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Number of Ratings: 17
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1-17 of 17 - Edo, May 18, 2023
- dgtziea, February 28, 2023
- manonamora, February 17, 2023
- Jaded Pangolin, January 12, 2023
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Alfred Hitchcock (Does Not) Presents, December 10, 2022Adapted from an IFCOMP22 Review
Goot eev’ning. Before I was a horror movie nerd, I was a Hitchcock nerd. I do appreciate that the game very quickly squashed any expectations on that front (39 Steps was an early Hitch film, based on the same source material). Sometimes it’s best to just pull the bandage off.
The presentation was spare, but attractive and efficient. The black/white/green palette was functional and compatible with the on-the-run thriller story. The music was really top notch. The author apparently composed it himself, and it could easily have fit in the background of any of Hitch’s black and white works. I know the disclaimer explicitly said ‘not inspired by film’ but take the win, game! Just about perfect for the story. I was vaguely disappointed it only presented during chapter breaks. A much lower volume background could have worked in a few set piece spots.
The game presents you/the protagonist with three general approaches to decision-making: Open (ie truthful), Sneaky and Bold. Characters and scenes seem to be informed by which of those you lean on in given circumstances. I like the mechanism overall. It allowed you to define the protagonist as whatever mix of the three you-the-player wanted to work with. I vibed with the concept of that approach and about half the time it seemed to work pretty seamlessly. The other half kind of pushed me away from Engagement, unfortunately. Some of the options seemed MUCH more appropriate to some decision points than others, watering down the open-endedness.
Not all decision points were structured around the three OPEN/SNEAKY/BOLD choices, some had more or less unaligned alternatives. Those were also hit or miss. I can remember seeing a few options laid out and thinking ‘why would that be an option?’ Eventually I tested it out by selecting what seemed an obviously bad choice, and yup, it sure was.
Another design decision that was smart for gameplay but pushed against my Engagement was the option to replay each chapter before moving on to the next. This worked in conjunction with italicized text that acted as a hint system of what should be accomplished in a given chapter. Because it's a thriller, it is definitely dependent on cause and effect so I understand the impulse. I also appreciated that it wasn’t a full game reset. But I would hope that kind of thing could be implemented more organically in the text. Until the final chapter, it was a take-the-bad-with-the-good thing. The balance definitely tilted when the hint up front set expectation that you’ll need to replay the final chapter multiple times to be ‘successful.’ This sapped all the immediacy out of what thrillers famously deliver.
Narratively, it was also a little uneven for me. On the one hand, the protagonist went from ‘hey a dead body’ to ‘omg I’m surrounded by enemies’ blindingly fast, in a way that didn’t ring true to me. It could be that the sequence of decisions I made didn’t quite cohere the way the author intended, but I passed through a phase where I thought he was a raving paranoid. Uh, the protagonist, not the author. There were actions taken (Spoiler - click to show)hiding the MacGuffin from the bad guys that seemed to have obvious impact on the finale, yet went unremarked upon. On the other hand, there was real tension in some of the chase set pieces. The overall language of the piece was delightfully evocative of early Hitchcock thrillers, in that earnest and slightly stagey way. The author really nailed the black-and-white film language and tone, just nailed it. I know what you said Game Disclaimer, you’re not the boss of me.
So many Sparks of Joy here in the setting, the language, the music(!), the decision framework. Just enough clanky narrative and gameplay choices to keep me from truly engaging. I did smile a LOT while playing.
Played: 10/21/22
Playtime: 30 min, replayed final chapter multiple times for 4 endings
Artistic/Technical rankings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again? I could see revisiting it after a Hitchcock marathon. Not the boss of me, game!
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
- E.K., December 7, 2022
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1 people found the following review helpful:
A pacy albeit implausible spy novel adapatation, December 6, 2022(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2022's IFComp).
Maybe we should style the title here as The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan, by Graham Walmsley? You see, this is a Twine reimagining of the early-Twentieth-Century novel that kicked off the spy thriller genre, albeit with all-new text rather than interpolating the original’s prose. I haven’t read the book, though going in was dimly aware of the plot – a resourceful hero forced to flee an omnipresent conspiracy, sort of a last-century Three Days of the Condor, with the mysterious title referring to some sort of cipher that needed to be unraveled to foil the plot of the baddies – which seemed well-suited to an IF rendering, what with the focus on action and puzzles.
(I've also heard debate about whether there are anti-Semitic implications to the novel – there are definitely some wrong ways to depict an international conspiracy – but happily there’s nothing like that in the game).
Overall I’d rate this as a successful adaptation. The game has a breathless pace that makes it the interactive equivalent of a page-turner – at every stage, you’re having to live by your wits, eluding your pursuers, trying to make progress on a dead man’s coded notebook, or having to decide whether a seemingly-friendly stranger is a potential ally or a disguised hunter. Throughout, there’s a simple but robust system that sorts most of your choices into clever, bold, or open options – unlike in a ChoiceScript game where these would probably be skills that you would develop through repetitive use, here they’re simply different choices of tactics (in fact sometimes a single decision-point could have multiple clever choices, or none), with the caveat that the best ending is reserved for players who take enough of the trustingly-naïve open choices to maintain their faith in humanity through to the end.
Some of these choices are definitely better than others, mind, and it’s certainly possible to end a chapter with a suboptimal result, or even fail the story entirely. But while there isn’t a save or undo system – they’d probably reduce the tension of the game significantly – in a nice compromise, you can go back and replay each chapter when you hit its conclusion; the few times I tried it, I found it only took a few minutes to retrace my steps and get a more positive outcome.
The game’s prose helps with this overall zippiness. It’s unadorned, but the locution is formal enough to suggest the milieu it’s trying to evoke, and it gets right to the point. Here’s the inciting incident that sets the plot in motion – there’s a lot packed into these two sentences:
"The man on the floor was quite dead, a knife through his heart skewering him to the floorboards. He was an upstairs neighbor, a trim man with gimlet eyes, who had looked at me searchingly whenever we passed on the stairs."
I do have a few critiques, mind. One is that while the game generally lets you fail forward, the difficulty of getting an ending where you figure out the plot and foil it completely seems quite high. For instance, several times in your journey, you’ll have a brief respite where you can try to improve your disguise, find some useful items, get some food or sleep, or work on decoding the dead man’s notebook. Obviously, the latter of these is quite important, but as far as I can make out, to suss out the baddies’ plans you need to choose the code-cracking option every single time. Meanwhile, the game flat-out tells you that the final chapter is meant to be played multiple times in order to gather the information needed for a winning run, without a metafictional conceit to justify the need for such outside knowledge.
The second flaw in the story – and given the genre I’m sincerely not sure how heavily to weight this – is that none of it makes the slightest lick of sense. Like, go back to that opening: you wake up with a dead man in your flat, and with all your belongings searched, because the evil conspirators know that the guy they murdered had written down many of their secrets in a notebook. Of course, you find said notebook almost immediately, at which point you have to elude the agents who are keeping your dwelling under observation so they can jump you. This is all well and good in terms of setting up thrilling set pieces, but pause for a moment and it crumples into incoherence. If the bad guys were so worried about this notebook, and so attuned to the risk of the protagonist finding it, shouldn’t they have murdered him in his sleep, rather than obligingly letting him slumber on uninterrupted? Contrarily, if they’d written him off as a threat, why establish such tight surveillance and try to grab him as soon as he leaves his apartment?
The whole game is like this. You hop a train to Scotland, losing yourself in sparsely-populated Highland villages, only to discover that there are conspirators on the train with you or waiting ahead at the station in the smallest of hamlets – if there’s a justification for this other than that they’ve somehow read the script, I didn’t pick it up. Fortunately, coincidences don’t just break for the bad guys: at one point, I was captured but managed to escape the deserted farmhouse where they’d taken me, only to blunder into a river fisherman mid-angling – who immediately recognized me, as he was a high officer in the Foreign Service who already knew I was innocent of the murder the villains had tried to pin on me and cleared my name without the slightest fuss or bother. Meanwhile, the final confrontation with this octopus-like conspiracy, that’s managed to extrude its tentacles across the length and breadth of the British Isles and has dozens of agents everywhere you look, involves facing down two weedy chaps, an elderly gentleman, and their noncombatant maidservant.
I’m not sure whether these are inconsistencies that can be laid at the door of the original, or were introduced in the adaptation. And again, for the thriller genre I’m not sure implausibility is too great of an issue – I seem to recall that the opening chapter of The Da Vinci Code involves an albino self-flagellating Opus Dei assassin monk named Silas escaping from a Spanish prison when an earthquake knocks down the walls, which is a sentence I can’t type without sniggering, though joke’s on me since it sold eight gazillion copies. Indeed, I almost got more enjoyment rolling my eyes at the silliness of the plot, and then just rolling with it, than I would have if everything had fit together with a neat and boring logic. The Thirty Nine Steps doesn’t seem to mind whether you’re laughing with it or at it, meanwhile – it’s too busy rushing from one fun, ridiculous stunt to the next.
- EJ, November 21, 2022
- 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
- Ola (Sweden), November 3, 2022
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1 people found the following review helpful:
An adaptation of a spy thriller, October 27, 2022I really am not sure how to review this one, because sometimes I think it's excellent and sometimes I think it's a bit choppy.
This is an adaptation of the book The Thirty-Nine Steps. I haven't read it myself, but from Wikipedia it looks pretty cool, about a man on the run who is hunted down everywhere he goes.
This adaptation adds a good deal of additional content, and allows you to focus on being Bold, Open, or Clever. Interestingly, the choices not only increase your ability in that area, but they also affect the way you see the world about you, making you more paranoid or clueless, etc.
The game gives you a lot of freedom, but I feel like, due to that freedom, I missed a few essential plot points, such as never really learning about the people I'm pursuing. A couple of other things I feel like are confusing without context (late game spoilers:(Spoiler - click to show)I pushed a fireplace rod and a bunch of steps disappeared in a cloud of chalk. Why? What's the purpose of such a mechanism?).
So I'm wavering between 3 and 4, but I'll round up to 4.
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Spy thriller with some fun mechanics, October 11, 2022In this choice-based multimedia game you play a man who wakes up on his last day of vacation in London to find a dead man in his living room and you quickly realize that it is part of some conspiracy and like it or not you are involved. What follows is a cloak-and-dagger chase across the English countryside where you must plan your actions carefully at every step to avoid being caught by your pursuers. Many of your choices will be presented in the context of one of three main strategies: BE OPEN, BE CLEVER or BE BOLD. Choosing one of them will alter the text in future scenes. For example: being clever will mean the text draws more attention to suspicious things, but also means that it might make something seems suspicious that really isn’t.
I quite enjoyed the mechanics of this game. Right from your first strategy choice the game tells you what it means to pick a certain path and will let you know when your personality alters later on based on your choices. I also loved that at the end of each chapter the game would give you the option to move on to the next chapter, or replay the chapter you just finished. Frequently, with choice-based games, I found that I’ve learned something for future playthroughs, but I still have to finish the game before I can go back and try the new thing. Sometimes I want to iterate on my path many times and that involves lots of clicking and not much reading. Being to take this game in chunks was lovely and made for a very pleasant replay experience. I also liked that at the beginning of Chapter 2 (Spoiler - click to show)the game told you that the chapter would end if you got caught and you would miss out on some of the story, then when I finished the chapter it let me know that I had seen the whole thing. Finally, I loved that the code in the game is a real cipher that you can decode on your own outside of the game, allowing you to take other productive actions during the game.
The game also has original music by the author, which was a nice touch in certain moments and at the beginning and end of chapters. I would also recommend reading the walkthrough that is available at the end of the game. It lets you in on things you’ve missed and also made me realize how impressive the coding was for this game.
The game says that it is adapted from a novel. I’m curious was the novel is like, but I can say that the reason I didn’t give this game four stars was the storyline. I just never felt invested in the characters, the plot didn’t grip me from the beginning because it all seemed to come out of no where without any context as to why I should care, and I felt like the end came too suddenly and too easily. So, only three stars for this one, but I hope the author writes another game like this with some of the same mechanics, I’d love to play it.
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Can you outwit your pursuers?, October 9, 2022I enjoyed The Thirty Nine Steps. You play as a man trying to evade capture as he moves from London to Scotland. It is fairly tense, with well-written details, and is easy to navigate. I thought I had made some good choices, considering how successfully I overcame each obstacle. However, on a second playthrough, I made different choices, but the results only altered slightly. This makes me feel like my choices might not have mattered, which takes away from the satisfaction I felt on the first playthrough. I also wouldn't mind if the story was expanded on a little more. It's nice that this game can be played without too much time investment, but I would be willing to spend more time on it if other scenarios were added.
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Spy thriller, October 6, 2022I really like what this game is trying to do. You are dropped into a spy thriller and must choose from a list of actions when presented with a series of tense situations. The way the story is framed and the meaningful effects of your actions provide a good sense of freedom.
Feedback for author:
I'm not sure I liked the labeling of the choices as clever/bold/open. Sometimes it didn't feel that the choice fit the label, and I'm not sure if the labels/tone were really necessary. Another criticism is that the events that result from your choices did not always seem obvious to me. When I encountered police in chapter 2 it wasn't clear that this was because of something I did earlier. I think making cause and effect obvious is good in games, even if it isn't always realistic.
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