Reviews by Harris Powell-Smith

When I woke, it was high noon, and the air was dead.

Sigil Reader (Field) is a fantasy exploration parser game made in Quixe. The PC is a woman called Priyanka Ramasamy who deals with sigils of protection, speed, silence, and more; she works in an institution whose role is to capture and log specimens and monsters. What exactly this involves is hidden at first.

Thrown into the events of the game, Priyanka has tattered memories of the catastrophe that has occurred, and the Station is deserted. It quickly becomes clear that while the Station is not working as it should, neither is Priyanka's mind.

Something made me look down, and there was my ID card clipped to my belt. Had it always been there?

Although the descriptions of the station offices fall on the spartan side, it's in the small details where the writing shines. Snippets about Priyanka's colleagues and brief but intense sensory interactions are some of my favourite segments, revealing low-key but characterful information about Priyanka's colleagues' lives, and what Priyanka herself remembers and values.

The game moves forward steadily, with minor puzzles that serve to enhance the atmosphere rather than challenging the player for any great length of time. As it progresses, it becomes clearer that Priyanka is in an altered state of being, but Sigil Reader (Field) is not about enforcing the player's will on the world: it's more about savouring the story, the world, and Priyanka's experience.

The snippets of information we get whet the appetite for more. As Christopher Huang notes in his Breakfast Review: "It feels like there’s a lot of detail in this setup that’s just a little bit beyond the frame."

Though Sigil Reader (Field) is successful as is, I wonder where it would have gone with a longer deadline. More than that, though, I'd love to see more in this setting ... and more non-Euro/US settings generally, more Malay SFF in the IF world, and more Singlish. The dreamy atmosphere and lightly-creeping dread of this game means I'm looking forward to playing more of verityvirtue's work in Ectocomp 2017.

A series of iterations of an AI deity being built. Rather than violence and creepy imagery, this game concerns itself more with existential dread:

"You awaken, with eyes everywhere, ears that hear all.

It is time for you to make the world right."

I’m hesitant to say much more about it – I think it works best going in without much prior knowledge – but the look of the game is pleasingly console-screen-style, and along with the ambient soundscape, the whole thing provokes a sense of heavy, dreamlike melancholy.

A tiny yarn about a creepy girl, needles, bodies, and an even creepier narrator. Chandler Groover is excellent at creating grotesque fairytales and disconcerting narrative voices, and this piece is no exception. Its barebones narration and interface works well to create the atmosphere, allowing the player to fill in the gaps – inevitably with more horrible images than could be depicted. One section reminded me of the party garden sequence from howling dogs, though rather than decadence overload, it gives the piece an added inexorable chill.

An interactive grotesque about a “knife punk”, one of a subculture of criminals existing with little identity but for the knives they carry. The setting is rich, with weird and intriguing details about deities, bodies, and weapons, painting the picture of a sinister fantasy city full of desperate individuals running and fighting for the sake of it. All of which is to say: this is my jam.

Although some of Bloody Raoul‘s implementation is sparse, the atmosphere is suitably sinister and imaginative that I didn’t much mind. There are a number of ways to die, but the game is brief enough that this is less of a barrier to enjoyment and more of a curiosity. For the PC, it’s all part of their nasty, brutish and short everyday life.

Having encountered a linguistic mystery in a fictional language that intrigues them, the protagonist dives down a rabbit-hole of more mystery. What they discover is up to the reader to interpret.

The piece reminds me of If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller (it feels descended from Borges, also, but I am more solid in my Calvino reading). The player is given the ability to manipulate the languages and words to create cryptic sentences, which unfurl further to illuminate (or not) the sentences in question.

As an exploration of fantastical language, it’s curious and interesting, but I found myself wanting more. I’d have been excited to see more about the fictional cultures, their histories and societies, to give the piece more richness. As it is, I found it a clever piece relevant to my interest, but one that didn’t leave much of a mark. I’d love More Of This In My IF, Please, with extra depth and bite.

I think I also need to reread If On A Winter’s Night, because I’m having a serious hankering for it.

Set over the course of several months, The Dream Self depicts the everyday activities of a character based in London. The PC stays with their parents, works, and interacts with and befriends other characters, but the game is generally light on details about their life. Greater richness abounds in the dreamscapes the PC explores in their sleep, in which a compelling unknown figure plays an increasingly prominent role.

(Spoiler - click to show)Between its dreamy periwinkle-and-teal cover art, the clear and clean interface, and the ingame art, The Dream Self makes an attractive impression. The dimming and brightening effect overlaying the PC’s room as the sun rises and sets, along with the dates flicking past, is a handy visual shorthand for the passage of time. Different dreams have different colours, elegantly emphasising the mood and tone of the text.

And there is a lot of text. It’s not hard to read by any means, but I found that with frequent strings of passages without choices, the click-read cycle grew repetitive. It was interesting to read, but the images and events didn’t grab my attention enough to stop me wondering when I was going to be able to have input into the story. For a game focused on surrealism and dream logic, the prose is quite straightforward and workmanlike.

When choices arose, I enjoyed being able to state how the PC felt about the events that were happening to and around them, but there were a few too many sections ending in a single clickable choice. For example, when shaking the hand of the dream-figure, the PC could not let go, and the only option available was to “Struggle”, whereas I would have been interested to have an option like “Grip desperately” or some such. Maybe my prior choices restricted the choices displayed, but there didn’t seem to be anything ingame to suggest this.

This seems a good time to mention my personal elephant in the room: that Birdland by Brendan Patrick Hennessy has spoiled me for dream sequences. Not only does Birdland’s style shift wildly between the real world and the dreams, while the stats highlight where dream-actions affect Bridget’s abilities in the real world. Where options are restricted, the game makes this obvious. However, in The Dream Self, things are less clear. Actions in the real world seem to affect events in the dreams, but it’s implied rather than explicit. Occasionally text is bolded; in some cases, it seemed to be conditional text based on previous actions, but elsewhere I wasn’t so sure. This ambiguity, and my uncertainty about whether the dreams affected reality, made it harder for me to care about the PC’s actions.

Having said that, I found that the development of the PC’s personality was effectively presented. I never had the sense that I should have been trying to gear my choices towards a particular type of character: I felt that I could pick and choose different attitudes as I went. As it turns out, Minuzzi based a large proportion of the choices on personality test responses, and I was impressed at the amount of nuance in the emotions the PC can express: no Harry Potter Sorting Hat style “do you want to go cliffdiving, read a book, give your friend a hug or murder someone” here!

In contrast, the unknown figure is by necessity a cypher. In my playthrough, the PC and the figure reached a sort of therapist-client accord, for the PC to confide in and return to when their worries took over. The connection the PC felt with them did not always feel quite earned, and yet at the end I found myself smiling at the interactions between the two, and wondering what would happen next in the PC’s life.

I found The Dream Self a gentle game with a thread of melancholy running through it, and I’m intrigued to see how other people’s playthroughs panned out. Despite wanting more zip and spark from the prose, the game is beautifully put together, and I’m intrigued to see more from Minuzzi and Tea-Powered Games.

The War of the Willows is a fantasy horror game about fighting a tree threatening to destroy the protagonist and their village. It has mythical and horror overtones, and is extremely lethal.

The first impression is that The War of the Willows is not a user-friendly game, which is likely why it placed so low in IF Comp 2015. Having to download and install Python on top of downloading the game files is a high barrier to judges, especially when such a prolific year means 53 games to blitz through.

For me, playing in a console window isn't good for my eyes and makes it harder to read. It doesn't help that the game launches straight in with a long epigraph that, while atmospheric enough, is pretty esoteric to open with and is tempting to skim or skip altogether.

Player input comes from a list of case-sensitive keywords to type into the console. You choose your motivation (I chose "love"), an item to help you along (I chose a locket), and your patron deity (I chose Athena). The descriptions and responses to these choices are lovely and help build up a sense of the protagonist and their background, though it seems that most of the decisions don't have much mechanical effect. In a game that's all about the battle, it would be helpful to have more feedback about the effect the choices have.

The battle itself is a back-and-forth between the protagonist and the tree, with feedback about how the protagonist is feeling and how many limbs or branches have been hacked off. The feedback sometimes felt incongruous: one moment the protagonist was feeling hale and hearty, and then they were stumbling around, and then buoyed up again. At various points I wasn't quite sure how much health my character had, and death came as a surprise. In this case the flowery language (pun not intended) got in the way of providing information to the player.

The choice to write the game in verse is a Marmite kind of decision. I liked it: it creates an unreal atmosphere, and while over-the-top, it works to build the sense of a legendary battle. The main language issue I had was the use of "Fuck." when hitting the tree: I don't mind swearing by any means but it feels out of place amongst the game's mythical register, and I wasn't sure what exactly it was responding to.

It's an extremely difficult game to complete without dying; I died several times before stopping playing. I don't mind that, really - a challenge can be fun - but the game ends abruptly upon death, kicking you out of the console window without so much as a "play again?", which doesn't lend itself to feeling inclined to continue. It also requires reading through the introductory text again, which while intriguing the first time round, grows tiresome when you're reading through it again and again.

Having said all this, I'm not sure The War of the Willows deserves its 53rd placing in the Comp: it definitely suffered from being written with an unusual system. A parser with limited verbs, or a hypertext system, would have almost definitely gone down better. Regardless, the language and concept are intriguing and interesting, and I'd be interested to see more work from this author.

Further reading: Mathbrush's review which discusses modding the game (as encouraged by the documentation), to make changes to language and combat.