Reviews by dutchmule

"Hollywood Visionary" casts you as a studio head in the 50s, trying to make your first movie to get your studio off the ground. The atmosphere is that of 1950s Hollywood, and is lovingly rendered: everything is period-perfect, and you're surrounded by big names, which really adds to the atmosphere. The NPCs that you encounter are indeed very well written; I have a soft spot for Fish Grundy, but other ones are quite memorable too. (Orson Welles, in particular, is hilarious and a great character.)

Most importantly, the account of the Red Scare and trying to be a studio head in the McCarthy era is just amazing. The character of Creed is great for that purpose : it is well-written enough that you could totally see someone like that existing back in that day, but still manages to say things that from our modern perspective sounds absolutely ridiculous. It's very impressive to manage to portray this aspect that well, while still making it transparent that the whole thing was a travesty of justice and completely, irrationally stupid. I came out of the game reflecting heavily on what is justice, and how politicians sometimes get away with blatant scapegoating that is profoundly unfair; it really resonated with 2016, although I see now in reviews that it also resonates with other events from a few years ago. For that matter, the tense scene near the end is just amazing, as (Spoiler - click to show)the stakes are high (even if you know how ridiculous it is, they could still end you!), and the atmosphere is oppressive; one of the best written scenes I have ever seen and felt in IF.

The meat of the game is trying to get your movie done while managing all sorts of aspects, like money, stress, actors, etc. This was well-done enough, and there are lots of possible choices; it is however mostly linear, and I came out with the impression that some choices always lead to similar conclusions, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I achieved enough variety to get achievements that I wanted to get, but I felt little interest in keeping going; to be honest, the huge number of choices do not actually feel like they're all supported, and sometimes it kind of felt like it was just string substitution. (as in "<your director> loves <your genre>"). Granted, I didn't really explore everything; but I feel like the game wasn't that great at giving me feedback or letting me know that this particular choice was a really good one. Instead, you are given 15 different knobs that you have to monitor, without really knowing how important they are, and it kind of felt (at least for the choices I made, which were mostly careful and not really going to extremes) like it was a zero-sum game, that if I spent more time on something, something else would lose as many points. This may not be true, and maybe you can manage to make a dismal movie or an absolutely great one, but I don't really know how, and I don't even have a good rule of thumb, which doesn't really make me want to try to achieve it. So, it's nice to personalize your movie, basically, but you don't really feel like it has that much weight or importance overall.

In any case, I had a very good time with this game, and the superb writing makes it a 5-star game in my opinion.

I wanted to like this game: investigative journalism in a futuristic noir cyberpunk world, with a city in shambles and gang violence? I love Deus Ex, Urban Chaos, and all that kind of stuff, so I was excited!

Now, two stars might be a bit harsh, but the game unfortunately disappointed me in a lot of ways. First, the setting was unsufficiently developed to me: there were a couple of neat ideas, like (Spoiler - click to show)privacy laws having been made way stricter than our current day and age (how does that work? Does facebook still exist? Is there a special police for that?), but mostly they were skimmed over quickly ((Spoiler - click to show)global warming is merely name-dropped, no mention why there is such poverty or inequality or what changed in the world). To be perfectly honest, it feels like the game could have been set in 2016 without losing much : replace New Angeles by, like, Detroit, use small bluetooth cameras or Google Glasses, (Spoiler - click to show)talk about the Carmat artificial heart and I'm not sure it would end up very different. This is one of my biggest disappointments from the game, since I was expecting more from the setting.

The game is mostly linear, from what I saw and from the length claimed on the CoG website ; this means the replay value is not great (I got 80% of achievements in 2 playthroughs), but actually, even worse is that a lot of choices end up not being real choices. They might affect the statistics, though I didn't track that too hard, but a lot of times the few options converge to the same text a couple of paragraphs later. This took me out of the game, as I felt the decisions had much less weight this way and ended up not surprising me much. There are a few times where the games has actually very different outcomes; unfortunately I only noticed because the game was contradicting itself ((Spoiler - click to show)Katrina sued me when I actually didn't attack her and stayed on my chair, Tracey downloaded images when I didn't record the conversations with Parker or Sloane), which surprised me from a CoG game. So it kind of feels like a linear plot with no room for different playthroughs or choices, which is not great. Adding onto that, the plot itself isn't too exciting, and you mostly get kidnapped (seriously, 3 or 4 times over 10 chapters is too much) by someone guilty who then reveals their plan "but i'd like to keep that off the record". And last but not least, the writing feels bland and sometimes clumsy, not only because the setting is not very developed, but because the style itself isn't great; there's things spelled out that didn't need to be, and a few rather lazy descriptions: the red wine tastes fruity, the dark beer tastes nutty, the bad guy wears a trench coat, and there's literally a nondescript henchman!

Anyway, this was unfortunately a pretty disappointing experience; I would not really recommand this game.

You are a vampire who somehow survived having a stake driven through his heart, and wakes up several years later. There's a bit of amnesia going on, which serves as a justification of having the first game in your lair (to introduce the character) while still having obstacles; I don't really like amnesia, but why not.

The tropes of the vampire are there (rich, immortal, big library; and particularly the thematic of seduction, which is at the base of the vampire myth - but there's a hint of a strong female character too which I find nice), and more, since you also have (Spoiler - click to show)the Necronomicon, demons, magic spells to resurrect the dead, telepathy, talking paintings, a torture chamber, and you live in a mountain (instead of in a castle on top of it, I guess). It's kind of a mixed bag, really; but I guess the point of the game is more to be cast at an evil supernatural character and riff off of it, and about the fun of being evil, as the writing seems to emphasize with glee and sometimes over-the-top/clichéd phrasings. There are a few English mistakes too (not that I can say anything), but in this case it gives the movie a sort of B-movie texture that's actually pretty fun.

I must admit I didn't really like being that guy: he seemed like a particularly sadistic vampire, (Spoiler - click to show)torturing people with glee (with descriptions), and it didn't really make me feel really comfortable - I didn't think this was fun, but others might find it entertaining.

There's about a dozen puzzles, involving recovering your powers and getting out of your lair; the puzzles are fair, but mostly of the "get X use X don't use it again" kind. There are a few non-standard verbs, usually used in one puzzle. The implementation is excellent: I found that almost all the actions have custom responses, and there's even amusing commands to try (there's a NPC that reacts to various topics, including Zork, apparently). The parser is rather helpful and everything was very, very smooth.

The game is fun, with a B-movie-like atmosphere but I didn't like the PC; the game is also very smooth, and all in all very enjoyable.

Random comment: the fact that the vampire would take advantage of his immortality to master the art of painting intricate, beautiful ceilings struck me as a delightfully Italian thing to do.

Random comment #2: this is a game about a vampire where >count is one of the non-standard verbs. I don't think that's intentional, but it made me smile.

I didn't find this game very fun, I'm afraid; but I learned later there were a whole lot of secrets, and basically a whole other game, hidden in the game, which I didn't find within the Comp's 2 hours (in fact, I had no idea it even existed). So, take my review with a grain of salt knowing that I might have missed lots of things; on the other hand, I'm sure I'm not the only player that missed all that.

The setting confused me: the idea that (Spoiler - click to show)your face was replaced by a featureless one is creepy and interesting, but the protagonist just shrugs it off. A lot of the rooms are empty, which is guess is meant to provide exposition but it felt like a lot of big empty rooms. And I'm having trouble placing the setting: (Spoiler - click to show)is the 'administration' and their motto/values meant to be commentary or satire? It's hard to know, since it seems close to what most governments do (free speech, laws minimising social unrest). I guess it hints as a role of leader, the Administrator, that you get by... doing a test involving nothing but computers and repairing them? Is this supposed to be commentary on the fact that a state leader doesn't have that much power or just needs to keep the system running? I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it. (Or maybe I didn't understand what the author meant, what with English not being my native language?)

So I would say it might be a writing issue: the direction to where the setting is going is not very clear, and we don't know what's going on, why, and most importantly why should we care; I was dragging my feet for the most part. (Or, maybe it all makes sense if you find the secrets, I guess). It seemed like the game was (Spoiler - click to show)mixing politics and sci-fi in its setting, so I expected commentary, satire, going a bit further exploring our society or the future and its consequences. But here, it feels like "oh in 5 years a computer will govern us, and you're the janitor". And yeah, the position in which we are as a player is not exciting, so the game isn't exciting: if there's (Spoiler - click to show)a central authority attacked by an enemy with computer viruses, I don't know if I want to plug network cables. And the game seems very, very on-rails for a long while: it's basically "read the orders, do the orders". (But again, maybe that's why I missed the secrets.) It gets more open when you reach (Spoiler - click to show)the caves, but then I didn't really know what to do and kept looking at the walkthrough.

On the other hand I was *really* impressed by the cable that you lay in the cave, and the fact that the game kept track of where you went and laid the cable in all those rooms and in which order. You backtrack and collect the cable, etc -- it seems really hard to implement, and to be honest I'd love to take a look at the source code for that.

Overall it seems like a lot of effort went into making this game (which is why I feel slightly bad that I didn't enjoy it): the game is polished, typo-free, bug-free, with extra responses, and nice hints for players about how to talk to the parser... Props to the genuine effort that was put into it, but I guess I didn't really find it fun.

This game takes a while to complete, about an hour and a half, which I think makes it the longest Twine game I've ever played. I must admit I wasn't too invested in the storyline; the game deals with being a female pop star and being in a polyamorous relationship, which aren't topics that I'm too familiar with: the former is pretty broad, saying that you are in a stable of other female pop stars (which felt like inspired by J-Pop or K-Pop) and have to keep working to achieve #1, and the latter takes most of the space, with mostly linear segments about the relationships in the 4-way you're a part of.

Because of the playing time I won't be replaying this, and so I can't really tell how much changes from one playthrough to another; some choices felt like they mattered, but I don't know up to what point. (Spoiler - click to show)(I'm assuming you can end up with either girl as your primary relationship? Does everything break down at the end?) I wished the game had let me know, or was more clear about this; I can't even imagine how big or linear the game is, because I have no idea what choices mattered and what their repercussions were (I feel like other choice games I've played did that better). There were other, cosmetic choices that weren't referenced at all the moment after they were made, which I'm not a fan of; I prefer it when those choices act as personalization/customizing your experience to you.

Again, I don't know if that's specific to my playthrough, but I (Spoiler - click to show)didn't spend a whole lot of time working and I spent more time dealing with the relationships, only for my career to explode, and then later the relationship. I liked the personalities of Nayeli and Taya, two of the love interests, but I felt like there wasn't a lot to choose except having sex with them or not (there's about half a dozen implied sex scenes); other choices that surface in a relationship (routine, fighting, compromising, balancing career and life, etc.) didn't really appear. And it felt at a couple points like the characters were kind of avoiding problems by just being with someone else instead; I have no experience with polyamorous relationships, but that's not what I like to do, and I didn't feel too happy about what was happening. Also, you have no control on the protagonist's personality; she has her own personality, and you have limited choices over whether she'll start fights or get involved in drama, which again doesn't correspond to me so it was hard to empathize. For those reasons I'd say that the game is supposed to be pretty linear, although maybe with a few different "routes". The writing was very good, although I felt like some scenes were a bit too long for their relevance in the story.

The character of Sarai made me uncomfortable. Basically what happens is that (Spoiler - click to show)she picks up this girl (you) at a bar, who is homeless at the time, and invites her to stay at her place in a polyamorous relationship, expecting her to 'bond'/'girlfriend' her other girlfriends, while paying for the whole thing. This kind of arrangement spelled more "cult leader" or "harem" than healthy relationship: the amount of control she has is very big, (Spoiler - click to show)all of this kinda feels like it's for her/her pleasure only, and she "doesn't realize it" and gets mad when, inevitably, two people feel the need to try to have semi-coerced sex, or one of them resorts to whatever she can because she hates feeling like a freeloader. But in the end, at least in my playthrough, (Spoiler - click to show)the whole thing implodes and almost everyone leaves her; I don't know if it's meant as commentary on power dynamics in relationships or just something that happens. But feeling uncomfortable almost from the get-go made the ending unsurprising, and I felt like I was dragged through something I didn't like only for the game to show me that what I thought was justified.

Anyway, it's hard for me to review this game because I don't know how typical my playthrough was, and I don't really know anything about polyamourous relationships. I would have liked choices with more explicit consequences, and maybe more choices with regards to the relationship (I guess because I wasn't satisfied with the way things were going); and I thought the "pop singer" aspect was not bringing much to the game, since it wasn't a big part and everything was fairly generic: I wish it were either more developed and more precise, with more choices about your career, or less developed (treating it as a day job in the background) to make the relationship the focus of the game.

This game had an interesting atmosphere, with several rather vivid and cool images (Spoiler - click to show)(the house covered in pine needles, the deserted town, the bat in the belfry). Unfortunately I couldn't finish it because I think I did something that locked me out of victory, and I didn't know until later.

One thing about this game is that it seemed to have several arbitrary elements/puzzles; you could say it's dream logic, but it just struck me as kind of unfair (how do I know I need to (Spoiler - click to show)sit on the dentist's chair and not die? how do I know i need something from the guy chasing me? how do I know I need to flush the toilet?). I ended up looking at the walkthrough a few times, which is how I discovered that I was locked out of victory. The >dream verb was very interesting, I thought, but it's only used in like 2 puzzles; it would have been interesting to use it more, and maybe it would have been of use to justify odd solutions to 'dream logic' puzzles.

Another thing that I found odd and actually frustrating with this game is the granularity of the actions: the game is pretty finicky about the things you can do and in which order. You have (Spoiler - click to show)to unwrap the box, then open it, then look into it, then take the key; you have to take off your shoes first, then your pants; you have to set each for the four dials to its individual number (instead of, say, >set dials to 9999). And similarly, there are a few times where the game refuses to do something because you didn't specify with which object you wanted to do this: unlock door "with what?", clean door "with what?". I didn't think I liked parser niceties that much, but apparently I find it frustrating to have to find the right order and/or words for something that's obvious given the puzzle.

The writing is okay, not many typos (a few), but there were quite a few instances where it kind of feels like the writer didn't put enough effort in the descriptions. There were a "non-descript door", a "non-descript shirt", a "non-descript tv", and "shoes that go with everything"; the architecture of a room is "weird but you can't really put your finger on it". At some point you have a "twilight zone" feeling, and another room feels like "brady bunch"; I think this falls in the category "show, don't tell": it'd be much better to attempt to give the player a feeling that reminds you of The Twilight Zone (your vision becomes black and white? or even has grain like an old movie?) than straight-up telling the player. It was kind of distracting because as a non-american I have no idea what those are, so they really don't help setting the mood; and the lack of details (non-descript feels to me like another word for "just picture anything") about other objects don't really help either. Object descriptions are not necessarily the most fun to write, but I think they're very effective at building an atmosphere; for instance I absolutely loved the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)there's pine needles all over the roof and the gutters of the house, which made the forest menacing, and I would have loved more of that!

Anyway, I wished that the atmosphere had been better built-up by the writing, and maybe also that the >dream mechanic had been used in more puzzles, maybe even making it more systematic.

I must admit I have a soft spot for RPGs with grind and an alchemy system, so that hits the spot. I got about 30% of the way before the 2 hour mark, which didn't even start the main quest but I got to learn how to make potions. One neat thing is that objects that you can gather in the various locations reappear after some number of turns (I think the food reappears after you ate it, but the other ones after a number of turns - you can, and will, collect a large number of ingredients). This probably also makes the game easier to program: you only need one large turnip, and when the player doesn't have it anymore you put it back, etc.

I liked the system that was in place to make things faster - since it's a grindy RPG, you will have to type the same stuff a lot, and so each ingredient has a code made of its initials. So you type 'p' to make a potion, then a number, then initials, and you created a potion; it's a pretty neat alternative to "make X potion with Y and Z" or "make X potion", and very welcome here knowing that you will have to type the same thing lots of time. (An abbreviation for "takeall" would have been nice too, though.) There also seems to be quite a number of potions you can make, judging by the list of ingredients and the fact that they each have 2 effects.

The world in the game is pretty standard fantasy, with inns and quests and people who speak British English; but the world sometimes makes references to the modern-day world (GMOs, Nantes carrots, Yukon potatoes...), which is probably some eccentricity from the author (I mean, I don't expect a twist like "it's actually set in the modern world!"). The story is pretty generic, too, of the "gain levels as an alchemist and be the new adventurer that saves a small town from evil marauders" kind; but I haven't gone too far in the two hours, so I don't really know how to plot unfolds.

The writing is okay, but the way the game reacted to my female protagonist bothered me a bit: basically, all men say "certainly, I love talking to fine young ladies like you", and one woman literally says "I love to talk to attractive young ladies like you", which seems really weird and unrealistic; and of course, the first comment you get when you buy an alchemy robe is "you look so good in it". Another thing that felt weird is that the game is very transparent from a code and statistics perspective: "takeall" literally starts Linux-style messages like "Beginning automated take... Searching for objects to take... Found: carrot", which feels really mechanical/computerized; I'm not saying the Inform way is necessarily better, but I'd have preferred it if the game attempted to weave that into a sentence; same with the description of objects, which says "(weight: 1; value: 6)", and your alchemy teacher who says "look at you, you are level 19!" after scanning you with a rod.

Anyway, the whole game seems to be based around the purely mechanical fun of grinding, selling objects, being able to afford power-ups, to complete quests, and then start again; the thing is, I kinda like that kind of mechanics, and have spent hundreds of hours playing CRPGs doing exactly that. But the game is very transparently built around that, and the writing doesn't try too hard to challenge anything: you have characters that have the personalities of standard RPG NPCs (buying, selling, rumors), a familiar plot in a fantasy world, a female adventurer/PC that must be young and pretty, and an emphasis on stats that, although necessary for the form, feels a bit too blunt. RPG fans might enjoy it, and will push along for the few hours the game demands; it feels like a nicely done, very (too) familiar RPG.

This game looks good - nice typography and choice of colors, and a few appropriate images. The first playthrough is very short (5 minutes for me), but the game is meant to be played several times.

The setting is that of a vagabond in what appears to be similar to the Middle Ages; the theme obviously involves a fortune teller, and you are presented with a few choices that seem inconsequential - but, as a good player of interactive fiction, you recognize those choices as preferences that might reveal your personality. The setup kind of reminded me of the beginning of Morrowind, or any of the other RPGs (Ultima IV, maybe?) that use the "what would you do in this situation" questions to gauge your personality - very familiar, then, and this is a good choice on the author's part to use this setting.

The first playthrough is nothing special, it ends abruptly after getting your fortune told: of course, you want to start again and try different choices. That's when the game reveals its conceit; but it reveals it in a way that i found quite brutal and unsubtle. Namely, the figure completely breaks the fourth wall (since the vagabond doesnt appear in the text), has quite an antagonistic tone ("What? What did you expect?"), spouts off text that shows that, surprise, it had tracked your choices (one paragraph = one choice, which is not very subtle or fun), and tells you at the last sentence that you could try again. Except, no, I didn't want to try again: I found it too on-the-nose and unsubtle for me to not get it, and to think that there could be a way to change the final outcome. I felt that the twist was revealed too soon (at the 2nd playthrough instead of, say, the 4th), and was too blunt and closed too many things: given what's before (a rhetorical question), the "you could try again" comes off as a "you could waste your time some more", which just made me quit. (Ok, I checked a third time just in case, but I wasn't willing to spend more time on this to see if the 10th iteration was any different.)

I guess the game was trying to make a point about restarting games to achieve better outcomes; that it doesn't work like that sometimes i guess, and that you don't have the agency in the game to change anything except quitting. But i didn't feel like the game tried to have anything more to say, which was disappointing. I played "Save the Date!" a while ago, and found it quite deep and interesting, with nice variations and characters and a few interesting things to say on the same topic; maybe it's hard to come after that, and maybe it's unfair for me to compare both, but, they are about the same thing... I might have liked it more if there was some variability, even maybe having fun with the concept (the hooded figure could become impatient, roll their eyes, joke that the cards will change if they get 10 pheasants, plead for the player to stop, etc..), but it might not have been what the author intended; as it is, though, its message is not very deep nor subtle, which made the experience somewhat unsatisfying in my opinion.

I liked this game! It's short-story sized, with a few branches that often merge pretty quickly, and an open ending.

The story casts you as the "speaker" for a paralyzed alien who holds an advice column; the thing is, you don't always agree with the advice, and you're in a position to publish whatever you want, hence choices show up. The choices you can think of are presented, and the game handles them gracefully, although some paths quickly merge with other similar ones.

One think that I really liked was what happens if you disobey: it's not that he fires you or sues you, it's that (Spoiler - click to show)his fans on the internet will try to track you down; I felt like this was a very interesting consequence, and it filled me with more dread than a hypothetical "i'll sue you in galactic court": we all know how (Spoiler - click to show)ruthless internet mobs and their pitchforks can get.

One thing that i didn't really understand was why the story was told with aliens instead of humans; was it to avoid presenting as controversial statements that some could get behind (like, if the story was about a paralyzed glenn beck?), or was it to make it a metaphor of something? I must admit that in retrospect i'm wondering what's the use/effect of casting that with aliens and sci-fi; it's not really a big deal, but I just want to know if I missed something. An enjoyable 20-minute game.

By now everyone know what Taghairm is about, right? I liked the game, and my experience was a bit different from other people, so I might as well talk about my experience.

First of all I had no idea this kind of thing existed, and it is SO messed up. For some reason I really like (Spoiler - click to show)messed-up, creepy, horrific Middle-Ages beliefs (changelings are another good one), so this was really interesting and neat! The sound atmosphere is really cool too, and adds a lot to the experience.

The game is very repetitive mechanically, and you (Spoiler - click to show)burn cat upon cat upon cat. But I felt like the horror you feel the first time starts to diminish after a few, and then is worn off by the end; I very quickly entered a pattern where I'd click almost rythmically on the links, barely pausing to read. This might be on purpose, and (maybe I'm thinking too much) may be meant as commentary on mechanized evil, and how easy it is to remove yourself emotionally from actions when they become repetitive. But if that was the purpose, I'm not sure it came across very well: basically my reaction was "ugh (Spoiler - click to show)I'm killing cats... why am I killing cats? I guess this will make sense later? Ok, I'll keep going, humor the game to see what it has to say in the end" - and then it was just about following whatever motions the game would make me follow.

By the end it's like I didn't believe the game anymore, I think I felt very removed, in a very conscious way, from the game. The voices near the end and the thunderstorm made some of the creepiness come back for me, but I wish it hadn't gone; I wish the game had been either more concise and more focused, or with more variety.
In particular, another thing that removed me from the game was that I quickly figured out that the game generated cat descriptions at random - if the game can keep generating interchangeable cats, why should I care about them? They're just 0s and 1s. If the description had more, sorry, fluff to them ("the scared cat is looking at you with big eyes", "the half-dead cat is twitching and his eyes meet yours", "the angry cat scratches you which wakes you up a little"), I might have cared a bit more; or if there was an actual direction to them, I'd have tried to see what the next cat showed me about the world or myself or my state; or if the intensity was heightened or the game kept going further. (If that makes sense?)

As is, I felt like the game heightened things by small amounts that had too much space in between them; I wish the moments where things changed had been bigger (big changes, big punches to the gut, new sounds, screen gets smokier, etc) or that the space between them had been shorter. Other than that, it's creepy, well-done, with nice sound effects, and a nice Halloween game - if you want to provoke very loud reactions in a group of friends.