198BREW

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

If there is a more effective hook in IF than “what the HELL is going on here?” I am hard pressed to come up with it on the spot. The pre-cursor text to Brew makes a WTF? promise that the work well and fully keeps here. You start, exploring a shared apartment uncovering a series of unsettling artifacts that soon blossom into full blown bonkers world building and lore. The ‘bonkers’ in that last sentence applies to BOTH predicates.

It is fairly tight in geography, an immediate neighborhood with a lot going on never mind the snowstorm allegedly happening around you. When focusing on discovering lore, the game sparks like mad. This is due to the fever-dream psychedelia of the world building that includes (Spoiler - click to show)time loops, murder cults, immortality and maybe-metaphorical but also definitely-not-metaphorical (Spoiler - click to show)cannabalism. All of it drip-fed through slow paced discovery, whose relaxed pace is an amusing contrast to the shocking lore it reveals.

Everytime you think it will explode into full on fiery engagement though, implementation gaps trip up just enough to drag things down. A notable number of missing synonyms (singular items are almost never present when plurals are). Incomplete directional cues. A staggering amount of ‘No response’ dialogue options cloud gameplay when related topics are a MUST to progress, yet the ‘no response’ cues that the NPC will not know anything. The most standout gap though, is its destructive use of default messages.

When creating a parser game, modern systems come with default responses to common commands as a convenience. The breadth of human communication makes this convenience nearly indispensable. To have to come up with those on your own is daunting and unrewarding to the potential author. It can also be CRUCIAL to the success of your work. There is a secret about the protagonist that gets explored early in the game. The standard response to >x me actively undermines this revelation in a way that clouds and blunts its impact for way too long. The same problem occurs with unimplemented dialogue options as observed above.

The cumulative weight of these gaps ultimate prevented the work from being truly engaging, though the puzzle design might also have done that, eventually. You are on a deceptively simple mission, and there is some amusement to be derived from the ludicrously escalating complications that ensue. However, once it escalates to (Spoiler - click to show)actual murder we have developed a tone problem that the bananas lore undermines as much as justifies. The problem is that the lore is SO bananas, it vacillates wildly between comedic and serious. We never really stabilize into a single tone. This is not inherently bad in and of itself, but then when we are asked to do dire things we have no frame of reference to decide ‘is this funny or not?’ Our protag’s response is so cold and removed, in the context of their secrets we similarly are adrift in ambiguity of interpretation. A stronger anchor in one direction or another would go a long way here.

All that said, the lore itself is SO singular, and the work provides some truly surprising, clever riffs on it, that independent anything else the Sparks are real.

Played: 9/24/24
Playtime: 65min, finished with limited hints
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Notable implementation gaps
Would Play Again?: No, experience seems complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless