Ratings and Reviews by deathbytroggles
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River crossing puzzle, November 1, 2020This 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.
Competently coded, underdeveloped world, November 1, 2020I 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.
Half-baked, October 29, 2020A 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.
Infectious!, October 29, 2020While 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!
Has potential, but unplayable, October 27, 2020The 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.
A goofy and endearing RPG for beginners, October 23, 2020I 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.
Amazing concept with near perfect execution, October 23, 2020What 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.
Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high, October 23, 2020A 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.
Poor structure, poor writing, October 23, 2020In 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.
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