Reviews by Mr. Patient

WARNING: This review includes some discussion of sexual assault.

Sometimes you'll see a piece of media and think, This is the writer's barely-disguised fetish. This is not one of those pieces of media. There is no disguise. One (More) Week in Dolcett is an AIF game with a focus on a singular kink: getting off on being cooked and eaten (while probably also appealing to those who prefer to do the cooking and eating). Given the relative puniness of the IF community, I suspect that this hits the sweet spot for exactly one person in this comp: the author.

I'm not going to dwell much on the subject matter. Know that it features phrases like "(Spoiler - click to show)cunt steak" spoken in earnest, and that there's graphic material on nearly every page. And also know that it features several instances of sexual assault. (The assailant is deadly serious, while the subject is getting off on it). Heed the content warnings.

In this universe, there's a country to which women travel with the intent of being cooked and eaten for their own and others' sexual gratification. You go there to rescue an infuriating naïf who doesn't realize what she's gotten herself into. But also maybe to go get eaten yourself. And possibly to start a revolution so that women only get eaten when they consent to it, which is definitely not the case in Dolcett. Partway through the game, I thought, ah, this might just be an over-the-top allegory for women's rights and sexuality in general, but that thought was quickly overwhelmed by the relentless spotlight on the details of the kink.

Let's focus on the gameplay. For most of it, you get about a thousand words of story, followed by a binary choice. One of these choices is right, and leads to another thousand words of story (often well beyond what you thought you were choosing to do), while the other generally leads to death, which also leads to another thousand words (it is the fulfillment of the kink, after all). At the start of the game, you are told that you can usually determine the correct path with a close reading of the text. And perhaps this is true, at least for some portions of the game. But I must confess that I did not read closely after a while, not just because I was still doing no better than chance at selecting the right path, and not just because the material was challenging to get through, but because there is just so much text. It was hard to stay motivated.

The game has a special mechanic that pops up from time to time: a Porpentine-like wall of dozens of links, with only one leading to success. Your search is timed, and failure to select the right link within the allotted span leads once again to demise on someone's plate, breathlessly described.

There's a bit of a break at what I thought was the endgame, but turned out to be more like the 60% mark. You get a choice of three mutually exclusive paths to reach a certain destination. I chose the one labeled the shortest. I can't speak to the other paths, but here is where the gameplay became really problematic. Suddenly the game is a little more typically Twine-like, with eight to ten links peppered throughout a couple of screens of text. As before, most of these lead to death and a reset back to square one of the scene. And most of them look rather similar. So gameplay turned into excruciating lawnmowering as I figured out which of the 8-10 links was the correct one, then moved on to the next page with the next set of links. This went on for half a dozen pages. I persevered in the belief that I was close to the end, but as noted, I really wasn't. I trudged on to get to the True Ending, which, after telling me that I had won, gave me another 1500 words to digest.

Needless to say, I can't recommend this game for most people. But if this somehow happens to match your freak, you're in for a heaping helping of material.

You've already played this game many times. You go down into the dungeon as a weakling with minimal equipment. You kill monsters in randomized turn-based combat and upgrade your gear and stats as you go. You keep doing this until you get to the bottom and defeat the final boss.

This particular version of the trope has a few quirks. In order to TAKE anything (not GET, which is not recognized), your bag must be open and have room. You have to close the bag before you can move. You have to manually equip stuff in each hand. It's tedious, but you get used to it after a while.

Weirdly, the game didn't display properly for me even though it's a Windows executable and I'm running Windows:

←[38;2;240;154;82mDUNGEON SURFACE←[0m
←[38;2;232;189;88m←[38;2;232;189;88mTHE JAWS OF THE ←[38;2;237;142;173mDUNGEON←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m CLENCH BENEATH YOU.
WOLF-LIKE WINDS SLICE YOUR SENSES.
A TEMPEST OF GOD'S TEARS WHIP VIOLENTLY,
DRENCHING YOU AS THUNDER RUMBLES IN THE DISTANCE.←[0m←[38;2;232;189;88m←[0m←[0m

There's one more noteworthy feature, which I'll hide for anyone intending to take this game as a serious challenge: (Spoiler - click to show)when you save the game it helpfully lets you know that the state is being kept in a JSON file. I was reminded of Simon Christiansen's Trapped in Time, which deliberately tempted players to cheat. I played MAD WARRIOR straight for about an hour and seven levels' worth of rooms before granting myself some major quality-of-life improvements and speeding things to a conclusion. Without that, I think it would have taken five or six hours to complete.

The title is certainly fun. I figured The Smirking Horror would be a broad, probably scattershot parody of The Lurking Horror, or Infocom in general, or maybe the whole genre of Lovecraftian horror IF. It's not any of those things. It's a low-res adaptation. The premise, the map, and the puzzles are all similar to the original, just highly compressed, and with significant loss of information/entertainment value.

The game plays it straight, swapping out some names and objects, but there's no comic bite, or even an attempt at one. This is partly the result of a much less capable platform and parser. You can't exactly take the piss when you've only got room for your own minimal descriptions. The cramped margins also mean that the game is dependent on your knowledge of the original. Some actions (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)wedging open the elevator doors and lowering a cord) seem to be entirely unmotivated in The Smirking Horror unless you've played The Lurking Horror.

I confess I didn't spend a lot of time with the game, for a few reasons: 1) it's at least Nasty on the Zarfian scale, if not Cruel; 2) there's no UNDO; and 3) I didn't bother figuring out how I could save a game with the emulator I was using (more notes below). I solved a few puzzles and mostly clung to the walkthrough. I don't think it would be worth wrestling with even with modern amenities.

Notes: I found the game (including walkthrough) on an Amstrad CPC archive, and I played on my Windows laptop using caprice32. There was probably a way to mount a blank tape image on the emulator where I could save games, but I did not investigate this.

(I wrote an unmemorable 1% of this game. The stars are for the other 83 people.)

I'd like to push back just a little bit on some of the introductory text from Cragne Manor. Not the parts about how the game is insane and brilliant and fun; that's all true. I'm immensely proud and grateful to have been part of it. No, it's the stuff about being prepared to be frustrated or overwhelmed on account of its hugeness. I completed it a few days ago, and I was surprised at just how playable it was.

There are a couple of things that distinguish Cragne Manor from something like The Mulldoon Legacy (which is amazing, but is definitely overwhelming). First, Cragne provides a fantastic amenity in the form of an item that tells you if you're able to solve the puzzles in a given room, or if you need additional information or items from elsewhere, or if you've done everything you need to do already. It's difficult to overstate how comforting this thing is. I get overwhelmed in huge games from the combinatorial explosion of rooms, puzzles, and information. I can't keep everything in RAM, so to speak, and become exhausted even looking at my inventory. The (Spoiler - click to show)coffee cup in Cragne kept my headspace manageable.

It also helped tremendously that each room was written without knowledge of the other rooms. Without saying too much about how the game and its puzzles are structured, this means that almost every item or piece of information is single-use. There are definitely things you'll need to take notes on, but for the most part, you use an item or a piece of info, and you can then throw it away (or put it in the zipped-up trash pocket of the brilliantly-implemented carryall). And many of the biggest and best set-piece puzzles are standalone.

I worked alone in my playthrough, and only needed a few hints. It probably took me over 30 hours to finish, and 6800 turns (maybe twice that when you consider moves lost to restores). But I always knew what I could do next, what would have to wait until later, and what items were still useful, and that made it manageable. Don't let the size of Cragne Manor scare you off.

Thaumistry, by famed implementer Bob Bates, would slot pretty well into the Legend catalog of the early 1990s. It's fun, it's breezy, and very well-polished. It's also less ambitious than the best-regarded works from Infocom or modern IF. No heavy themes, no unfamiliar gameplay mechanics, no fiendishly intricate puzzles. It'd probably be an excellent first game for newbies.

You're Eric, a struggling inventor who learns that he's also a bodger; which is to say, a wizard who seems to generate an inordinate amount of bad luck. You spend the game discovering your powers and foiling a threat to the hidden bodger community. Spellcasting is Enchanter-style, where accumulating spells with silly names and effects is the primary means of progressing through the story. The tone is "restrained zany" in the Infocom house style. Prominent members of the IF community past and present (Bates's Kickstarters and former colleagues) show up as NPCs. I enjoyed getting to prod baf up onto a stage.

The puzzles are straightforward, and most don't require a lot of lateral thinking. There are very few takeable objects, and a finite number of spells. Solving the puzzles is generally a matter of running through the list of objects and spells until a new result is obtained. With some of the spells (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)summoning Greek waiters), there's no way to anticipate what the spell will really do, so it's just a matter of trying it everywhere until something happens.

The real strength of the game is in the implementation. It's as thoroughly-tested and bug-free as anything Infocom or Legend ever shipped, and, since we're no longer playing on Commodore 64s, much more richly implemented. It gates you in a tutorial area to begin. It ensures you can never end up in an unwinnable state. It minimizes pointless tasks, and teaches you shortcuts as you go along. There's a very handy THINK/RECAP function, which summarizes what you know and what you need to work on. There are appropriate and funny responses to almost everything, and Easter eggs everywhere. The feelies are fun and don't overstay their welcome. Presumably the hints are helpful and well-designed; I never actually looked at them. All in all, it's an extremely smooth experience. A little more friction might not have been so terrible, though.

This is a traditional-style text adventure set in a sort of mathematical wonderland, populated by mathematician NPCs and puzzles based on physical manifestations of mathematical concepts. You can tell it comes from a place of deep love of the subject.

I was a decent math student. I made my way up through calculus, and was able to memorize and apply formulas, but I can't say that I truly understood the concepts underlying all of them. And that was 25 years ago. So this game was not exactly in my wheelhouse. I managed to solve some of the puzzles on my own, but there were more than a couple where I stood no chance without the walkthrough.

That's OK. A Beauty Cold and Austere is well-written, polished, and witty, with modern amenities and forgiving gameplay, even if the puzzles can be trying for math mortals. My favorite amenity is the ghost who can tell you if an object you're carrying is still useful. I would pay cash money to port this ghost over to a game like The Mulldoon Legacy.

My main complaints:
1) It takes too long to acquire the carryall. There's no reason to delay that, I don't think.

2) The game is several times the size of a normal comp game. Math majors might be able to finish it in four or five hours, but I doubt anyone could complete it in two. Near the end, it's possible to tap out early with what seems to be a successful ending, but it takes quite a while to get there. I would have liked a structure a bit more like Shuffling Around's, where you can get a successful ending within two hours, and then return after the judging period to explore the rest. Do enough to get a C, in other words, and come back later for extra credit.

In last year's comp, Jeremy Pflasterer gave us Koustrea's Contentment, an intriguing, atmospheric, very large, and somewhat underclued game that initially lacked a walkthrough, leading a lot of players to give up on it. This year, Pflasterer has submitted Hill Ridge Lost & Found, which is similarly intriguing, atmospheric, and still a little underclued, but also about the right length for the comp. And the walkthrough, thankfully, appeared much earlier (though not on day one).

Hill Ridge is an off-kilter modern western, mixing familiar tropes with alien but relatable elements. We're the Ambler, an old cowboy gone to discover the fate of a long-unseen neighbor. Like with Koustrea's Contentment, proper names are all askew -- there's a Langle Olk and a Mrs. Vumfarr, and the missing neighbor is Lonon. There are cows and barns, but also jiller vines and vorairs, huge temperamental armadillos. The weirdness is pleasingly low-key, and the writing is understated and effective:

It's not good to sit still with suspicion. Better to carry it somewhere, quick and careful. But it ended up being somewhat late in the day that Sunday when you set out, after all manner of procrastination had run its course. And that, for you, was unusual.

I wanted to like this one.

The story, such as it is: after escaping your bedroom, you find yourself captain of the eponymous sailing ship, searching for the lost sons of the previous captain. The game is amazingly, almost endearingly primitive. There are no descriptions of anything. Almost every command is met with "I can't" or "I see nothing special." You can't even recall the room description without exiting and re-entering. There are severe guess-the-verb problems, starting with the opening room. But for all that, I was still having a good time about 2/3 of the way through it. The puzzles (mostly) made sense. I stumbled around the map but somehow always found the right place to be, and I was able to progress with a little help from the walkthrough when verb-guessing became impossible.

But then I hit a point where the game is simply broken. An object that is supposed to be there, isn't. Following a footnote in the walkthrough, I came to learn that the only way to complete the game is to hack it with The Quill to conjure the missing object. That's quite a ways beyond where I was prepared to take it. It's a shame.

Time for Tea makes a terrific first impression, with signs of a lush, deeply imaginative setting, great atmosphere, and strong writing. That impression isn't quite sustained through extended play, but even so, it's a deserving winner of the 2nd Metafilter competition.

The setting was adapted from Clarabelle Chong's Time 4 Tea, from the 2010 One Page Dungeon competition. Most of the other entrants that I looked at were in a D&Dish vein: caves and orcs and that sort of thing (although I see that Adam Thornton had a winning entry that year entitled Central New Jersey After the 'Big Whoops'). Time 4 Tea is a fantasy/SF Victorian "dungeon" with an enormous amount of imagination stuffed into the one page. There are tea alchemists unlocking magical powers, tea pirates, missing persons, mysterious notebooks, strange symbols, sinister labs filled with unusual machines, and of course, the rough outline of an actual dungeon which ends with the word "secrets!".

Virtually all of this ends up in the IF game (which was not written by Clarabelle Chong), along with some new elements: airships, a cult of Hermes Trismegistus, permutation theory in mathematics, and a touch of Lovecraftian horror. The setting seems fully-formed right out of the gate. Very quickly -- before having left the first room, even -- we find a notebook filled with historical details. We're encouraged to SOCIALIZE with the other patrons in a tea garden, suggesting that this will be a game which takes its pseudo-Victorian backdrop seriously. The initial objects we encounter have been given the deluxe treatment:

> x silver coin
Minted just two years ago, the coin carries the visage of Blake Whitstone, who founded the eponymous city in 1843, just after the War of the Rosy Cross. On the reverse is a diminutive picture of a fleet of clipper ships with minuscule tea leaves inscribed on their tiny sails. The coin should be just enough to buy your afternoon tea.

In Pinched, the PC is the hilariously crude Jayne Cobb, the accidental hero played by Adam Baldwin in Firefly. Jayne usually provides the muscle of the Serenity crew, but in this adventure, he does everything but that. It's an amusing setup, although it doesn't quite reach its potential.

The key thing in fanfic like this is to get the voices and behaviors of the characters right. Here, I think the author mostly does a fine job. Mal's voice in particular is well-realized, and almost all of the default responses have been replaced by funny things that I can imagine coming out of Jayne's mouth. Some of these are downright terrific (like the response[s] to SING). And naturally, there's lots of Whedony language and callbacks to the show. While not quite bug-free -- there are some minor run-time errors when eating unexpected things -- the game seems solid, and was allegedly tested, although the testers are also anonymous.

I wish it had a more open design, though. The game is broken into a series of one- or two-room scenes, where you either bide time during expository dialogue, perhaps interjecting something with JOKE or ASK QUESTION, or you solve (or brute-force) a simple puzzle. It's easy to code, I'm sure, but it's a real missed opportunity. The joy of playing a Firefly game (and writing one, I would think), would be in poking around Serenity and interacting with the crew: playing with the dinosaurs on Wash's console, or lifting weights with Book in the cargo bay. We don't get to do these things, or admire Jayne's prodigious gun collection, even though we're in his bunk. Firefly has a large cast, so I understand the challenges of implementing all of them as fully-realized NPCs with detailed conversation trees, but I was hoping for more.

The puzzles, while funny in the abstract, don't really deliver the daring heist promised in the blurb. A little bit of "Jayne is uncomfortable in polite society" goes a long way. Some more tension or derring-do would have been welcome.