Reviews by Lance Cirone
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Super zero, April 7, 2023One day, Gilda Garrison examines a dusty old lamp in an antiques shop, and the genie grants her a wish (not three; budget cuts). She sneezes from the lamp dust, making a noise that can be interpreted as a wish to inexplicably transform into an art gallery. In the present day, you're greeted with this incredibly amusing brief of the story so far:
You, Gallery Gal (or rather, your mild-mannered alter ego Gilda Garrison), are sitting in a classy artisan coffee place waiting for a friend-of-a-friend you will, quote, "like, totally hit it off with!"
You have the sneaking suspicion that this friend-of-a-friend is actually more of an acquaintance-of-a-friend and that Brenda may have been exaggerating about how totally you would hit it off.
You feel bad about doubting Brenda's judgement, but that would be a very Brenda thing to do.
The rest of the game follows Gilda meeting up with said friend: a superhero named Captain Caulk, who can patch every hole except the one in his heart. However, he's too entitled to realize that other people have the same problems he does, so Glinda leaves him (she can also spill hot coffee on him first). There's also the ever-present temptation to just turn into an art gallery right then and there. It's pretty crazy, and the writing made me laugh.
After your run-in with Clark, you have two paths to choose. In the first, Glinda is buying steak, but it turns out to be too expensive. The second choice is to go to an art museum. However, you can't do anything at this point, and you'll quickly run into an unfinished thread in both of these.
The game seems to have been abandoned, and honestly, I'm not sure where else it could have gone. The Clark stuff was funny, but it would have been more satisfying if there was a proper wrap-up after it and then the game had a formal ending, rather than taunting me with the promise of more and immediately taking it away.
Light the fire up in the night, March 30, 2023If there's one series that's interested me lately, it's Ryan Veeder's Little Match Girl games. I hear about the thing so much, and the increasingly crazy ways it develops and new games get revealed. So I took the time to check it out for myself.
I had been completely unfamiliar with the story, so I took a bit to do extra research before playing the game. Here, you're an unnamed little girl who's freezing to death at a street corner. You can light four matches to see different visions, each with new places to go and people to meet.
The writing is descriptive while using few words, and it made the text engaging to read. All the characters you meet have unique personalities and backstories. My favorites were Poseidon's two daughters, who are glad to accept you as their own sister.
The gameplay is a simple puzzle chain of finding an item in one area, giving it to someone, then using that somewhere else. Still, there's easy-to-follow logic with each. I always had an idea of what to do next, but it never felt boring or overly easy.
It's a charming story that doesn't take too long and is worth your time. I'm excited to see what the next games are like.
Hard to learn and hard to master, but that's why it's rewarding, March 29, 2023Kerkerkruip is an acquired taste, and it took me a while to warm up to it. This is a roguelike along the lines of NetHack, which I've never been particularly good at. What I found slightly aggravating and confusing quickly revealed itself as a game of logic, math, and a lot of dice rolling.
To start my journey, I read the help menu and beginner's guide. When I got into the game, I could tell I wasn't very successful. I was rarely able to make sense of the items I found, and any enemies (particularly those daggers) would kick my butt in a second. Despite this, the feelings of frustration from losing rarely lasted, and I'd immediately hop in for another chance. It was impossible for me to stay mad at the game for very long.
A few playthroughs later, and I hit my stride. I found some good gear, was destroying enemies with relative ease, and I realized something: I had been rushing way too fast. There's no reason to treat it like a real-time battle to the death. The best thing you can do is check your enemy, their weapon, your weapon, whatever else you might have, environmental hazards, anything that may have been inflicted on you from previous spells or battles. Once I started playing more defensively like this, I was doing better. You have so much to take into account, so take your time and really plan out your moves.
Combat itself is pretty in-depth. The main mechanic is that you can attack, or "concentrate" to build up your attack power and increase the chance it hits. When an enemy attacks, you can dodge, parry, block, or roll, all of which have different effects and are better in certain situations (you wouldn't want to parry a big club if you have a small dagger, and dodging when you're on a thin bridge isn't a good idea). There's a bit of RNG with the rolls, but much of the battle is determined through item stats and what you've done beforehand. Every enemy also has a unique weapon, moveset, stat set, and power it gives you after. If an enemy's too tough for you, you can retreat; you get a free one upon discovering a room, so it never feels like you're being punished for exploring.
There's a big feature that really incentivized me to keep going. Every time you defeat an enemy, you get a skill (like a chance to immediately act after being hit, a piercing attack, or the power to stun other enemies), in addition to a max HP increase and some points to freely distribute into one of three stats. Only the latter is permanent; there's a complicated rigmarole you have to get through in order to keep the rest of your bonuses, which involves the order you fight your enemies in. This winds up being one of the biggest puzzles in the game. It's not something you should worry about for your first few tries, but when I was about to fight the final boss, I picked up pretty quick why it important -- and I had lost all my skills except one along the way. The second time I fought him, I planned my gameplay out so that I retained three powerful spells from earlier, which led to my victory.
Weapons and gear rarely feel like straight upgrades from others, and it's fun to work out a battle plan from what you have. The array of items you can have mostly amounts to types of grenades, from what I saw, but they have vastly different effects in play, some of which are unpredictable. Some gear will also be cursed and have negative effects, which you'll only know after you put it on. In this case, you can either live with it or find a way to purify it.
There's more to watch out for, too. The game has a religion and sacrifice mechanic, where you can sacrifice skills to different gods in favor of themed bonuses. You can find scrolls spread around, but most of the time you won't know what they do until you use them. However, you can find scroll analyzers or learn about them from other books. Some enemies will fight alongside others, and they'll either gang up on you or start attacking each other. You'll also come across different types of machines around the labyrinth, which you can experiment with.
It took me a little over two hours to finish Kerkerkruip for the first time. My victory was somewhat dampened when the game told me I had now unlocked normal difficulty, but the key point is that I was always having fun with it. Even a failed run felt rewarding, since I picked up on some bit of new information or thought of a strategy I'd want to try next. Now, I'm pretty excited to go back in and see what new stuff is added on harder difficulties.
This game felt different every time I played it, so I'd definitely recommend it. And don't worry about dying; it's a learning process!
Future lost, March 26, 2023Textos Blast from the Past is disposable garbage. It's unfunny, it's immature, it's unfinished, and there's nothing worthwhile about it.
You play as Texto. Your bird friend, Oreo the Parrot, has built a time machine for you on top of an abandoned toy warehouse. Also, you live in a cave. All of this is established from the first paragraph. The game runs on a similar form of nonsense, but none of it is particularly funny. Also, you apparently have the power to text while driving, which never comes up in the game. Some mediocre drawings outline your adventure.
You leave your cave, go parkouring, and kill someone in the process. The game contains lines like "Your a dumbass" and involves multiple casual murders for no reason at all. Anyways, you are trying to capture proof of your "badassness" to activate your time machine. So you stab some guy in the crotch so "his ballsack blood and everything go everywhere." If you fail this segment, you're sent back to earlier and have to click the same options to get back to where you were, adding a tedious bit of frustration to an already short game.
After this, you arrive in a forest with Oreo. But rather than any description, you get an "{UNKNOWN TEMPLATE: THE END OF CHAPTER 1 - THE PRESENT}" and are left with nothing else. I can't say I'm excited to see what Texto would have gotten up to next.
House exploration treasure hunt, March 22, 2023Burglar! is a simple treasure hunt. You're a burglar invading someone's wealthy estate, and you have two hours to explore and rob it until they get home.
There are a lot of items to find: some important, some treasures (helpfully marked in bold), and some red herrings. The latter were definitely disruptive, but I can't say I wished they weren't there. They both fueled and foiled some of my crazier plans: for instance, I was trying to catch the cat in my bag and sic it against the dog, or put butter on the legs of a desk so I could move it downstairs. Neither worked, but I had fun trying.
Verb choice was a bit weird here. You can't use "search", but you can "look in" and "look under" items. I wasn't really sure what I could do at first, so some more points in the right direction would have helped. Similarly, I wasn't able to get all the points without a walkthrough. Every playthrough I'd find something new and figure out what to do with it, but there's definitely one or two things I wouldn't have found myself. Thankfully, you can leave the house at any time if you're happy with the treasures you've looted. I was also glad that the optimal solution isn't too time-crunched, so you can still mess up or lose track of a few things and make it out with all the valuables in time.
Still, this is a pretty good game for something made as a coding exercise. It's fun as a small game to play a few times, maybe take notes on, and see how much you can get.
Everybody’s house is haunted, March 7, 2023Ghost is a hidden gem. This game's writing is really funny, the puzzles are clever, and it gives you a large space to roam around. Right off the bat, the game got me with a joke: describing a beautiful foyer, which is "probably your last favorite room in the house," and you hate how it gets redecorated and remade every time you mess it up. The protagonist's general hatred of the house, plus their aversion to visitors, are always amusing.
The main plot is that four obnoxious teens run in, and it's your job to get them out. Each one has a specific fear, so it's up to you to psychologically manipulate those to scare them out of the house. The four characters are actually pretty dynamic; they roam around the house, each has special interactions, and it's fun to see what they have to say.
The possession mechanic adds some depth to the gameplay. When you're playing as the ghost, you can phase through walls and locked doors to get places faster. But you can also possess most of the guests, allowing you to do tasks like opening cabinets that you can't do in your non-corporeal form. Some objects can also be possessed, and these are integral to puzzles.
The game has a few helpful shortcuts to make it easier to play. If you don't know where the visitors are, there are two interactions that can summon them all into one room. Similarly, you can see a list of locations you've visited, and jump to them with just one command (provided you're not possessing anything).
I ran into a few bugs, but thankfully, the results were pretty silly and not game-breaking. While possessing Adam, I wanted to take a shower. And I did -- the entire guest fixtures went into my inventory. I carried them around with me for the rest of the game. There was another problem when I was in the game room and the ghost managed to be in the room with me, somehow. It called me out for walking into a wall. Also, some of the room text didn't update as I moved items around, which got a bit frustrating.
I should note that I haven't finished Ghost. I don't know if anyone has. I was able to get Dana out of the house, but there's some more things I can't find. If anyone's willing to figure this game out, hit me up!
How about a game of chess?, March 6, 2023GlkChess is not an IF game, but a recreation of Chess playable in Glulxe. Everything works the way you would expect, with even some complicated moves like castling and en passant added in. You play white, and you can see the board from either player's side. There's also eight save slots for your game, an undo button, and a way to restart. Despite my enthusiasm in Chess, I'm not that good at it, so I didn't manage to beat the AI. Still, my game played smoothly and worked well.
End of The World is a demonstration of how Google Forms works as a vehicle for making and playing IF. It's a very unusual format, but it worked... surprisingly well. It's a traditional choice-based game with two options each time and multiple endings. Honestly, a Twine port of this would play pretty much the same.
The story starts with you being approached by a strange creature in a black cloak. You can hide, or approach it with violence. If you get the chance, you can learn its identity and ask it about what's going on. I admit that the "cat" scene didn't make much sense, but the story feels secondary to the game's purpose.
I'm not going to give this game a star rating, since it was mainly made to demo a new format. I can't really see Google Forms becoming a popular choice for IF creators, or players, but it could have been executed much worse.
Broken and underimplemented, February 13, 2023The most intriguing thing about this game is its title. Don't be fooled; it's a generic fantasy game with nothing notable about it, and it's full of bugs that prevent you from even beating it. The writing is brief and riddled with spelling errors ("There are faint crunching noises coming from the cave to the east, but most likely it is a ZOMBY."). You'll also be lucky to come across anything that has a description, and they're rarely useful (two "potions" that I took from a witch told me nothing until I tried drinking them).
When the game starts, you're pitted against an elf named Eromix. However, you can walk away and do other stuff rather than fight him. And you'll realize that there's not much to see; characters have minimal interaction, and some rooms have nothing of interest.
Battles, which run on the "Inform ATTACK" extension by Victor Gijsbers, aren't fun or varied because of the game's format. Every weapon is a straight upgrade from the last, and you have no way of seeing their stats. Some enemies will also always attack when they reach two concentration, making it even more railroaded. There's no challenge to them, and even the titular "Blood Lust warrior" at the end of the game died in three hits. He didn't even have a description.
There's also a "hidden door" that, despite being mentioned along with the "you can go..." directions, cannot be entered or opened in any way. A certain enemy you can kill is always described as "running about" in the static room description. The "X" you have to dig up on the island also can't be interacted with, since the only interaction is for "searching the X," which doesn't work properly.
I peeked into the source code out of curiosity, and it explains a lot of this game's janky moments. I found that one enemy flat-out does nothing due to a spelling error. He's defined as "a duerger called Dridennan", but everything initializing his stats and items calls him Dradennan. Neither spelling will work on him in the game, so while you can "see" him, he remains motionless and can't be interacted with. Even the way you're supposed to get back from the island, typing "xyzzy", isn't implemented properly. The actual command you have to type is "xyzzzy" (despite what the game tells you) and it's set to apply to an object. Attempting to use it on anything won't work, so you're basically stuck, and there's no way to win the game.
This game is a broken mess with repetitive gameplay, vague descriptions, and a lack of a notable story or characters. You can't even finish the thing properly. Skip this one.
Action-packed superhero silliness, February 12, 2023A Matter of Heist Urgency has an intriguing genre mash-up of being a heist and a brawler, and one where everyone's a horse. Some ponies, some llamas, some work as pirates while others are knights and superheroes. After some brief detective work to figure out who stole your city's crown jewels, you're off to a desert island to fight a scurvy crew of llamas.
The game's got a nice style with separate "parts," each headlined with some sequenced jazz music. You have a few fights to get through before the end, and the first pits you (and your partner) against a team of three. It introduces the battle mechanics well, where you're discouraged from using the same move against an enemy more than once. RNG determines whether your attacks hit and if you dodge the enemy, but it was generally skewed in my favor, so it felt fair.
There's a scene midway through that convinced me to give this game 4 stars instead of 3. It really impressed me, and it seems to be added in response to earlier reviewer feedback, so I want to highlight it here. Please play the game before reading this part! (Spoiler - click to show)It's a flashback to Anastasia's past as a rainbow factory worker, and how it got sabotaged by a llama. We also learn about her friend's death? I assumed that's what it was. The music score here is astounding, being perfectly timed with the text, growing in intensity as it goes on, and even having some beeping in time with the rainbow meter's explosion. It adds more backstory, it's fun to follow along with, and it's a great attention-grabber after the first battle.
For the pirate battle, there's action set pieces you can take advantage of (with a little thinking) to get rid of certain enemies, guaranteed. Running around the ship, solving puzzles before the llamas could catch up to me, was a surprisingly fast-paced and intense experience. Eventually, I just chose to fight them head-on. The third battle is done in choice format, but has some nice descriptions and visuals. Each one feels dynamic and serves a purpose, so it prevents the game from getting repetitive.
I think the short, punchy nature of this game works in its favor. The wild premise and bite-sized battles make it an easy choice to just jump into and enjoy. In that way, it's like the IF equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon. The IFDB page and in-game header say that Heist Urgency is the first in a series, and I'd easily play a sequel to this.
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