Ratings and Reviews by Marco Innocenti

It's been a while since I last wrote a review on ifdb. Like Bruce Lee in the movie in Rome, I swore I would never do it again. For many reasons, but above all because reviews are hateful things, especially if they are negative. We all wait for them with open arms, until we read something that doesn't suit us...

I promised myself, however, to use this means "sometimes", when I felt it necessary, and only for good purposes. That is, to showcase those stories that had, so to speak, cut me in half. Not for the five stars ones, what would be the point? There are dozens of better reviewers than me, maybe hundreds. And never for anything less than five stars.

So, I do it for something more.

There are pieces of IF that are simply atomic explosions. If I think that this was made as a "bonus game" for the backers of the 50 Years project it makes me cry. Like that, with the left foot, just for fun...

...But no. You Are Standing is obviously a VERY THOUGHT OUT game.

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Let's make it short: these are six games in one, played by a PC that finds themselves in their hands with an old disk of their companion (lover? friend? it doesn't matter), left on the desk and ready to be examined (in the best tradition of text adventures). Each game is in the peculiar style of a gaming era (the one that you can go and reread in the wonderful compendium of which this game would be a compendium: 50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron Reed --> If you don't have it, go get it!): we start from a game book, in which you have to turn the pages to pace forward, and then move from the old YOU ARE STANDING, YOU CAN SEE, up to the "modern" semi-Twine-like one. And then one last, which doesn't work because the diskette is corrupt and needs to be fixed (no spoilers here, I guess). None of the games on the disk work, however, to completion. And I won't add anything else because, yes, that would be a spoiler.

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Well, I almost cried over it. And it's not, as I wrote on intfiction, because this "game" made me relive my entire gaming life. But because it is a moving game and the very MAKING of it turned me romantic.

There's a story inside, which is made up -- guys, I'm not kidding -- of SINGLE PHRASES of EVERY SINGLE INTERNAL GAME. The story is what we expect, the medium in which it is told... well, yet another answer to those looking for something that can only be done with IF.

In short, I can't say more. Technically You Are Standing is a gem: programmed in PunyInform, the Inform6 library that allows games to run on 8-bit machines, the result is already exciting in itself (I don't even want to start thinking about how to do them, all those things there, in I6--but Aaron is certainly more competent on the subject than I am by several lengths). But this is not the point. The point is that for a couple of hours (it's not even short, this "bonus game") you will be immersed in keys, mirrors, singers and castles from which, if you have an empathy similar to mine, you will never escape.

There are two things I want (sorry for the imperative), and it would be nice if you could help me:

One, the reason behind this review: I want you to play this game. That you leave for a moment the castles and hermits and singers who are just castles and hermits and singers and throw yourself like a fish into a universe of metaphors. Let everyone know that IF is serious stuff and not an endless fetch the key.

Two: I want to know how the hell you write a game like this. I mean, not just thinking about it, but then putting down every single brushstroke so that it looked like any other brushstroke and, in the end, instead they were all gems, to be dug in the desert (yeah) and to be brought to the ruler at the end of the path.

Six stars. Cursed are you who always raise the bar...

PS: (Spoiler - click to show)The game is also a gift. This must be told. A poem, at the end, which you, the player, help create. It is Shakespeare. I'm not exaggerating it a bit. You can even save your copy. I sure as hell saved mine.

Thank you, Aaron. You are standing.