Reviews by Lance Cirone
View this member's profilePrevious | 11-20 of 69 | Next | Show All
Man Tries to Sell Insurance to Baroness, You Won't Believe What Happens Next!, December 18, 2023I admit to being a bit turned away by the word "erotic" in this game's summary. Thankfully, the other reviews convinced me to give it a try. The most suggestive parts of the game just come from the character's imagination and the blurry, out-of-focus images of the Baroness in the magazine -- nothing outright graphic or sexual is shown or described.
You're in the waiting room of Baroness Valerie and preparing to sell her insurance. But your eye is drawn to a crooked painting hanging on the wall above the couch, and that bothers you. Fixing this will launch you into a chain reaction of other things going wrong around the house. It's easy to follow and the parser is responsive.
One detail I really liked is that you can get the best ending without needing to earn every point available. I finished with around 47 and still got it. Replaying the game to look for things you've missed is fun, and there are a few obscure ones I stumbled into (such as (Spoiler - click to show)kissing the magazine or (Spoiler - click to show)feeding the fish twice). I do wonder if there's a 100% guide for this game anywhere, though.
Like a few others, I was confused by the lead-in to the ending. I thought it would be a separate puzzle, and there's an aquarium full of water, so I was trying to use that to extinguish the fire. But the best ending is a nice note to go off on.
This is a short puzzler that isn't hard and I definitely enjoyed playing.
I'd build it up just to burn it down, October 6, 2023I beta tested Assembly. In the process, I ran into many wardrobe-related mishaps, proving that "HINDER" was more than living up to its name. But now that everything's ironed out, I'd definitely recommend the game. It takes a mundane setting like an IKEA and manages to make it surprisingly off-putting. The core mechanic is being able to use instruction booklets and furniture parts to build and disassemble pieces of furniture. It's responsive and makes you think about what items you can make to solve certain puzzles. The two ending puzzles are definitely the highlight; it's so exciting when you finally realize "wait, I get to do ''that''"? Ultimately, I had a lot of fun with this one.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, October 3, 2023I got to be a beta tester for Honk!, and the game blew me away.
The game takes place in and around a circus, where the performances are being sabotaged by a mysterious Phantom. You, Lola the Clown, must use your skills (mostly pie-throwing and nose-honking) to put a stop to it. The main portion of the gameplay is figuring out how to work through your circus mates' performances by using the tools you find around the carnival in creative ways. The performances can be solved in any order you want, and each has an engaging and fast-paced puzzle to go with it. You're also given as many chances as you need to get through one, and the respective performers have plenty of hints to offer, so it never feels like you're out of options.
Each of the characters are full of personality. The game shows this through letting you talk to them before, during, and after the performances, explore the inside of their campers, and giving each one unique speaking styles and idle actions. The first puzzle I chose to solve was with Freda the strongwoman, who happens to be your girlfriend. During her final show, lifting up an audience member, the Phantom shows up and turns out to be too heavy even for her. While the solution is inventive and one of the easier segments here, there's also a lot of ways for this to go wrong -- some of them involve hurting Freda, which made me feel guilty and forced me to go back, a testament to just how well this came sold me on its characters.
Ken Lawn's show was easily one of the funniest parts of the game for me, which is saying a lot. Lawn is a goose tamer who tries to have his goose tell a story for the audience (titled The Goose Who Ran Into Traffic And Got Hit By A Car) through hand motions -- but when the Phantom blindfolds the goose before the show, Lola has to use noises to get it to follow along. Lawn's oddly serious, no-nonsense personality contrasted with him desperately gesturing at a blindfolded goose had me laughing even when I was still figuring out the puzzle.
Adagio the magician also has her magic show sabotaged. The Phantom steals her method of escape when she ties herself up and lowers herself into a tank of water, forcing you to think fast and come up with an alternate solution to cut the rope. I liked the solution here a lot: (Spoiler - click to show)it makes use of a lot of small parts you'll probably have noticed, but not known how to put together yet.
This game's jokes also bring it up a lot: multiple lines had me laughing out loud. One highlight would have to be the dialogue when Adagio is about to tell you how her magic trick works. Rather than keep it a secret, you can ask if you can tell Freda. Then Ken, then your boss, then your brothers, then the guy who runs the Monster Manor, then the goose... she says yes to that last one, at least. There's also plenty of fun to be had in throwing pies at whatever you can imagine. Default responses are practically nowhere, as the game responded accordingly to whatever I tried to do during my playthrough -- everything has a bit of extra flavor to it from Lola's perspective.
I don't want to go into the endgame portion too much, but I found it satisfying and everything comes together in the end. The one flaw I had was a janky mechanic involving the circus ring and how hard it was to get back up once you left -- but I hear that this has been addressed since I played it. With all this said, Honk! is a masterclass in working humor, puzzles, and characters I care about all in one easily-accessible package. There's no objectionable content here and nothing is scary, it's very kid-friendly! I'd recommend it to anyone.
Digging deep, July 29, 2023This story relies on the "nothing is scarier" school of thought, and it pulls it off really well. You play the story as an outsider, not knowing your Father's intent for the digging he's been doing for years on end. But you do know the feelings of unease it's caused you, the fact that it made him drift away your mother, and your brother's sentimentality. It's an intriguing story where you do always feel compelled to learn what's going on, and every few scenes introduces a new bit of information that makes you think. I'm not entirely sure what the whole thing was about, but it left me feeling legitimately shaken by the end of it. Definitely worth the hype.
Memorable simulation, July 18, 2023I came across The Evolution of Trust a few years back, and the game's always stuck in my mind since then. It's an interesting little experiment. It uses simple diagrams and characters to illustrate its point, and raises some important questions. How do we learn to trust people, and when does this cycle break? How does miscommunication, people who are inherently dishonest, or copycat behavior change this? It's something that's worth a play for not only the freedom of being able to use all kinds of sliders in the sandbox mode to run simulations, but how you can interpret its message.
Hilarious group chat story, July 4, 2023I really enjoyed this game. It's presented as a traditional Discord conversation between friends: there's some drama over one of your friends scamming another by refusing to fix their solar panel. The comedic timing, the writing styles each character has, the way you ping people to get them involved, it feels straight out of real life. A very short story, as per the Neo-Twiny Jam rules, but it worked well.
Life-threatening lesbian action, July 4, 2023Being threatened at knifepoint. Intense lesbian sexual tension. Two great tastes that taste great together!
So You Have a Knife at Your Throat has you, an assassin, about to be jumped by a fellow assassin. There's a few lines that hint at more beyond just what's witnessed in the game ("you're pretty damn sure she wants it too," "this has been going on too long," "you don't want to think about how your heart beats faster when she's around"). I like the bits of detail we get, but the dynamic was interesting enough that I would love to see it expanded on in another story. Still, working within the Neo-Twiny Jam constraints, it's worth playing.
Worth going out for, May 4, 2023Gone Out For Gruyere is a fun puzzlefest. In this one, you're stuck in a room with a giant cheese mocking you every time you move. It's pretty obnoxious, and your goal is to get rid of the darn thing. There are eight directions you can go, each connecting to a single room with one or two things of interest. Rooms will close off once you've done everything there is to do in them, which helps keep it more manageable.
I had one problem with this game, where I got locked out of an item I was supposed to use. (Spoiler - click to show)I multiplied the rope, but left the room without shrinking it, so I wasn't able to go in and get it back. I had to restart the game for that. I was also unsure about how the game drifts into more abstract concepts later on, which made it a bit harder to understand and visualize. Despite this, I managed to reach the end, which was pretty satisfying.
The funny concept of this game and the variety of vignettes you can enter make it worth checking out. Definitely play around with it.
Another heist for the highlight reel, April 30, 2023Playing Lady Thalia is an all-around good time. I'll start off by saying that I love its style of writing; a lot of Lady Thalia's observations on snooty, upper-class lifestyles made me laugh. A favorite would be this at the art museum: "As the group strolls along towards yet another picture of a basket of fruit; you've never really understood the point of these, [...]". I also really appreciated the game's avoidance of info-dumps, preferring to let me take in information naturally through the conversations I had and the places I went. Despite this, I never felt like I was uninformed. If I was unable to truly pull something off, it was solely due to my own mistakes. I'd also like to praise the game's presentation: it's a royal purple-and-gold combination that looks visually striking without being distracting.
The game's main feature is three heists against the obnoxiously uptight Lady Satterthwaite. In each one, you get a daytime period to sneak around and get a sense of the layout, search for design flaws that will help you in your heist, or talk to others in your daytime-civilian persona to extract information. Then comes the nighttime, where you have to pull off your heist with as much stealth as you can. A newspaper article recaps your actions for the day, and your partner Gwen will tell you how you did and give you an idea of if you're on the right track. You also get a bit of planning for what to do the next day.
Three heists feels like just the right amount for the concept; just two would have left me wanting more, but four in one game would have overstayed its welcome a bit. Each of them grows in intensity and difficulty, too. I definitely performed the best on the first, where my only slip-up was not figuring out the combination to the safe and opting to pick the lock instead. The second and third didn't go as well, but that's mostly because I became accustomed to picking the most rude and sarcastic dialogue options. Yes, I wanted to still do my best with the heists, and yes, they're rarely helpful, but I very much appreciated the fact that I could make Lady Thalia say exactly what I was thinking at the moment. I jumped at the chance to tell Mel to go to hell.
I'd had my eye on this game for a while, and I'm glad I decided to give it a try. There are two sequels, which I'm looking forward to checking out; I hear one even has a romance system included. Maybe I'll give Lady Thalia a bit more reserve there. Maybe.
The presentation of this game tripped me up at first. The Twine window on the main page is actually Twine itself, opening a menu for you to edit new stories with. You have to click a different link to access the "game"; it asks you if you know what the word "Herculean" means and what it connects to. I do, and continuing the quiz ends with a bunch of literary text being dumped on you at once. I also don't think there's a way to scroll through the text here, so I had to decrease the size of my browser window.
The website is a branching segment with clashing colors, Comic Sans, and a bunch of images that are too small to really read the captions on. The text analyzes allusions and references in media like Danny Phantom or Zootopia. It's clear that there was thought put into it, and I did find it slightly interesting, but it can barely be classified as a game; it's more akin to a school project. I can tell there was effort put into the writing and research, but I don't think it'd be fair to give this a star rating and judge it as a game.
Previous | 11-20 of 69 | Next | Show All