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.

The story lives and dies by its atmosphere, its mood; so whether or not you like it will depend on whether or not you feel the atmopshere.

Gameplay is on the basic side; implementation is a bit south of "solid"; the story itself seems a bit too outrageous. The question is, will the game's mood make you buy into that outrageous story?

For me, it did. Hook, line and sinker, this is stuff I love.

I was impressed with the pacing; after a strange introduction (wonderfully, delightfully, strange) you begin the game in an apartment, and your quest is to get coffee. If your first command, like mine, is >X ME, you get the default inform answer. So, first looks are likely to be underwhelming, and you seem primed for a basic quest in a mundane setting.

It is as you examine the things around you (I don't think this is worth being in a spoiler, is it? Examining everything is the bread and butter of an IF player, and we're talking about the very first rooms) that you realise things are off; this is not as straightforward as you thought, and your impressions are challenged a few times until you grok onto what's happening. You also realise that the game uses descriptions to give you bits and pieces of the overall background plot, so you'll have to examine everything you come across. Is this a chore or a delight? Again, it depends on how much you buy into the game's premise and plot. I found it to be a low-key apocalyptic body horror that really spoke to me. You will have to piece for yourself who/what, exactly, the PC is; there are enough hints for you to have a broad idea. And it's rather satisfying when you see confirmation of your hyphothesis.

The implementation gets a little bit sketchier. A few too many paragraph lines when I don't think there were supposed to be; using "him/her" pronouns to refer to people didn't work (that was quite unfortunate); "USE" is a verb that is going to be your friend. Clearly the focus was on writing and world-building. I seem to remember there was even a room description that included an action - you know, the sort of situation that's a classical no-no, because it gives the illusion that the action is repeated every time you type "look". Also, stuff like "car" not being recognised but "cars" being. A character whose default ASK ABOUT response is to say she wasn't paying attention because she was looking at the lake... but if you then X LAKE the game tells you that's not there at the moment.

Conversation is done almost exclusively via "TALK TO", with one notable exception - which is expressly spelled out for you. There are many possible keywords these characters could reasonably respond to, storywise; but apart from the one that's spelled out, I only found one other, and really, it's not worth looking for any. It's a TALK TO conversation system; best to stick to it. (After writing this review, I checked the game's itch.io page where the author recommends that you do ASK people ABOUT stuff. Sadly, if this was the author's intent... it failed utterly. I recommend you don't; if you do, frustration awaits you. The game is very enjoyable with just TALK TO and the one keyword that is expressily given to you for you to try.)

The writing serves the worldbuiling very well, so it's very jarring when you come across a default Inform stock response. Very jarring. The effort to rewrite these would have made a significant difference.

I don't think I want to talk about the story much, because I love its lack of definition. It's got so many things going on - it's a veritable stew of elements. I can hardly credit how well they go together; I think they only do because the focus was not on making a credible, plot-hole-less coherent story. I think the focus was instead on making an atmospheric story, with bits and pieces thrown at you, for you to make sense of and put in a coherent whole.

With that last sentence I may have given the impression that the game is of the style "throw every nonsensical thing at the player and let them find a story in there somewhere". No. Absolutely not. There are very clearly defined elements in this story; it is not random haphazard stuff. But there's so many different elements put together that I find it somewhat difficult to put them all in a completely cohesive, history-book-style narrative in my mind.

And - I can't stress this enough - I don't think you have to do that, anyway. This is a piece to be experienced, rather than to be completely understood. At least, that's what it felt like to me, and in this context I found it deliciously enjoyable. In a dark way. I was often reminded of (Spoiler - click to show)that Parasyte manga/anime.

I'm afraid I intensely dislike the cover image for this game. Its cartoonishness is at complete odds with the experience I went through.

To sum up, I believe the game is very enjoyable - if you are willing to buy into its universe, and if you like the game's way of doing things (examine everything, take it all in, accept that conversation will be limited and the game will make things a bit more difficult for you than it should by not always implementing everything in a way that is comfortable and sensible). If you want your fiction to be a bit more realistic/grounded, a bit more straightforward; if you very much want a solid, robust gameplay experience; or even if you are not comfortable with the themes this game touches on; you probably will feel differently.

Personally, I will be very interested in playing more games from this author.

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.