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.

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 22 Sep 2024.

This is a very strange parser game, with a bizarre almost scifi story. I’m still not entirely sure what was happening. I did understand the simple “get coffee!” goal at the start. Though I’m more of a freshly ground coffee person than the character in game who drinks Nespresso made from capsules.

On plus the world is intriguing, and odd, in a way that drags you in, almost in spite of yourself. It gets quite gruesome quite quickly though, and I think heftier content warnings would be appropriate in this case.

On downside it’s extremely under implemented. I had many “You can’t see any such thing” when I tried to interact with objects in the game descriptions. Coding more synonyms for objects would have helped a lot e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)“paper” for what must be referred to as “ticket”. And implementing more of the mentioned objects full stop would be good. It did feel frequently that I was fighting the parser and the game. Against that the text descriptions are perhaps overly long. Some judicious editing may have helped smooth things here.

I also found the clueing inadequate. I was doing without the walkthrough, until I got stuck, not realising that I needed to do something very extreme ((Spoiler - click to show)kill someone). Even when I read the walkthrough and saw that I needed to do that I wasn’t happy about that action. The content warnings - or lack of - hadn’t prepared me for this.

Another area of under implementation is in:

>examine me
As good-looking as ever.

Which without going into detailed spoilers is rather under selling things.

So a game with an interesting premise, and an intriguing world, but it needed much much more polishing. This is probably a case where more playtesting by others would have helped a lot. Because there’s a really nice core idea here. But the playing experience, at the moment, isn’t smooth enough.

(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.

(Some unmarked spoilers here, it’s that kind of game).

Rarely has a game’s opening left me with more whiplash than 198BREW’s. After a cryptic couple of paragraphs telling me that my soul is suffering eternal and well-deserved torment, which smash-cuts to a fantasy-ish vignette where a queen urges her consort to kill and cannibalize her, control is handed to the player – only to find that you’re in a My Dumb Apartment game and need to get some coffee because you’re all out. It’s two different lazy late-90s parser IF tropes in one!

Well no, not really. While 198BREW does end once you finally get some sweet, sweet caffeine down your gullet, this is no wacky slice-of-life comedy; and while the first couple of locations are a mostly-nondescript flat with unnecessarily detailed fixtures, it quickly opens up, and that “mostly” is covering for some real eye-poppers. As the prologue indicates, neither the player character nor the world they inhabit are quite like our own, and the gameplay as well isn’t typical parser fare. Sure, getting to the end requires surmounting a series of obstacles laid out as a daisy-chain of fetch quests and medium-dry-goods puzzles, but while your next step is generally obvious, the context for what you’re doing is often left deliberately incomplete, and the outcomes of each action are surreally divorced from the traditional logic of cause and effect. Midway through the game, you’ll stab a woman because a painting asked you to and receive three quarters for your trouble, and that’s only the weirdest puzzle by like 20%.

This is the game’s greatest success, I think – it commits to its enigmatic, downbeat theme, successfully infusing it across the prose, plot, and gameplay. This is the kind of world where just about everybody is trapped in a private hell, mostly of their own making, and their external circumstances match their internal torment. 198BREW’s subtitle – The Age of Orpheus – seems to conceal, but actually reveals, the thematic focus: we’re concerned here less with the best-known portion of the myth, where Orpheus journeys to Hades to rescue his lover, and more with the messy aftermath, where after having lost Eurydice through his own mistakes, he’s torn limb from limb and his still-living head floats down the river, singing lamentations all the while. The player character, you see, like many of the other significant characters, is cursed with a vicious sort of immortality, which means that they displace the mind and soul of anyone who eats their flesh and drinks their blood (in fact, this Dumb Apartment isn’t quite your own; it belonged to your now-dead lover, whose body you now inhabit after she willingly butchered and consumed you). Others are doomed to remain breathing even as cancer wracks their systems beyond what once were the limits of human endurance, while some fall victim to time-loops making a single day an endless, repeating ocean. And then there’s the Evangelion-style ruined mecha crashed in the public park, with a perhaps-still-living pilot deathlessly entombed within.

There’s a fair bit of complicated worldbuilding to establish, in other worlds, and while the approach is a little idiosyncratic – examining prominent objects often prompts multi-paragraph exposition that ranges far beyond describing what you see – it’s well managed, doling out enough details to help you understand what’s going on while avoiding didactically spelling things out. I can’t say I have my head fully wrapped around every detail of the setting, with some questions remaining about that aforementioned sentient painting and those mechs, but I much prefer that to having the mood ruined with dry lore, and I did get the sense that everything here does connect, even if those connections aren’t fully visible to the player.

Beyond over-detailed infodumping, this story is also the kind of thing that would easily be ruined by inadequate prose; happily, it’s largely up to the task, remaining engaging even when there’s not much to directly narrate, as in this near-abandoned train station:

"It’s quiet. Not even the storm’s wailing can breach this place. The only sounds are the echoes of your own footsteps. With every click-clack, the station feels like it grows in size — the ceiling grows higher, the steps further away. The longer you look around, the more convinced you are time itself is somehow expanding, too; the grand clock above the ticket booths seems to move slower and slower as you stare at it."

On the gameplay side of things, well, things are a bit thinner. As mentioned above, your coffee quest ultimately requires you to jump through an increasingly-absurd set of hoops. Each step is generally signposted quite directly, with whichever NPC whose desires you currently need to assuage spelling out what you should do next, even where their ability and desire to provide this direction is a bit unclear. With that said, I sometimes ran into challenges due to the game’s less-than-robust implementation. There’s lots of scenery missing, important NPCs don’t appear to actually be people under the Inform world model, a cat bowl is “hardly portable”, the player has a default “as good looking as ever” description, and as for actions, well, that assassination unwittingly provided one of the few bits of levity to crack the game’s bleak surface:

> hit woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to hit the strange woman.

> hit woman

Violence isn’t the answer to this one.

> cut woman

Cutting him up would achieve little.

> cut woman with knife

I only understood you as far as wanting to cut the strange woman.

> use knife

You can’t use that.

> use knife on woman

You probably shouldn’t go around stabbing things for no reason.

In principle I am right there with you, game, yet here we are (KILL WOMAN did the business, so that brought the mood right back down again).

With that said, these are all typical first-time-author issues – nothing a bit of experience won’t improve, and nothing that substantively reduced the effectiveness of the game. For all that I admire 198BREW’s commitment to subverting expectations and leaning hard into a mournful, uncomfortable vibe, though, I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I have other similarly bleak, well-written works. Partially that’s because a preoccupation with the downsides of eternal life is theoretically interesting but by itself isn’t that viscerally engaging to me – when it’s clear this is a fictional way of talking about survivor’s guilt or depression or what have you, I think it’s a trope that can work, but this game is so defined by negative emotions and negative space that it doesn’t really communicate what positive things the player character, or most of the others for that matter, has lost. And the game’s themes seem to mirror these subjective experiences, basically just saying that life sure is a bummer.

The one potential exception is a minor character: a cameraman who’s filming the rally of a doomed political candidate who rails against the corrupt status quo, and who hands you a ticket when you feed him a keyword. The cameraman is a member of the orthodox church that upholds said status quo, but some of the things the politician is saying make sense to him. He’s listening, he’s feeling torn, he’s questioning things – he seems like a person whose fate isn’t sealed and whose mind could still be changed, someone who still has things he cares about (heck, he even makes a pass at the player character before they make their lack of interest plain). Let the world as a whole be just as fucked, but I wouldn’t mind playing a sequel about that guy.

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.