| 5 star: | | (0) | | 4 star: | | (1) | | 3 star: | | (3) | | 2 star: | | (1) | | 1 star: | | (0) |
| Average Rating: 
Number of Ratings: 5
Write a review |
1-5 of 5 - verityvirtue (London), September 26, 2023
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Greek?, July 12, 2023Adapted from a SpringThing23 Review
Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Maybe I should have done some preview reading at the start of the Thing. In my review of The Kuolema I wrote:
"Of course, in five years, I’ll be typing 'Live IF via GMAI, what even is my life right now?' ”
5 Years? It was TWELVE DAYS!! Now I’m playing an AI-assist generated IF! Even the DARPA Grand Challenge took 2 years before self-driving cars completed the course.
The implementation is a hybrid click-select/parser set in Greek Myth. In practice I found that to be… pretty ok. It even seemed to handle my mischievous “click on link near top of page, after subsequent commands.” In practice the link acted as a ‘canned’ command for the parser, but did not preclude full parser input. My usual complaints with hopping input devices were kind of addressed here, at least addressed enough, and it was kind of… convenient.
The presentation was attractive, nicely evoking classical mythic art. That’s got me a little conflicted, tbh. Chokepoint Capitalism (ref. Cory Doctorow, 2023) has already transferred huge swaths of revenue from artists to rent takers/platform monopolists. Voice artists are under siege from AI audio, visual artists from AI artwork, now the extremely rarefied sector of IF?? We’re hardly a pot of gold waiting to be raided here! With that charged background I take no delight in saying: the art was pretty attractive and evocative. That’s how they getcha.
I take significantly more delight in saying the IF work shared a lot of shortfalls that beset pre-Beta human-created IF. I wish I could have transcripted it, but I understood the online interpreter to be required. There were lots of typos (a “fairly plan->plain corridor,” “later” instead of “latter” among others). There were many unimplemented nouns, including many samples of the evergreen “You are by the side of a river…” “>X RIVER” “You see nothing like that here.” There were issues with state awareness. (Spoiler - click to show)After freeing Narcissus, the room description still had him mesmerized, but trying to X him yielded “not here.” There was some overwrought prose: a cave mouth described with fangs instead of stalactites.
Wait.
Did we feed the corpus of IF art to a machine, and it decided THESE THINGS WERE FUNDAMENTALLY PART OF THE FORM?? WHAT DOES THAT GO@^#$%#MN MACHINE THINK OF US EXACTLY???
Before I get too paranoid, I am going to attribute human agency to some key elements of SD. For one, the overarching plot is very much aligned with modern, revisionist Myth interpretations. From Broadway to video games there has been an impulse to infuse these classic stories with modern sensibilities and twists and by and large I’m for it. Why not? Cultural currency. We got a Winnie the Pooh horror movie, can’t wait to see the same thing done with Micky !@#$%^ Mouse. SD is very much in the former vein. (Not so much the latter, but I would also watch the crap out of an Achilles Slasher movie. “Andromeda, he’s not dead! Get him in the heel Andromeda, the heel!”) Don’t know that I was clamoring for a redemption arc for (Spoiler - click to show)Narcissus but why not? On the other hand, its more generous take on (Spoiler - click to show)Phaedra was nice. Cause man could that have gone a different way.
I think my favorite dear-god-I-have-to-believe-this-was-a-human moment came in an error statement. Instead of “You can’t do X with Y,” or “I don’t understand that,” I got “That’s -not- Greek to me.” I guffawed aloud at that, not the least of which because the piece is pretty straight drama otherwise. I swear to god if you tell me a machine produced that line I’m going to go full Kaczynski. (Minus the postal terrorism of course, Jeezuz.)
In sum, I found this to be a promising work. It suffered a lot of the issues that plague pre-release hand crafted IF, but none fatal. Its premise was neat and well executed. The story was contained and linear, but I understand that also to be a work in progress. Look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Just keep the machine out of comedy for me.
Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Greek Mythology
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would institute a world wide pause on AI while we enlist our best thinkers to really plumb what it means for humanity to offload increasing amounts of cultural, technical and legal authority to inauditable, evolutionary systems. And for once, create guard rails and policies that keep technology in service of us, rather than letting clumsy, flawed systems run roughshod over the social order to keep enriching fewer and fewer. I mean, after I submitted this for a grade of course.
Spice Girl Ratings: Scary(Horror), Sporty (Gamey), Baby (Light-Hearted), Ginger (non-CWM/political), Posh (Meaningful)
Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Greek myth parser/click combo, May 16, 2023This is a combined parser/click game, where you can interact with elements of the text as well as type in parser commands. The game is set in Ancient Greece, and sees you try to uncover what is going on, including a journey into Hades. I definitely recommend playing it online because you will get images there. The images don’t appear - or at least didn’t for me - using the downloaded game file and an offline interpreter.
There’s a lot to like. There’s a lyricalness to the storytelling. However being relatively unfamiliar with the setting and the ancient Greek myths I found things quite incomprehensible in places. I also had difficulty understanding the geography and the directions. For example early on I was trying every direction to move things on, even though the game suggested I was following a clue character. This repeated trying west/north/east/south broke the immersion for me. I think clearer clueing would help.
I got to an ending where I think (Spoiler - click to show)my character died, after dreaming of his wife for many years. Which was satisfying, but overly abrupt. I’d like to see that smoothed. I would also have liked to see some after game notes that you could read after finishing. There are also a lot of unimplemented scenery objects that are mentioned in the text but don’t respond to EXAMINE X. A fuller and richer implementation covering those would be well worthwhile
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
A vorple exploration of greek mythology, May 15, 2023This is an experimental, somewhat unpolished game entered in the back garden of Spring Thing. As an experiment, I think it works, but it could use some touching up as a game/story itself.
The idea is that you, following the examples of Orpheus and Heracles, have descended into the underworld to follow after the woman you love.
Like other stories about the descent into Hades, you have a guide, Phos, a ball of light that follows you around, and who gives you a guided tour of the afterlife, showing you what happens to people there, etc.
This is written using Vorple, which allows multimedia and hyperlinks to be added to Inform. Most of the game, if not all, can be played by clicking links in the text, typing directional commands, and choosing menu options.
The art is Ai-generated, and looks very good; the model seems well-trained on the style used. Apparently some text is also AI, which makes sense; I had in my review notes that 'the text has strange errors at times, not like non-native English speakers, just strange placement of words'. So if it were AI-influenced, that would make sense.
The game doesn't outstay its welcome, and has some very nice moments. However, there are some stray typos, like double periods or the word 'sturggle' instead of struggle. Sometimes menu items for conversation still appeared even though I had left the area in question. But despite these rough edges, the core game is enjoyable.
Note that Vorple games such as this one don't currently work well if downloaded and played offline.
- Rovarsson (Belgium), May 11, 2023
1-5 of 5 | Return to game's main page