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Previous | << 1 2 3 >> | Next | Show All - AminX, September 2, 2022
- Sobol (Russia), September 1, 2022
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- William Chet (Michigan), July 31, 2022
- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), June 11, 2022
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
A multi game with several different ways, March 27, 2022I have previously played this game for the comp voting. Now I have played it again to the end.
Some quickly impressions:
It has some of the same vibes that Impossible Bottle. Player travels and interacts between some differents existence in-game plans.
The first third of the game is quite simple ad evoques a tutorial.
The second part is almost difficult if you don't realize that you are inside a game.
Finally, the third part of the game is a bit easier and leads to an autoexplaining ending.
So, the better is it's originality and plot, the story and develop.
The upgrading possibilities are a better descriptions and perhaps some more explanations.
I recommend to play it while it is warm.
- Jade.
9 of
9 people found the following review helpful:
Weird, sweet, nostalgic, metafictional, February 25, 2022Firstly, I wish I'd played this before reading any reviews of it; even a few lines gave something away that would have been an amazing experience to discover firsthand. If you haven't played the game yet, go and do so. This is a spoilery review, including a major revelation in the ending I got, and ATYCTAHNUTPO is an extremely spoiler-vulnerable game.
ATYCTAHNUTPO is a game rooted entirely in text adventure nostalgia. It's a well deserved comp winner, and while innovative, it's probably one of the best counterexamples to the common complaint from nerdy middle-aged men that IFComp is getting too far removed from the puzzly parser text adventures they played as nerdy boys in the 1980s and 90s. It's a game about a nerdy teenage boy playing puzzly parser text adventures in the 1980s, or the idealised Stranger Things version of that time. That atmosphere is created skilfully by the prose -- you can almost hear the spinning wheel of your Raleigh Chopper carelessly parked against a Vote Dukakis yard sign outside. The nostalgia is mainly in the setting and story, but also from the storytelling form, which manages to be simultaneously traditional and highly inventive.
The first ten minutes or so are nothing but scenes from (fictitious) text adventures of that era, tiny two- or three-room fetch quests that feel procedurally generated. I've only played once, so I'm not sure if they actually are procgen, but they feel so much like it that I'm sure it's deliberate. These are interspersed with commentary from Riley, who is the best friend of the nerdy teenage boy protagonist, Emerson, who is playing games on Riley's parents' computer, in Riley's house, while Riley, your best friend, sits there and watches, I guess. It must suck to be your second-best friend. Anyway, after three or four of these mini-quests, Riley gets understandably bored and demands you play something else.
[EDIT: I later found out that the author deliberately never specified the protagonist's gender and Emerson is a gender-neutral name, so Em isn't necessarily a boy. Maybe I got a lot of male-coded vibes and/or maybe I made assumptions I shouldn't have. I'll leave the rest of this review as I wrote it.]
This opens up a small range of other minigames based on period-appropriate PC games and software: an OTT ye-olde-epic-quest roguelike RPG, a horrendous-quality edutainment program, and "strip poker" complete with squint-and-you-can-just-about-see-it ASCII boobs. All of these play out as mini-IFs in themselves, in a much more modern style, containing their own fairly deep characters, and they all cue revelations about the "real" characters' stories too, their families, their relationship, their out-of-shot lives, past, and hints of their future. The marriage of the shift to the modern, character-driven style with the continuation of almost parody-level "puzzles" that match the simplistic style of the introductory mini-adventures is interesting, and will give the nostalgia-loving players their fix while smuggling them into a more modern style of IF in a fairly subtle way.
As you play on, the lines between the various layers of fiction start to lose definition. The adventure games bleed objects and character knowledge into each other, then into the other in-game-games as well as the "frame" universe of you and Riley. This is expertly paced, not overwhelming at first, but by the end it's deliberately uncertain what layer of reality you're playing in at any time. Then a cut to an actual ending -- I've only played once, but I *think* there are multiple of these -- that (at least in the case of the ending I got) gives the character some closure, retroactively explains a lot of the seemingly prescient throwaway lines throughout the game about where the characters will be in the following years, and cements the nostalgic element by making this not just a game about being a teenager playing text adventures in the long eighties, but about being an adult *remembering* being that teenager. As one of those adults I can't help appreciating this... but we're not exactly people in desperate need of having our stories told.
Comparisons to both "Endless, Nameless" and "Photopia" are unavoidable: the former for the nostalgia and the gradual reality creep, and the latter for the fairly linear story and the main "perfect girl" NPC. [Mid-to-high-level spoilers for Photopia coming up.] OK, that comparison might not be totally fair: Riley is a *much* more solid character than Photopia's Allie, as low as that bar is, and -- in the path I got -- wasn't sent marching into a tragic ending because that's the inevitable fate of flawless female characters. In Riley's relatively few lines of dialogue and descriptive writing she gets far more characterisation than Allie, and even a few flaws in a "she's so uncool, isn't that cool?" sort of way. But I couldn't help wishing she had more agency of her own, and wasn't defined almost entirely by her relationship to the extremely audience-insert male player character. In my playthrough, the only point at which she seemed to have any significant control of the narrative was a short scene in which she took her top off. (To be fair, that scene didn't feel lascivious or inappropriate, another mark of skilful writing.)
The game is too well written for this stuff to bring it down, but for the same reasons, it's so well written that Riley feels like a missed opportunity. Often, following some revelation from the "games" universe, I tried to talk to Riley and see what she had to say about it, and got nothing but "1. Never mind" as a dialogue choice. If she's really my best friend, why can't I talk to her about stuff? The in-game-game protagonists frequently tell you "Don't worry, Riley can't hear us." If she's really my best friend, why wouldn't I want to share with her that I'm having a full-on paranormal experience in her house? Even towards the end, when I'm finally allowed to show her the cool stuff I've collected from the minigame characters, I'm happy to leave her thinking I thought of it myself. *My best friend.* I only hope I told her the truth some time before marrying her.
I can't compare this game to Photopia without noting that you and your character in ATYCTAHNUTPO have a lot more agency than the player/player character(s) in Photopia. (Or at least it felt like it -- after one playthrough, I can't be sure how much railroading was going on under the hood, but that hardly matters.) I've inferred from other reviews that there are multiple endings, and I found myself making choices out of genuine care for the characters. In a way it's doing some of the same things Photopia was doing, playing with expectations and using interactivity to explore a fairly static character piece, but much better. I also suspect that, like Photopia, ATYCTAHNUTPO will be better remembered for its innovative form rather than the story itself.
I'm better at writing about flaws in things I like than I am at writing about their good qualities, so I'll stress again that I really enjoyed this game. The writing is excellent; the characters, including Riley, all have a lot of depth squeezed into their limited screen time; the story is charming; and the form is original and artfully executed.
- pieym (London, UK), January 30, 2022
- Jim Nelson (San Francisco), January 23, 2022
- nosferatu, January 20, 2022
- Stian, January 13, 2022
- Say (Paris, France), January 11, 2022
0 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Be-vare, January 9, 2022I got stuck three times in a row and the hints file didn't help. So I'm pretty shocked this got 1st place for a contest, unless that contest was to be worst "guess the verb" text adventure of all time.
All three play throughs I got past the first two easy quests no problem but the witch... You can't talk to her - she's on the phone. The other room has a locked safe - no key... anywhere. Can't "crack" it. Can't "break" it. Any verb you try fails. Any verb you try on the witch... fails. Pure evil
Hint's file for adv. 8 translates to "talk to infinite adventure Riley" but if you talk to the witch... nada. Talk to Riley... again, nothing. You could even put in those exact words in one go and nothing happens. So how is...? No, after three tries I quit.
[edited] - Ah! I see now. If you wander about long enough the "timer" seems to go off and you get to use a computer and more than that "x notebook" (which solves it). IMHO it's pretty dirty to do that to the player though.
I made a NeverWinter Nights game module back in the day with a cursed door that would spit chickens at you and you could only ever open it from the other side which you got to by finding a secret path to there through a graveyard on the side of the mansion. This "witch" scene reminded me of that (so, yeah, I'm guilty of stuff like this as well at least in one of the games I wrote).
All right I changed my rating up to 4 stars from 1 but it's still a bit tough at that one early part. Seems like you have to waste a bunch of turns to get it to progress from there and then, even then, have to ignore that there's a computer and resist the urge to "p" (play it) and x notebook instead.
Interesting game but still a bit bland in that there are only ever a handful of rooms to explore on each "play." Also, the thing is, if you were to ask people to beta test this they'd come up with a ton of "bugs" in that you can't examine certain nouns mentioned in the descriptions and such. To be a five star game I'd think the author should program in all the noun objects where mentioned in the text just to flesh it out.
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), January 8, 2022
- Wanderlust, December 28, 2021
- dvs, December 25, 2021
- TheBoxThinker, December 13, 2021
- TheAncientOne, December 11, 2021
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Cute Enough, December 10, 20211: Is it complete and cohesive?
Yes. "And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One" has strong game mechanics and always leaves a path for you to follow. There is more than one way to complete certain quests and a concise list of verbs.
2: Interesting Mechanics
The trippy-ness of the game was charming. However, the experience I got was different from what I expected. (Spoiler - click to show)I expected the repetitive houses to continue until and become progressively different in slightly creepy ways. The actual mechanic of jumping in and out of computers was interesting, but left me wanting for the mechanics of the premise.
3: Storytelling
This is my main area of issue. This game just isn't meant for me. It has a cute little story which explores impermanence in our lives, but I just don't care about (Spoiler - click to show)romance. I also found that I was more interested in the characters of the CompuDoctor and the Witch than I was in what were supposed to be the main characters.
Overall a decent game that allows for multiple solutions but tends to railroad for the sake of emotion. Provides a good atmosphere and an interesting enough story, but not my cup of tea.
- Xavid, December 1, 2021
- gene666 (Washington state), November 29, 2021
1 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A worthy winner!, November 24, 2021Wow! This was a fantastic game! Not too long, or too hard to complete, and a really really well written story!
- Bobsson, November 24, 2021
- NorkaBoid (Ohio, USA), November 24, 2021
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