Ratings and Reviews by Lance Cirone

Death By Monkey is the only fully original game made in the IAGE engine. The others are Alice Through the Looking Glass, Cloak of Darkness, and Ruins ported over from the Inform sample book, an incomplete port of Mini Zork, and an MST version of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die. Curiously, this game also has multiplayer compatibility, apparently. IAGE lets you host a server that other people can join to play games with you, and there's even functionality to kick players who are disruptive.

It was a pain to figure out how to play this game in the first place, given the obscurity of the platform. I wound up using the IF Archive to download the launchers, hosted my own server, and then joined it in another client (there didn't seem to be a way to just play this on its own). I was surprised the program worked perfectly on my PC, given that it was discontinued in 2002.

For the story, you are driving down a dark road at night when your car crashes. With nowhere else to take shelter, you go to a creepy mansion and look through the window to see a mad scientist zapping a caged, implanted monkey, causing it to briefly gain super strength. Now, you head down to the basement and see the monkey for yourself. You can knock it out by throwing a rock at it, and there's a few items and pieces of scenery around that serve as red herrings, because the rest of the game is unimplemented. You can't get killed by the monkey, either. There's no formal ending point.

This is one of the 12 games made for ToasterComp, explaining the noticeable spike in toaster-related games of 2000 you may notice when browsing the IF archives. It is extremely short. You are hired to fix a toaster and must do so by following the manual. The game's setting and atmosphere is what lifts it up: it's happening in the middle of a cook-off where stagehands are rushing by and pressure is put on you. Also, the guy you have to fix the toaster for is named Biff Backowicz. It's worth checking what your score is throughout the game, because the ranks are pretty funny.

Noticeably, Leon Lin has returned to regular IF developing over twenty years after this game, making some pretty well-received games for EctoComp and Spring Thing.

I was hoping to like Earl Grey more than I actually did. The game's upper-class English writing style befitting a tea party is very well-done, and the characters are memorable. The game also gives you some of the protagonist's internal monologue after each move, which can clue you in to what to do next or (more often) give you a joke. I found the jokes to be a bit excessive later in the game, but there were some clever ones too ("You know, Eaves, it's not like I didn't have other options today. One of my friends offered to teach me to fish! I could have eaten for a lifetime!")

The game is a bit like a reverse Counterfeit Monkey. Here, you get to take letters out of things and transform them, then re-insert the letters. Confusingly, a few puzzles involve removing a letter, doing something, then putting the letter back where you found it. The opening has you do this twice in a row and I had no idea what happened differently between the two times -- the dialogue made me think I screwed up the puzzle and it was giving me another attempt. And the biggest problem I had with the game is how confusing some of the puzzles can be. They get really abstract or make use of things you don't think too much about.

There's a lot of potential with this game, but I found it a bit messy. David Welbourn's walkthrough is very helpful if you just want to read through the story without struggling with the more esoteric puzzles.

SpeedIFs are always a bit hard to review, because they have so little to discuss by nature. Still, A Wizard Goes Shopping is a fun five-minute adventure. You have to collect lobster, mango, and fettucine by exploring four aisles of the grocery store and casting spells to help you reach what you need. I think this concept could easily be expanded into a longer game.

In this game, you're an 8 year-old inventor who gets bullied on the playground, and has to set up traps to use on the bullies the next day. You find all the materials you need by exploring your house, featuring a few small puzzles. Assembling the traps is fun and the game gives you a good amount of clues, there aren't any super complicated or interconnected puzzles.

Also, you don't need to solve everything: you only need three traps, and I ended up making four. My favorite was the dart gun that launches a superglued sticky note on the bully's back, and you get to write whatever you want on the note. Seeing all the traps in action is satisfying and you can easily picture how they play out.

I like that you get a sense of what the protagonist's family is like just based on the narration and what they have around the house, and the ending climax plays out well. I think the writing in this game could be pushed a bit more -- it's good but not great. There's also a few issues with synonyms not being recognized. Still, this is a simple, lighthearted story that I enjoyed.

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.