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Number of Reviews: 6
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1-6 of 63 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Pithy parable, January 27, 2022What I liked:
This is a short but effective tale about someone - let's call them a positive role model - who examines and questions their own psychological baggage, ultimately transforming it into more constructive forms to help them move forward. I found it a beautiful and inspirational read. The entire endeavor is fairly simple, but there's enough metaphor to keep it from feeling totally "in your face."
What I didn't like:
There seems to be a rather serious bug where (Spoiler - click to show)the fellow-traveller will stop speaking if you leave the road and come back.
What I took away:
Sure, Baggage is a fairly short and casual play, and a longer game that explores the same themes in greater depth could perhaps have conveyed them more powerfully. But for a 5-minute experience, it's wonderful.
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Not sure if I found everything, April 24, 2021There's a lot of fun poetic imagery in this piece. It ends quite abruptly, and won't take more than a few minutes if you play it as I did.
(Spoiler - click to show)INVENTORY, then EXAMINE all of the stuff in the satchel. The game will suggest that you can CHANGE the stuff, so CHANGE all of the feelings, one at a time. Then you can trivially GO EAST and WAIT a turn to win that way, or CUT BRAMBLES and GO WEST and WAIT a turn to win that way.
EDIT: (Spoiler - click to show)You can also optionally help the traveler, who appears fifteen turns into the game. You can GET ODDMENTS (twice), GIVE ODDMENTS TO TRAVELER, and then TRAVELER, CHANGE MOMENTS.
Maybe there was another way to win? Maybe there's more to it? Or maybe that's all there is.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
An abstract fable, April 20, 2021I’ve noted in several of my other reviews that I prefer games that get specific, providing details to ground their narratives in a particular context and add texture to the emotions and themes of their stories. Baggage takes the opposite approach: it’s a parser-based game that presents an allegorical vignette about the difficulty of moving on when you’re feeling weighed down by, well, see title. It’s all plausible enough, but because of the game’s commitment to an abstract presentation, I didn’t find it as resonant as it maybe deserves.
To give a little more detail on the setup, you’re a nameless, faceless, genderless protagonist on a road to nowhere, hemmed in by high hedges and toting a satchel freighted with half a dozen abstract concepts. Some of these are coded positive – there’s hope, and a good memory – and some negative – you’re also toting some fear and resentment. You can examine them, but you don’t get much to grab on to if you do. Here’s regret:
"Blank years and empty months and wasted weeks and dull days. You could have done so much more."
So yes, checks out, that’s regret, but it’s not a description with much emotional weight.
After I’d finished the game and was looking through the hints and help text, I found that there’s a nonstandard THINK ABOUT command implemented. This is only mentioned if you tell the HELP command that you’re new to interactive fiction, though, which I think is a misstep: if your game has a bespoke command that’s not specifically cued by the game, it should really be mentioned in the top-level ABOUT or HELP text if you want a player to find it. Anyway, it didn’t change things that much – here’s THINK ABOUT REGRET:
"Ugh. The embarrassment. The shame! It’s a hot cramp in your stomach, a shiver creeping up your spine, a sharp taste in your mouth."
That’s more specific but doesn’t actually seem much like regret to me?
There’s more to do in Baggage than just contemplate your baggage, though. You eventually come across a fellow traveler (confusingly referred to throughout as a “traveller” – the prose is otherwise clean and free of typos, modulo the occasional linebreak error, so I wasn’t sure if this was an intentional misspelling) who serves as a cautionary example of letting your obsessions rule you, and while you can give in to despair if you let the time limit expire, there are also a few positive endings possible.
Reaching these requires solving a small puzzle to reframe your baggage in new, potentially-transformative ways. I actually liked the writing of these bits – the text finally starts giving details, with the main character’s regret revealed as being about not seizing a chance to get out of a dead-end job by trying for a (perhaps intimidating) training program. And the message here seems right – you can’t get rid of your regret, but you can change it from a backward-looking fetter into a goad not to let opportunity pass you by the next time.
Do enough of this, and the protagonist can eventually escape their stasis, and even maybe help the other traveler. The puzzles behind this weren’t my favorite, since they’re not too far off from guess-the-verb challenges (the latter in particular requires the player to use a command form that I think is a bit obscure for a modern Inform game: (Spoiler - click to show)CHARACTER, DO SOMETHING) and seem a little facile (spoiler for the former set of puzzles: (Spoiler - click to show)you just type CHANGE REGRET) though I suppose that’s fair enough since we’re in the realm of allegory.
I noticed a few niggles in the implementation – besides the aforementioned line break issues, some synonyms weren’t implemented, most notably when upon being told that I thought there was something strange about the shadows around the roots of one of the hedges, I found that neither X SHADOWS or X ROOTS was recognized. Overall though it’s solid, especially for a first game, and while I didn’t personally find the prose compelling, I think it hits the mood it’s trying for. If you’re in the market for an interactive riff on the Pilgrim’s Progress, Baggage has you covered – I just prefer my fables with a bit more flesh and blood.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
A brief metaphorical Inform game, April 13, 2021This short game has you on a narrow roadway with obstacles on either side, and you have to find a way to get free.
You are carrying several metaphorical objects (a hope, a fear, etc.). There is a single NPC to talk to, and two (that I found) possible endings.
I like the idea of this game, but I didn't feel satisfied with specific elements of the implementation and the writing.
Implementation wise, it seems it just needs a little more polish, like the formatting of the ending text or the whitespace at the end of some of the paragraphs.
Writing-wise, for me personally it was a little too abstract. I have the same feeling with many games, including some of Andrew Schultz's work, which deals with similar concepts of overcoming personal challenges and regrets. For me, it's easier to grab onto more specific examples and wording than to universally applicable truths.
-Polish: The game could use a bit more polish.
-Descriptiveness: I felt that the game could use more specificity.
+Interactivity: I liked the gameplay.
-Emotional impact: For some reason, the situations in the game didn't resonate with me.
+Would I play again? I played through twice just to see a different ending.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Stepping off the gravel road..., April 9, 2021Baggage is set in a very evocative symbolic setting. You're on an endless gravel road going nowhere. Your only chances of getting somewhere lie behind two impenetrable hedges.
You must dig deep within yourself to make for yourself the tools you need.
This vignette tries to relate to the player the hard and painful work it takes to open a path out of depression or emotional blockage. It gets a lot of things right; the need to hold some cherished beliefs to the light and see them for what they really are, to leave behind painful yet known -and therefore twistedly comfortable- convictions and memories.
The way to deal with these, to mould them into something helpful instead of restrictive is a bit easy. I would have liked to see some more of what a person need to do and what needs to happen to a person to climb out of the darkness, instead of presenting it as a "simple" decision. However, this small story does present the necessary steps one has to take, albeit somewhat on the theoretical level.
The contrast between the player character and the traveller (the only NPC) gives a bittersweet taste to the endgame.
A sincere and thoughtful piece, worth thinking and feeling about after you finish.
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Couldn't figure it out, April 3, 2021This game is very abstract, with concepts implemented as objects and I suspect able to be used in that way if the conditions are right. I could not figure out how to do so though, and after puzzling with it for awhile and asking the game for help (only to be told I'd created a game condition without an associated hint), I gave up. There wasn't anything about the game up to that point that made me care enough to fight harder to get a resolution/ending.
This is a game I feel like would have been better in Twine or a similar system. Instead of me getting frustrated to the point of giving up, trying to make the parser do what the author wanted me to do, I could have been guided gently down the author's intended path.
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