Ratings and Reviews by Lance Cirone
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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.
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.
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