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1-5 of 5 An ambitious work with implementation issues, December 16, 2023I loved the premise of this game — it puts you in a short, repeatable scenario as an accretive PC (something similar was used for The Copyright of Silence in the previous year's IFComp), and you use your knowledge to make predictions as a fortune teller.
After three runs through Unfortunate, you have enough information for completely accurate predictions. It poses an interesting question: should you predict misfortune and then passively watch it unfold? Or do you want to take action for more positive results?
Unfortunate is an ambitious work, and that ambition may have created some implementation issues. I played the IFComp version, which had exits that became inaccessible and descriptions that referenced non-existent objects. And I couldn’t predict misfortune and passively watch the results, because two characters completely disappeared from the game.
I would have appreciated it if Unfortunate set out its initial expectations more clearly; I approach puzzles differently when it’s clear that they’ll be a repeating sequence. This entry was fun, but more playtesting would have improved the experience.
2 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Doubly unfortunate, November 22, 2021(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece)
Ugh, the title here is apt in more ways that one. It’s a clever bit of wordplay for this parser-based fortuneteller-me-do – we’re not talking turbans and crystal balls, you’re just looking to show off your palmistry to some friends at a party – but it also conveys how frustrating it is that the significant promise here is let down by significant implementation issues. This isn’t just a matter of smacking down a few bugs here and there: there’s a need for additional design work, from fleshing out the conversations, deepening the characterization of the party-goers, and providing clearer feedback on how you’re making progress, as well as a good amount of polish. But even the rough version on offer goes a good way towards showing the (I think first-time?) author has some great ideas for how to realize this wonderful premise.
Digging into that setup, which is delightfully more specific than the blurb initially made me think: as mentioned we’re in the real world, not a fantasy one, and the protagonist is a hobbyist, not a carnival charlatan or anything like that (in fact, since you do get vague flashes at least some of the time when you do a reading, you might have some real talent). And the party here is one of those awkward post-college hangouts featuring a mix of old friends, exes, and coworkers, some of whom can’t stand each other. There’s a complex web of actual and potential connections, which creates a lot of potential for how things can shift once you start telling fortunes and intervening.
That’s the other part of the premise, you see – the game proceeds in two phases, with an initial round of conversation and palm-reading giving way to an interactive second phase as the characters start bouncing off of each other and having accidents both happy and not. Success isn’t about guessing a correct fortune and then lying back and waiting for fate to catch up to your intuition, though: you do have a choice of three different prognostications to offer to each of the other guests, but except for the first, generally negative, option, they won’t come true if you take a laissez-faire approach: you might have to arrange some mood music, or make sure someone has what they need to ensure a romantic gesture goes off.
These puzzles are pretty tricky, though. For one thing, it seems like there’s tight timing in the section – the other characters move around, and while some of the setup can be done ahead of time, there are also some right-place right-time pieces. You also can’t work on most of the fortunes on their own – the majority of them are about romantic matters, so how the fortune you pick for one character plays out can depend on what you picked for one or more complementary characters. In fact, after an initial, spectacularly unsuccessful playthrough, I realized Unfortunate is meant to be played multiple times as an optimization challenge – there’s a clever meta touch here, since the player’s accumulating knowledge over multiple passes stands in for the protagonist’s flashes of intuition.
On paper this should appeal to me, since I usually like optimization puzzles and real-world settings. Unfortunately (there’s that word), implementation issues bedeviled my enjoyment, so I didn’t get very far. Again, this isn’t just implementation in the sense of programming, though there’s some of that – X ME has the default description, lots of scenery is unimplemented, rules for picking up objects give responses that only make sense the first time you take something, whether or not a device is technically switched on doesn’t make a difference to whether it works or not, there are misdescribed or even missing exit listings, and room descriptions sometimes don’t update even after you’ve removed objects. And there are lots of typos.
The bigger issue is that there are significant chunks in need of a lot of polish, and sometimes things even feeling unfinished. The characters are probably the major example here. There are seven of them, and their backstories and roles are intriguing enough to set up a bunch of potential business as they bounce off of each other. But they’re thinly drawn, with physical descriptions focusing on superficial details like clothing. While there’s a multiple-choice conversation system, all the characters have the same three options (one of which initiates fortune-telling), which feels quite artificial. And there’s something odd about the implementation of the second phase, since the different characters don’t actually seem to be present and available for interaction, even as event text describes them talking and moving around.
I also wanted there to be better feedback on how I was doing on the puzzles. There are some ideas that seemed obvious but the game wouldn’t let me try (Spoiler - click to show)(Moses is allergic to flowers so giving him the bouquet for his big demonstration of affection doesn’t work – but while the herb bouquet seems a likely substitute, I couldn’t get him to accept it) and some of the fortunes are probably a little too vague, since there were a couple of times when I thought I’d satisfied one only for the post-game scoring to say I hadn’t. Combined with the combinatorial explosion of trying different mutually-dependent fortunes and the choreography required in the second act, this lack of clueing makes it feel like making real progress would require a lot of trial and error.
It’s not hard to guess at the source of these rough patches: Unfortunate doesn’t list any testers in its credits, and however much playtesting it got wasn’t enough. I’m really really hoping for a post-comp release of this that makes upgrades and bug-fixes based on folks’ transcripts, since Unfortunate could easily be a five-star game given the quality of what’s already here – I haven’t mentioned the prose yet but there’s some really good writing too – if it had more time in the oven. Here’s hoping it gets it, and that the author keeps writing games but gets more testers next time (I’ll volunteer, just DM me!)
Highlight: Figuring out how to get one of the good fortunes to work felt really rewarding – this is a great puzzle-solving framework.
Lowlight: The game lists exits in all-caps, which is a nice convenience – except one’s mislabeled (it says it’s east but it’s actually in) and then there’s one that isn’t even mentioned at all (tip: going IN from the kitchen will get you to the laundry room).
How I failed the author: Henry was having a fussier couple of days, so I only put like half an hour into the game before I had to put it aside for a little over a day, and while I intended to play more, the challenging difficulty and thin characters meant I wasn’t able to get back into it.
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2021
- Edo, October 6, 2021
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A complex and vivid parser game with active NPCs but parser hangups, October 6, 2021This is a game with solid writing and design but shaky implementation, what one would expect from someone with a good writing background that is just now breaking into Inform 7. On Twitter I see that the author is an MFA student in game design, and the game's ABOUT text says it's a demonstration game, so that would all check out.
You play as a young would-be fortune teller in the house of a professional fortune teller. They dare you to tell the fortune of everyone in the house correctly.
There are 7 people in the house, and you can assign each of them 3 different fortunes.
Once you've done so, after a certain amount of time, they start interacting with each other, and after a certain time limit is reached, the game automatically ends and you are evaluated on how accurate your fortunes are.
Conversation works well in this game. But the complex scene-changing machinery is problematic. At one point I was in the closet and saw dramatic happenings in the room, with somebody storming out. Then I left the closet and the room, and saw the exact same scene, this time from outside the room.
More egregiously, on multiple playthroughs, after the first cutscene, I tried talking to Lux and then became stuck in the kitchen, with no way to leave. Any attempt to exit resulted in no text at all.
I wasn't able to determine if any actions you take besides fortune telling matter. It seems like it might; there are a few random objects scattered about. But with the bugs it's kind of hard to tell.
This game is far better than most projects made for MFA or BA degrees in game design (although there was a really nice Choicescript one recently). No testers are credited, and I think that having several more testers would have really pushed this to 'excellent' territory.
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