198BREW

This game might be described as "Weird Urban Fantasy". After a brief prologue, it starts off with a classic 'my apartment' game that models different rooms of a fairly mundane apartment before digging into some of the strangeness.

Gameplay consists of crossing a map and discovering unusual individuals, each of which is far from baseline reality. Unlike much of fantasy and sci fi, most of the people are normal, physically, but inside is something different. There are of course some exceptional cases.

While there are many different threads running through the game, they feel like they all have thematic similarities. One constant refrain is (Spoiler - click to show)fear of nothing happening, stuck in eternity balanced against (Spoiler - click to show)the fear of something changing or finally happening after so long.

Implementation is iffy. One really tough issue is that pronouns aren't set right for women so X HER doesn't work, and for both men and women you can't X MAN or X WOMAN, you have to instead type out the full name of the person you want to speak with. Many objects listed in the description can't be interacted with in-game and many that you can't interact with don't give responses. TAKE SHOWER uses Inform's default response of 'That's hardly portable'. So it could use some polishing up. I didn't see typos or bugs, though.

I liked the game. It gives me the same kind of feel as Deadline Enchanter, one of my favorite games. I also have some major phobias associated to some of the things in this game, but the way it handled them made me feel less tense rather than more, which is nice.

The opening of the game made no sense to me, but after replaying it all clicked, so I recommend trying that afterwards.

(review based on the IFComp 2024 version)

Disorienting.
Discomforting.

Strange…

198BREW drops the player in a nearly incomprehensible setting. Just familiar enough to wander around and explore. Hints of backstory, glimpses of history, fragments of memories,… paint an icy, fractured picture of a World, a Church, a Queen, and of some of the unfortunate people inhabiting the City.

The writing is splendid. Descriptions feel alien while still evoking detailed-yet-disturbed images, the sequence of events and actions draws the player along with urgency, without ever gaining clear motive. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of the large-scale prologue with the practicality of the apparent game-objective in the opening scene, especially since that down-to-earth practical objective is twisted and spun and distorted during the game that follows.

I loved this, but precisely because I can see the potential, I also grew frustrated. While the descriptions are very impressive on the surface, it takes but a minor scratching to see that the implementation is sorely lacking in depth. Many nouns are not recognised. characters who seem interesting turn out to be cardboard figures with only one conversation-trigger, commands that flow naturally from the setting are dismissed by a default rejection-response, plausible alternate courses of action () are not accounted for,…

This game excels as a mood-piece, it has provided images that I will probably see in my dreams, it suffused me with an undefinable feeling of strangeness. However, to become the truly masterful IF-piece it carries the kernel of, more polishing and shaving is needed.

It’s such a drag when you run out of your preferred source of caffeine. Especially if you discover it first thing in the morning and then you have to formulate your plan to acquire caffeine while you’re still groggy. It’s even worse if you’ve had a bad night, like if for example you just took over your girlfriend’s body, destroying her consciousness (consensually, sort of) in the process, and you’re trying to adjust to the new body while also processing the loss. And it’s snowing.

I love 198BREW’s weird, dark world (that nevertheless still has Nespresso pods), the evocative descriptions of its bleak setting, and its lightly sketched but intriguing characters (including the late girlfriend, who is very present in the narrative). I also love that this is a time loop game where the PC is not the person in the time loop—the actual time-looper is just so done with the whole thing that he’s looking to delegate the task that will get him out of the loop. The standard version of the time loop trope is evergreen to me, but I do appreciate the freshness of a sideways take on it.

Unfortunately, however, the game is distinctly underimplemented, with the full range of “inexperienced parser author” issues—from lack of synonyms to objects mentioned but not implemented to default responses not changed. (If any game really, really needed to ensure that the response to X ME was not “As good-looking as ever”, it’s this one—and I’m not even the kind of parser player who always types X ME just to see if the author put in a custom response; I only did it because the hints the game was dropping about the PC’s situation suggested to me that the response might be interesting.)

The logic behind the actions I needed to take also didn’t always come together for me. In the art gallery, for example, it didn’t occur to me to (Spoiler - click to show)talk to the painting, in part because the descriptions seemed more focused on the tangibility of other elements of the painting than the liveliness of the central figure. I was otherwise able to follow the logic trail that led me to acquiring change for a pay phone, but when the game then told me that I needed something interesting to say over the phone, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. Because I’d completed everything else there was to do in the game by that point, I essentially solved that puzzle by interacting with the last conspicuous setpiece that hadn’t been relevant yet and then going “Well, I don’t see anything else to interact with, I guess it’s phone time,” but even once all was said and done I wasn’t really sure why (Spoiler - click to show)telling Jacob to eat the crows was more interesting and/or convincing than any other random task the PC could have made up.

So I really liked 198BREW as a work of science fiction, but I liked it somewhat less as a game. Not that I think it would have been better as static fiction—I do think it benefits from its interactivity, and in most cases the underlying structure of the gameplay is fine—I just wish the interactive aspects had been a little better executed. But I’d definitely be interested in future games from this author.