A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 26 Sep 2024.

This is a graphical form of interactive fiction, where you have a series of comic strip panels, and below them text links that you can click to move the story on. You are a cop, trying to catch some criminals. And end up in a tight scene at a gym. As you work through the story the graphics in the panels update to show what happens. Which is really neat.

However I had trouble with the user interface on my Mac. I run it at a very large low resolution. I couldn’t see all of the panels or text initially. Changing the screen resolution helped. As did zooming out from the browser. More seriously I struggled to even see the clickable ? link to the walkthrough. Which I really needed by this point. I recommend that the author provides a linked version of the walkthrough on the competition game listing. Because I had got very stuck, and was going to give up the game, unscored, until I found there was a walkthrough after all.

The story itself is a tight one, where you have to slot in with the right actions at the right time. You will need to replay. In particular you need information you only get later, but then have to use earlier in a subsequent replay. To be fair, I rationalised this with myself that (Spoiler - click to show)if the cop had been watching these criminals, and had intel, then they probably already knew this info. But as a player it was surprising to have to replay with info my character hadn’t then seen in game.

My other interface hitch was that at one key moment you need to not use text choices to move the plot on, but must click on part of an image to see vital info. That caught me out, and I found it really unintuitive. I was cursing repeatedly that the option needed wasn’t a text option. It never occurred to me that I had to click on an image. Until I read the walkthrough.

So I think those two core puzzles are a bit unfair, especially the latter. However I liked the tight plotting, and I was happy eventually playing right through, with the walkthrough’s help.

The art is great. I particulary liked how earlier panels also changed as you did things, e.g. at one point - before you have to replay - something major happens in the first panel. Where your player character isn’t currently located. To be fair that could be easy to miss. But unlike the “click on the image” thing that I did miss I thought this visual narrative trick was good.

So stuff to like, and very creative, but I think at least one unfair puzzle (the image click one), and another that breaks normal game play rules, but that I could just about justify for in game reasons.

However I’d be a lot happier if the game worked on lower resolution screens too. And make sure folks who need it know there is a walkthrough and how to find it. Even once I knew it was there, the ? link was often hiding and hard to click on.