Reviews by RadioactiveCrow
About 1 hour
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Short surreal adventure that lacked something to tie it all together, YMMV, October 5, 2021I feel like surreal pieces, perhaps always, but especially in the case of this game, are really more about the author expressing something or working through something important to them in a way that only they fully understand. These kinds of stories are like the songs you hear on the radio with a catchy tune and lyrics that you can sing along with, but when you really listen to the words you have no idea what the song is about.
This is a well enough written and implemented, short choice-based piece, but I didn't think there was enough to me to grab on to in the story for me to come away with a lasting impression. I could easily see the characters and bits of conversation having meaning for the author, but I think the average reader will not know what to do with this. Surreal pieces like this need to have very well-defined themes and/or symbolism, punctuated with moments of clarity, so that even though it seems like you've been tossed in the middle of Wonderland, you can still ascertain what the author is trying to say. Perhaps some lines of angry or poignant dialogue that pull together the last few pages of haziness into some philosophical point. For me this piece was lacking enough of those elements to give me something to get out of it.
Fun story that utilizes multimedia elements to really set the atmosphere, October 3, 2021If you threw Europa Report, Aquaman, Abyss, The Core and maybe a touch of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets into a witch's cauldron and made it spit out a comic book, you'd have this story. Add in a Myst-like atmospheric soundtrack and you have the game "Mermaids of Ganymede".
You play the commanding officer of a research vessel that crash lands on Ganymede, or rather crashes through the ice layer and sinks to the bottom of the ocean surrounding the core of Ganymede. Soon it becomes clear that you are not alone in the icy depths, and there is a whole world down there that no one knew about. Can you repair your ship and radio for rescue? Or will getting home require a different skill set you never thought you'd need on this mission?
The game is broken up into five chapters. The odd numbered chapters play out much like a traditional choice-based game, with you selecting a story path at various junctures, and making dialogue choices along the way. The even numbered chapters play out much more like puzzle-centric games, reminiscent of "Tavern Crawler" from IFComp 2020. The interface remains the same, but rather than being pushed down the main plot line with some ability to steer, it becomes much more open world, with you able to go to a wide variety of locations, backtrack as much as you'd like and have to solve a puzzle of some kind to be able to reach the next chapter.
I liked the story chapters a lot more than the puzzle chapters. In Chapter Two it took me awhile to realize that was what was going on and it threw me off a bit. Chapter Four (Spoiler - click to show)is a maze that is hard to wrap your head around the geography of given the very brief descriptions. Additionally, you can die (which I did four times before finally figuring out the right order of actions) and have to restart the chapter. That threw me out of the rhythm of the story. I think I would have rather than whole game been like the odd chapters.
The story itself was fun, if a bit cliched and not terribly deep, but I think appropriate to a game of this length. It did feel like the author was throwing every idea they had against the wall to see what would stick. The best part of the game were the multimedia elements and the atmosphere. From the illustrations, to the color of the text, to the background music (different for each chapter), it was easy to really see myself in the world that the author had created and stay immersed in the story.
The game is very polished and well worth your time, a great improvement from the author's entry in IFComp 2020. Given that improvement and all the things that worked well in this game, I'm eager to see what the author comes up with next.
Linear game about how quickly strangers can become friends online, October 2, 2021This piece strikes me as a very personal story from the author. Nothing at all like their entry in last year's IFComp (which I very much enjoyed). Kind of a journal entry and therapy session played out in the creation of this work of Twine. I'm not sure if the author explicitly said so in the blurb or intro to the piece, but it feels like this is a slightly fictionalized re-telling of things that actually happened to them. I hope that they have been able to heal a bit by sharing their story with others.
Perhaps because I haven't shared any of the experiences in the story it was hard for me to relate to this piece. I think I'm just not the target audience. The story is extremely (maybe completely) linear, where the few choices that you are given are often just different ways to say the same thing. I've found that if you aren't given enough agency to choose the personality of the character you are playing, then if you don't relate to that character sometimes the game just misses you. That was the case here. The short sections alternate between fandom discussions of anime, programming a website, online SFW role playing and discussions of the main characters home woes. The only sections I was really interested in were the last kind, and they seemed infrequent and over quickly. Again, because I'm pretty sure these were real experiences it makes sense to switch back and forth between these scenes in this way, just not sure it makes for the best story structure.
Honestly, my enjoyment of this game was closer to the two-star level, but because I know the game was important for the author to make and will hopefully be important for some others to read, and because I do want others to play it in case it does speak to you, I gave it three stars.
Auto-biographical parser game that should have been a choice-based game, October 2, 2021First let me say that this game would have been much better if it had been a choice-based game. I think the author learned Inform 7 to make "The Eleusinian Miseries", his IFComp entry in 2020 (my personal favorite from that comp and one of the best first games ever), and just stuck with it for this game. Sadly, I think making this a parser game detracted from it overall. That said, it doesn't take long to play and is still worth your time.
The game is a combination of personal memoir, tribute to the author's twin sister, and diatribe against bees (preach!). It is broken up into six vignettes, all personal experiences of the author, each punctuated by a bee sting (or twenty).
The second section (and to a lesser extent the fourth section) frustrated me greatly as I couldn't find a rhythm with the parser. It seemed like I was always getting scolded for either waiting or trying to talk, and in the meantime a lot of sailing jargon was being thrown at me and it was up to me to guess which words of that mumbo jumbo (land-locked pleb here) I was supposed to parrot back to the parser to get the game to progress. My advice to future players would be to just fight through that second section in whatever way possible to get to the rest of the game, which is much better.
In the end the game becomes a story of love, both the romantic and sibling variety, where it was found and where it was missed. All the while getting stung by bees (what rotten luck!).
Halfway through the second segment this felt like a two-star game, but at the end it felt closer to four stars. I'll settle in the middle with three with the knowledge that this game will probably stick with me a lot longer than other three star games.
(Spoiler - click to show)My sincere congratulations and condolences to the author. I hope you keep making games, Mike. F--k bees and f--k cancer. Prayers and best wishes.
Tore my heart in two and then put it back together, December 3, 2020In this choice-based work you play as a kid who, in order to escape a bad situation at home, goes to a Neopets-like website called Ruffians and makes a friend named BusyAsABee. The game plays out over the course of 11 chapters and 11 years (you start as an eight-year-old and get one year older each chapter). The game primarily plays out through the chat function on the Ruffians website, though in the interludes there is some conversation with your sister (including voice-overs). Over the years you have the choice of how to develop your friendship (or romance) with Bee and how much to reveal about your troubled home life.
The middle part of this game is rough, with the player-character experiencing (Spoiler - click to show)maternal abuse and ridicule at school. Some of the scenes and conversations are heart-breaking. But thankfully, in the end there is still hope and things are looking up. Depending on how warm you've been in your conversations with Bee, the ending scenes can be beautiful in how much trust and love has grown between the two of you. I played through the game twice to try some of the other options. It is possible to get an aborted game if you don't want to open up to Bee at all in the beginning, and some of the best stuff is cut if you are more aloof towards the end. So in this game, as in life, it seems best to open yourself up to those that love you to get the best experience.
I thought this game did many things well, including a realistic portrayal of a now decades-old messaging system, and the speech patterns, cadence and abbreviations of kids chatting with each other online from elementary school age through college. The images of the Ruffians website were also great to help set the mood. I also thought the voice acting was very strong and really added something to the game. I loved the character of Rachel and her relationship with the player character. Finally, I had a huge smile break out across my face when the game ended with some music, a la the credits scene in a movie. It was a great song for the occasion and I let it play to the end.
The few things that I didn't like were the parts of the game where the audio looped until a part of a scene finished. Purposefully, the audio is intrusive to match what is happening in the scene. But the more it repeated the harder it became to focus on the text. I'd recommend the audio fading out or stopping after 2-3 loops. Also, sometimes the text and graphics were so big that I had to scroll to find the right place to click to continue the story, and I think that could be polished a bit to make it more compact.
Well worth your time!
This appears to be the author's first game and it feels like it, November 29, 2020According to IFDB as best as I can tell this is the author's first game, and it definitely feels like the game you'd write based off of half an idea just to see if you can make a functional game. That said, it is a pretty good first effort, lacking depth and in need of polish, but showing potential.
You play as a vampire businessman, bent on getting revenge on your chief rival, another vampire businessman. You have to infiltrate his headquarters and destroy the latest project he is working on to ruin his reputation and his company. The parser was pretty well implemented and I only had to fight it a little, but there were a few hiccups that threw me off. The game bills itself as a comedy, but I think the hardest I laughed was reading the introductory blurb. That line was genuinely funny, but much of the rest of the game is only barely grin-worthy. The puzzles are lacking too, feeling either nonsensical, or telegraphed (again, like this game is a test run). However, I did enjoy the climatic scene and thought the solution to that, once I figured it out, was very clever.
The map is mercifully small and depending on how much time you spend reading the extra content (i.e. all the possible dialogue choices) can easily be completed in under an hour. A good first effort and I hope to see more from the author in the future.
One-room game that works its puzzle(s) into its storytelling, October 20, 2020This is a short, one-room, parser-based game where you play someone moving into an office at a university. The game is basically one complex spatial puzzle where you have to take items out of your moving boxes and put them in various places around your office until they all fit. Well, actually (Spoiler - click to show)they don't all fit, and so a second layer to the puzzle is to figure out which items are important and which items can be thrown away or sent back to storage. Despite the basic nature of the puzzle, the game uses the objects in it and your actions with them to tell your backstory and reveal why you are at the university in the first place. Part of the story, who you are, is pretty obvious from the get-go. The rest becomes clear as you work through all the puzzle pieces. I thought it was a fun and unique way to tell a story.
My biggest complaints would be that the game was heavy-handed in some things, like (Spoiler - click to show)revealing your true nature, and not clear enough in others, like (Spoiler - click to show)how to know when you were done or even if you were headed in the right direction. Still, well worth the time!
Fun introduction to Choice Of Games, October 13, 2020This is the first Choice of Games game that I played and I really enjoyed it. You play a member of the navy of a fictional country, roughly equivalent to 19th century Great Britain. It isn't particularly deep or long, but it was fun to guide the main character through not just a single battle or campaign, but really his whole career. You make a high-level choice for how to proceed with the next step in a battle or your career, and then watch the result play out in front of you, with your choices having lasting consequences throughout the game. While I usually go for more characterization and detail, this game is a nice change of pace. An excellent introduction to the Choice Of Games model/style as well.
Now I know what it's like to... well, best you experience this one for yourself, October 9, 2020While I've never taken hallucinogens, I was drinking whiskey while I played this game. Not sure if that made me like it more or less.
Re-live the infamous sidewalk chalk tournament of 2011 as you take control of various people who were there, playing out your part in its sordid conclusion. I can't say too much about this game without spoiling the best parts of it. I will just say this: go into it with an open mind and if you get stuck don't be afraid to scroll slowly down the walkthrough, just to get the trick you need to move forward. I used the walkthrough a few times and it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the piece at all. Rather, while this game does feature a few things that I would consider puzzles, it is mostly about experiencing the moment. So take your time with this game, look around, talk to people... and when it gets weird, enjoy that too. I promise it will make sense (at least as much sense as possible) by the end. And don't forget to explore the bonus content after the end of the main game. Plenty of laugh-out-loud moments in this game once you get the bit.
The only very minor, slightly spoiler, but essential thing that I would advise players of going into this game is (Spoiler - click to show)that in the first scene, playing as Lane, as you move through the map, make sure you stop and "x art" in each artist's square. It will help the rest of the game make more sense. Trust me.
Exciting start to what I hope to be more Elizabeth Boldan stories, October 2, 2020This is a primarily a straightforward choice-based piece, but there are lots of visual bells and whistles to accompany the text. Pop-up panels (not pop-up windows, don't worry) to add details, changing choices depending on which details you decide to examine, and other visual/text effects. And I've never seen them put to better use. Usually visual effects in text games don't add a lot to the story, they are mostly distractions or an author/programmer showing off. But in this story they are on point.
You play a cybernetically enhanced woman, making her living in a high-tech brothel. But your enhancements are not for use in your sex work, as you might expect in a story like this, but rather the result of experiments on you as a child, and you prefer to keep them hidden from the world. One of the benefits to this tech is a hyper-awareness of the world around you, implemented by flashing or stylized words in the text that you can click on to examine that aspect of the story in superb detail. At times these additional observations will alter the choices available to you, with new choices delivered in a corresponding color and typed out quickly, one letter at a time, the perfect choice to strengthen the mood. To me, it felt like some of the opening scenes of Terminator 2, with your electronic components giving you micro-reports on the environment and people around you, directly to your HUD/consciousness. It really helped me embody the character.
I'm looking forward to playing through it again when I have time, hopefully when the next installment comes out, as this is meant to be the first in a series of stories.
My only compliant would be that the pivotal scene, at least in my playthrough, when you are (Spoiler - click to show)fighting with the mysterious woman in your massage room, drags a little bit for what should be a fast-paced and tense scene, and that some parts of it are vague/confusing as to what Elizabeth is perceiving to be happening (I'm sure more will be explained in future installments though). A very minor downside to an otherwise entertaining experience.
This game is part of IFComp 2020, so if you are reading this in October or November of 2020 head over to ifcomp.org and sign up to be a judge. You can play this and other wonderful games and vote on which authors should win cash prizes!
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