Reviews by Lance Cirone

Looking back at the game now, it doesn't seem that revolutionary or interesting. It's almost a troll game, if anything. Games like Aisle have done its concept so much better.

Nuns commence incanting as the lightning strikes your temples thus! Electrifying your chambers wholly, scorching out their sovereignty! You were just a boy, you see! You plead of them, have sympathy for you!

Actually, this game's pretty light on plot. The Kaden have locked your mind's essence away in cyberspace, and your companions, the Souden, might be coming to help you. Most of this game is spent talking to a cube, which is frustratingly obtuse because it barely has anything useful to say. It feels pretty esoteric: you know the spider is used for maintenance, but do you know how to talk to it? It's repeatedly spinning around and holding a doll, how do you deal with that? Other puzzles include just typing a command twice in a row to make it work, or trying to overload computers.

You can easily miss out on story events, including the warp to the game's ending, if you happen to be in a different room than the cube. The game also loves giving you puzzles with time limits, so I had to save often for what's ultimately a short game. As far as the ending goes, I thought it was pretty unsatisfying and confusing. Also, there's these pretentious quotes that keep showing up at the top of the screen, but they don't go away very fast and just cover up earlier text. It'd be easy to turn this into something worthwhile, but it's not worth seeing how the brain plays around.

Indigo is a game that's really more frustrating than fun. I love the concept, but it's not communicated well, and the game is full of bugs. I was relieved to be finished with this one.

You're sent into the wide land of Threediopolis. Your new employer, Ed Dunn, has a list of places he wants you to visit so you can complete tasks for him. But, in this realm, it's not about where you're going as much as how you get there.

Threediopolis is a game that seems overwhelming at first. You have 40 tasks and 10 friends to find. Every place is signified by a 3 digit number and a cryptic description. At first, I was wandering around without a clue. (Spoiler - click to show)I decided to figure out how my movements effected the numbers, then honed in on one place that wasn't far from the start. I had to go down, north, and east. Easy. I tried every combination of these... but when I went north, east, and then down and met a guy named Ned, I suddenly realized what this game was. It's a word game!

(Spoiler - click to show)You have 6 directions, using letters, and you have to spell words with them. Like SEEDS takes you to a gardening supply store, DUNES takes you to a desert, and WEENERS is a hot dog restaurant. There's also a bunch of bonuses if you type things like SENSUS (you fill out a census forum), SUDDEN (a loud noise startles you), and SEUSS (you meet a Dr. Seuss creature). If you can't work something out from the text description, you can try to figure it out with the numbers.

I was able to finish all the tasks and find all the friends, but you don't have to. You can return to Ed at any point to turn in your list and get a final score. The postgame gives you a list of 80 bonus tasks, some of which you may complete over the course of the regular game.

Overall, I found Threediopolis to be a fun time. The writing is witty and funny, even wrong expeditions will reward you with something amusing, and it's not that long or difficult once you get the hang of it.

Very Vile Fairy File has you as Kerry Kyle, transported into a strange world consisting of rhyming couplets. The titular Fairy File will repeatedly show up to insult you until you can put a stop to it.

The game revolves around rhymes: you have to turn Soft Sand into a Loft Land, a Coral Cage into a Moral Mage, a Stark Store into a Dark Door or you can Mark More. Seeing how many puns the writing can string together is part of the fun, especially when you run into a dead-end room.

The game encourages guesses, since ones that might not exactly help will still feed your Lurking Lump, allowing you to use a Jerking Jump to bypass puzzles you're stuck on. It's a fun trade-off, but I did find myself devolving into just going down a list of syllables or letters during particularly frustrating areas. You can also use your Leet Learner to get an idea of whether or not you have to subtract or add letters from a term.

There's a good amount of context clues you can work out from examining objects, and only once did it use a word I didn't know. There's also a flat-out hint feature, but most of the time it wasn't that helpful. Either way, there's plenty of anti-frustration features, and multiple areas will always be open at once, so you can just do something else to clear your head until you want to return.

Very Vile Fairy File is strong and funny, and definitely worth a try if it seems interesting to you.

This game has a nice story, but once you've exhausted it, there just isn't that much to do. The wording on (Spoiler - click to show)the final command is awkward, and while the clues are there, (Spoiler - click to show)it just amounts of doing the same thing in every room until you happen to come across it.

This is flat-out one of my favorite games of all time. Everything it does just struck all the right chords for me. The dry, sarcastic humor, the gloomy atmosphere, the way Helen and Grant interact with each other. You get a sense of what each of these characters have been through, and you genuinely do want to see what each of them have to say.

You are in a cafe, meeting up with an old classmate who you used to be in love with, and you want to prevent any embarrassing bits of history from coming back up... including a prank with your friends as part of a secret group you were in. You can try to distract from the conversation, focus more on the present, talk about your past, all sorts of interesting things.

The writing is hilarious and goes off onto all these somewhat bizarre topics or bits of history. There's Regis, the sculpting cowboy who Grant's mother is now dating. There's your English teacher who would squeak a dog toy into students ears when they weren't paying attention and now writes cheesy romance novels under a pen name. There's your twin brothers, who have a frog named Fuzzy and are completely unaware of how unfitting such a name is.

You can talk with Grant about movies, religion, literature, debate the origin of the universe, all sorts of sophisticated stuff. Helen in particular has a lot of problems with her mother that she can vent. And this conversation feels natural. You can see his posture and expressions change depending on what's brought up. Topics bounce around a bit, but it flows realistically. Your options are varied and make sense. Everything you do feels worthwhile.

The game gets right into its topic. No long-winded exposition; you can read background information as you want by thinking about certain topics. I was a bit baffled at first when it talked about "3Nigma" and all these characters I hadn't met, but the thinking command and the general flow of the conversation kept me on track.

The actual conversation content is beautifully written. It knows when to be funny and when to be grounded, like when you have a conversation over some poetry Grant dissed without being aware that you wrote it. Or when he finally pulls out the notebook of long-winded, embarrassing poetry you wrote about him, and you have to decide how to deal with it.

This game has become so comforting to me. Each line of dialogue gives you something new to consider or contemplate. It's a work of art.

Max Blaster is a game I am extremely divided on. On one hand, I love the written content and the story. Max and Doris are a great duo, with Max being the dumb action hero and Doris being the snarky sidekick who doesn't take his shit. Puzzles make use of their physical attributes and the different gadgets that each one has. You can switch between the two characters when they're together, but there are puzzles where you have to use a certain one.

The game's humor is really funny, with some highlights being a magazine full of bird puns and Max's repeated "I told you so"s to Doris after being saved from a snake. You also get a lot of footnotes that you can read for even more jokes. You can even type ">re-enact famous socio-political decisions" at one point and get a response. I like the interactive cutscenes that let you decide what you want to say, even if they're mostly at the beginning and end.

The thing I don't like about this game is the bugs and the unresponsive parser. So many times, I clearly knew what I wanted or had to do, but I had to figure out the right way to word it, and it felt like nothing I did would register. I'm not someone who usually gets tripped up by guess-the-verb, but this game was infuriating with it. Max's barrier tool -- you set it to a shape you want, then can summon that and use it physically -- was such a pain that I stuck to Doris until I was forced to learn how to use it.

It's so easy to get yourself hardlocked by bugs in this game. There is a mandatory portion in the middle involving opening modules on a computer, and if you use the same module more than once, you will get a parser error. There is no way to work around this and nothing you can do to progress. I also ran into numerous issues where text that was supposed to display didn't, leaving out critical parts of puzzles (the presence of a gap after you climb onto the stepladder) or story details (such as how Max gets across the gorge). I only saw these on replays.

Another problem I had was with the first split-up puzzle, Max needing to make a sandwich for robots. No matter how closely I followed the walkthrough, I was not able to get this to work. I had to restart the game and make sure I was Doris to get a different puzzle. When I entered an even more complicated puzzle with Max later in the game, I chickened out and decided to see what Doris's puzzle was, and it was thankfully more manageable. If you want the least frustrating way through the game, save often, and make sure you're Doris every time you get separated.

If you're willing to put up with an unpolished gameplay experience, give Max Blaster a try, because the story and jokes here is very much worth it.

(Adapted from intfiction.org post)

Lenard Gunda’s Lazy Wizard's Guide was one of the first IFComp entries I played this year; the charming premise made me interesting in what it could be.

One of my favorite styles of IF game is when you have a magic system that just builds on top of itself, starting with simple spells and then moving on to more advanced and interesting ones. It’s not that common, but it’s always a joy to play; compare Junior Arithmancer. Even beyond this mechanic, Lazy Wizard’s Guide amazed my with its varied characters and non-linear goals.

The plot: You’re a senior student at a magic academy, taking your final exam to be a licensed wizard. The problem is that you don’t have a clue on how do to any of it! Armed with only a Beginner’s Magic book, can you explore the school and its surroundings to figure out how to complete all five of your exam goals?

I love the atmosphere of this game. You’ll run into all sorts of fantasy creatures – tree people, ghosts, gnomes, witches, vampires, among others – and it’s fun to go around the school. The characters you can interact with are unique and memorable, and I’d always liked checking back to see if they had anything new to say as I progressed. Room descriptions are kept concise, and everything you’ll need to know is mentioned. The game also uses a special web parser that makes conversations easier (you get to click numbered options) and highlights certain important verbs or notifications, which improved the ease of play and makes it easier to recommend to people who are new to IF.

The spell system is easy to understand: learn a spell, and you know it forever. If you have the ingredients you need, go ahead and cast it (on something if needed). Some of these are as simple as lighting up dark rooms or unlocking doors, while later ones include entering paintings and summoning vampires. You also have to brew some potions to complete your exam. The versatile spell system also leads to some puzzles having multiple solutions, which I liked.

There’s one area I would like to see improved: if you’re stuck, you can call an “exam jinn” to give you hints. However, most of his hints are vague and there’s points where he didn’t even have anything to tell me. I ended up beating the game without any of his help. It’s also a minor nitpick, but at first, I ended up (Spoiler - click to show)drinking the tea that was meant for Mirlena. She kept asking for it, and I was wondering if I made a mistake, since I couldn’t get any more. I ended up going back to an earlier save to give it to her, but nothing new happened; the dialogue seemed the same and there didn’t seem to be any achievements related to it. It was a bit of confusion that stuck out, considering how good the rest of the game is at giving feedback and ensuring I can’t mess up puzzles.

Lazy Wizard’s Guide is a lighthearted and imaginative IFComp entry with strong gameplay and great worldcrafting. I liked it a lot, and I’d definitely recommend it.

If you have any doubt, stop reading these reviews and play the game.

There is so much to do in Counterfeit Monkey. I've played it three times and I'm still finding new stuff. Everything you do is rewarding and fun. The writing is consistent and the style is really original. The letter-remover is one of the most creative and well-implemented concepts I've ever gotten to use in a game, and the new tools that open up as you play just kept amazing me.