attraction here are extraordinary many details for those interested in the life and times of Geoffrey Chaucer. Quotes from Virgil, Boethius, etc.; scattered references to the original Canterbury Tales and other Chaucer's works (the Prioress' dog, the name "Blanche", the astrolabe, Saint Christopher's medal, etc.); excursions into the English religious history - and so on.

The story is good and a bit slow-paced, as it fits the source material. The tales pilgrims tell each other are not those from the original book, but condensed versions of other medieval tales (a lay by Marie de France, for instance). Likewise, the characters are new. The Miller, for one, is completely redone and has little in common with Chaucer's Robin; Alyson of Bath, though, is still recognizably Alyson of Bath (and she's romanceable, too!). The most alive of the cast, for me, were two historical figures - Chaucer himself and Philippa.

The most unusual ChoiceScript game I've seen so far: there are no RPG elements and stat-balancing at all, only puzzles to solve.

A child gets transported into a fantasy land and has to answer a series of riddles to return home. The riddles are mostly classical ones and can serve as an introduction to some common puzzle types and themes; I especially liked the riddle about goldfishes - a homage to Fibonacci's Rabbits. (Several puzzles can also potentially give children an introduction to the joys of brute-forcing.) The characters are cute and provide some entertainment between riddles.

You know those moments - when, say, in Lost Pig there's absolutely no reason to type BURN PANTS, and the sensible course of action is quite obvious, but you type BURN PANTS - and are totally happy with the results?

Well, this whole game is one of those moments in the purest form.

It's extremely brief. You can see all possible endings in a couple of minutes.

Crocodracula supposedly recreates the feel of American TV shows for kids from the '90s; having little familiarity with those, I was instead reminded of the recent hit series, Gravity Falls. There are similarities: two young protagonists in a small town full of various supernatural stuff, a creepy swamp, a climbable water tower, a helpful book about magic and dark secrets, a cryptogram... There was a cute plot and some good kid-friendly spooky moments.

Games by Ryan Veeder generally feature lots of optional details, glimpses of a backstory, digressions (like, for example, the tale of Homeschooled Gwen in Robin & Orchid) which add to the atmosphere and give you the feeling of inhabiting a rich world. In a game like this, which encourages you to look everywhere, search for hidden content and don't do what the NPCs tell you to do, these many optional details turn into red herrings. After helping the sheriff and playing through three different endings I'm still not sure I've seen it all. Is there a way to open that door with a Latin inscription? What is the significance of the Old Tree? Or the verb "ululate"?.. Perhaps some mysteries of Opasassa are never to be unveiled.

You were going to meet a dragon, but you're stuck at a door which won't open. I looked through the code - seems like there's no way to get in. So, it's either unfinished or an unwinnable joke game (having one among the entries feels now like a good old IFComp tradition). Probably the latter. There were a couple of mildly amusing moments, though.

A fruitful idea: taking one common action verb and building a whole game around it. We already had SMELL: The Game by the same author, KILL: The Game, GO NORTH: The Game together with GO WEST: The Game, last year's TAKE: The Game, and even USE - I mean, UNDERTAKE TO INTERACT WITH: The Game. Now it's EAT: The Game.

I often have hard time relating to the games by Chandler Groover with their aesthetics of abhorrent, but this one turned to be not as revolting as I initially expected. The puzzles were satisfying, the images vivid; the game is cruel (I think it should be the first one to boast both "child protagonist" and "evil protagonist" tags at IFDB at once), but not particularly repulsive to my taste - mainly because of two reasons:

1. A strong fairy-tale atmosphere that smoothes everything, gives an unreal, dream-like feeling (and excellently fits in with the game mechanics, as many classic children's tales are obsessed with food - Hansel and Gretel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, etc.).

2. Many food descriptions were pleasant and genuinely appetizing (e.g. cheeses in the armory).

All in all, not a "don't play it while eating" kind of game.

The game feels a bit unfair, but it's so short and your options as a grue are so limited that it isn't hard to win; in-game hints are also available. There are several nice atmospheric touches like referring to the human NPC as "it", the description of the starting location, some customized responses, etc. And even many standard responses - e.g. the infamous "hollow voice" - seem completely at home in this setting.

I'd like to see more parser games from the author. Hopefully with some more polish - this one doesn't list beta-testers and is kind of rough.

A Study in Porpentine is a text game about making a text game. I initially expected something like Last Minute, where you make several choices of what your game will feature and then play the result.

As it turned out, the essence is roughly the same, but the game is... very different.

You explore a small multiverse of nested worlds, seek for inspiration in various sources and collect parts of your game - its "skull" (the main idea? your game can have two skulls and more), its "bones" (game structure?), its "flesh" (writing?), its "skin" (appearance?), its "hair" (?) - until the whole organism is complete; even when it's not, you can try to play what you've got (don't fear to use "Entwine" - you won't lose anything).

There's repetition. There's confusion. There's irritation. How many parts do you need? You don't know.

But I liked it.

The ending was beautiful.

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.

The Gostak taken to the extreme; still, it isn't terribly hard to get the gist and win in a few minutes. I think the "AAAAAAAAA" in the title stands for "Adventure"; if so, I wish this adventure was longer and had more puzzles.

Which means there's no escape from your monotonous labor and the game is an unwinnable annoying waste of time.

True art moves people, and so did this tiny joke game at IFComp 2006: some judges were amused, many irritated. I see no reason to play it nowadays, though.

It's tavid to doatch about this halpock without fargishing scurm-brolges; let's just doach it's very snave, rorm and dobbly... if somewhat dunmile.

The game clearly belongs to the escape-the-one-room genre. The winning ending - the one where you become a pirate - is hard to find, since there are so many red herrings: princes, witches, slippers, etc. But it feels very satisfying when you finally manage to free the player character from people who clip its wings, lock it in a cage and ridicule it.