| 5 star: | | (1) | | 4 star: | | (7) | | 3 star: | | (3) | | 2 star: | | (2) | | 1 star: | | (0) |
| Average Rating: 
Number of Ratings: 13
Write a review |
1-13 of 13 - fuyuhiko, January 19, 2023
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
A chaotically inventive work-in-progress, December 20, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
I've mentioned in other reviews that I have a one year old son. He is an amazing, lovable little guy, but he is also precocious as all get-out, meaning that he’s realized that since he’s (mostly) figured out how to walk, he might as well get started on other life skills such as climbing out of his play-pen, eating anything that looks like it’s been on the floor for a long time, and face-planting into the edges of his toys. He’s a one-baby force of anarchy, and my wife and I trade off trailing after him, trying to preserve him from gross bodily injury and restore some semblance of order in his wake.
Speaking of gross, an hour ago as of this writing he pooped in his bathtub. You know what’s not especially pleasant to clean up? Poop. From a bathtub.
I share this not to give Henry something unique to tell his therapist when, later in life, he’s asked why he’s a pathologically private person – that’s a happy side-effect – but to say that a) I know whereof I speak when I say trying to keep the eponymous detectives in Cannelé & Nomnom on track feels like bottling chaos, and b) given that’s what I already spend the majority of my non-work hours doing, I’m maybe not the ideal audience for the game. Combine that with running into some bugs that, from looking at other reviews, don’t seem to strike universally, and I unfortunately didn’t wind up liking this big, funny, creative game as much as I think it deserves.
This is another high-production-value Twine game, with attractive character art, well-chosen colors, and a bunch of different sub-interfaces and minigames that bring its mechanics to life. The story is just as vibrant, taking a hoary old protagonist-with-amnesia premise and giving it an extra jolt by having you turn to the aforementioned duo, who bicker like a long-married couple and whose approaches to crime-solving turn on blagging your way into places you don’t belong with no goal or aim in mind, and trying to cadge free food wherever it can be found, respectively. The world isn’t our own, either – while the overall vibe struck me as early 20th-Century French, everyone’s got some kind of magical gift (so far as I could tell these tend to be fairly low-key – less slinging fireballs, more having a really sensitive nose), and it’s populated by characters who are less colorful than the title pair, but only just, from a hobo with a magic coin to a delightfully-married couple of cheesemonging (cheesemongering?) lesbians.
Does this sound overstuffed? It feels overstuffed. Getting from point A to point B typically involves detours through C, D, X, H, back to A, choice of L or R, and then a jaunt to the conspiracy-board minigame where you match clue post-its to the mysteries they solve to finally unlock the road to B. There are further diversions, like having the option to defer to one detective or the other in their attempts to crack the case of your identity, which sometimes adds to their respective scores, which are tracked and always visible in the game’s sidebar; I also played a Texas-Hold-em-meets-Scrabble minigame, to no clear purpose, and had fun though I suspect the game cheats to get to the narratively correct result. Plus getting anywhere always involves a lot of banter between the core trio, which is advanced single line by single line (thankfully, you can bang the space bar instead of wearing out your finger clicking).
All this is to say that after an hour and a half of play, I’d only just managed to make it to the first significant location of the investigation and gotten the clues to solve the first non-tutorial mystery; I’m a fan of shaggy dog stories, but the game felt especially shaggy to me. Partially this is because I wound up finding Cannelé and Nomnom a little annoying. They’re each funny, and are able to create distinct scenarios of comedic mayhem – I don’t mean to be a killjoy, there is some good stuff here, with the quip that the cat who’d run off with my wallet had committed a “heinous feline-y” eliciting a half-laugh, half-groan – but they’re very one-note characters, at least in the time I spent with them. More, they’re continually at each others’ throats, forcing the player to mediate, keep them focused, and/or take sides between them; again, it’s like the most exhausting parts of parenting, with siblings who never let up the bickering to play nicely together or give a compliment if one has a good idea. This is a dynamic that can work in adventure games, I think – it’s not miles off Sam and Max, for example – but I think there’s a difference between games where you play one of the chaotic duo, and this one where you play their babysitter.
The game’s also shaggy because it has some polish and stability issues to iron out. I think the authors’ first language is French, as there are some passages that seem oddly or incompletely translated – “we have many interrogations”, one character says upon opening up an interview – plus there’s a cool rotating-text effect that leads to spaces getting erased, as well as the generally-flabby pacing mentioned above that would probably be tightened in an editing pass.
The bigger issue were the host of bugs I ran into, though. The conspiracy board is the game’s primary mechanic, but from the tutorial, it was throwing off errors. I seemed to be able to ignore a popup saying there was a bad evaluation error, but when I tried to link any clue to certain mysteries, I got another popup complaining about not being able to read the properties of an undefined ‘note_id’. At first this only afflicted an optional mystery, but eventually it spread to a mystery I needed to solve to move the story forward, bringing my progress to a halt. Attempts to shake off the bug by restarting and reloading, or trying a different browser (I was using Chrome, truly the most normcore of browsers) failed to fix the issue.
Despite the complaints I’ve leveled, I was disappointed when that happened; there’s much more good here than bad, and if I’d had the chance I would have followed Cannelé and Nomnom to the end. Per a post-Comp news update, it looks like the authors are hard at work working on finishing the game. I’ll of necessity be keeping my toddler-wrangling skills sharp in the meantime, so should be ready to go whenever it surfaces!
- E.K., December 7, 2022
- Cerfeuil (*Teleports Behind You* Nothing Personnel, Kid), November 30, 2022
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Stop Fighting Me Game, I'm On Your Side!, November 24, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
There is a really great game in here, struggling to get out. The setup: (Spoiler - click to show)You are an amnesiac in a magic city trying to figure out who you are and what happened to you. You choose singularly bad detectives to help you. A lot of the writing is flat out delightful. Your frenetic, bickering partners have character and unique voice, and their banter is often lively and fun, as is the protagonist’s increasingly exasperated or impatient reactions. The Mind Map is a really cool mystery solving mechanism, and the clues provided are plentiful enough that solution is not intractable, but neither is it mechanically easy. The graphical use of color, font, static images and animation is really attractive, functional and appealing. The swinging pull string alone is just an amazing touch. There is also a “scoreboard” that tracks when one or another of the rival detectives “scores points” against the other. I laughed out loud when I realized what it was for. It doesn’t seem to have any other game function, and I kind of hope it doesn’t. What a great detail.
The mystery is engaging (lower case) too! It leverages the fantastical setup, tweaking the premise in a way that builds on the most interesting pieces of the fantasy background. Amnesia is a well worn IF trope, but here it seems to serve a larger plot purpose in an intriguing way. I would be lauding any work that accomplished two or three of the hundred things this work accomplishes. I haven’t even talked about the sound, the graphic flourishes, the hundred delightful turns of phrase (“somehow shriller voice” “Hoboolean coin” “DEFECTIVE AGENCY” so many more).
So why did the game make me fight it to enjoy it?
For everything it does right, the game seems to make equally misguided decisions. The pace of this thing is sooo slow. It took 45 minutes to leave the detective office! Part of this is an artifact of the writing. There is an extended “water drop” introduction that meanders through the city before the protagonist is even introduced. When this is done in cinema, the point is to establish the geography of the setting, and maybe show off the production value a bit. Here, the journey is too narrow both in description and path taken to do either. It’s not helped that the water drop has an insanely large surface cohesion, such that not only does it move frictionlessly through the city, it won’t even merge with other water! And it goes for a bit. As far as I can tell, that entire sequence should be the first thing to hit the cutting room floor. But even initially humorous scenes either go on too long, or are injected into the story as elaborate cul-de-sacs. A briskly paced piece can afford some pointlessly funny side quests, but when you are already struggling to make headway it feels… disrespectful?
The interactivity also deliberately, maddeningly slows things down. You are asked to hit the space bar
for [space]
every [space]
sentence [space]
in the text. Even in long blocks of descriptions. Even in dialogue, when only one person is speaking. It is a maddening choice that slows things down so much. Even when it is used for comedic impact, the effect is so blunted by repetition as to be lost. At a minimum paragraph breaks would be an improvement. “Reviewer,” you might be saying, “chill out! Just spam the space bar, it’ll be fine!” Except frequently you are called on to click a player interaction with the mouse. Many times with only a single option! You are shifting from one input to another for no narrative reason! (Well maybe not “no reason.” There is a difference between affirming protagonist action and ungating narrative. How about “…for narratively intrusive reasons.”)
The mind map also frustrates over time. It is implemented as a small window that you can pan around, drag, arrange and connect yellow sticky clues. It is a delightful idea, except the implementation is inexplicably frictiony. You quickly accumulate a super dense amount of clues, so many that organizing them becomes a slog of click-drag-pan, click-drag-pan, click-drag-pan. No zoom out. No “fullscreen mode.” And even the underlying workspace ends up being crowded despite the pans! Its a virtual desk, why is it so constrained? The graphics and constrained space end up meaning, once the clues get dense, that you grab objects you don’t mean to SO often, introducing more drag. I went from playing with it because I could to dreading when it would be needed in less than an hour. Even ‘solving’ with the mind map has unnecessary delays. If you connect everything right, the mind map itself does not tell you that. You need to go back to the text interaction and click, then be told if you solved or didn’t.
Aaand there’s minigames that don’t serve the narrative. There is a clever gambling word game whose interactivity (again tied to excessive space bar/mouse clicks) impacts its enjoyment, in turn making you anxious for it to be over so you can get back to the mystery. It doesn’t end for a while. There’s a timed ‘avoid disaster’ sequence that requires excessive input after the point of ‘oops this isn’t going to work’ before you can try again.
In the end, the friction in the game overwhelmed its many, many charms and that’s a shame. Fireworks shows have fewer Sparks of Joy than CNDA. But when I hit the chapter break at the 1:45 mark it was almost relief. “Only 15 minutes, no point starting this.” That’s not a great reaction. Its not buggy per se (maybe one - the text attributed a “point to Nomnom” that the scoreboard didn’t score during a coin toss). But the interactivity choices were Intrusively impactful. This feels fixable though, right? Some nip and tuck in the text, some coding changes in the spacebar break points, a zoom/fullwindow for the mind map, tighten up the minigames… It’s like a chunky, craggy slab of granite with Michelangelo’s David patiently waiting to be freed!
Played: 11/10/22
Playtime: 1.75hr, finished chapter 3
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Intrusive (frictiony)
Would Play Again? No, too much friction, but would ABSOLUTELY play a greased up update!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- EJ, November 21, 2022
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 20, 2022
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Two detectives, no brain cells, November 17, 2022Cannelé & Nomnom - Defective Agency is a game you can get a very accurate read on from just the title and summary. You’re an amnesiac who has hired the world’s most dysfunctional detectives to help you regain your memory. (They hate each other and are constantly wrestling for control of their single shared brain cell.) Your task is to keep them on track long enough to work on your case, and not get themselves into too much trouble – a tough task, given that neither of them have any morals and the fantasy world they’re in gives them far too many opportunities to wreak havoc.
This summary doesn’t even come close to doing C&N justice. First of all, this is the most polished Twine game I’ve ever seen! I am in fact COMPLETELY BLOWN AWAY by how much effort and polish went into this. There’s (timed!) sound effects, music, art, extremely good use of text effects, and even multiple custom minigames! (One where you connect the post-its on your evidence board with red string and one fully implemented graphical card game, so far). If the authors added more images this could be a full-blown visual novel. The writing is equally good, and the mystery is as compelling as the characters are wacky. The farcical antics of our defective detectives are balanced extremely well with the increasing hints that there is something very rotten in the state of Falaisant.
What I Liked
I already spent a while gushing about this game but this is my review thread, so I can gush more if I want! I already vaguely mentioned that this is set in a fantasy-ish universe, so I want to throw a spotlight on the worldbuilding. The game takes a little time to explain how magic works at the beginning, but from then on does an extremely good job showing and not telling. I never felt confused, but I also enjoyed the bits and glimpses of what Falaisant is like and never felt like I was being beaten over the head with lore.
Also, for anyone who watched Pokemon just for Jessie and James’s antics – you’re going to like this game. Cannele and Nomnom are basically those two with the player character having to act as their Meowth.
What I Didn’t
The writing is fantastic but could have used one last editing pass by a native English speaker (I assume, given the large amounts of French, that the authors don’t speak it as a first language. My apologies if that’s incorrect). There’s a few spelling issues and weird turns of phrase that could have stood to be ironed out. Also, The Contre Morte section was a lot of fun to play, but the delay in seeing the options pop up made it frustrating to go through multiple times (which I had to because I’m dumb). Still, these are minor things that in my opinion don’t distract from a very well-done game.
- OverThinking, November 16, 2022
- Rovarsson (Belgium), November 16, 2022
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2022
- Brad Buchanan (Seattle, Washington), November 13, 2022
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
A long and rich comedy detective game with shares-one-brain-cell duo, October 24, 2022This is quite a large and complex Twine game that has a lot of humor. It's about a mysterious male protagonist who wakes up and seeks the help of two magical detectives named Cannelé and Nomnom. They are a duo who act like siblings (maybe are?) and express intense dislike for each other while also acting pretty dumb.
The game has excellent styling with colors used for text, animations, and some minigames that are quite well done. One is a card game; another is a complex 'detective board' with red string and post-it notes that unfortunately doesn't always work well with saving and loading, but is fun while it lasts.
The game is very long already, lasting over two hours for me, and is actually incomplete. The player is invited to post their hypotheses and guesses for the finale online, with the author taking these hypotheses into account for their later writing of the big finale.
I loved the images, the interaction between the protagonist and the two detectives, the minigames, all of it. Except...
I don't like the dynamic between the two main NPCs. It's just pure negative all the time, completely unrelenting. It can be a funny bit, but I wished for just an occasional gleam of fondness, or loyalty, etc. There may have been some, but it was few and far between. This is 100% just personal taste; I think there could be many people that like this so it doesn't have to be changed. But I like 'jerk with a heart of gold' more than 'jerk with a heart of jerk'.
I also found more than a few small typos and had some trouble with saving and loading and keeping the 'memory board' the same.
Overall, this is one of my favorite games of this comp, and the criticism above is just a small detail in a great work. I'm looking forward to the finish, and can recommend this.
1-13 of 13 | Return to game's main page