Reviews by deathbytroggles

As a white, cisgender, straight male I am in the dominant group in almost every conceivable way and have been the transgression of microaggressions too many times to count. I have had to continually educate myself and be intentional on how my words and actions perpetuate acculturative stress, systemic racism, and impact my relationships with my peers. Fobazi Ettarh does an excellent job of allowing the player to experience this stress in the day to day life as either a gay male or a disabled, black, female.

With either character you choose, you are continually bombarded with realistic microaggressions and are asked to make choices as to how you would respond in that situation. The common theme throughout is how exhausting it is to be around well-intentioned people who are constantly hurting you. Indeed, I have played through this a few times now and have been exhausted every time. And I don’t have to live it.

While there are a couple of minor visual bugs, play is smooth and each time through takes no longer than twenty minutes. If I could change anything about the game it would be to make some of the microaggressions even more subtle to really hit home how easy it is for well-meaning people to be hurtful. That said, Killing Me Softly effectively does what it wants to do.

I work for a mental health agency and made this a part of a team training exercise; it was well-received and the discussion was quite robust. For those inclined to do the same, please give BIPOC and LGBTQ staff the option of opting-out as it is not their job to relive the pain in their daily lives and educate the dominant group.

Science fiction is at its best when it is used as a tool to explore the human condition. Science fiction games have an extra hurdle of not alienating players by making the sci-fi overly complex; to do so can disengage the player from the story. Gateway mostly succeeds at both before faltering in the final act.

As the story's hero, you play a prospector hoping to gain fame and fortune by going off on solo space missions to collect artifacts from the mysterious Heechee race, whose equipment you are immersed in but barely understand. Half of the game is learning how to use and manipulate the various Heechee tools and machines you come across, and half the game is solving standard fare adventure puzzles. Thankfully, learning the alien technology is often a fairly simple exercise in interpreting basic symbolism or at worst guessing and checking. And for the most part the rest of the puzzles are only moderately challenging. I required only a few hints for the duration.

The game design is identical to all the early Legend games, with the option of playing the game as a straight text adventure or using a graphical point and click interface reminiscent of the frame hell of Geocities websites and requiring the user to choose from a list of every possible verb the game understands rather than the standard eight from LucasArts games of the time. While I can't imagine any sane person strictly using the mouse to play Gateway, the verb list is occasionally helpful for reference and the still pictures are helpful in visualizing puzzles in addition to being gorgeous.

The plot itself is engaging, slowly unraveling while allowing the player to tackle one of several puzzles at any given time. This was a huge relief as sometimes I just needed a break from one puzzle; several times when I came back to a tough one the solution became clear. The alien worlds you visit are for the most part captivating, each with their own technology as well as flora and fauna. The most satisfying areas of the game for me were the puzzles surrounding the beast (with unexpected drama with every step) and the world where you find a stranded prospector (as every puzzle has a moral and immoral solution). I did find one, uh, bug involving a spider that required some finesse. And there is no way to put the game in an unwinnable state unless your only save is during one of the game's few local time limits.

Unfortunately, the end game is a disappointing mess. The sci-fi becomes Inception level confusing without the dramatic appeal, and the puzzles become more obtuse. In particular, the puzzle involving the goblin takes some guess-the-author's-mind wizardry, and the final puzzle involving (Spoiler - click to show)the VR manual is a disappointing whimper. The ending itself sees the player in a passive role and is also lacking a satisfying resolution. Still, I'm quite glad I played Gateway and look forward to playing the sequel.

While I do enjoy a good character study where the players talk way above their station (e.g. Mamet Speak), I am more comfortable when the characters just act and talk like run-of-the-mill boring humans. While the writing here isn't always up to par, Lance Nathan creates a sympathetic boring protagonist in Perry and plops him into an electric situation. The entire game takes place at a college party that Perry is entirely uncomfortable with; in that sense, he reminds me a lot of myself. In the following paragraph, Nathan demonstrates his strengths and weaknesses all in one:

How does your roommate know these people? And how does anyone get this drunk? For a moment you pause to wonder if there's a connection, before realizing you really don't care and would rather not think about it. Plenty of time to think about it tomorrow, you tell yourself bitterly, while you're cleaning up.

The first two questions say a lot while saying very little. Our protagonist is likely an introvert. He's usually sober, and likes to have a sense of control over himself and his surroundings. He also has a contentious relationship with his roommate but is not confident enough to confront him. The resentment is growing and will likely simmer for a long time. But then the paragraph just goes on as Perry's thoughts and feelings are dissected (replete with an adverb) and thrown in our laps. We learn nothing new. This happens a few times throughout the story, the author not trusting that the player will pick up on the characterizations.

That said, I'd like to point out another strong introduction to the story's hero, Andy:

Sometimes it could be aggravating; you got mad at him over nothing in eighth grade and the two of you spent a month not speaking to each other, until one day he sat down across from you at lunch again and you started complaining about the meatloaf and everything was back to normal.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I have lived this exact situation and I imagine many others have as well. Nothing quite like shoving resentment down without talking about it and being glad things feel okay for a while.

The story is on rails, which is ideal here. However, occasionally you will read a conversation that happens between characters, then click on a hyperlink to observe something else, and then when you return you get the same text dump you saw before. I encourage the author to brush up on if/then/else for future games in order to avoid this continuity issue.

Despite my concerns, I did enjoy this story. The characters are fun and the ending is bittersweet. I look forward to any future offerings from Nathan.

A potentially charming paradox experiment where Sir Isaac Newton must restore the timeline when modern folks somehow forget the laws of physics due to Einstein not being able to build on Newton's work.

Unfortunately, there is little interactivity as the game actively encourages you not to explore or talk to anyone, and many rudimentary actions are dismissed as Isaac not being interested. There are also only a couple of novice level puzzles and neither of them have to do with time travel or science; essentially you are just guiding Isaac along the story path until you reach the ending.

It was an interesting choice to use past-tense and third-person, and given the lack of interactivity it worked. I wish more time had been spent on world building. The actual science is given superficial treatment and I learned very little about Newton or his theories.

This is just your standard river crossing puzzle, and if you've ever solved one before then this shouldn't take you more than about ten minutes. There's one tiny additional puzzle, but there's no red herrings as there's hardly anything to look at other than the cabbage, sheep, and bear you're trying to get across.

In fact, the game's entertainment is pretty much solely from all the ways you can lose. In that regard it's quite charming and I wish there were a dozen more ways to fail. Geng has a way with words and I am looking forward to future offerings from him.

I will play any time travel game, full stop. Knowing that Entangled has eight endings had me jazzed to dive in. Unfortunately, after finding the first ending I had little desire to find the rest.

Entangled is a game with a bunch of neat set pieces with little world view or motivation for them existing. The PC is at first motivated to find his friend across town because his friend's wife is being obnoxious. This is interrupted by the motivation to help a delusional man in the street for no apparent reason. The game literally won't let you find your friend until you get rid of the guy but the PC is given no motivation to do so. The actual reason is to force the player to explore the town and talk to all the characters before finding the time machine, but since I was focused more on the puzzle than the exploration, I didn't get much out of it.

After the PC time travels, the objective becomes more focused, though my motivation did not. Getting back to one's own time is simple enough, but finding the other seven endings presumably is done by further exploration and manipulating the lives of your friends/neighbors across town. But other than finding endings, I found little motivation to do this. I have no reason to care about these characters or their lives, because the only thing I know about the PC is that he hates his friend's wife and the only thing I know about the NPCs are highlights from their biographies.

Take for example Nick, one of the primary NPCs. He runs a tattoo shop and he used to play music.

>ask about tattoos
"I've been doing it for around 30 years now. I think I've learned my art. If you're looking for something. Let me know."

>ask about music
"You like it? It's some stuff that I wrote when I lived in Los Angeles. It's a little dated now. But I think it has a solid beat."

>ask about Los Angeles
"Yeah, I used to live out there. Some crazy times. I played guitar for a few bands, but wrote a hit with this one guy. Axl. Made pay dirt there. He went off and made it big. I took the money and ran."

Wait, so Nick could have been in Guns 'N Roses? That's amazing! Except Nick shows no emotion about it. No wistfulness. No regret. Not even interest. He just casually mentions it as trivia, not expecting that anybody even knows who he's talking about. I presume that if I were to play my cards right, I could in the past convince Nick to not give up guitar and he could make it big. But since he doesn't seem to care, I don't either.

Atmosphere is a problem throughout. Most of the things that happen are just cuckoo bananas but the descriptions are so perfunctory one would think that androids are observing. Early in the game when the delusional guy is ranting about UFOs, most people in town dismiss him or believe he's seeing meteor showers. You can humor him by trying to see what he's seeing.

>x lights
You look up, seeing a streak in the sky for a second. You suppose it's a ufo.

So now the PC thinks that something incredible and life-changing could be happening around them, and they just suppose and move on. Not that I want the author to lay out all of the PC's thoughts out on the table. But there's no sense of wonderment or awe or descriptions to elicit feeling. Everything just is.

All of that said, the game is coded extremely well. It appears the author worked on the game for four years and it was in beta-testing for about eight months, so they did their due diligence. The game responds to most reasonable things you can try and the NPCs respond to a ton of different questions. The game pushes the player gently when needed and the in-game hints are written well. I wouldn't have written such a lengthy review if there still wasn't so much more potential to be unleashed. I really wanted to like Entangled. But when a game's core is about the fate of the lives of humans, more time needs to be spent exploring the humanity.

As someone who has never found card readings appealing or helpful, this was not an experience I could get into. However, I would imagine for those that do that this could be a gratifying experience. Thomson has presented a slick, simple, and beautiful application and I hope there is an audience for this.

A far out (see what I did there?) story based on a far out (yup, still going there) theory about how our amazing brains became amazing by getting high all the time. I have never had the fortune of getting high, so I'm probably too stupid to review this, but I'll give it a shot.

Heaton does a decent job of making the theory come to life, though in a much more accelerated fashion. It's humorous how quickly our protagonist becomes smart and successful, including proving it by winning a game of mancala. But for me the protagonist never really came to life like the hero in The Edifice. Part of that may be the structure of the game; you can win without any thought at all just by clicking every link. The only choices are during the games of Tic-Tac-Toe (the most basic game ever invented) and mancala. And while I do like the occasional game of mancala, the presentation here was a bit confusing and I won by accident.

But, like I said, I've never been high before.

While the concept of being a doppelganger for hire is brilliant, what really excited me to play and keep playing this game was the sheer enthusiasm of our protagonist. It's hard not to be infected by their joy for their work and their optimism that their career will take off. Because of this, I made the effort to find every line I text I could even if I sensed it wouldn't change the plot or lead to a different ending.

In fact, I was ready to give this five stars until I couldn't reach one of the four endings as the game kept crashing for me while at the recital heading for ending four. The walkthrough was not helpful in avoiding this bug.

If there is a sequel I will be first in line to play as I'm still rooting hard for our rising doppelganger star!

The content warning for this game indicates "blood and murder" and to my knowledge this only refers to the final score this game will be given during the IFComp due to it being virtually unplayable.

I totally dig the concept as you play a young woman trying to break through as a pop star. You are given base stats in several different skills of a pop star which you can manipulate based on the choices you make. As the game progresses you must improve your ranking by impressing the judges, and presumably, murdering or avoid being murdered. Unfortunately, shortly after the first competition a passage becomes unpassable.

I may come back to this game if it's fixed. What is playable so far is bubble-gum fun and I'm intrigued by the horrors that await.