198BREW

This game might be described as "Weird Urban Fantasy". After a brief prologue, it starts off with a classic 'my apartment' game that models different rooms of a fairly mundane apartment before digging into some of the strangeness.

Gameplay consists of crossing a map and discovering unusual individuals, each of which is far from baseline reality. Unlike much of fantasy and sci fi, most of the people are normal, physically, but inside is something different. There are of course some exceptional cases.

While there are many different threads running through the game, they feel like they all have thematic similarities. One constant refrain is (Spoiler - click to show)fear of nothing happening, stuck in eternity balanced against (Spoiler - click to show)the fear of something changing or finally happening after so long.

Implementation is iffy. One really tough issue is that pronouns aren't set right for women so X HER doesn't work, and for both men and women you can't X MAN or X WOMAN, you have to instead type out the full name of the person you want to speak with. Many objects listed in the description can't be interacted with in-game and many that you can't interact with don't give responses. TAKE SHOWER uses Inform's default response of 'That's hardly portable'. So it could use some polishing up. I didn't see typos or bugs, though.

I liked the game. It gives me the same kind of feel as Deadline Enchanter, one of my favorite games. I also have some major phobias associated to some of the things in this game, but the way it handled them made me feel less tense rather than more, which is nice.

The opening of the game made no sense to me, but after replaying it all clicked, so I recommend trying that afterwards.

Note: This review was written during IFComp 2024, and originally posted in the authors' section of the intfiction forum on 22 Sep 2024.

This is a very strange parser game, with a bizarre almost scifi story. I’m still not entirely sure what was happening. I did understand the simple “get coffee!” goal at the start. Though I’m more of a freshly ground coffee person than the character in game who drinks Nespresso made from capsules.

On plus the world is intriguing, and odd, in a way that drags you in, almost in spite of yourself. It gets quite gruesome quite quickly though, and I think heftier content warnings would be appropriate in this case.

On downside it’s extremely under implemented. I had many “You can’t see any such thing” when I tried to interact with objects in the game descriptions. Coding more synonyms for objects would have helped a lot e.g. (Spoiler - click to show)“paper” for what must be referred to as “ticket”. And implementing more of the mentioned objects full stop would be good. It did feel frequently that I was fighting the parser and the game. Against that the text descriptions are perhaps overly long. Some judicious editing may have helped smooth things here.

I also found the clueing inadequate. I was doing without the walkthrough, until I got stuck, not realising that I needed to do something very extreme ((Spoiler - click to show)kill someone). Even when I read the walkthrough and saw that I needed to do that I wasn’t happy about that action. The content warnings - or lack of - hadn’t prepared me for this.

Another area of under implementation is in:

>examine me
As good-looking as ever.

Which without going into detailed spoilers is rather under selling things.

So a game with an interesting premise, and an intriguing world, but it needed much much more polishing. This is probably a case where more playtesting by others would have helped a lot. Because there’s a really nice core idea here. But the playing experience, at the moment, isn’t smooth enough.

(review based on the IFComp 2024 version)

Disorienting.
Discomforting.

Strange…

198BREW drops the player in a nearly incomprehensible setting. Just familiar enough to wander around and explore. Hints of backstory, glimpses of history, fragments of memories,… paint an icy, fractured picture of a World, a Church, a Queen, and of some of the unfortunate people inhabiting the City.

The writing is splendid. Descriptions feel alien while still evoking detailed-yet-disturbed images, the sequence of events and actions draws the player along with urgency, without ever gaining clear motive. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of the large-scale prologue with the practicality of the apparent game-objective in the opening scene, especially since that down-to-earth practical objective is twisted and spun and distorted during the game that follows.

I loved this, but precisely because I can see the potential, I also grew frustrated. While the descriptions are very impressive on the surface, it takes but a minor scratching to see that the implementation is sorely lacking in depth. Many nouns are not recognised. characters who seem interesting turn out to be cardboard figures with only one conversation-trigger, commands that flow naturally from the setting are dismissed by a default rejection-response, plausible alternate courses of action () are not accounted for,…

This game excels as a mood-piece, it has provided images that I will probably see in my dreams, it suffused me with an undefinable feeling of strangeness. However, to become the truly masterful IF-piece it carries the kernel of, more polishing and shaving is needed.