Reviews by DB

OK so this is going to be a bit of a review of my thoughts on Perplexity as experienced through this game perhaps more than it's a review of the game. We'll see. Also I considered spoiler tagging some of this, but as I got all of three rooms deep into the game, I don't think I really got far enough to spoil anything.

"I only understand full English sentences like 'take the lamp.'" Hmm. OK, but even "Take the lamp" uses the conventional shortcut of an implied subject. It can't further imply an article and answer to >GET LAMP? That seems a little backward.

Turns out Perplexity will expand some typed commands into what it understands as a full command, but it will take the time to tell you every time. I get that the screenreader is helpful for some players, but I wish I could turn it off specifically because it reads these messages out to me every time, word for word, when I would rather just ignore them and move on, reading at my own pace [unspoiler: it is possible, I just missed it]. People have had this critique of homebrew or startup parsers for a long time and it's not that there's no purpose in them, but: what is the point of developing a parser that is specifically less forgiving than its more popular, conventional contemporaries?

>Who am I
"you"
>What am I wearing?
"I don't understand 'wearing'"
>knock on door
(Rephrased as: 'Knock on the door.' I'm just guessing here since I'm not designed for shortcuts, use a full sentence or I can get confused.)

Perplexity rejects the convenience of using an established vocabulary of shortcuts in favor of fully embracing the false promise of the parser while at the same time constantly reminding the player of the limits of its parser. Its parser also seems less advanced than some others, unequipped to understand "it" as a reference as far as I could tell.

>Where is the baby?
"Rosa's House, a living room, a world, and north somewhere."
I'm not really sure how I should understand this answer. I think it means: in the living room of Rosa's house, north of your current location, but it kinda reads like I asked William S. Burroughs during a binge.

>Where are you?
"inside a porch and inside a world"
No, that's where *I* am. I think. Actually, I'm *on* the porch.

>enter house
"(Rephrased as... [truncated])
You look around the immaculate living room. Near the couch is a coffee table with a note and a diaper bag on it. Tom is sitting on the floor next to idScrewdriver1.

Tom is gone!

There are doors..."

Welp, that's where I quit. I did report this apparent bug and I'm informed that it's fixed if you're curious about having a further go at it than I did. The game needs more polish and although I appreciate Perplexity's accessibility for screen readers and mic use (not my preference), I think that its rejection of conventions works against it more than it helps.

OK, it has to be said: it was weird for me personally to see this as a title rather than the development system. I know not everyone had that reaction, no bearing on the review, but it was a funny moment for me.

I would have liked a prompt to press enter at the opening. After playing a few games in a row in Twine, I sat there clicking, trying to scroll (a scrollbar is visible), etc. for too long before I remembered that this project was written in Inform.

I found this game interesting, insofar as the included art drew me in and the events unfolding kept me engaged, but it's overall underimplemented as far as I can tell. I'm not sure I managed to accomplish many verb inputs aside from examining some things. The game suggests that "Maybe you could reorient yourself." I tried some verbs (reorient, turn, twist, spin, somersault, cardinal directions), none worked. I got a response like, "What do you want to turn?" >ME "You might not like that." Hm. No verb list available. No about text. I do suppose (Spoiler - click to show)>DIE has a neat string of responses though.

I'm missing something, I'm sure, but the one help or hint message didn't produce any meaningfully assistive prod in my brain, so I'll probably have to wait for a post-comp release to really enjoy it.

Bare. Only interesting bit is one monster description, and that's bluntly standard Lovecraft pastiche. Hints suggest that this Spring Thing entry is either meant to be an allegory, a joke, or both. In my consideration, it fails in building enough surrounding context/content/implementation for either interpretation to really work. From my first playthrough, I regarded this as a troll entry.

I came back after another review suggested there might be more possible than I had originally witnessed (Spoiler - click to show)in terms of interaction with the monster. Noticing this game came with a link to Zarf's IF postcard, I opened that up and ran down the list of verbs offered since the game has no other vocab list included. Almost all led to either A) another variation on a one-note theme of (Spoiler - click to show)being dismembered/digested or B) unimplemented or nonsensical responses. The only two implemented parts of the environment as far as I could tell in that playthrough were ocean/water and island/sand, but neither has any meaningful interaction. (Spoiler - click to show)Figuring maybe the point was that everything had some implementation, I was disappointed to find that trying to fill the monster with sand wasn't understood and >JUMP IN OCEAN, though implemented, produces "You take a moment to frolic in the waves. WHEE!" ... what? huh? Why?

At least "Q'udzlth" uses "monster" and some other words as synonyms because otherwise its name is a pain to type with no abbreviation and no pay off but repeated death.

Based on some of the author's previous work, I'm inclined to think this was more of an I7 coding exercise than a full-fledged work. A lot of "oh, you just die" coding exercises were made for TWIFComp back in 2010 and none were especially well-received (mine included), but they weren't necessarily meant to. TWIFComp was more about the challenge of releasing anything given the constraints. Perhaps this author has likewise built this as a personal challenge rather than for a crowd? Or maybe it really was just taking the piss, so to speak.

If the author wanted me to stick around for more, they might have implemented some more encouraging or interesting responses up front. As it is, there's not any "more" to stick around for.

Hinterlands: Marooned! only really became a joke proper the way the hints suggest it's intended once reviewers started playing along with it by flattering the game. Even then though, it's the reviews that were funny and managed to make me laugh, not the game itself. As allegory some have suggested comparing the player's role here to Sisyphus, but I think this is closer to Tantalus: expected to drown with no escape, redemption, or satisfaction.

The Box is a thin setup for a short puzzlebox-escape-the-room type adventure. Nothing necessarily against a thin setup, just go into this knowing that it's a puzzle-forward experience. The puzzles such as they are are none too difficult and can all be solved by prodding enough of the environment to find the next clue when stuck. They're largely not of a sort of puzzles to need several clues. At least a few are pretty much spoiled on finding a single clue. At least one of them was sort of artificially gated in a way that I felt resisted a logical secondary solution ((Spoiler - click to show)burning the ropes on the drawbridge), but I think I get it. (Spoiler - click to show)Highlighting the one solution is meant to reinforce in its own way that in Kreate the mouse is important (the bit of hardware symbolized by the creature implemented in the game... personally I found the mouse implemented in-game a bit too "talkative" for my tastes; especially considering how little it really contributed to puzzle solutions, it seemed a bit misleading and distracting for me to be hearing from it every couple turns). Only the mouse (the in-game creature yes, but also the bit of hardware) actually didn't turn out in my playthrough to be super important so much as it was handy in a couple given scenarios. Though Kreate has the advantage of featuring a hybrid input parser, mouse input salience was still overall pretty low for me as a player in this game. But then I'm also a practiced typist and not everybody will have the same automaticity in typing IF commands, nor will every game have the same level of keyboard-vs-mouse use. Its inclusion is welcome and I can see future games on the platform making even broader use of it.

The big advantage of Kreate's hybrid setup from the perspective of a player is in being able to use the mouse to interact more thoroughly with the story rather than typing commands into a parser. Maybe I'm being too repetitive here, but it seems a major point of both the game and platform. More specifically, in The Box the mouse (the computer hardware, not the animal implemented in the game) can be used to click links to perform commands (though the links automatically generated are not always immediately helpful, sometimes a distraction) or to operate some of the glyphs and dials on the titular box which might be more tedious if done entirely through parser commands. The drop-down menus for operating letter dials were a particularly welcome change of pace from what would have been a tedious exercise if typed into a parser. Inform has extensions for creating hyperlinks and buttons, but I've yet to see a drop-down menu implemented in Inform as far as I can remember (it probably has) although I don't see why that wouldn't be completely possible too.

I have to admit though that from playing this game alone, although I wouldn't say I disliked it, I'm just not totally clear on what Kreate's advantages as a development system are over its contemporaries. I suppose the success of the platform will come down to more people trying it out and The Box is at least an advertisement that it works. As a work of IF, The Box is a rewarding enough puzzler to spend your time on. If you're experienced, it won't take a lot of time anyway, and if you're new seems like it should be accessible enough to guide you through without too much head scratching.

fix it is a short practice for a psychological grounding exercise. It's earnest and admits in the end that "it isn't always easy." The goal here is toward "self-compassion and tolerance of your own feelings," though that's only said explicitly at the very end of the experience. fix it might be useful in introducing a user to some basic grounding techniques with the right setup and expectations. Perhaps teaching the techniques isn't actually the goal here and it's just like a more personal, reflective work about an experience and that's fine too. I want to be clear at the outset here that despite the amount I'm about to ramble I don't think that fix it is bad, in fact, I think it is even valuable and useful. But I also think that it could just as easily backfire and given the piece is rather short that's what I've decided to focus my blathering on about here. I will briefly note that my going on about it is somewhat based in my work with the Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities, so again, perhaps a limited context but I would think it's worth considering. The tl;dr here is not "I'm offended! This is bad!" nor do I intend to offer a bad faith take of the text, but mostly fix it kind of rubbed me the wrong way in that it could be read in the context of caregiving in a way that's malicious. Maybe "That's a full-on misread" is perhaps also a valid response to everything I'm about to say, I dunno. I don't think fix it was necessarily intended to be interpreted in that context, but it is there and it is possible, so here I go anyway.

On a quick neither here nor there technical note, I found the opening screen a bit too slow, but I get that I should sit with that feeling and ~6 seconds isn't exactly a major waste of time. That seems appropriate thematically and allows the reader to notice and consider the author's note before jumping into the main experience. OK.

I am otherwise about to run through a set of criticisms of the setup and execution which should not entirely detract from its commendable goal. I don't know what Lily Boughton's relation is to the issues at hand, e.g., whether the author personally deals with OCD or has training as a psychologist. Poems like "Ritual," "You Call Yourself an Artist," or "Bittersweet" (found here) seem to suggest that the author might identify with the subject of fix it and the narration might be a representation of a couple voices of internal monologue, one more helpful than the other. I don't want to presume too much here in my review, but to offer data points from my own reading and from imagined, possible counter-readings (again, fully intended in good faith) that might help better inform it or draw a bigger picture around it as a tool for teaching psychological grounding. My apologies to the author if none of what follows is entirely relevant or helpful.

For starters, one might not read fix it to completion, feeling mocked by the initial scroll of negative responses rather than seen or identified with. The author's note acknowledges this insomuch as it offers that one might quit if they feel uncomfortable. So I feel like some who might have greater need of approaching the subject are already either being shut out or else asked to read it in a controlled setting removed from the sort it's intended to model, if it's to be read to completion. That's fine and doable and indeed one might argue that's the very point of practice, but it does limit its potential audience and playthrough settings in a way not entirely suggested by its open presentation as a general entry in Spring Thing. True, most entries are probably not played in a situation where one is not at least comfortable enough for some extended reading, but fix it also makes a point of both actively triggering its reader and offering clear-cut solutions which is kind of like trying to have your cake and eat it too in a situation that's not a one-size-fits-all sort of deal.

(Spoiler - click to show)A reader might not (as I almost did not) scroll down to see that taking a deep breath was an option during the "fix it! fix it! fix it!" screen. Scrolling isn't really necessary in playing through until the twelfth click of "fix it." Also the option to "take a deep breath" which moves the story forward doesn't appear until after the 16th click of "fix it," so one should have to look for it and know or at least expect that there will be a change or alternative option introduced (or play with the text at about 80% zoom full screen at 1920 x 1080 resolution in order to see its entirety). In some ways the core message of having to sit with one's discomfort already has to've been internalized to reach this point.

(Spoiler - click to show)It can often take a lot more than asking someone to breathe when they're "discomforted" to see a result and could even exacerbate an active issue, much in the way that telling someone to "calm down" is almost certain to only make a person angrier. A binary choice (Spoiler - click to show)between the chance to "continue fighting against your discomfort" or "to make space for that feeling and move on with your day" is easy to make in an interactive fiction with clearly delineated choices played at leisure. The game's inciting event is ambiguous, even trivialized to an extent that could be an issue. It's never even really clarified who exactly thinks the issue-to-be-fixed is an issue; it even seems a bit like it could be that the narrator is projecting an issue onto the reader. Instead of getting the sense internally as the reader that I had a problem to address (I kind of just always felt the goal was to progress through the story but that's because of the context in which I was reading it), I am told there is a problem and "if you would like to be comfortable, you have to fix the problem." ((Spoiler - click to show)Actually a lie that will get you stuck in a loop.) This could be even worse if the reader takes that issue to be an internal one which by the by it is not clarified if the issue-to-be-fixed is internal or external as far as I could tell, i.e., is this an issue with my environment or with who I am? Though well-intentioned, in some cases client-centered language (Spoiler - click to show)like "what you do next is your choice" can be empowering in one context or more sinister in another, especially if these were external problems inflicted upon the reader or if they were internal issues projected onto the reader that might not be truly "fixable," whatever fixing means.

(Spoiler - click to show)The author's note mentions themes of self-harm, but when hands bleed when washed, it is because they are commanded to be washed. I suppose this is a crucial point for some of the other criticisms I had as well and I've already mentioned it a bit, but: not everyone lives in a situation where this command would be read as coming from an internal monologue. Read in a caretaking rather than internal monologue sense, "if you would like to be comfortable, you have to fix the problem" and the grounding exercise could be seen as victim blaming or unhelpful distraction, respectively, or even negligence or abuse. Asking the reader to perform stretches further reinforces that this assumes an able-bodied context.

I've gone on for far too long about a project that ultimately implores us to be kind and gentle and that I actually thought was mostly well-written and effective. Perhaps my spinning my wheels over it might speak a bit to the effectiveness with which it managed to lodge a bit of a thorn in my brain. Should I have just breathed and moved on from these thoughts and feelings? That can be tough to say sometimes. As fix it says, "It isn't always easy." That might be an understatement in some cases, but I guess I'll leave it there.

It's hard not to be drawn to Sweetpea's striking cover art. It really speaks to the full level of commitment that went into the entire project.

From a non-supernatural perspective, Sweetpea is (Spoiler - click to show)the dramatized story of a child frightened of the "other" person her father becomes under the influence of alcohol and how he chooses to change to do better for her. But forget the non-supernatural perspective because this story likes to get weird with it and I love it for that. This is a battle between an invading doppelganger and a guardian angel inside a living house.

Much of the overall linear story (I was surprised to hear from the author that the game was written without actually any state tracking at all. This did lead to one issue though where a player might have to retread part of the game if it's done out of order) is written around being jolted awake and falling asleep again, and the events that unfold feel like the sort of vividly wrought nightmares one might have in between those twilight states. The story's imagery is deeply and effectively described throughout-- the sights, the ghostly creaking wood of the house, the taste of coffee and caramels, the feel of the cold-- the writing clearly delights in all of these. They can start to bog down the tale a bit though, as the protagonist gets sidetracked describing minutiae a few nodes too deep when a more immediate response might have better maintained a sense of urgency. (Spoiler - click to show)Should we really be recounting gift pens and remembering secret drawers for stashes of candy and savoring caramels or old sweaters when something is banging on our door trying to get in? This opening section reminded me of playing The Forest House or Back Home back in the day, and for me I think this pace mostly worked. Lacking the option to (Spoiler - click to show)rush downstairs and let the dad-doppelganger in reinforced the dread of our viewpoint character at least until the point where she decides to (Spoiler - click to show)take a nap. That threw me off.

When the text starts getting really crazy-jittery after that though, you just know something's about to go down. (Spoiler - click to show)Broken glass, bloodied footprints, a rosary bead stuffed against teeth, doppelganger vomiting and washing its face in the sink, abduction by a shapeshifting guardian angel with no constant, understandable visage. And then, your choice of breakfast. This crazy, pitched pace is exactly what the slower, early portion allows to build and pay off. Then we get some breathing room again, grounded in imagery (food), and some exposition.

I won't spoil the climax, but I will say that it did involve a perspective switch that caught me by surprise. I rolled with it just fine once I did realize what it'd done though. The ending is a happy one whose tone is quite different from the rest, as emphasized by the change in background color, but it's one that's earned rather than forced.

I did notice that Sweetpea features a content warning for "ecclesiastical content" that made me slightly apprehensive, but aside from it having a rosary in it and a guardian angel the story itself didn't seem too specifically religious. Then again I'm not sure what I would've expected to fit that sort of tag. It's certainly not irreligious and it does include those elements. I suppose a story can feature such content without directly offering a sermon or revolving around Christian ontology or messaging in general, and the story does feature at least one redemptive theme that would fit with that theology although it could fit with others as well. It's also possible that I missed some other symbolism that someone more versed in that sort of stuff might have picked up on, but it is good to know that that CW tag doesn't mean enjoyment of the tale is founded on that understanding.

A surreal, crazy quilt entry in Spring Thing 2022. The Hole Man is often playful or bizarre though not always very cohesive, as one might expect of a crazy quilt. It's clear the author had quite a time writing it all, taking us on a tour of a wandering mind and showing us what weird, wonderful stuff they've conjured up, peppered with observations, insights, jokes, and literary allusions. That's one of the more pleasurable uses of writing after all, and probably what makes this game most commendable rather than a reliance on complicated puzzles or technical wizardry. The game's informal, fun tone of writing always kept me chuckling and wanting to see what the author would come up with next. I enjoyed it with a mallsoft/easy listening vaporwave soundtrack playing alongside that was not included as part of the experience and may have influenced my reading, just FYI, and you might find that sort of soundtrack fits too. The Hole Man is a bazaar of the bizarre (to borrow another allusion) with sights to behold and bedazzle.

As the reader traverses The Hole Man's different connected worlds, they will meet Wise Men (as far as I saw, always men, and always The X Man-- a parallel with the protagonist's position as The Hole Man) who each offer their thoughts on a subject. (Spoiler - click to show)The Go Man offers some thoughts on games, The Servant Man offers some thoughts on the dependency of belief systems on non-belief, The Slaughter Man offers thoughts on food production & horror, etc. Maybe I'm just picky, but some of their offerings came across as a little pat to me or somehow not fully explored. Some of The Hole Man's Wise Men offer more eloquent or stronger positions than others, granted, but I won't spell them all out here without a spoiler tag beyond saying your mileage may vary. With a spoiler tag, however: (Spoiler - click to show)I think it seems unlikely The Slaughter Man was read through by a vegan (those gingerbread people were sentient, man!) or The Servant Man by an atheist, for example, (also, nitpick, in the instance where the object of worship demonstrably exists, we're talking not necessarily about believers, but followers... but that's a fine hair to split I suppose and my own hill, not the author's) or that the author would really be satisfied if I were to pick up a piece of paper and just write my own ending to the game as suggested by The Go Man (I would have missed a lot of the game that way as he was the first I encountered). Perhaps they're good fodder for a forum thread somewhere and the starting point for some good conversations though.

After hearing any one Wise Man's thesis, the player is offered a chance to take the place of the man they were listening to. That seemed to me at first blush like a distraction from the goal of rediscovering and reclaiming the protagonist's own body in a game that's made of distractions and sideways steps, but it is suggested any time you meet one of these men that they are "like you," based on some bit of description, so maybe any one of these is actually secretly the same person that was heading for jury duty before having their body stolen at the start of the game. Indeed, that seems to be the suggestion of the epilogue, sort of like the game is structured as a big personality test. As a test of this sort, I think it matters less how exactingly structured the arguments of any one Wise Man are because what unvoiced disagreements seem to suggest then would be more like, "This position isn't the right one for me," assuming a player is trying to find the "right" one rather than simply collecting them all (although actually the latter option is the game's more valorized one).

On a technical note, most nodes in the story that I saw do not change text upon revisiting, meaning that links lead to experiencing the same scenery, descriptions, and events every time. This goes uncommented on by the text itself, but is pretty much forgivable given the scope of the game and the understanding that because the goal isn't related to solving puzzles around different locations, tracking state in each of them is not so much a priority of the player either.

Although I've said most of the locations are disjointed by the "crazy quilt" nature of the game's setup, they do share at least one major theme through it all as far as I could tell. They all portray a kind of search for the self through consumerism. The "soul" (or "the person/body with accompanying attitudes," such as it is; the text agnostically suggests such a place as Limbo exists, but goes a long way in not committing itself to any one understanding of a soul as part of a specific or pre-conceived notion of afterlife) is lost in a mall. The player wanders through The Hole Man looking out on mall shops or department stores, exploring their contents, commenting on the sale or creation of art products, watching rituals of consumption, etc. all while trying to discover and listen to single Wise Men generally defined by their primary vocation expound upon their pet subject in mostly one-way conversations, thereafter offering up their positions in the market as a path to a new self. (Spoiler - click to show)Even "Reason. Patience. Acceptance. Things you can't put on a store shelf, and that you can't wrap up in a box" are still explicitly packaged along an assembly line by elves in The Kind Man's workshop, for example, awaiting their consumption (or, parallel with the game's other major choices, awaiting bestowal upon the seeker by a Wise Man). While my guess is that the author may not have intended The Hole Man as an allegory about the search for self-identity necessarily through consumerism or vocation outright, and The Hole Man may be better enjoyed as the exploration of an eclectic intellect for entertainment purposes with personality test style epilogues, I think that the idea sitting under the surface there unengaged or uncriticized (for as far as I played through anyway) kept it from going deeper than it might have in some of its analyses. Each of the selves available on offer in The Hole Man is prefabricated and can be selected like a different brand of cereal off a shelf, made "just for you"; at the same time each is also explicitly treated as a collectible commodity.

For purposes of this review, I did cut my playthrough short a bit by accepting the role of The Kind Man. The epilogue wrapped up with a neat moral and posed a bit of a quandary to think about, which was a fitting ending. I don't think I have time while trying to play all of the other entries (Spring Thing has 47 this year) to go back and try to get what the blurb says is 12 different endings with a perhaps hidden 13th if you collect all 12, but I may return and revisit later just to let my mind wander along with the author's again and see what other spectacles await me there.

Wry is a delightfully chaotic, farcical comedy that can easily be played through in a single sitting. This was a playthrough that I had a lot of fun with, sort of like visiting an interactive comedy sketch where things just keep going wrong in a Rube Goldberg domino-like setup, but one that will keep its player going, "Ah, hm, okay... I can deal with this..." (and where it's intuitive enough that I didn't run into any "guess the verb" issues) until the scene escalates from minor infractions of etiquette into real ridiculousness. Although I never did find out (Spoiler - click to show)what was causing the curtains to burn or how to stop it (if that's even possible), at some point in a good comedy these things like cause-and-effect or rationality go out the window for the laugh. Or, if you prefer, the cause is: because it's funny.

The highest rank I've been able to achieve after a few playthroughs is Shy Guy, which is only a little over half of the highest possible score, and wanting to see how to get more has kept me coming back. So far I've only seen a win ((Spoiler - click to show)you sell the insurance) and loss ((Spoiler - click to show)you are sent on your way with no sale), though the game's description does mention that there are three possible endings. I might even have to come back to revise this review if I manage to find it. So far I've kept coming back with little ideas and have managed to progress to (Spoiler - click to show)throwing water on the curtain from the coffee cup (although also the response to (Spoiler - click to show)trying to throw coffee was funny too), but that didn't seem to affect much. I'm 95% certain of a couple things about the game's structure: 1) (Spoiler - click to show)it will generally last 30 turns and 2) (Spoiler - click to show)the game will always end a couple turns after the curtains catch fire. Even if my brain is working at solutions in the background, I have reached what to me is a satisfying and funny ending, so I'm going to move on to some other Spring Thing entries for now.

If there's one thing I would say is missing here it's not the hint system, but an >AMUSING command at the end, if it wouldn't be too spoilery. There's plenty to laugh at in Wry.

Humorous writing, even slightly educational. Brief 'n buggin' (but bug-free as far as issues go). I was pretty sure it would have some squeamish bits, but no that's not really this bite-sized game's direction. It's sincere about the virtues of eating bugs from an environmentalist and nutritional perspective.

Good Grub! could've been more complicated; like a bug there just isn't a whole lot of meat on the bone here (or should I say inside the exoskeleton?). To be fair none of it is wasted. If the blurb even half-way intrigues you, I do recommend it. It might even be faster to finish a playthrough on your own than to read reviews of it.

A quick, fun jaunt-- or perhaps a "romp"-- into corvidity. Crow Quest has quirky humor plus sweet crow art (many props to the illustrator). It's entirely worth the 5-10 minutes it takes to play through and beat it twice and probably more. Although I was a little disappointed that the game rejected crow names I came up with even when I thought played along well enough ("Aleister Crowley" was my best shot; I get that the idea is that (Spoiler - click to show)nothing you type will work, but playing along anyway is part of the fun and that I felt I could play along from the get-go is a good clue that the game communicates its tone clearly right away), I got a chuckle from the crow names that the game came up with for me too. Being rejected here was more like that cheerful tone Willy Wonka strikes when Violet says, "By gum, it's gum!" and he says, "Wrong!" and he's excited (even delighted) to go on about the wonder of Wonka's Magic Chewing Gum as opposed to being rejected like, "You get nothing, you lose, good day sir!" (I'm talking about the scenes in the '71 movie, but never mind.) Alas my only true disappointment was that despite the bevvy of creative names the game had to replace whatever I came up with, my crow rival Rodney always had the same name.

A lot has and will rightfully be made of corvid intelligence and their uses of strings and sticks and things, but my favorite interaction in this game was probably (Spoiler - click to show)befriending the little girl by giving her the dead frog and seeing how delightfully weird she got with it.

The game also kinda has two levels of difficulty, which is cool. You can play through (Spoiler - click to show)with a partner in crime for immunity to an event or two and the ability to have almost every inventory item at the cost of having to fight at the end, or go (Spoiler - click to show)on your own for a more challenging playthrough.

I wanted more of Crow Quest in the way one wants seconds after a good slice of pie, only to find crumbs left: a larger pool of events, longer storyline, greater complications, more crows in the murder, more items, maybe a higher attitude cap (goodness knows the writing and art have attitude to spare). Even just the bigger event pool would've been welcome, if I was to ask for one thing. Still, it didn't ever come close to wearing out its welcome and I can see how that might be a risk in a version that strings too much together or goes too long, so there's a certain grace and satisfaction in keeping it short. If there is a sequel or an expanded post-comp release I would look forward to playing it though.

Minimal, abstract graphemes of varied points and lines assemble lost stories from forgotten country ("the land of no signs" if I parse the name correctly, or perhaps "The land of which there is no sign," which sounds more accurate to its state). In Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky proposes an exercise in "hearing" the geometric point, whose sound is silence. ["Today I am going to the movies. Today I am going. To the movies. Today I. Am going to the movies Today I am going to the movies

."] To my mind B.J. Best has used a style of abstract imagery similar to Kandinsky to likewise create a multimedia exercise in hearing and feeling for the dead of this imagined land, who currently speak the same language as the geometric point.

What do the pictures themselves represent? Typically triptychs, though sometimes less, we can see in their horizontal alignment how one method of reading perhaps already influences the reading of the art, further bolstered by its presentation with interstitial scenes in English that make new meanings from the player's selections. Are these arrangements written sentences in Asemian? No, they assemble into larger passages. Are these images perhaps journals, with each image representing a day? No, the text suggests they are probably less formal than this (at least one seems to be little more than a crumpled note, though to whom any of them were written seems uncertain). Unless I missed something, their relation to the textual translation that follows seems to imply that each grapheme operates as a discrete unit of meaning in some way, like the practice emoji tutorial that the game opens with, featuring no interaction between the graphemes though they do form a larger picture. That smacks of a missed opportunity to me (what might it have meant for any one triptych to only contain a single point? what if we managed to arrange points in ascending order?), although it would require exponentially more work to finish the project and as the time to complete any particular work approaches infinity the artist is certainly justified in making cuts. In this way though, although these mysterious scribbles are translated into lines (haha), they sort of remain points of relation rather than transcending to a lexical plane.

I was quite captively spellbound by the possibilities of the graphemes and studied them and their accompanying textual scenes for quite some time the first time around, as one might art on a museum wall, but the game features multiple rounds. The recycling of selectable images and their related lexia (if any new ones were introduced on subsequent rounds, I missed them) led in my case to desensitization and scanning rather than deep reading, especially by the third time around. I was more into seeing what changed if anything on the second and third pass. By the third I was more or less just clicking through and this is too bad because I really enjoyed finding what I felt was the "right" fit for all of the scribbles on my first time through. Maybe this aspect was intended as a commentary on translation. Regardless the monotony of this experience is definitely reflected and commented on by the framing of the viewpoint character (a literal translator) and a choice of dialog options responding to that character's surrounding monotony, frustrations, and the relation of inner and outer states (the need to get the "right" translation, lingering sadness and anger, and eating (Spoiler - click to show)nothing but chicken). The game's final choice (Spoiler - click to show)between some "translated" lines of text not drawn from a grapheme allows the player a say in capping off the emotional experience of the project in general.

This is all to say that I found The Fall of Asemia intriguing and exquisite without even beginning to touch on its sonic aspect. My previous tries at reviewing something like that suggest that while I can say that I thought the ambient soundscape matched or heightened the mood of the piece overall and suggested either what the language of Asemia might have sounded like or how 'twas garbled through the mists of time (? [(Spoiler - click to show)but at least not so long ago that they didn't have jazz]), someone else out there is better qualified than myself to more fully assess that part of the experience.

Ah, well, it's natural to miss something, I suppose. The translator does it, the survivors of the dead must do it, and so any one reviewer probably will too.

Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy Full Circle. Its setting is interesting enough: a dark fantasy like Doomed Xycanthus or the author's previous Shards of Memory. Its presentation is sleek. Exits are clearly displayed and there's a special touch to the inventory: it's organized, convenient, and appealing, unlike many other inventories one sees in i.f. I expect that with some revisions it may yet win my enjoyment, but those revisions may be numerous. As it is, the story is almost completely suspenseless and the conscious choice of a design aesthetic based on obscurity and frustration with the expectancy of players progressing by revelation (“the time-honoured method of slamming [one's] head into the desk until something clicks,” as Mr. Whyld himself put it) actively works against the game's favor in my opinion.

When I say it is suspenseless, I don't mean you'll know what's going on right away. What I mean is that the writing seems to want to be suspenseful, but constantly gives itself away or plays up mystery where the audience already has answers. Even in the opening text dump we're presented with our amnesiac protagonist and asked, “Have you been here before?” and so we the audience know that, yes, we have. After being mauled by the beast away from a glade (very early in the game, so it is no spoiler), we are flatly told, “Death wraps you in its icy embrace.” Upon being returned to the glade: “Did you die? Have you been reborn again? Is that how you ended up in the glade in the first place?” Again, the author tells us first (we have died), and then questions so insistently that mystery is dispelled. This is not suspense. For an example of a very good ontological mystery IF with player-character persistence after multiple deaths, see Shrapnel.

Many interactions in the game are badly designed and become unfair Guess the Verb puzzles. On seeing a man hanging from a rope, for example, >GET ROPE flatly refuses because “the rope is of no use.” For the unclued command >UNTIE, >UNTIE ROPE gives “I don't understand what you want me to do with the ropes.” One must specifically (Spoiler - click to show)“untie corpse.” “Body” or “man” do work as synonyms for “corpse.”

On top of being very puzzle-heavy, the relation of player/protagonist knowledge is not always clear. We can see a statue in the first room, but must examine its several parts more closely before coming to what should have been an easy or more general observation about it available from first-level description-- where its arm points. Close by this, we are offered a >DIG verb from the help menu, which is never used by the player, but automatically done by the protagonist. In fact, the game's major unique verb is not listed in the help menu-- all the more pernicious because it is possible to explore the gameworld without any knowledge of it and become irreversibly stuck.

Verbs offered in the help menu also don't accurately reflect their usage in the game. For one, the player must use (Spoiler - click to show)>BURY instead of the already given >DIG, for no reason with no indication. Toward the end of the game, the author changes the rules of conversation unexpectedly, without warning and without indication of the newly expected syntax.

Even beyond the obscurity of many solutions, many of the game's descriptions are often misleading. For example, the game describes the use of a branch as a possible weapon, but it never seems to be used in this way. Instead, you're supposed to (Spoiler - click to show)make it into a torch using a verb that you might never be able unlock if you go east of the quicksand without learning the spell from the cave. For another, upon examining oneself, the game says, “You are... you... You seem to be in reasonable health, aside from your memory problems.” However, this is patently false, as your character has a “mark” on him that not only appears as a large bruise (so you're not healthy), but (Spoiler - click to show)is the key to learning how to cast magic without which it is impossible to progress. This sort of writing is not helpful; it is badly designed.

Though I did finish the game, I think my last shred of hope it would be any good basically went away on reading the ship's log. Many of the previous GTV troubles, cruel design, and misleading descriptions could have been accidental, just a forgivable hazard of solo development and lack of outside beta-testing. Reading the ship's log, however, shows 1 of 10 pages completely at random. There is no diagetic reason that the protagonist should have to read pages at random, nor a reason offered why he would, rather than reading chronological order from the beginning to the end like people do. This use of randomness and frustration over order and flow was an intentional design decision that was completely needless in its frustration, and may best sum up why I did not enjoy this game. The log also makes it clear that (Spoiler - click to show)basically all of the exciting stuff happened on the ship; as in a game of Clue, we find ourselves engaging the world of this game only after all the action is over. This might also serve to explain the lack of suspense in the story.

If you have a very high frustration threshold, an unabidingly old school love of unraveling mysteries in high fantasy worlds, and ADRIFT 4, then version 1 of Full Circle might just be what you're looking for.

ADRIFT author Mel S. is probably best known for zany horror-comedy hijinks (light on the horror), but he didn't always write in this style. Prior to this game, it seems most of his work was of the Deadline murder mystery type. In Mystery's ADRIFT-O-Rama, Mel's course is themed around the murder mystery rather than comedy. It seems that the inception of Speed-IF compilations in the ADRIFT community (and for the purists, this one is a true, one-hour-only Speed-IF) fundamentally changed the major output of this author with their constraints. The author has recently stated that these are his favorite sort of games to write. In fact, it seems that every game he has written since this one has been written as Speed-IF with his now trademark wacky tone.

So how does this one hold up? If off-the-wall, amped-up freak outs over the impossible and the absurd make you laugh, this one definitely will. It merrily defenestrates mimesis. It even shows good characterization for its scope. Unfortunately, probably as a side-effect of being made in an hour, it does suffer from Guess the Verb (one annoying instance, for example, where “take” is accepted, but not “get”) and Guess the Syntax problems, but if they really stymie you, there's no shame in turning to a walkthrough. These problems, however, are few. Little replay value except in booting this crazy, li'l thing back up to show your friends, but hey.

Ultimately: like drinking absinthe and novocaine from a little shot glass with a big, dangerously pointy chip in the glass, it is perhaps best done fast and with a little guidance, but if it's your thing-- oh, you will laugh.

ADRIFT-O-Rama is a special type of game, a sort of community in-joke featuring members of the ADRIFT Forum. It's less an interactive fiction and more an interactive creative non-fiction (even if ICNF is a clunky acronym that sounds too much like “I sniff.”), so that's how I'm judging it. As far as I can tell, the first of this type of community-based creative non-fic in the modern IF Community is Adam Biltcliffe's Are You a Chef? (2000). ADRIFT-O-Rama is not the first of its type in ADRIFT, either, being preceded a couple months by Woodfish's Forum (a comment in ADRIFT-O-Rama seems to suggest that Woodfish might have gotten the idea from Mystery). But where Forum is ultimately a work of fiction that just name-drops a few 'DRIFTers and ties its adventure together with a couple community in-jokes, ADRIFT-O-Rama goes the whole nine yards as creative non-fic, presenting its author's personal view of her contemporaries through the lens of a mock game of miniature golf.

I think the great thing about these sort of time capsule games like ADRIFT-O-Rama is that, as historical documents, they arguably become more valuable with age. It is especially gratifying not just to see ADRIFT authors represented (it's an 18 hole course, 17 for authors and 1 for Guess the Verb), not just to show how their works are perceived (each hole is modeled after a single author's forum persona or oeuvre, with no shortage of commentary), but to have them situated in the specific context of another 'DRIFTer's viewpoint (i.e., Mystery's). It's a really neat glance back into the community and into what being a member of it and author with it is (or was) like, especially from a member of one of the oldest cohorts of 'DRIFTers.

Particular actions in ADRIFT-O-Rama are very juicy: hitting different objects with the club, hitting them with your hands (while holding nothing-- yields different responses than clubbing), hitting the ball, and throwing the ball can produce several different, amusing responses in each room of the game. These actions all have variable responses controlled by randomized numerical values and ADRIFT 4's text replacement system, ALR (Alternate Language Resource). According to the ALR, most of these actions throughout the game can yield anywhere from 5-15 or so possible responses. Consider that that's stretched over 18 holes (19 rooms, counting the ball room), with several implemented scenery objects to act upon in each, and you'll understand what makes this game so deceptively deep. What Noah Wardrip-Fruin calls the Tale-Spin Effect (describing “works that fail to represent their internal system richness on their surfaces”) is at work here, hampering the full experience of this piece while the parser mediates that experience.

On a typical playthrough, one might experience the game as something like a quick short story. It's possible to just go through, hitting the ball in every hole and scoring a hole in one every time, so that one might see none of the >hit %object% responses, none of the throwing responses, and only one response for sinking the ball per course. One trouble with the game is that because the responses are randomized, it's impossible to figure out how many responses one should expect for a given action without looking at the game's code.

On an attempt at a deeper play, however, the amount of effort and soul that went into this game is plainly evident. The replacement text from the ALR file alone is over 17,000 words long; after adding room and object descriptions, the game approaches novel length. It's a shame the process for uncovering these scriptons in the game is randomized, but the game's amusing writing does reward persistence. Perhaps a better strategy for reading ADRIFT-O-Rama is to play through the game once and then read the ALR file itself to catch everything you missed.

The tone of the game is generally zany and a jokingly abusive of the player. The text is very self-aware, and shows an erudition with not only the ADRIFT community, but also the platform itself. For example, the game often spoofs the ADRIFT 4 parser's standard responses(Spoiler - click to show)(“You hit, but nothing happens. Heh- thought you wouldn't get that response, did you?”). In one section (after trying to (Spoiler - click to show)hit things in the Ball Room), the author makes one of many write-in appearances. In this one, she threatens to lecture the player on the importance of beta-testing. Upon continued abuse, she makes good on that promise-- only with a spelling error early on in the response that I can't help but think has to have been typed in with a wink.

Mystery trades in insult humor for much of the game, writing in her own satirical visions of other ADRIFT authors and community members, many of whom are gone now. It's safe to say that these authors were also intended to be her audience at the time, thus much of the abuse taken by the player character can also be construed a sort of imaginary, playful abuse to fellow 'DRIFTers. Especially in the early '00s, this sort of abuse was commonplace on the ADRIFT Forum-- consider the importance of the Forum's most active and longest running thread (2 Aug 2002 - 28 May 2006), the Smacking Thread. Mystery appears in-game to smack the player character around quite often, which I believe other 'DRIFTers would've recognized as a sort of good-natured and wacky playfulness (in fact, smacking was also a primary verb for the player in Forum).

But there are some more brutal portrayals in the game, as well, where Mystery makes no mystery of her opinion on some authors. If Don Rickles had written an ADRIFT game, it would look like ADRIFT-O-Rama. One hole on the course is dedicated to the takedown of David Whyld, comic roast-style(Spoiler - click to show) (“Did I mention he despises Mystery too?” the game informs us). In another instance, DuoDave (i.e., David Good) appears(Spoiler - click to show) to call Mystery an “anal control freak” and scoff at her beta-testing suggestions. Another Forum member is shown as a feckless pothead in a cloud of smoke, while yet another has a course adorned with “Shit-on-a-Stick™.” There's a current of brazen honesty, bitterness, and a disillusionment with elements of the community that runs throughout the game, which seems somewhat common in even current members of ADRIFT's sometimes claustrophobic-seeming community. Had this been made a few years later, I think it's likely it would have included the 'DRIFTing community's most feared and hated phrase, “ADRIFT is dead.”

Of course, Mystery doesn't exclude herself from her own roasting. She has a hole on the course, too, whose primary feature is a maze (referencing her game ADRIFT Maze). Upon trying to hit the ball, Mystery might make another author insert appearance to tell the player, for example, that (Spoiler - click to show)"Selma's Will was a fluke." I say “might” again because of the randomized nature of the game's responses. Read the ALR-- it's in there.

At times-- and perhaps including the previous comment-- the text waxes confessional. Especially at Mystery's hole, the writing of some segments either directly addresses the author's grievances (Spoiler - click to show)("If you'd behave yourself you wouldn't need a [forum] moderator. I wasn't sure if moderating was something I wanted to do. People expect you not to have opinions when you are a moderator...I guess it isn't really funny, just sad." She lowers her head and returns to the darkness whispering, "I was a Drifter first.") or through more generalized expressions that exemplify her frustration, which I won't include here because I can't just spoiler tag everything (Spoiler - click to show)(Yes I can) and you should read this thing for yourself.

This is a game that offers an incredible insider's view of ADRIFT to the rest of the IF Community, and it is one that certainly no 'DRIFTer should go without playing. This is the heyday of ADRIFT 4 with all its personalities caught in Mystery-tinted amber, a bold, inventive piece of writing that will make you laugh, scorn, think, and putt.

Highly recommended.

Unraveling God is linear, but non-chronological, puzzleless, story-centric IF (some have questioned whether or not it is truly IF, though I would vote 'yes'). It shares a lot in this way with Photopia. In fact, its opening uses a single, thematic word (optionally in color), almost exactly like Photopia. I think the game is different enough, though, that we can see this as an homage, a clear acknowledgment of Unraveling God's predecessor rather than merely a copy. Generally anything other than Photopia is going to fall short of Photopia, and I'd like to try to look at this game on its own merits, but the comparisons are inevitable.

That being said, I admit that Unraveling God's religious themes initially made me (an atheist) hesitant to give it a play. I expected it to be preachy and poorly-written, with foregone conclusions, as in some other religious IF I have attempted to tackle. That is not to say that religious IF can't be done right, but I hadn't seen one in the ADRIFT community capable of grabbing my interest. Still, Unraveling God has a high star rating, it placed well in 2002's IFComp, and it's been on several lists of recommended ADRIFT games... so I had to be wrong, right? Well... mostly, yes.

The specificity in setting pulled me in, especially being at a university. The writing is well done, and I finished the game with a feeling like, “Hm. Yeah. That was good.” In particular its protagonist, Gabriel Markson, a distinct character voice and style. This especially comes through even early on, after reading a fluff piece he's written about his experiments (in which he necessarily sounds upbeat), followed immediately by intensely cynical-- even sinister-- internal dialog. From the first few interactions I saw him in, I already got the sense that the protagonist was a ruthless cynic and a power-hungry jerk-- Varicella with less flair and more tenure. Especially in an ADRIFT game, a character of this style-- and this strongly written-- is a rarity. I had to play on.

Lots and lots of little things kept chipping away at my will to see the game through, I admit. A couple spelling or grammatical slip-ups I was willing to abide, but mostly I don't think the game's design has aged well. In particular, the granularity of the actions the game is willing to accept is super annoying. One must stand from a chair before looking at a bookshelf, you have to explicitly open doors before going through them, have to open a folder before reading an article, have to be holding the folder to open it, have to look at the desk to see the folder so you can pick it up first... these things really grated on me more than I suspect they might have a decade ago. At the very least, though, this character still intrigued me enough that I wanted to see his story to its end, so I persevered.

Then we hit the game's dialog. Again, these sections are all linear-- you can express Prof. Markson however you like, but you'll get the same outcomes anyway. The writing is believable to an extent. The supporting character, Claudia, is a stock religious alarmist character, questioning whether or not the advances of the professor's experiments should move forward. But she's also supposedly a science grad student, so I don't buy her dialog when, for example, she calls Galileo's notions “obscene.” (Really? So she believes in a geocentric universe?)

Admittedly, Mr. Watson likely had some difficulty putting himself into the shoes of a Christian believer in writing this dialog (he mentions his own leanings in an afterword), but it doesn't come out sounding incredibly natural. The dialog choices for Markson do feel more natural, especially given his character, but that feeling is damaged a bit by the fatalistically linear structure of the game.

Unlike Photopia, the writing lacks the subtlety and sympathy necessary to make me want to explore my expression of this character. I might have felt it mattered a little more had I interacted with Markson as another character, the way players jump between characters in Photopia, but this never happens. While the flexibility of the dialog does make me (as the player) feel the author has considered his audience rather than just feeding them all of the plot while they're tied to a chair, as a player I felt more concerned with just seeing what Professor Markson would do and what would happen to him.

Although Unraveling God is structured in such a way that it offers players an either/or moral choice at the end, the value of these choices is so clearly telegraphed-- and the quality of those endings varies so drastically-- that it can't really be imagined as a choice. The game's events, its cosmology, everything points at one answer and says, “Choose this because it's right.”

By contrast, (I guess this is a spoiler unless you've already played Photopia and have an idea what's coming) (Spoiler - click to show)Markson makes a drastic moral choice on his own in the climax of the story which the player is powerless to stop. Instead, it's more like we're an absent conscience watching, but unable to inform. In terms of affect, this moral decision by the player character is the more powerful than the one taken by the player in the ending.

On the whole, I think this might have been a 4 star game back in 2002-- even a 5 star game amongst the ADRIFT community-- but I'm just not sure it holds up as well today. It's still definitely worth a look, especially for those who like strongly characterized player characters, but do I judge it according to its importance and uniqueness from 2002 or against the relative quality of just other ADRIFT games or do I judge it on how it stands amidst a wider, evolving field of IF today? This seems more like a choice with no clearly right answer to me. I think the answer for me is to fall back on my own personal IFDB rating system: 3 stars-- I enjoyed it, but your mileage may vary.

It's obvious the author put a lot of effort into making this game. The intro especially showcases a strong regional flavor with its use of dialect that bought a lot of initial faith in the story from me and kept me hoping it'd get better. Unfortunately, I have more complaints than anything else about this one.

For starters, the title suggests you'd be spending your time in the woods when you really spend your time investigating a haunted house. The title is true in this case-- you are surrounded by woods and they are dark-- but it just doesn't seem like it's the best thematic fit for this game. But maybe that's a minor complaint.

Room names are coded into the descriptions, so they double-up when the Runner is set to display room names, which is annoying. Luckily this can be turned off. On top of this, early room descriptions are large text dumps, generally overwritten, whereas later rooms run out of steam and are more spartan. It's an awkward distribution. Also, if a player starts without the introduction, the wrong initial room description displays. </end room complaints>

There's a mystery to solve and the way you've got to go about it is by wandering around this haunted house searching and collecting items. While this is pretty traditional for an adventure setup, having to wander in an undirected way slowly dissolves the tension from the setting. The scavenger hunt focus along with the variety of objects that the protagonist deems fit to pack rat work against the horror atmosphere (what would you do with a half-eaten chicken burger, a brush, a holy cross, and a strip of duct tape?).

There is one nice bit of item-craft in the game, though, where you put some items together to make a new one. It's well-hinted and clever, so credit where it's due. It's kind of a shame you only end up using it once, though.

Despite your most meticulous searching, the majority of relevant information collected about the mysterious disappearances you're investigating comes in the form of unreliable hallucinatory sequences of one sort or another rather than material evidence of any kind. Adventure logic-wise, their occurrence makes sense, but diagetically they feel like they happen when the PC is doing the most random things that don't seem to be furthering the cause of finding his lost friends. These include (and-- spoilers-- I'm gonna go ahead and list them all so you can see what I'm talking about) (Spoiler - click to show)arranging dolls in a doll house, building a fire and then sitting in a rocking chair, playing with a rubber ball, looking in a tub (but only after playing with the rubber ball-- there's no real rhyme or reason to this one, it just happens), hanging up a picture, singing, or painting a frickin' pram. Sigh. At any rate, this method of revealing all of the plot-important information through hallucinatory revelations (essentially disconnected plot dumps) rather than evidence is neither satisfying nor convincing. Maybe it could've been more effective if the PC were some sort of paranormal investigator?

The descriptions of most objects found after these violent hallucinations seem especially contradictory, too. (Spoiler - click to show)For example, after seeing the bloodied ghost of a friend drop this ball which was clearly not present before, the description reads, “It was just an ordinary ball found in very ordinary circumstances.” or later after finding this thing belonging to a ghost near a bathtub that moments ago poured blood: “You see nothing special about the model pram.” After some time, the necessary actions for plot advancement stop being well-cued and the world model seems to make less and less sense, with objects spontaneously generating where there had previously been nothing.

The basic flow of wandering, collecting things, fiddling around until you do something right, having a terrible hallucination come along, and then questioning your sanity as the world returns to a state of utter normality (rinse, lather, repeat) becomes a tiresome pattern pretty quickly. Wandering aimlessly after one such scene, I finally turned to the walkthrough and found that I'd been facing a genuine “read the author's mind” puzzle. Then another.

As a small note-- I don't think this is a spoiler-- “looking glass” is a vague name for an item and a bit misleading. To me it suggests a spyglass when what was meant here was a magnifying glass. Perhaps this is a regional difference, though, and I should let it slide even if it's frustrating.

On the other hand... (Spoiler - click to show)
“... it was only then I noticed something on the floor. It was a small model pram...
>paint pram
I shook my head because this wasn't going to work. I had about enough paint to cover a cigarette box let alone a whole pram.
>get pram
I take the model pram.
>paint pram
I made the best I could of it. I lightly covered the model pram with a thin coat of pink paint...”
See the misleading part there?

At least I seemed to pick up on the allusion (I assume this was intended, but at this point I've lost enough faith in the author's design that I can't be sure) and took the hint to examine the *yellow* walls. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, anyone? Unfortunately, that action just led to another hallucination. This one, though, was the Final Reveal From Out of Left Field leading to the climax... the opening move of which is apparently done for me in a longish, over-the-top, and seemingly out-of-character bit no matter what I type. When I finally get to confront the bad guy, a default ADRIFT response amusingly tells me: “Now that isn't very nice.”

The ending sequence definitely needed better beta-testing.(Spoiler - click to show)
>get gun
I couldn't see that anywhere around!
>get shotgun
I take the loaded shotgun.
>shoot tanner
Now that isn't very nice.
>shoot michael
Now that isn't very nice.
>shoot michael tanner with the shotgun
The sweat ran down my face. I couldn't make it to the shotgun – he'd nail me before I got to it.
>i
I had with me a window key, a half burnt diary, a cheap looking glass, a holy cross, a handle, and a loaded shotgun.

Overall, I just wasn't buying it. More vigorous testing would've helped, but only so much. I really wanted to like this game and kept waiting for it to do something clever and win me back somehow, but that never happened. The double whammy twist ending double didn't do it for me, either.

Meh.

After mazes, the next tropes in interactive fiction to wear themselves out entirely were probably the “Escape the Room” [ETR] format and death. Seeing yet another ETR game is enough to make a seasoned IF player roll their eyes. These tend to be basically plotless, decontextualized setups for a puzzle rather than a good story. If you have to stuff something under a door to catch a key, it's probably enough to make a player quit. We've seen that game with that puzzle so many times and in so many incarnations that it was now beneath our notice, like spam. And the last thing we want to do is to die over and have to restart our attempts every time, especially on something so limited.

But Marika the Offering offers a fully contextualized, narratively complete game with an interesting story and a structure that subverts our basic aversion to death by turning the ETR format on its head. No longer is your goal to escape from a locked room. Your goal is to lock the room and keep a vampire from coming in.

Obvious means of entry and ways to bar them start the player out proactively, which is good because they're about to lose. When the player feels they have finally blocked off all they can they go to sleep (or else they'll run out of turns and fall asleep anyway). The player then get to watch how the villain enters the room to kill our heroine. In this way, each death is a clue in solving the overall puzzle of the game. Rather than an annoyance, the author has made death into a service to the player. Aside from presenting a challenge, the continued inventiveness of the (rather traditional) shapeshifting vampire at gaining entry into the tower room becomes a running gag that's amusing to read. Especially if you're a completionist, the flow of the game becomes more about blocking one entrance at a time and then dying, then blocking the next, rinse lather, repeat.

There are a couple of tricky commands to execute in this game where players might run into Guess the Verb troubles. It's also worth noting that the game is inventoryless, preferring to let players use things from where they lie rather than making them pick all of them up explicitly. This lets players focus on examining their surroundings and blocking exits rather than acquiring objects.

Overall, this is a rewarding, not overlong game with difficulty neatly balanced on a knife point, worthy of as many plays through as it has deaths. Highly recommended.

This is the first of what would become a series of Speed-IF horror from Seciden Mencarde, and it is the only one which ever received a revision. It is also, in my opinion, the best of the series, not just the best because of its revision, but because of the author's restraint and management of atmosphere lacking in further episodes.

The Forest House doesn't drop the reader right into horror-atmosphere-tryout land knee-deep in gloom and corpses. It's more about restraining the player from getting what they want right away-- you want to go west? Well, the door is closed. Okay, open it, now go west. It is as though the parser is a big brother warning the player, “Are you sure? I don't think you're gonna like it...” but the obvious action is right there, and everything is so close, so the player keeps going until they finally arrive on the scene of the horror.

More than just holding the player back, The Forest House beckons them in with a sense of childish wonder, hinting at dread. True, some of the writing is a little stiff (“A basic four-legged table with a chair. The only thing that makes it a desk is your use of it in that manner.”), but this is generally a result of implementing scenery the author seemed to think negligible to the overall tale. In that moment and elsewhere, some of the game's (un)implementation choices are questionable-- likely a result of the original Speed-IF constraint, it would've been nice to see them fixed in the revision, as well.

The more important elements of the game's writing, however, tap into a dark pool through the lens of what could be a child's heroic imaginings and trepidation. The house only you can see, that can only be seen at night. There might be monsters in the closet. Little touches like these reinforce the horror while luring the player through a scene of stealthy preparation with adventurous expectancy rather than slapping them in the face with horror tropes and abject darkness right away. This allows for a more subversive, but still gradual-feeling switch from a world of the expected and the rational (even including mundane flashlight battery replacement) into the unexpected and the irrational.

The sort of setup this game presents is Doing It Right. In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner describes how authors draw a reader into the “fictional dream” of a work using sensory clues and elements of from life to make the reader feel the story is real, or at least plausible. This is part of buying our suspension of disbelief and, to some extent, our investment in the actors and events of a tale. In this way, the aforementioned battery replacement-- a speed bump on our way to adventure and the unknown-- exemplifies the game's use the parser, restraint, and granularity of action to mirror the reality of a child sneaking out at night. It's an effective build-up and, because of touches like this, we can see how The Forest House operates more effectively as an IF than it might as static fiction.

Once one enters the titular forest house, the imagery changes to decay-- but even with a little bit of humor mixed in as the player character copes in the face of the grotesque and the unreal. This sort of horror, built on suspense and atmosphere, takes hold better than gore, gross-outs, or threats of physical violence alone might, especially when setup correctly. I admit after several playthroughs, I still haven't been able to get the last lousy point of the game, but I'm beginning to wonder if the inability to do so-- offering us a vain and frustrating search in its place should we try-- might not be part of the game's message. As we can never fully reach back into the wondrous, nightmarish expectancies of childhood except vicariously or in senility, as those imaginings may never reach their threatened realization, so, too, might The Forest House deny us these things and be all the more creepy for it.

(Though, seriously, if you have spoilers for the last lousy point, please comment below.)

Warning: spoilers, because this game is so short. But a lot of blathering to go on.

(Spoiler - click to show)I must admit I have to feel a bit of a soft spot for a game which accepts as its first moves >GET KNIFE, >KILL ME... and then continues. In that beginning, the whole world is winnowed down to one room with a nothing outside and four things: a bed, me, a knife, a throat. And one must do something... or else one could wander the world forever finding only a nothing “Outside” and rooms with beds, knives, and your throat.

Constrained implementation makes the suicidal restlessness of the PC signify strongly, controlling and consuming the viewpoint protagonist's entire umwelt to represent its intention. In this way, the text of “baby tree” is not sparse, but dense. This is not the faux minimalism of NoM3rcy, but a crafted and toned torture machine shrunk to miniature scale. Minimalist perspective sharply delineates, but actively obfuscates existences in a world of nightmare.

The space of the game is odd, but odd in a way that tells us about the world inhabited by its characters. When moving, rooms simply cycle from “Room” to “Outside.” One can move in any cardinal direction from “Room,” and up or down and in, but not out-- to “Outside.” It makes normal sense to not be able to move out from Outside, but to go from Room to Outside by going in instead of out does not make sense in world of normal physical laws. That retreating inward can bring one to an outside space suggests not only a retreat from a world of logical forces, but that entropy in the inward retreat is constant and irreversible to the protagonist, who cannot return from her inner state. In this way, the world of “baby tree” is a reflection of the incoherent non-logic of nightmare.

Even this initial room might not be the protagonist's own. The geography of “baby tree” exceeds the bounds of a personalized domestic territory-- for how have we returned to the same “Room” by continuing in a direction away from it? Geographical connections in this world must be senseless, as we can move at half-cardinal directions like northeast or southwest and end up “Outside” in a spot that once was a “Room.” It is because of these diagonals that-- rather than a constrained, simple world of two rooms or an infinite, static checkerboard of rooms and outsides-- the layout of “baby tree” suggests madness, a conspiracy of death stretching across an endlessly networked map, a tainted carrier of disease killing dogs and babies whose wanderings haunt the uninhabited rooms of a nightmare nowhere, affecting only each other with no ecology beyond ghost children, unpeopled rooms of beds and knives, dogs for dying, a sickness inside to be cut out, the cries of the baby tree, an inescapable trap of infinite death and guilt with an unreachable history.

I can think of one way in which this nightmare could maintain diagonals and sense, but I do not want to consider for the moment the implications of “baby tree” spanning a scale of eternities in which civilizations rise and fall, their outsides becoming rooms, their rooms becoming outsides. Although the game has no explicit relation to time, to me the measure of 1 turn per command (the game's only relation to time) seems to indicate a more local scale: one second, maybe, or one minute, not one millenium.

This horror is not without controversy. The identification of the protagonist as female in the ending has led some to interpret this story as punishment for the evils of abortion, an interpretation the author has said was not intentional. It also means that the player's description and second-person narration are misleading to a male audience in a way that-- violated so abruptly at the end-- breaks suspension of disbelief. Clearly the second-person has been dealt with wrongly in this IF; if the protagonist is to be distinctly gendered it should be made clear the identity of “you” is separate from the player. Instead, the author used the most basic one-word AFGNCAAP description: explicitly “you.” This invites the reader to imagine themselves. If the author had not intended gender association between male players and the PC, he should not have invited it with second person. On the other hand, Mr. Galin might just as easily change one word at the end of the game to more fully embrace his use of the second person perspective, perhaps changing it to “person” or “human.” This would also preserve controversy, if the author finds that a valuable element of his storyworld.

For what it's worth, I did not interpret the story as being about abortion-- partially because I didn't interpret the second-person PC as a female until the very end. The baby tree initially suggested to me the guilt of a person (perhaps a doctor) who wants to save everyone, but can't. In my first reading of it, these were the faces of all of “all the babies you killed” through inaction or inability, of babies dying across the country or in other parts of the world, the nightmare guilt of which traps the PC in this inescapable nightmare. As a self-proclaimed experiment in madness, I think this space for personal interpretation works in its favor.

Even in the minimal presentation, there are some misfires in implementation.

(Spoiler - click to show)>LIE ON BED
can't
>GET ON BED
ok

This isn't entirely without precedent in an experimental work. There are shades of Rybread's Symetry here... darker, better-formed shades that thankfully don't abuse another author's work as a crutch.

In the end, although I found it horrific, I do have to wonder how the story would be different had the author used ghost puppies or kittens or even just plain ol' corpses instead of babies. Would a “corpse tree” with the screams of adult ghosts be as effective?

Gordebak has potential as a writer, but (as, I assume, a newcomer to interactive fiction) seems unfamiliar with I.F. conventions which might benefit his work. "What the Murderer Had Left" is a good example: in an interesting story about examining people and the exceptional qualities they may willingly or unwillingly express versus those they might hide, the PC has only a default description. Experienced players are likely to notice this, as X ME is one of the first things a lot of them might type.

Still, I think this is definitely worth the minute of your time it'll take to read through.

Interesting static fiction (there's really no use of interactivity in it), but the ending is wrong in my opinion. (Spoiler - click to show)The retreat back inward, back into the source of the player character's stasis, should have been overturned in the final action.

Still, work like this makes me wonder what a stat fic publisher's reaction would be to receiving an IF transcript as a submission. Has anyone tried this?

The book, of all things, is unimplemented. Stronger implementation (even of just a few important details) could reap stronger immersion and affect. There was also a (Spoiler - click to show)cigarette at one point which the PC had, but again, not implemented, not in the inventory, so it pulls one out to suddenly realize it *is* there.

(Spoiler - click to show)All one does here is type >READ. While I'm open to the idea that a single-action, multi-turn IF could express something powerful, here I think the forced single-mindedness of the player prevents them from connecting with the distracted state of the player character.

(I'm trying my best to avoid spoilers here, but in a work so short it's maybe a little tough.)

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.

Despite its stated goals, "Edge of the Cliff" is not actually non-interactive. Once past the initial questions (Spoiler - click to show)(false choices which still manage to frame the content of the piece, and can only be said to actually have been ignored *if* the player chooses a configuration other than the pre-authored one and *then* executes a command-- such as examining oneself-- which allows them to see that one's input has, in fact, been ignored), the player's choices matter. Choice and interactivity shape the content of the narrative in some significant ways. (Spoiler - click to show)Does the PC roll off the cliff in his/her sleep? Trip and fall? About what is the PC so concerned? Yes, these all ultimately wind up with the same end effect, but with different paths come different content and different meanings.

What I think this piece does successfully is to-- in a quick, highly replayable fashion-- portray a lack of agency. We may take actions, but even the PC seems to take any one of them too far (often by no fault or intention of his/her own). Its style is humorous: a farcical mode that pokes fun at overwrought or overly serious writing, at least funny enough to make me laugh.

"The Edge of the Cliff" may not have succeeded at non-interactivity, but it certainly fails interestingly.

A superhero origin story needs to go beyond the plain fact of how one gets their powers. To take an example, Peter Parker doesn't just get bitten by a spider, "The End." He gets bitten by a spider and chooses to use that power become a crime fighter. An origin story should tell us what a hero fights and why. Suzy, aka Scarlet, is fighting... what exactly? We don't ever really see it. She's not fighting from intrinsic motivation either, which makes her harder to work into the mold of a heroic figure. A lot more is left vague than I would've liked in that regard.

Superheroes need to be strong characters, defined by what they do. What does Suzy do? The interpretation I got was that she's a sexually harrassed waitress who hates kids and lugs around useless items that she loathes. Especially given her items, I felt like I was getting mixed signals, expecting Suzy to be a farcical superheroine, but that didn't pan out.

The story claims that her usual response when a crying child says their mother is trapped a building she can see is currently burning is "to shrug [her] shoulders and say, 'Yes? And?'", which didn't do a lot to make her likable to me. Is she supposed to be an anti-hero? I get strong reluctant hero vibes from her, but that doesn't really work with the rest of the setup unless (Spoiler - click to show)the Magic Eye compel at the end completely changes her, focuses her will for action in some visible way. If it does, though, we don't get to see any of that, so we're missing out on major character development.

I feel like I should've gotten some development from (Spoiler - click to show)Suzy's debatably brave rush into danger, but it sort of happens and is done, and that's it. Quite a bit of the game, instead, is spent developing interactions between Suzy and the annoying child (Spoiler - click to show)(giving it the mints and wiping its face with a tissue, oh-so-motherly-like), even when those representations seem to run counter to the rest of her character. Is she motherly at heart or does she hate kids? I'd be curious how the scoring breakdown of the game characterizes Suzy.

Come to think of it, overall I'm just confused about who Suzy *is*. Messages are too mixed. What one action in the game defines her as a heroine?

It's pretty hard to get an audience into a conflict the protagonist doesn't even care about. Like Suzy herself, the writing feels like it's just reluctantly going through the motions in an aimless, "Well, I guess I'm here, I might as well" sort of way. I much prefer this author's writing when it lets loose from conventions and blasts off full force into its subject matter, like in "For Love of Digby" or "Back to Life... Unfortunately."

I appreciated that some work went into getting players to execute non-standard commands and into the presentation of the inventory. The items, though... didn't really do much for me in terms of character development or usefulness.

We didn't really get to use (Spoiler - click to show)our New Alien Toy for very much. It would've been nice to use it in whatever way Suzy will regularly use it against crime at least once in this setup so we'd be ready for it when it comes up again.

I'd've liked to see how Suzy reacts to (Spoiler - click to show)being Magic Eye compelled at the end. The story just kind of stops there. Again, it sort of felt like if we just said, (Spoiler - click to show)"Peter gets bitten by a radioactive spider-- the end."

Every room in this game has a minimum of three mistakes in its writing, except for a room with no use and practically no implementation that only has two. The paragraphing manages to be all over the place and crammed together at the same time, and all dialog is in italics, so it's a mess even to read. Motivation for puzzles and plot is likewise scattershot, with no hints included. Confusing parser responses abound, largely due to a too specific method of task construction and lack of synonyms. Even scenery descriptions can be actively misleading ((Spoiler - click to show)e.g., a corridor where "There is a number of doors along the corridor" (sic), but implemented are only "the left door" and "the right door"-- without obvious synonyms). The small world map is artificially inflated with pauses; 3 second waits when moving from a room makes going east just once feel like moving through 12 rooms. Generally, all of the most potentially interesting items go unimplemented, but you'll see a lot of chairs, shelves, and tables, generally described in some hyperbolic state or another.

On the level of representation and tone, the game doesn't know which Camelot it wants to represent: a glorious, high fantasy kingdom of legend or a cruel world of "the darkest medieval age" (quote from the game). One moment it describes the deplorable condition of the dungeons or kitchen, this-or-that crude furniture, darkness too thick to see through and vomit-inducing stenches. It subjects the player to caste-based bigotry ((Spoiler - click to show)Why exactly the master chef would give the protagonist a loaf of bread with the express instructions to deliver it to King Arthur, only to have the guards look down on him and not let him in or take the bread themselves because of your character's station-- like most of this game's logic-- utterly escapes me. You never even do get the chance to deliver the bread to Arthur.), and even launches a totally uncalled-for ad hominem attack on a respected member of the IF Community. Then this game wants to turn around and fascinate us with images of peacocks strutting "like princesses," beautiful tapestries, and some really tasty (if "luke warn") baked bread. We just can't buy it. If there is an attempt at subverting the image of Camelot, it is quite poorly executed.

One wonders why the author chose Camelot as a location at all. The only character important to Arthurian legend that the player actually interacts with is Merlin, and even then that interaction is not beyond the barest extent of characterization. It's clear the author wanted Merlin to come off as likeable, but he never actually *does* anything likeable. If anything, I don't see why he couldn't be replaced with a generic evil wizard who might also kidnap a random library janitor (through a method of dubious reliability, but whatever, it's magic), make him into a kitchen slave to be somewhat routinely beaten and insulted by the staff of this savage castle, and then force him to do his dirty work. Add to this that there's no particular *reason* the PC can do what must be done that Merlin couldn't himself do... that's some evil wizard sh*t, right there.

The rags to riches story underneath it all is, like most of the other elements of the game, purely lip service. Ultimately, I leave the game feeling like I've been bribed by Muammar Gaddafi. There's nothing likeable in the PC, either-- the writing characterizes him as an almost supernatural klutz and kind of an idiot with no particular redeeming qualities. It might not be Escape from Camelot, but that's just because it's playable. That doesn't mean I won't give it the same rating.

Avoid.

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.

Densely overwritten, yes, but nobody could charge Heal Butcher with unoriginality-- characters, setting, and diction all are out of the ordinary and strongly support the story's mood of mystery, horror, and the uncontrollable. There is even a shade of absurdist humor amidst its toil and suffering. At the very least, the quasi-flabbergasting verbosity of "The Wheels Must Turn" offers a refreshing break from the fairly rote descriptions one sometimes finds in interactive fiction. On these strengths, it warrants a play or even just a gawk.

On the other hand, the interactive element feels pointless to the extent that I cannot offer it more than 3 stars. Aside from conversation subjects, second-level descriptions only offer repetitions of what has already been said, and the plot structure, short as it is, is strictly linear-on-rails. The winning action seems overtly symbolic, but since what exactly it represents in the world is never clear it just feels empty. Perhaps these detractions were due to competition restrictions (I haven't been able to find the constraints of the ADRIFT Spring MiniComp 2001 anywhere), but player action holds so little meaning in this text that I have to wonder if it could have been better presented as static fiction.

Overall: strongly atmospheric, but left me scratching my head.

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.

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.