Ratings and Reviews by DB

This is a fun adventure, clearly crafted with original thought and care. The potential for combinatorial explosion is pretty evident in the design-- here the author has simply not gone for completeness as a solution-- but for me this felt forgivable. Besides, if the story of a picked-on kid standing up to three bullies with nothing but his imagination and love of invention doesn't capture your attention, you might only be half a human being. Plus, it's got its own soundtrack.

Full disclosure: I did some beta-testing for the ADRIFT release of this game.

Playing for the first time is somewhat like walking into a mine field as the game's wacky events of varyingly high levels of improbability go off all around the hapless protagonist. Just like in a mine field, however, the triggers that would allow the player to set off most of the comedic bombs in this game are often invisible, buried by its "Read the Author's Mind" style of puzzle structure. Even playing with the source code visible, I find myself fairly baffled as to how I was supposed to get from point A to point B in many situations-- or even how to start some of them.

Maybe the most annoying part is (Spoiler - click to show)when I am asked if I have any meteor ore and get rejected with no time to respond, even when it is clear to all present that such material is (for reasons I'll leave vague) readily available.

The real loss here is that the situational humor doesn't withstand several playthroughs. Many of the funny parts won't even be seen by the player unless they can guess the verb and work out the byzantine pathways required in solving chains of sometimes interlocking, sometimes independent puzzles. Lack of player friendliness is a heavy weight on what might otherwise be a light-hearted (even sparkling), surreal sitcom.

Perhaps best played with a walkthrough handy.

From the beginning, the game tries to help players along as much as possible, perhaps even too much. It's clear the author had some trouble setting up the game's primary NPC with a depth that both motivates and withstands continued player interrogation. The writing throughout remains functional, with a few sour spots.

The obvious star of the game here is the variability in the game's writing. While goals remain the same (in short, shoot somebody and make your best exit), the details of the event change with each play. This is interesting in the way that it resists the creation of a static, command-by-command walkthrough, ensuring the significance of the player's role as an interpreter in the story's action. Gameplay is otherwise straightforward. It has its puzzles, all solved fairly easily.

The less obvious star-- and, I think, the potentially more interesting one-- is the game's protagonist. Beneath the content of his actions on the job, the text frames the killer as a soft-spoken intellectual who maintains a family and loves gardening. This introduction gives some depth to this variably named 40-something professional killer, and the varying amounts of attention given to objects in the world also complement this character's mindset in a nice way. Remembrances of training, just snippets of quotes, bubble up to the surface of the killer's mind in the same way a song might get stuck in a person's head. The variable and replayable nature of the adventure suggests that the protagonist has worked for several gangland bosses, and that assassinations are, to him, a routine as straightforward as a game. Here the contradictions of playable space and linear narrative in the form of an IF ultimately serve the development of this likewise complex and contradictory character.

Admittedly, not everyone will be quite as pulled in by this one as I was, but for its compact size and play time you really can't go wrong giving Target a shot.

Mostly uses one short, primary verb for the easily distracted. Reminiscent of E.V.O.: Search for Eden. Nom, nom, nom-- a yummy treat and a quick play, do try.

Game by up and coming ADRIFT author Mike Desert. Heavy uses of anti-mimetic writing and familiar stereotypes. Inclusion of illustrations and music may ameliorate these for some.

Not as funny as it wants to be. By hiding victory commentary in unpublished ALR, the game forces the player to have to "lose" arbitrarily, meaning the game commits the same errors it attempts to lampoon. Written as Speed-IF, and it shows.

The illustrator's younger brother supplied the initial "seed" for this story: the idea of a meat monster. He was at a time when he liked making up stories and wanted to write books, but only ever came out with rough ideas. I told him I would use an idea from him as the basis for one of my own stories, and this (plus puns) was the result.

Produced under EvenComp restrictions, it is only constraint and the game's ridiculously over-the-top delivery that make this one stand out to me, which is why I think it could take two stars instead of just one despite its being rather bad. The story strives to hit two extremes, of horror and humor (hoping to bring nuance to a "so bad it's good" shlock style), but fumbles its deepest horror element. The humor becomes sort of awkward next to an image of a man chopping a bloody fountain out of... something with a lot of blood in it. Ultimately the experience evens out somewhere around the level of simple gross-out shtick. Unfortunately, that's a fail for both horror and humor.

Still, some of the humor does manage to amuse me when I look back on it. The hyperbolically mean, old man makes me giggle. Who's really that mean? My favourite line is the one about The Stranger's name.

A work made without seriousness which maybe had more potential in it somewhere, but might still be worth a chuckle... or a squick?

Full disclosure: I thought I would upload this because I saw a poll for Worst IF Titles and figured this might garner a vote (two of its reviews from the ADRIFT Forum mention the quality of the title). Also, though I wasn't when this game was made, I've been a vegetarian for a while now.

A funny game at times, but tedious. I don’t know what I would think of Rybread if I hadn’t happened to play this game first. Certainly it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I also enjoy Ed Wood, so hey. It’s a good fit.

The writing is at its best lampooning literary criticism, doing unique or otherwise unvisualizeable things with language (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)“Room in the Shape of a Burning Credit Card”), or toying with notions of interactivity (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)playing with audience assumptions in the first interview scene). Those elements make Acid Whiplash recommendable. It could’ve done those things more frequently, though. Irritable players: use a walkthrough (I did).

Its non-sequitur humor gets stale quickly. Why did it have to include any mazes? I sort of wish the game just had a word you could type in to skip from one interview scene to the next.

I’ll be upfront: my personal experience probably biases my interpretation of this story in ways that maybe not everyone else can account for. Having taught English in Southeast Asia I have a special affinity for the scenes and characters crafted by Mr. Whittington in Love is as Powerful as Death, Jealousy is as Cruel as the Grave; they all seem just so much more real to me for having my actual experience there to which I can compare them, and ring true. I don’t wish to say that the game isn’t flawed -- it has its flaws -- but I do wish to emphasize that I think the narrative in this Cambodian ghost story stands far above any problems in its coding.

Could it use more polish? Maybe, but a strong story is already there and on the strength of it I still definitely recommend Love is as Powerful as Death.

On uploading the more recent executable version of this diversion onto IFDB, it strikes me that my original review was unduly masochistic. There is something interesting, I think, in the Mad Lib style construction of this piece. In particular, I had originally written it out of a desire to be able to answer the questions the voice over asks in "The Perfect Human"-- so there you have it, some reasoning. +1 star, little buddy.

Your mileage may vary from play-to-play, especially depending on who you are and how you approach the thing. Some have created surreal, even poetic, stabs at it, while I've seen others try to make it into AIF. I can't assert that there's really much of a right or wrong way to do it.

I'll end this with the same primary assertion as in my previous review: a short game, to be played for a quick break.