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1-17 of 17 - Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), November 4, 2023
- nilac, September 12, 2023
- Edo, May 18, 2023
- E.K., March 10, 2023
- dgtziea, February 25, 2023
- Jaded Pangolin, February 10, 2023
- Juuves, January 9, 2023
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Wait, What Is "The Magic Flute" About?, December 10, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
I’ve always had a soft spot for opera, but it's always been very tightly bounded spot. The music is just really vital - soaring and complex and dynamic. But man GOING to the opera is a LOT. There are minimalist productions to be sure but straight-up classical opera? Costumes and set design are hat on hat on hat on hat - pageantry for its own sake. The audience too, maybe the last place in the world you can see capes worn unironically. Maybe it is ur-cosplay? And then there’s been one or two productions that have decided either to sing in English or provide electronic scrolling subtitles. Hoo boy does that take the shine off in a hurry. When you don’t understand the words, the vocals are a featured instrument, weaving into and above the orchestra and engaging directly with what makes us human. When you understand it though? Swelling, compelling music in service of “What does the gypsy boy want? The gypsy girl the gypsy girl the gypsy gi…iiirl.” For cryin’ out loud opera, you were better when I didn’t know.
Obviously I mention this because Prism evoked imperfectly analogous feelings. The most prominent feature of this work is its language. Like opera it can be by turns deeply satisfying or so over the top as to be kitsch. I grabbed a bunch of quotes, examples of both, on my playthrough, too many to incorporate here. Let’s use an early one [annotated]:
"The thought strikes you in perfect time with the dry-storm lightning above. [I mean, no, that didn’t happen. Perfect time? Statistically, what are the odds?] It works into your chest like truth [ooh, that’s a nice phrase] as electricity strikes from rotating hexagonal clouds above into the humming cylindrical basin at your back [wait, what are you describing here? I understand those shapes but not in that context]. "
The overriding atmosphere here is poetically over-written, except when the poetry resonates just perfectly. The problem is, when it is perfect, it kind of draws attention to itself. When it’s not it ALSO draws attention to itself, and also the fact that it’s not perfect.
Now all this poetry is pressed into service, not by philosophers or y’know poets, but by hard-scrabble street dwellers. This is not a fatal choice, but certainly a challenging one. It clashes with the stark practicality of their day to day struggle in a way that is never truly resolved. You could forgive the poetic narration matching the protagonists’ voice, if you assume their inner voice is also the narrator. But everyone in the world talks like that, except the beings that talk MORE that way. There are beings whose alienness is conveyed in a very specific, kind of cool but nearly impenetrable patois. It is alternately admirable and confounding. And unfortunately showy, as the protagonist by turns seems to converse just fine (like dialogue with adults from Peanuts), then call them out as POEM TALKERS. Mr. Kettle, maybe don’t throw that particular stink at Mr. Pot.
There is some impressive world building in the first half of the game. I want to say in spite of itself, but really no, the over-descriptive poetry is every bit a core element of the city as the neighborhoods, buildings and infrastructure that are lovingly described throughout. As a setting it is nicely conceived: physically specific but also impressionistically singular through the language used to describe it. Like Scorcese’s New York but fantasy, if that doesn’t feel like too much of an overreach. Looking back, this is the most prominent achievement of the game, and its biggest Spark.
I have just described the first half of the narrative I experienced, which comprised more than 3/4 of the playtime. At the turn - probably not coincidentally when I chose to leave the city - suddenly what had been an almost meditative, expansive, exploratory, quasi-open-world experience contracted to a limited-choice rushed plot on rails and almost no setting. The pace and interactivity shifted gears with an audible thunk. Ok, that’s crazy, clearly I didn’t hear anything. I think the style is leaching into me. If the language made it a struggle to Engage the work in the first half, this shift really made it a lost cause. And yet, the story still found a last sentence that was so nicely resonant I couldn’t just dismiss it either.
It appears, based on the options I didn’t take, to have many narrative paths to explore. That’s always nice in IF. Not sure whether I’ll explore more later, or just let that final sentence ring.
Played: 11/4/22
Playtime: 1hr, 1 ending
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Notable
Would Play Again? Not ruling it out, with the right mood
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
My city of runes, December 6, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
There have been a lot of cities in this year’s Comp, I’ve noticed – the arboreal paradise of Elvish for Goodbye, the gentrifying Toronto of Grown-Up Detective Agency, the dying arcology of Archivist and the Revolution, the city-of-Damocles of Hanging by Threads – but I reckon Conduin, the desert metropolis that’s both setting and star of Prism, is the one to beat. The game’s got characters and a plot and significant choices, all which work perfectly well, but it’s this fantastical city at the center of the work, with the story continually circling around the questions of what it is, where it came from, and what it could be.
So what’s the deal with Conduin? While it’s blooming in the middle of the wasteland, with canals sluicing life-giving water in the midst of the sands, it’s no paradise: the city is a stratified place, with the poor chased out even of empty apartments, and growing your own food is a crime because self-sufficiency would insulate you from the lightning-based economy that structures society. Crystal-structured buildings are drawn up from the depths of the dunes by geologicians, the domes of the academy glow on the horizon with the promise of a better life, and couriers cling to a marginal existence, ferrying precious cargo and messages across the rooftops, dodging corrupt constables and cultist-gangsters alike.
This is a hell of a setting, and that’s just what’s established in the opening, before any of its secrets begin to be peeled back. The protagonist, of course, is one of those couriers, with the game starting as they’re hired onto a job that could change everything for them (most people in the city go by “they”; gender is seen as a foreign affectation only a few opt into, choosing pronouns regardless of their body’s biology). What starts as a simple delivery from one scholar to another will see you decide to take a stand against the injustices in Conduin, discover the mysteries behind its rise from arid destitution – or just keep your head down and get paid.
The setup really is masterful, and in some ways I feel like it’s wasted on IF – for all that the author does a good job limning the city and it’s precincts, really this calls out for the AAA treatment. I can easily see Prism as a hybrid of Mirror’s Edge and Dishonored (there’s even some whalepunk elements to this one…), unspooling the same plot over a series of action-packed missions that send you sprinting over, above, and through the city, getting into kinetic fights with the constables, and unlocking supernatural powers if you decide to join the Streetborn cult.
That’s not to say it doesn’t work well in its current form, though. Exploring the city is still very engaging, and unlike many Ink games I’ve played, it’s quite interactive; you can choose to focus on your mission, seek out your childhood friend who has joined the aforementioned group of cultists, or get drawn into a street brawl with a silver-armored superhero. Sure, many of these involve action or sneaking scenes of one description or other – thus the wish for the more conventionally video game version – but the prose is tight and exciting when it needs to be.
While all the pieces are in place for a memorable experience, I think the structure slightly lets Prism down. The game’s overall a sort of dumbbell-shape: there’s the aforementioned delivery mission and related side-activities, and after that wraps up you can either decide to take your earnings and get on with your life, or dig deeper into the secrets that you’ve started to catch glimpses of. If you opt for the latter choice, there’s a time jump, a whole bunch of new characters are introduced, and then you’re conveyed into another action-packed sequence that wraps up the game as a whole. The plot holds together, but it feels unbalanced – after finishing the delivery I spent a long time thinking that I was experiencing an extended, kind of anticlimactic denouement before realizing the narrative hadn’t actually wrapped up. The two pieces didn’t mesh together smoothly in my playthrough, either: I got hints at what Conduin’s engine of prosperity actually was in the course of the delivery, but in the remainder of the game, the protagonist seemed ignorant of those hints even in moments where it seemed like they really should have. Whether these were bugs or narrative oversights, they reinforced the feeling that Prism is two separate experiences stapled together in the middle.
Still, I enjoyed both experiences. Sure, the narrative is a little lumpy, and the fact that I’m gushing about the worldbuilding over all else I think is an indication that the plot and characters are, when you strip away the rococo detail-work, fairly straight-ahead. But it’s not like I needed more of an excuse to play tourist in Conduin, which might wind up being counted as one of the great IF cities.
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 20, 2022
- OverThinking, November 16, 2022
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022
- Brad Buchanan (Seattle, Washington), November 13, 2022
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A world of mysterious and unplumbed depths, in more than one sense, October 18, 2022In this choice-based game you play as a former street kid turned courier, scraping out an existence delivering packages to those much more well-off than you. The world you live in is a strange walled city in the middle of a desert, with a rainless storm permanently hovering above a garden at the city's center. Outside of that protected greenspace though, life is bleak and always a struggle.
My favorite thing about this piece was the world building that took place quickly and effortlessly as the beginning of the story unfolded. Think steampunk, but without the steam. Yes, there are robots and elaborate machinery, but their workings are more mystery and magic than steam and pressure. The main currency is electricity stored in a personal battery/wallet. The weaponry is blades and spears, rather than guns.
The author did an amazing job setting the scene, throwing you into a strange new world without much explanation, but almost always with enough context that you could figure out what was going on. I didn't feel like (at least in the first half, more on that later) that any aspect of the world or culture was brought up just for the author to show-off. Even if it was only tangentially important to the scene at the time, it always seemed to keep with the flow of the story while also hinting at undiscovered depths to the world. This piece could have easily been a much longer game or even a novel. And the writing was really good (at least in the first half), slow enough to let you take in all the strangeness, but fast enough to keep the action moving; flowery enough that it felt like poetry at times, without being ostentatious.
The first half of the story was near perfect. Everything was working for me. The second half didn't quite keep me locked in as much as I would have hoped though. All the things that the author got an A+ on in the first half slid down to a B in the second half. The world got deeper and stranger to the point where I couldn't keep up any more. I think the game should have either been longer, to help flesh out and explain the new concepts and characters, or shorter, with some of the story trimmed to lower confusion and keep the plot moving. The writing got a little too flowery and philosophical, and there were a few digressions to make certain points that I thought could have been just as powerful if addressed in subtler ways (as they were in the first half of the story). Finally, the ending was a bit disappointing. Perhaps I will find a better one after more replays, but for all the build-up of the first half, I just felt like it ended weirdly.
I came very, very close to giving this one four stars, and I still might as I think about it some more and play it another time or two, but I'm very stingy with my ratings and I just couldn't get there on this one.
Bottom line though, this is a very enjoyable work and I would encourage everyone to play it. I hope to see more from this author. Would even love to see another story set in this world!
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Listen to the Staticophone, October 13, 2022“We’re too young for nostalgia, sparrow.
Go live a life worth reminiscing about.”
These are the final lines of the introductory paragraphs. An incitement to explore the nooks and crannies of this narrative urban maze.
During the first dialogue, I was immediately drawn to the protagonist and their companion. The little inklings of their hidden personalities dropped by the author made me thirsty to learn more of their personal histories and their place in this world.
The setting their meeting takes place in is equally intruiging. There are precious hints of a sprawling city with simultaneously mystifying yet familiar inner workings. Technomagical engineering seems to take the place of our cogs and gears, but the story remains vague about the ratio of familiar cause-and-effect and magical interference. There is mention of storm-powered “jolt” resembling static electricity but also of a crystal with strange workings.
During the story, the player is presented with several situations which increase the narrative tension. There is ample opportunity to shape the personality of the protagonist through the choices of which action to take, and in doing so, to determine the future, the outcome of the story.
I took a conservative path on my first (only, so far) playthrough, choosing to lay low and let the big problems and mysteries be handled by those perhaps better suited to heroic interference with the powers that be.
I learned a lot about the people of Conduin, the great city, and about the power dynamics that drive their society. I survived to live perhaps not heroic, but content with my role.
No point reminiscing about the time you got killed for poking your nose too far where it doesn’t belong…
Very good speculative fiction. I’m gonna go exploring more now, perhaps indeed poking in some darker corners…
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A fantasy steampunk game about a mysterious package and strange things, October 11, 2022This game is very much a story, not in the sense that it's not a game, but that it has a strong central narrative, creative setting, and interesting characters.
It's an Ink game, with two main kinds of choices: role-playing ones that have temporary effects but let you get into character, and branching ones that affect big chunks of the storyline.
You play as a courier running around the rooftops of a desert city. There is a lot of worldbuilding here, between enemies, friends, and strange creatures.
The branching storylines are very different. In one, I spent a ton of time with two academics, eventually becoming one. In another, I spent much more time with my friend Karae and robots.
Overall, I found it polished and descriptive, and had some emotionally touching moments. It was interesting interactivity, but I feel satisfied with my playthroughs and don't plan on revisiting.
- jaclynhyde, October 6, 2022
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