Ratings and Reviews by Lance Cirone

The Mean Story bases itself on offensive humor and warns you multiple times about it. I'm not really a fan of this, but I can't blame the game for it when it's the entire point. As a game, it doesn't have much to offer -- there's a few ableist slurs, some racism, and a puzzle that consists of tricking various disabled people. It's not very fun to play through.

When you type "AMUSING" at the ending, it asks if you've tried "...not being amused by a story like this in the first place?" The help menu also admits it might say something bad about the author if he found this funny enough to make. It feels like there was some apprehension about publishing this.

AI Dungeon isn't a game many people would want to play today. The ethics of generative AI have been discussed countless times, the environmental impact is horrible, and it's been shoved down everyone's throats for a while now -- it's become the next tech buzzword that every company thinks they need to use.

But back in early 2021, when generative AI was in its infancy, not as readily available to the public, and restricted to just text with images being a pipe dream, AI Dungeon was something to see. I loved playing this back then. My stories rarely ever made sense and I'd try to follow them the best I could, but if I got bored, I'd prompt it with some crazy plot twist and see where it tried to take everything. The writing could also range from funny, to profound, to just bizarre. Sometimes people wouldn't even just use it for stories: they'd prompt it to write song lyrics, jokes, or lists of fun facts, which came out as incredibly mangled and hilarious in a surreal way.

Granted, even then it had its problems. The game had an insistence on making you go to school, wake up in the forest, or have your mother appear in the story, no matter how much sense it made. It was also really bad at following physical character descriptions or permanent bits of worldbuilding you wanted to add.

If you want to see what a traditional text AI output looked like around this time, try B.J. Best's You Will Thank Me As Fast As You Thank a Werewolf, it was made around a similar time and had a very similar energy when I read through it.

The game's decline was rapid. If you asked me to review it in March 2021, I'd probably say four or five stars. But around April, the game was hit with an infamous censorship system. This wouldn't be a problem if the censor wasn't so trigger-happy. Having a character or animal that was under 18, in the cleanest contexts, would upset the censor. Even saying that a person had short hair would trigger it. It would flag your story, halt it, and Latitude would read your private stories for content violations.

Fans complained, and the response of Latitude was horrible as well. If the censor got triggered, you'd get the patronizing message of "this took a weird turn, help us figure it out?" And if you clicked that, they'd double down with the text "It's possible that our systems messed up; that can happen when you're on the bleeding edge of technology" and imply it's uncommon that the player would "actually like reading." This did nothing to appease the already angry community, who were backing up their stories into Google Docs, canceling their subscriptions, and deleting their accounts. Latitude also changed their official Discord server into an unofficial one and removed their social media links from the game's homepage.

By May that month, the true source of the training data was found, with it being heavily illegal and NSFW material. Latitude's next update was releasing an in-app purchase that let you have the AI speak text out loud in a Russian accent. They also started to let random people sign up to read the flagged private stories for 7 cents each.

I dipped from the game and checked back in 2022, where it turned out to have an energy system: one ad gave you 10 turns. A Steam release that didn't even have the premium AI was made with a price point of 30 dollars. The AI itself also got even dumber -- while it had a bit of inconsistency, it was flat-out unable to write a story by this point.

MathBrush's recent review inspired me to check in on the current state of the game, and it seems like it hasn't improved too much since then. There are also competitors like NovelAI, but in a world where AI is now starting to become more of a genuine threat than just a tool to use for fun, I don't think the appeal is there to most IF authors.

This is an IntroComp game that was never finished. The premise is that you are a fighting therapist, who opens the day by giving a primal scream in the mirror, wearing gold cuff links, and attempts to intimidate his patients.

No matter which way I play this game -- Gargoyle, iplayif, a downloaded Scare interpreter -- I get a warning that "the game uses Adrift's Battle System, something not fully supported by this release of SCARE." I can't find any versions that seem to work, and information on this is very obscure. I also looked into decompiling the game to see what the combat looked like, but couldn't find any working programs.

After waiting a few turns, your client enters and you are given the teaser "Which of these combattants will emerge triumphant? The answer awaits you in the conclusion of this, our first selection from the files of Sigmund Praxis, Guerilla Therapist!!" The way this is phrased also makes me think a battle just might not have been implemented yet -- the game's very small filesize is also an indicator.

I'm not sure if it's just the fault of aging technology, but there doesn't seem to be much to this. But I think it's a good premise, and one I'd be excited to see brought into a full game.

This is a short, parody romance story. According to the help message, the Santoonie devs have a habit of making games too vast to be fully completed, and in this game, their fifth attempt, they're dialing it back to be more manageable. This is all part of the joke, being that their games are intentionally short and unimplemented, but the game can feel a bit odd without that context. Some objects don't exist or have no descriptions, and trying to use a wrong exit will output no text (just play a sound).

The plot is that you are a fourteen year old boy, Todd Gack, spending the summer at your grandparents' house. You hear beautiful music from the woods and meet a girl on horseback who comes to visit your grandfather, who you fall in love with. The game ends with you meeting her in an abandoned spa and kissing. With how many items you can pick up, and how 60 of the game's 100 points are earned with the final move, I was expecting it to be a bit longer. I think that's the joke.

A few of the lines in this game really catch you off-guard, like what it says when you try to leave the room without your pants on, and I laughed at the line "GACK! THE SACK!". Inspecting unwashed spinach includes "I should not eat of this." The highlight for me is the letter your mother sends you:

"Todd,
Me and your father are enjoying the Bahamas so much. You would really like it here. Your brother stepped on a crab and your sister won a free glider ride at the dunes. I bought you some salt water taffy. Hope you are having a wonderful time. We sure miss you.
Love,
Mom
p.s. I’ve enclosed a little weed for you, don’t tell your father."

It's a bit hard to judge an intentionally bad parody game, but I'd say this is one of the funnier ones out I've played. The implementation issues never got actively frustrating to play through, and it did make me laugh.

This is a short minigame where you can start in any of the contiguous United States, and can go to any bordering states, but only once. You have to find an optimal path across the entire US that doesn't cross any state twice. The presentation of the classroom and some of the warning messages you get being shown in-universe is cool, too. I think this game will definitely be easier for some people than others, as I had to think about it for a bit, but it's smooth to play and I had fun with it.

In this game, you are a scientist who is researching time, when you discover that hidden nuclear devices recently planted by terrorists will detonate 23 of the world's most populous cities, including your own. Thus, you have to use your in-development time travel machine to save the world: you can go forwards and backwards in time, and different buttons you press determine how far you go. The readme says that it was inspired as both a return to the mid-1980s Infocom age and a tribute to Golden Age science fiction. It was also the author's first time making interactive fiction, and the game came out really polished and well-written.

The opening segment of getting to your laboratory and fixing your time machine has some standard, easy puzzles. After that, the game is supposed to open up, but much of the midgame is unfinished. There are no NPCs or goals programmed in, and most time periods consist of wandering around until you get lost and/or die. Still, it's clear that the author had a lot of plans that likely would have worked out if they were implemented. It's a shame that this game wasn't finished, because the writing style and premise are engaging.

This game starts off awesome and somehow manages to get even better as it goes on. First off, it's so authentic to the music scenes it's portraying; the atmosphere of the concert, the observations of how certain fans of different genres act, an entire D&D board designed as a tribute to a band, there's a lot to like. The author clearly knew a lot about the subject matter and pulled off a great tribute to it. Some of the purist jokes and elitism almost definitely come from experience (“I didn’t say The Warning—you know, the extremely-popular-femme-fronted Mexican hardrock band—I said WARNING, whose 2006 album, Watching from a Distance is one of the bleakest, noisiest doom-metal albums of all time!").

The game's puzzles are based around an evolving mechanic where you recruit your bandmates, who are preoccupied with activities from evading stalking fans to being caught-up in a game of Animal Crossing. Once they're on your side, you can jam with them to use their types of music to your advantage, each portrayed in a clever manner: sludge metal causes grimy water to pool and pirate metal summons seagulls, for example. Merely by the way Codex Sadistica describes the music do you get the full impression of what it would feel like to listen to, and that's very impressive writing.

If you have at least two band members, you can have them jam together to make new genres of music. You get a lot to do using these, and I had a lot of fun seeing what kinds of music I could make and how it would solve the puzzles. The game has a good amount of hinting for which genre would be best or what order you have to play in, so the puzzles never feel unfair or too niche.

I was genuinely hyped throughout the entire climactic battle. You (Spoiler - click to show)light the stage on fire and fight off the demon form of a glamrock vocalist, finally unlock Mae's full potential with her drumset, and get to play even more powerful genres than anything you did before. The entire thing is fast-paced, thrilling, and a natural ending point of everything the game set up. It closes with the band all playing in unison as you prepare to do what you do best: scream. Cut to the victory screen. It's perfect.

Codex Sadistica takes a theme that's not usually seen in IF and executes it with so much passion. The writing is amazing in capturing the harsh atmosphere of a metal concert and the characters all have their own unique personalities that make reading their dialogue enjoyable. The core puzzle mechanic is well-implemented and constantly evolving, with a lot of genuine tests of how well you understand it. Even if you're not that familiar with the music scene it's referencing, it's a very well thought-out game that you can have a great time playing.