Ratings and Reviews by Ryusui

Dog Saves Baby puts you in control of an intelligent dog who must save a newborn baby from the Evil brothers (yes, that's their family name). It's just as corny as it sounds, even with some gruesome imagery thrown in for no reason except to quantify this game as "horror", but it's an interesting concept on paper: the salient detail is that the protagonist is non-human, with all the obvious restrictions. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Unfortunately, the author has managed to take this idea and suck all the potential enjoyment out of it.

I don't know where these authors get the idea that if they have a good story to tell, it doesn't matter if the game itself is fundamentally unplayable. While Dog Saves Baby is unquestionably better-implemented than Hors Catégorie, the game's central conceit is that not only are you only limited to what a dog can do, but you must also phrase commands in a way a dog would presumably understand. While this mainly means you have a host of new, dog-appropriate verbs ("sniff" on its own behaves as a radar for nearby locations of interest, a nice touch in my opinion), this means that some ordinarily acceptable verbs and even synonyms are rejected: "look at" something ("examine" and even "x" are rejected) will tell you to try "listen", "sniff" and "lick" instead (and before you ask, you can't use the common "smell" or "taste" verbs as synonyms), you can't "wait" (annoying as the game begins with a sequence of ten turns during which you can't do much of anything except try out your new canine vocabulary) or "take" (the game demands you use "fetch" instead), and most annoyingly, any attempt to move in a direction must be prefaced with "go". Mercifully, the usual abbreviations work, so you can type "go w" instead of "go west", but you must type "go" before any direction. This is arguably enough on its own to make the game unplayable, especially for an experienced player who is used to brevity: denying the player the ability to use the common one-and-two letter abbreviations ("n. x sign. e. g. z. in.") is almost as serious an impediment as chopping off the player's fingers.

The most annoying "feature" is that all the common interaction verbs - "open", "close", "push", "pull", etc. - have been discarded in favor of a catch-all "use" verb. This unintuitive implementation opens up a whole new world of "guess-the-author's-mind": attempting to "use" the (Spoiler - click to show)glove box, for instance, will inspire the dog to try opening it, while trying to "use" (Spoiler - click to show)Terry's pocket in an attempt to search it will simply produce an error message (Spoiler - click to show)(the game expects the player to "bite pocket" instead). The current version puts the (Spoiler - click to show)taser in its originally-intended hiding place, turning it from an insultingly simple "get-X-use-X" puzzle into an exercise in frustration: imagine MacGyver being handed a pile of scraps with the expectation he's going to turn them into a plasma rifle, with the caveat that he is not allowed to have any tools. There are ten rooms to explore in the first chapter, most of which include some detail of note (Spoiler - click to show)(including a patch of earth that you can dig in...of course, true to form, the game rejects "dig" in lieu of "use soil"), but despite the author's claims that there are four ways to solve this introductory region, nothing that doesn't involve the (Spoiler - click to show)taser (which the author has dutifully disposed of) is readily apparent with the objects and verbs you have to work with. The player also starts the game with a time limit: you must "treat your wounds" within a very short time frame, otherwise you die instantly, and only a person who is very used to thinking like a dog will hit upon (Spoiler - click to show)"lick wounds". The rest of us will have to hope for that walkthrough the author promised.

All told, the game suffers from exactly the same problem as Hors Catégorie: it suffocates whatever promise its premise had by gutting the standard interface and replacing it with something frustratingly inferior. New verbs are one thing, but why get rid of the old ones when they worked so well? Especially when you get rid of all the helpful shortcuts and useful alternate phrasings in the process? Not even restore works properly: it works fine in-game, but if you die, guess which one of the classic "Restart/Restore/Quit" options refuses to work (despite being listed)?

So why give it a two, you might ask? Because it's a fun idea. I'd like to see the author go back and hammer out a rewrite: fix the interface so that I don't feel like I'm playing Simon Says every time I enter a command, play down the "horror" and play up the sheer ridiculousness of the game. You play as a heroic superdog who had a traumatic child(puppy?)hood at the hands of an abusive bastard only to be miraculously redeemed by a loving family and their newborn baby; then you watch as said family (Spoiler - click to show)is brutally murdered by The Smurfs by way of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you set out to bring your bloody revenge down on the Evil brothers (I'll never get tired of typing that) and save the precious baby before she is turned into One Of Them. That's not sarcasm, by the way, that's the game's actual plotline, and it's really a shame that such a hilariously ridiculous plot is imprisoned by a substandard interface and illusions of being an actual horror game.

If you're reading this, Mr. Kriss, I hope you take my criticism as an inspiration to improve rather than quit. And please include a proper hint system next time. (Oh, and "use" is actually not one of the common IF verbs, despite being touted as such in the manual or in-game help. And the manual itself? Using a PDF for what amounts to four pages of plain text is just pretentious, and pretentiousness is one of the things I hammered Hors Catégorie for. Just saying.)

This is a one-room game with two simple, but very logical, puzzles. It doesn't aim very high, but it hits its target. The sparse implementation is well-excused by the premise that the protagonist has been abducted by aliens who are not all that sure of what constitutes ideal living conditions for a human being: literally everything plays into one of the game's puzzles in some capacity, and subtle details give the protagonist himself a nice bit of characterization. Taunting Donut is nothing earth-shattering, but the author definitely shows promise with this first effort.

If you've never heard of the story which this is based on, don't feel ashamed. The Gallery of Henri Beauchamp is one of a myriad of so-called "creepypasta" stories brewed up in the depths of 4chan: these are basically bite-sized bits of horror, usually of the Lovecraftian variety, wrapped in the premise of an urban legend.

This is a short game. This is no surprise, as The Gallery of Henri Beauchamp is a short story. A complete walkthrough of the game is only ten lines long. But it remains an adaptation of a story, and as such falls into the same pitfall that most previous attempts at adaptation such as the two MANALIVE games fall into: it assumes an understanding of the source material. So you can't really play the game (without resorting to the in-game help, anyway) unless you're familiar with the source material, but at the same time, if you've read the source material, there's really no impetus to play the game.

The game is implemented well enough to be playable from beginning to end without any awkward responses or guessing games, but then the scope of the game is very narrow: the whole purpose of this exercise is to let the player live through the story on which it is based without any noteworthy deviations or side trips or, truth be told, any incidental detail whatsoever. That said, what detail there is happens to be quite well-written: reading the original story reveals that almost the entire text is drawn from it verbatim (the text written by the game's author tends to falter in comparison).

All told, it's a better first showing than many. The story is itself basically a copy-and-paste job, but the implementation is sound, if shallow. It's not an excellent or even a terribly good game, but it's a decent start for a new author.

It's a bad sign when a game's tagline reads like a passage from The Eye of Argon. This self-proclaimed "experiment in affective, embodied interactive fiction" manages to evoke only a vague sense of confusion and a powerful sense of moral indignation.

First off, for whatever reason, it seems the authors have thrown out the standard I6 library in favor of something hand-rolled and unforgivably primitive. Most of the standard IF verbs are absent: you can't listen to the beeping on the first turn, for instance, and even utility verbs such as save, restore and restart respond with an unhelpful "Not implemented yet." Using the standard library would have fixed most of these issues; unfortunately, the loss of most of the standard IF vocabulary isn't the full extent of the game's problems.

Actually exploring your surroundings is a chore, even beyond the obvious parser shortcomings. You can't examine any of your surroundings while you're on your bed; the table and desk are inexplicably described as being "on the floor" and thus supposedly difficult to examine (which doesn't make much sense, seeing you're stuck in bed and thus above the floor). There are "things" scattered on the floor which you can't examine, because the game infuriatingly doesn't recognize the word "things" (or the word "all", for that matter, rendering any attempt to pry some idea of what nouns the game is supposed to recognize from a "take all" attempt futile). The game is so brutally underimplemented that any attempt to glean any kind of story from it will only result in headaches: after "turn off alarm", the next puzzle involves soothing your aching muscles, which can be accomplished via the magic phrase "rub tiger balm on legs"; the problem is, the tiger balm is effectively invisible, likely in the scattered junk on the floor which you can't examine, meaning the only way you'll know it's there is by typing "help", quite possibly the only useful verb in the game, and after I realized that the game's problems extended much, much deeper than the parser I quit in frustration.

The game purports to be an examination of the moral and ethical consequences of drug use by athletes, a one-room game that blasphemously refers to itself as being inspired by Andrew Plotkin's "Shade". What it comes off as is yet another project whose ambition far outstripped the talent behind it. The parser is garbage, important objects are virtually if not entirely unimplemented (you can't even "examine me", for crying out loud)...anyone who can actually play this wreck to completion deserves a medal (not that I have any to give). Whatever story it might have is hopelessly drowned in a sea of ineptitude: apparently, being "avant-garde" mattered more to the authors than producing anything even remotely playable.

In closing, I have three things to say to the authors:

1. The standard library is there for a reason. Use it. (As it stands, this game gives a horrible new meaning to the term "Z-Abuse".)

2. Have your game beta tested before you even consider another release of any sort.

3. "Guess-the-verb", "guess-the-noun" and other general "guess-the-author's-mind" puzzles are generally considered bugs, not features, and it's the fault of the author if the player doesn't leap from, say, "itchy legs" to "tiger balm" if there isn't any tiger balm visible.