Ratings and Reviews by Lance Cirone

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.

The Play won me over with its strong cast of characters, stylization, and comedy. In this story, you play as a director for a local theatre production. Opening day is tomorrow, and nothing is going right. With inexperienced actors, tension between cast members, a lack of fitting costumes and props, and bizarre improvisation, you have to make sure everything works as smoothly as it can.

The game switches styles between a formally written play script detailing sections of the performance, and prose for the sections where you are given backstory or choices. Also, some words can be clicked for a bit of extra background detail, which is a nice option. For the ending, there's a neat capper where you are given a review of the play based on what you decided to go with. The sidebar also lists the crew members and what their current mood is. The choices do all build up and impact the story, but you don't feel pressured that you could miss out on something big, and a single playthrough is short enough that you could easily play it a few times to see what else you can do.

What sells the writing for me is that while we only see a day in this troupe's life, we can already get a good understanding of their dynamic just from how they talk to each other and what they do during the rehearsal. The story is full of little references to previous experiences they've had, including some peculiar credits that go mostly unexplained ("The Ballad of Benji Benjamino", "last month's run of Much Alarm About Agnes"). The writing is very confident and doesn't slow down with unneeded exposition.

This is easily one of my favorite choice-based games I've played, and it deserves all the recommendation it gets.

This is a surreal game where much of it seems to be left to the player's interpretation. You explore a garden surrounding a wedding, picking up items and using them to uncover more details: such as finding nice clothes to join the wedding yourself or getting gardening tools to dig up a mysterious spot in the garden. The latter will lead to you uncovering a grave and begin a murder mystery. Namely, you think you were the murderer, and it might also be your own wedding you're attending -- it's all a bit unclear.

Every time you loop around the garden, you are given the choice to submit to one of two outcomes (accepting your guilt or deciding it wasn't your fault), and the game tells you neither outcome is exactly the "correct" one. It depends on the information you found and how you, the player, feel. Alternatively, you can take another trip around the garden to use items or look for places you might have missed. It's a pretty engaging structure, and I found myself constantly coming across new things.

I also liked the game's writing style: it leans into this more ethereal vibe where you're not exactly sure what's real or not. I wasn't able to come across a proper ending in my playthrough, but I might have missed something. The game was a bit longer than I expected, too. Overall, I'd recommend this one.

This is one of the games from Bouchercomp, a SpeedIF running in 2008. The premise involves a prison escape, and the interpretation here is quite unconventional: you are trapped in a miniature pocket universe by Professor Shecky Lowell, consisting of a park, a few people doing repetitive actions, and a shed. The only escape is through a giant void, where certain conditions must be completed before you are allowed through.

The game's main puzzle is strange, in that the only hint I could find (the text on the flagpole) seemed to be a red herring. Still, the map is so small and there are so few interactable objects that you are bound to find it through trial and error. In the end, you don't even escape the paradise: you just find kitten powder that lets kittens frolic through the park, like Lowell told you they used to until they were scared away (or eaten) by a giant.

In the end, the main puzzle just isn't that satisfying to solve. Still, I do like that Lowell's Paradise was able to fit in so much backstory and such a unique setting for a game developed in a short time.

Merk is a pretty amusing SpeedIF. You are sent a letter by an alien who requests that you bring him a 100 year-old typewriter, because he always breaks newer keyboards. You go to the typewriter store and find one in the back room, but it turns out to be cursed and transports you to Pluto. The entire planet and its inhabitants are cursed too, so the alien tells you to blow up the planet, which you do using a cartoony detonator. "The moral is: never open your mail."

It makes no sense, but I always get a kick out of more surreal stories like this. It was also pretty easy to play, it's basically a linear structure where you are immediately told where to go or what to do next. I liked it.

Midnight Snack is an beginner-friendly game revolving around getting out of bed, making and eating a sandwich, and going back to sleep. You are graded on how fast you can complete the game. Once you're aware of the few caveats you need to take care of before getting to bed (turning off the lights and sinks, putting away your butter knife and food), it doesn't take too long to beat the game with the best rank. I think this game could be good for introducing someone to basic parser gameplay.