Ratings and Reviews by dutchmule

J'ai récemment rejoué à Ekphrasis, pour enfin le terminer, et écrire la première review en français (!) de ce jeu. Ce fut une expérience intéressante mais très frustrante.

Vous êtes dans la peau de Gilbert Fontenelle, un professeur d'histoire de l'art à la Sorbonne qui se retrouve embarqué dans une enquête sur un tableau de Boticelli, qui l'emmènera aux quatre coins de l'Europe et dans des aventures rocambolesques. Ce personnage principal, grognon et bourru, est néanmoins attachant ; les personnages qui l'accompagnent, bien que n'aidant jamais le joueur, sont aussi bien écrits et crédibles. Même si il y a des méchants et des courses-poursuites, le jeu trouve toujours la place pour placer une petite remarque ou blague qui rend l'aventure cocasse sans en faire trop. Le jeu est long, et il vous faudra sans doute une dizaine d'heures pour le finir.

La plus grande qualité de ce jeu, à mon avis, est son atmosphère. Les images qui accompagnent les aventures de Gilbert sont du plus bel effet, toutes bien choisies et donnant un charme et une immersion indéniables au jeu ; les lieux sont de plus bien choisis, tous intéressants à leur propre façon, mais aussi très variés et donnant des expériences de jeu très différentes au joueur, car le jeu combine plusieurs mécanismes de jeu d'une façon très intéressante ((Spoiler - click to show)un rêve, un labyrinthe, une partie de cartes, une course-poursuite...), et certaines séquences du jeu sont particulièrement mémorables. Le jeu est très linéaire, mais ça n'est pas vraiment un problème grâce à ces atmosphères différentes et bien décrites -- exactement ce qu'il faut pour un jeu "à la Indiana Jones".

Malheureusement, le plus gros point faible du jeu est sans conteste son implémentation, et cela justifie pour moi cette note sévère. Le plus gros problème de ce jeu est qu'il manque énormément de choses, sans doute à cause de sa taille. Il manque des synonymes évidents ("clé" pour "clef", ou (Spoiler - click to show)"saint" et "saint george", ce qui fait qu'on ne peut taper que "george"), il manque énormémént d'objets mentionnés dans les descriptions (la plupart du temps, les seuls objets implantés sont ceux qui font immédiatement avancer l'histoire), il manque des formulations alternatives cohérentes ((Spoiler - click to show)"demander un spécial au barman" ne marche pas mais "demander spécial au barman" marche)... Ceci fait que le jeu est, je pense, impossible à finir sans walkthrough -- et encore, le walkthrough fourni sur le site officiel est truffé d'erreurs ! Ceci fait qu'on se retrouve soit dans une situation où on sait ce qu'il faudrait faire mais on ne trouve pas la bonne formulation, soit on n'a aucune idée de ce qu'il faut faire et on tourne en rond (il y a très peu d'indices, et même pour certaines énigmes j'ai eu l'impression que c'était impossible de trouver si on n'était pas l'auteur).

Et puis, il y a les bugs. Premièrement, il y a un grand nombre d'erreurs dans l'orthographe ou la typographie, ce qui donne vraiment l'impression que le jeu n'a pas été relu ; c'est très dommage qu'un jeu aussi ambitieux et intéressant se vautre sur quelque chose d'aussi basique que les accents sur les mots, les retours à la ligne intempestifs, et l'orthographe. Ensuite, il y a quelques "[Programming error:" (ce qui n'est jamais bon), des bugs bizarres ("parler à" ne marche pas, mais "parler a" marche), mais surtout, des gros bugs avec des conséquences pas bonnes pour le jeu : un bug fait qu'on peut sauter une énigme ((Spoiler - click to show)on peut aller au nord devant le portail à Monte Negro, comme si le portail était ouvert), et un gros bug sur la dernière énigme qui la rend impossible à résoudre (pour être plus précis, si on fait tout bien, ça ne marche pas, parce que l'auteur s'est trompé dans le code et (Spoiler - click to show)a inversé un "m" et un "mm", et le walkthrough n'aide pas ; on ne s'en rend compte que quand on regarde le code source). Ce qui laisse un très mauvais goût en bouche, et je me demande combien de personnes ont réellement fini le jeu.

Au final, Ekphrasis est un jeu très intéressant : son ambition et sa taille sont à saluer, et devraient donner des idées aux auteurs contemporains (où sont les jeux longs en français ?) ; les graphismes et l'ambiance du jeu, ainsi que l'humour présent tout au long du jeu, en font un jeu attrayant et qui devrait plaire aux joueurs. Cependant, il y a trop de bugs, trop de choses non implantées, pas assez d'objets, trop de fautes d'orthographe, et trop de "devine la formulation" ou "pense comme l'auteur" pour que le joueur ne soit pas constamment frustré et pour que le plaisir ne soit pas gâché. Ce jeu devrait servir d'exemple pour auteurs de fictions interactives, un exemple de projet ambitieux montrant tout ce qu'il est possible de faire et donnant envie de jouer ou créer plus de jeux dans le même genre, mais aussi un exemple de pourquoi polir et retravailler son jeu est primordial si vous voulez que le joueur trouve l'expérience de jeu plaisante.

(Note: j'ai uploadé un walkthrough corrigé sur cette page, pour que les joueurs futurs ne se retrouvent pas bloqués.)

This is a great game and I highly recommend it. Graphics are good, the music is catchy, and the premise is very interesting. It's one of those games where you have to restart frequently, but the experience is pretty streamlined so that you keep hitting the "restart" button to discover more. It is also a pretty funny game; the writing is very good, and your date is a very nice character, believable and, interestingly enough, not a damsel in distress.

The game's concept takes it in a place where it's able to make a commentary on CYOA/dating sim games, games in general, and stories, and it does that really well, raising some valid points (although some I kinda disagreed with). This is also done in an accessible manner, which is a plus, and I liked that the author grasped the full implications of his mechanics.

The first time where you discover what is going on is a real "a-ha" moment, and so I won't spoil it. Unfortunately, getting to the end of it requires a bit of lawnmowering (and the branching structure is not trivial either), and there were some times when I felt I had done enough, but it was not enough for the game (because that wasn't exactly the right branch). I ultimately resorted to a walkthrough to get to the end quicker, and I finished the game in about two hours and a half.

Anyway, give it a try, you won't be disappointed!

I really love Porpentine's writing: it's always very sharp, blunt, and very evocative, both in the ideas/situations and in the way those are told. A very intriguing, fascinating repetition sets up a great twist, a big change that carries you powerfully. In the end, still don't really know what happened (I'm guessing a lot of it are metaphors, or used to convey an emotion or state of mind rather than facts - and with Porpentine's words, it works), but really enjoyed the experience.

A really short game, based on a sweet children book. Implementation is good, and the writing is neat (I guess it's made to sound like the book). However it is very short and seem to follow very closely the book - if like me you don't know the book, you have no chance of figuring out how to pass some obstacles. I guess that game might be liked by kids who know or don't know the book.

This game is about wordplay, and it's mostly about figuring this particular puzzle out in a systematic manner (almost no objects to interact with, which in this case is fine).
You are given a list of tasks to accomplish, and each of them implies figuring out a specific command related to the constraint at play here. You can figure out about half of them fairly easily, then you realize that you missed a few more; you then get somewhat stuck, but luckily you can use the room numbers to try to get more information about the rest of the commands (very wise from the author to have included those, the game would be simply too hard without them). And then, there's the last lousy ones, including obscure ones (also, it's not very clear that you can combine two words, so you can get stuck on the longer words for a while if you don't realize that).

Apart from those commands, there's a few more that generate a (usually funny) response from the game - which is an interesting design choice (it could have been than any valid command would give you a point, but it's not; although I feel some of those "extra" commands could have been on the task list, which could have bumped the tedious ones off the list and made the game less frustrating). But yay for Big Lebowski references.

The writing was actually somewhat underwhelming, I found. Responses to valid commands rarely go for longer than one line, which doesn't really make it that rewarding. (I know writing 45 different responses is soul-crushing, but here I feel it's a necessary evil!!) The end message (for completing the task list) is incredibly underwhelming too. ((Spoiler - click to show)We spend hours running around, putting things in a quantum shoebox to prepare a mysterious party, please tell us how the party went, if the boss was pleased, how we managed to fill the room with the box's contents, anything!). I did notice a few typos, and a non-critical bug, but nothing more.

To sum up, it's almost all about that wordplay puzzle, which is fun and challenging, making the experience enjoyable but a little rough.

First Porpentine game for me, so I was kinda eager to see why people were talking about her games. And it went great!
The game isn't too long, about half an hour. There's a lot of surreal elements in it, which I thought were brilliant: it made the whole experience very powerful and vivid. The prose feels raw and emotional, which I understand seems to be Porpentine's writing style; it works great here, because the game focuses on trauma and its consequences, and it really makes you feel what the character feels. Sometimes there's weird details thrown in, and they never fail to make the text more evocative. Sound and animations are sometimes used to complement the atmosphere, and I thought it worked well when they were used.
Also, gameplay is very cleverly used to convey emotions (that bit where (Spoiler - click to show)you just can't stop crushing the angel was absolutely brilliant). Finally, I found the final sequence very smart and powerful ((Spoiler - click to show)the game where you must be the last one bleeding, so to speak - it felt like a weird cross between Marienbad and Chuck Palahniuk).
There were also a few flaws in the game; for instance, it feels kind of disjointed, and I'm not sure I understood how everything fit together in the end ((Spoiler - click to show)the basement in the first location with the bottles containing your faces is interesting imagery, but I still don't really see the connection to what I felt was the main theme of the game). Also, Porpentine's distinctive style, of raw, no-bullshit sentences and emotions, means that sometimes it feels a bit sore or like it's missing its target and fails to evoke anything to you, or evokes the wrong thing - I guess it's a risk to take. (One of the things that really didn't work for me is (Spoiler - click to show)the use of the term "your nemesis" in the final sequence: in my head, this particular word feels overly dramatic, and I associate it with James Bond villains - I get that the intent was to stress that this character was absolute evil to you, but at that point I was so into the story that I didn't need a reminder that he was evil: a simple "him" or "the bastard" would have been more effective than "nemesis", which I felt made the prose go a bit over-the-top).
But anyway, this game worked very well for me for most of the things it attempted to do, and is really a very good and powerful game.

On to Howling Dogs!

The main mechanic of Further is an interesting idea (you go through color-coded rooms, that correspond to various memories, triggered by certain objects). The various settings seem completely disconnected from each other, in a kinda surrealistic way sometimes, which creates something interesting considering who the PC is.
However, this game seems to be interested in telling a story, various moments and memories that are loosely connected to each other. The way it accomplishes this is rather ham-fisted: you can't do anything unless you follow the "internal compass" of the game and go exactly where it wants you to go. Thus I spent the majority of the game following directions the game gave me, and that isn't a very good feeling in a game. Furthermore, there seems to be absolutely no objet implemented except the ones that trigger memories (even when the locations describe objects, they're not implemented), so you really feel like stuck on rails.
The game is really short, very very linear, and has a few typos; it's not a bad idea, but it's way too linear to be really enjoyable.

This game feels like a first game that hasn't been beta-tested by anyone else than the authors. There's a lot of guess-the-verbs situations ((Spoiler - click to show)one being that >swim doesn't do anything, you instead have to >swim to boat ; as a consequence, that guess-the-verb problem made me unable to get something else than the "good ending" - I had to go out of my way and look at the walkthrough to get the bad ending!); lots of objects in the descriptions aren't implemented; some objects appear in the description even when you have removed them (classic beginner flaw, I'm afraid...); a few bugs ((Spoiler - click to show) In the medieval setting: >give flag to statue : "i'm only interested in money", the pirate says (?!)), a few typos (lone periods at the beginning of lines, missing extra line breaks between descriptions and prompts).

The "game" part of it isn't that great either; it's really short, the story pretty much unfolds by itself, and you just have to perform a few obvious actions from time to time; all those actions are basically a binary choice ("do you do what is good or this other stuff that is clearly bad?"), and it's "be good several times to win". Oh and the last scene seems really incoherent ((Spoiler - click to show)So the Illuminati give you lots of money but also tell you how to screw them over??)

Anyway, this game didn't work for me on a lot of levels: too short, too many bugs, too linear.

Death off the Cuff has a very original and interesting concept: you are a Poirot-style detective, and all the suspects are in the room, waiting for the final reveal; you must observe and evoke relevants topics to move the case forward and ultimately discover who did it.

The mechanics of the game are quite simple, since it's about focusing on the case and the suspects and find out what is not quite right with the facts. However I found several problems with this in the game. First of all, there are a few topics that weren't implemented, and others that quickly run dry, so when you're stuck you end up trying a lot of different things that get rejected by the parser. Second of all there were a lot of reveals, and maybe a bit too many: every character has several things to hide, but they may not all be relevant to the case, in which case they feel a bit futile. Lastly, some clues were very subtle and involved looking around to detect a very small change in the situation, which was a bit frustrating for me because I didn't always think of it and instead tried to talk about different topics that seemed logical but didn't work. (But I guess you can't expect the case to solve itself either, eh?)

On the other hand, the game's writing is very good, since I found it managed to stay in the style of Agatha Christie but with a touch more humor, which made it a refreshing and genuinely funny exercice in style. All the responses to action furthermore fit very well the setting, in that they all seem like parts of the exposition that the detective is attempting to create, and seam together very well. The responses to the observations you make to stall are almost guaranteed to make you chuckle.

On the implementation side, there was a few typos (missing " for instance), the hints were linear (when you can find the reveals in any order, meaning you can find a few of them and get stuck and the hints will hint at the things you've already discovered, which isn't very good), and, unfortunately, a pretty big bug that meant I had to restart and follow the walkthrough to see the end of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(I think I had looked at the constable a bit too much before getting all the other reveals done, and right after I focused on Jonathan's wounds, there was a picture of someone with a gun, and I barely had time to see that the constable had turned into a German murderer without explanation without dying. I imagine that's the trouble with having several reveals you can find in any order, is that if you didn't think of a particular order it produces a bug.) However, the rest of it was well implemented and well made.

To sum up, I wish I could have liked the game more, for its very nice writing and concept, but there was a few issues that made playing it frustrating.