Reviews by deathbytroggles

I don't love RPGs as much as I did when I was younger, but can still get roped in if the focus on story outweighs the focus on stats. Tavern Crawler does just that and succeeded in keeping me interested for a couple playthroughs.

You play as a gender neutral hero (with a choice of fighter, mage, or thief) who tags along with a female mage and a male fighter on a quest to slay a dragon and collect a handsome reward. What follows is a charming quest with plenty of plot twists and character development. You can take on many optional quests which can improve your stats but mostly focus on story development and a lot of your time is focused on building or destroying your relationship with your two partners.

Another cool feature is that you can decide to play in a more traditional RPG mode where you can focus on building your stats, but almost every puzzle can also be solved even with poor stats if you make the right choices. Saving and restoring is also easy along the way and there's no way to get stuck. There are multiple endings and every playthrough also has an epilogue that shows you how your actions affected others as well.

What initially appears to be a charming slice-of-life about a six year-old girl helping her dad get ready for a dinner party turns into a old-school puzzlefest with an extraordinary mechanic that I'm embarrassed to admit I needed the in-game hints to even discover. For those that don't mind knowing ahead of time, the mechanic is (Spoiler - click to show) that your bedroom has a dollhouse which is a replica of the actual house, and putting items in and taking them out of their respective rooms changes their relative size in reality. For example (not in the game), if you were to put a toy sword in the dollhouse's kitchen, and then go to the actual kitchen, you'd find a regular sized sword.

The coding for this puzzlefest is damn impressive, as there are so many things you can do that aren't required that the game allows you to do, and even some potential alternate solutions to puzzles are at least acknowledged even if unsuccessful.

I badly wanted to give this five stars, but the more I played the game the more I found myself exhausted. Some of the puzzles enhance the charm of this universe and the way your family reacts (or doesn't react) to some of things you do is great. I actually adore the whole sequence with (Spoiler - click to show) the stegosaurus and the way Dad reacts to it. But there are also several puzzles that seem to be there simply for puzzle's sake, (for example the (Spoiler - click to show)rope/anchor puzzle inside the impossible bottle), and I found myself going to the hints quite often just to get a jumpstart on what to do next. There are also so many items you can carry or manipulate and a lot of them are irrelevant to progressing in the game, so I found myself easily getting overwhelmed and resorting to the hints for that reason as well. For their own sake, the progressive hints were really well done and I rarely needed the final hint to progress; I mainly just needed a nudge on where to focus my efforts.

A must play for puzzle enthusiasts and I would be surprised if The Impossible Bottle doesn't win an XYZZY award or three.

A short game that interweaves the magic of literature with a pirate's need to live one more glorious battle. Several historical works are referenced, such as Moby Dick and Peter Pan and the way they are weaved into the story is charming. If you're a fan of pirate fiction then this will likely be more enjoyable, though the concept is meant for everyone.

My only significant criticism is that some of the font choices (especially the ones in cursive) are really hard to read for my tired eyes, which significantly hurt my enjoyment.

I'm glad this wasn't a puzzle, as it would have not fit with the theme for poor Captain Graybeard.

In the game's blurb, the author announces (after begging the player not to quit the game early, which is always a good sign) that, " I am a believer of absurdity, that our actions in the end have no meaninging (sic) in the interacting force between humans and universe." Yet, this author's other entry in the competition was a moralistic game which strongly advocated that our choices make a lot of difference.

Playing through The Place does little to shed a light on the purpose of this story, though the message appears to be to look within for happiness instead of material pleasures. The player listens to a narrator talking about the life of a woman who is somewhat defined by the player's own tastes, as the story is constantly interrupted so that you can answer questions about your own dreams which are then projected onto the female protagonist. I suppose the message here is to ask the player to put their own dreams in perspective, though if that's the case then I'm not sure why the protagonist is given a specific gender.

Regardless, the story is just not written well. In addition to a lack of proofreading, the prose tries way too hard and trips over itself. The most egregious passage may be the following: "She feels the breeze of spring air brushing through the tip of her nose. Her lungs (sic) capacity expands, absorbing that volume of fresh air. Then, slowly decompressing to release the cardon (sic) dioxide, she gets the negative thoughts out of her mind." I am not certain how air can brush through the tip of a nose, and juxtaposing this with a biology textbook kills any mood this passage was going for.

As part of my career I teach (and learn) racial equity and antiracism and was hoping at least one game in this year's competition would address it. Stand Up/Stay Silent addresses it through an allegorical piece that takes place on a future Mars colony. I was reminded a bit of Blade Runner while playing.

I kind of wish this had addressed today's racism and political environment head on, though this could be traumatic for BIPOC players so it was probably wise to make it allegorical. That said, the game simply wasn't long enough to build this cyberpunk setting, and I was often left deciphering terminology instead of being in the moment with these characters.

I appreciate the choices offered throughout the game and the acknowledgment that being antiracist can take many forms in addition to direct protest. I also appreciate it addressing that there is no middle ground; you're either for or against.

Growing up on JRPGs and being a huge fan of the Dragon Quest series, I was excited when I loaded this one up. For sure it really stretches the bounds of interactive fiction, but here there's no hand-eye coordination necessary and there's plenty of text, so it works.

Quest for the Sword of Justice is a brief send-up of the genre, poking fun at the same things that most everyone has been poking fun at for thirty years now. The jokes still work, especially the more subtle ones you can discover just by examining the most random of things in your environment (like other people's meals!). However, I wish there was more to it and both possible endings annoyed me more than made me laugh, especially since they contradict each other.

If you're a fan of JRPGs you will probably find this amusing for ten minutes. If you've never played one, the jokes probably won't land as well.

A competently coded and not unpleasant game that is unfortunately devoid of story and creativity while implementing random combat elements and a pointless maze. There's only illusion to the plot, room descriptions are sparse, characters send you on fetching quests while telling you exactly what you should do, and all the interesting parts of the game are red herrings (for example, (Spoiler - click to show)the Morse code on the radio which I bothered to decode, the additional spells for the cauldron, and the cube which seems like it should have more scientific complexity but doesn't ). Despite this, Elsegar had so much potential!

For the most part, the parser is very kind. Exits are always clear and the game always seemed to understand what I was trying to do. One bizarre moment comes at the beginning, when you're told you can't get off the bed because the door is closed, though nothing in the room description indicates that the door is blocking you from standing up. Otherwise, things are clean and the presentation was crisp. The next game from this author will hopefully be more complex and give the protagonist motivations.

Everything about Tangled Tales screams 1980's text adventure, including the manual which feels like it came directly from Infocom. While on the positive side this brought out a lot of nostalgia, it also came with all the drawbacks of the time. Tangled Tales uses its own parser and is reminiscent of Scott Adams' games, with brief and awkward descriptions. To wit:

"You examine a rusty old wheelbarrow. This is the kind often used to remove garden waste, or drunk [sic] from parties. A rusty old wheelbarrow is open and in a rusty old wheelbarrow is an empty glass container."

Also:

"A bottle of water is open and in a bottle of water is nothing." This despite the fact that the bottle is full of water and you can drink from it!

The game itself is rather easy, as it's mostly a series of fetching quests for fairy tale characters, reminiscent of King's Quest only some of the stories have changed slightly, being more crass. I did smirk a few times, my favorite twist being the reimagining of the Three Billy Goats Gruff tale. However, because the parser was quite limited with its syntax I got frustrated early and went to the walkthrough. To my dismay, the walkthrough also had its issues, as abbreviations used there were not always accepted by the parser, and a couple of times the compass directions were wrong. Also, my fairytale kingdom for an undo verb!

The low-res graphics were the highlight.

There have been many games in the history of IF that have utilized the journal as a storytelling device, and many of those have had the player discover the journal pages out of order to add intrigue. In Passages, the entire story is reading a journal out of order, with the raison d'etre being a distortion of the space time continuum.

The time and space mechanics take a backseat here to the relationship described in the journal, primarily all of the author's regrets with regard to said relationship. It's a cool concept and I think it was structured fairly well. However, I think it would have made more of an impact if we had seen more journal entries from happier times to give the despair more weight. Mainly, I wish the protagonist wasn't such an insufferable twit; I had no emotions to spare for this person. To be fair, the PC reminds me of myself when I was fifteen, so your mileage may vary.

Two feelings kept swirling around me while playing A Rope of Chalk. The first was jealousy, regularly wishing that my brain could come with a concept such as this; the second was gratitude, as this is only the second game by Veeder I have played and no doubt there is plenty of fun in my future.

Veeder does his best Kurosawa impersonation here, letting us experience the events of a sidewalk chalk competition from the perspective of the four students who helped put it on. It starts out as a quaint slice-of-life and slowly becomes a multi-layered, avant-garde tour-de-force. While there were times I was confused as to what was happening, Veeder anticipated this and installs a character whose purpose is to guide you as much as you need to not only advance in the story but to interpret your surroundings. You also have the choice to ignore this character if you'd like to interpret the story for yourself. And then when the story ends we pan back to the director's office to search for development notes and other delightful minutiae.

In my one playthrough I found no flaws, and the game continuously rewards observation and exploration (and knowledge of 2012 American politics!). So take your time and bask in this world for an hour or so.