Reviews by Sobol
View this member's profile1-10 of 32 | Next | Show All
The joy of discovery, April 10, 2016Currently the biggest, most complex and most polished game by the author, Superluminal Vagrant Twin is a space trading simulator - an old and noble genre including such classics as Elite, but tragically underrepresented in IF until now. There's a huge universe waiting for you to explore with lots of different planets to visit, people to meet, goods to buy and sell, side quests to complete.
You can rush through the main plot fairly quickly, but there are many other things to discover (even after getting all the achievements) - which I naturally won't spoil here. And, of course, rushing through this game would be completely missing the point, because the best part of it is not making the money but savoring the wonderful descriptions - terse and colorful, poetic without being pretentious; closing your eyes and trying to visualize all the various worlds you travel to (Spoiler - click to show) (there were 53 of them in the beta version I played).
My favorite character was the deep space explorer on Splinter. I instantly imagined Ursula K. Le Guin.
Clever and captivating, November 30, 2014Weird City Interloper is a fairly small conversation-based game.
Perhaps "conversation-based" is an understatement: there is literally nothing but conversation here. No conventional IF narrator telling you what is there, and how it looks like, and what is happening: only the direct speech of the NPCs. No "examine", or "inventory", or "go north": all you can do is talk.
And yet there is wonderful scenery in the game, and eventful journeys through the strange and colorful city of Zendon, and exciting adventures. Playing it reminded me of Elizabethan drama: no stage sets in the theater, almost no stage directions in the text; and then somebody says something like "But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, / Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill" - and you get the picture.
Above all, the game has vivid and memorable NPCs. I think even Gun Mute, another work by Pacian with a magnificent NPC cast, in this respect pales before Weird City Interloper. Each one of the fantastical and amusing characters would be enough to make a whole game centered on them. You could write an entertaining game about Lissa Ratdaughter, our trusty streetwise guide - and I would definitely play such a game, because I found Lissa interesting. You could write a nice game about Zook Spiralhouse, an innkeeper (who also happens to be a gigantic snail), charming in her grandmotherly way. And here there are not one or two, but a dozen of them - funny, mysterious, grotesque, different, each with their own unique voice and world-view.
There are no difficult puzzles (I don't think anyone can get truly stuck in this game, even without hints from (Spoiler - click to show)the rat queen) - just exploring, going through different topics of conversation, discovering things about the city and yourself; "lawnmowering", if you wish to call it such. But I never thought "lawnmowering" could be so enjoyable.
Cool in a grotesque way, October 3, 2017A fruitful idea: taking one common action verb and building a whole game around it. We already had SMELL: The Game by the same author, KILL: The Game, GO NORTH: The Game together with GO WEST: The Game, last year's TAKE: The Game, and even USE - I mean, UNDERTAKE TO INTERACT WITH: The Game. Now it's EAT: The Game.
I often have hard time relating to the games by Chandler Groover with their aesthetics of abhorrent, but this one turned to be not as revolting as I initially expected. The puzzles were satisfying, the images vivid; the game is cruel (I think it should be the first one to boast both "child protagonist" and "evil protagonist" tags at IFDB at once), but not particularly repulsive to my taste - mainly because of two reasons:
1. A strong fairy-tale atmosphere that smoothes everything, gives an unreal, dream-like feeling (and excellently fits in with the game mechanics, as many classic children's tales are obsessed with food - Hansel and Gretel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, etc.).
2. Many food descriptions were pleasant and genuinely appetizing (e.g. cheeses in the armory).
All in all, not a "don't play it while eating" kind of game.
A rorm and snave halpock, October 23, 2014It's tavid to doatch about this halpock without fargishing scurm-brolges; let's just doach it's very snave, rorm and dobbly... if somewhat dunmile.
Mysterious, November 4, 2017Crocodracula supposedly recreates the feel of American TV shows for kids from the '90s; having little familiarity with those, I was instead reminded of the recent hit series, Gravity Falls. There are similarities: two young protagonists in a small town full of various supernatural stuff, a creepy swamp, a climbable water tower, a helpful book about magic and dark secrets, a cryptogram... There was a cute plot and some good kid-friendly spooky moments.
Games by Ryan Veeder generally feature lots of optional details, glimpses of a backstory, digressions (like, for example, the tale of Homeschooled Gwen in Robin & Orchid) which add to the atmosphere and give you the feeling of inhabiting a rich world. In a game like this, which encourages you to look everywhere, search for hidden content and don't do what the NPCs tell you to do, these many optional details turn into red herrings. After helping the sheriff and playing through three different endings I'm still not sure I've seen it all. Is there a way to open that door with a Latin inscription? What is the significance of the Old Tree? Or the verb "ululate"?.. Perhaps some mysteries of Opasassa are never to be unveiled.
Cute and cozy, June 14, 2020If you liked young detective games by Brendan Patrick Hennessy and Felicity Drake, you should probably also try Sixth Grade Detective. It's in the same genre, but with younger characters: the children are around 11 years old, and reading about their fluffy crushes is as sweet as watching Chico and Roberta dance. The mysteries you investigate are accordingly tamer - like finding a missing book in the second episode.
The characters are likeable and have some curious hidden depths; I was particularly surprised by Kyle, the leader of the bullies. And the fifth "case" was really heart-warming.
Nice idea, too short, November 20, 2014The Gostak taken to the extreme; still, it isn't terribly hard to get the gist and win in a few minutes. I think the "AAAAAAAAA" in the title stands for "Adventure"; if so, I wish this adventure was longer and had more puzzles.
Magical, January 5, 2018Besides being amusing, absorbing, excellently written, cozy and generally making you warm inside, the games by S. Woodson also demonstrate an interesting approach to branching in an interactive story.
There's a sort of contradiction in choice-based puzzleless IF. On one hand, linearity is usually considered a drawback; most players want to feel that their choices really matter and substantially affect what happens, want the game to be truly interactive. On the other hand, in a significantly branching story the player will only see a small part of what's written by the author, can easily miss the best bits; the ratio of the player's enjoyment to the author's labor is low.
It would be great to make the players restart the game and explore all the various plot paths; but motivating them to replay many times and read different variations of the same story requires some serious stimulation.
In the games by S. Woodson - this one, ♥Magical Makover♥ and Beautiful Dreamer - different story branches entwine and interact with each other to form a kind of higher unity; some paths throw light on enigmatic elements of the other paths, make you see your previous game sessions in a new way - and even revisit them because, as it turns out, you didn't pay proper attention to something curious. They are all different elements of the same picture, and you want to see the picture whole.
(Narcolepsy by Adam Cadre utilized the same idea, though less effectively: the crazy guy in the university plaza always gives you hints referring to other storylines.)
In both ♥Magical Makover♥ and Beautiful Dreamer, there's one "main" branch - the one which is central to the picture and which the player is most likely to find first.
In ♥Magical Makover♥, it's the one featured on the cover art - the only one where the protagonist's initial goal is reached. If, say, the player tries three different random products on their first playthrough, they get this branch with the probability of 60%.
In Beautiful Dreamer, it's talking to Cephiros about the moth - which has the highest priority among all the topics the protagonist may discover.
Get Lost!, which is much smaller than the former two games, lacks the "main" branch: all the paths are of equal importance.
A peculiar experience, May 1, 2017So, you have 7 moves to thwart an apocalypse. That's not much time, not enough to leave the building you are in. You explore the building for a very short while, learn something about the game world, then you die, and start anew; it resembles, for example, Rematch.
But, unlike Rematch, which is a parser game, Save the World in 7 Moves is choice-based. Therefore, you don't have to invent some complex and unobvious actions in order to win - all the options are explicitly given to you, and at first it seems that you can solve the puzzle by simple "lawnmowering": just go everywhere and try all the links - sooner or later you'll find the winning one, right?
Wrong. This game experiments with the choice-based format, uses a few rather unusual ways to conceal information from the player and makes you do things you rarely need to do in a Twine game.
Also, it's funny, light-hearted and somewhat absurdist.
I'd recommend (Spoiler - click to show)listening to The Song right after you finish playing.
Good, August 5, 2018On the first playthrough, I was having fun and experimenting and enacting a fireman fantasy. Then I died. Then I thought about the game for a while, replayed it and adjusted my rating up a star.
The Volunteer Firefighter is probably the most realistic ChoiceScript game I've played. It's set in our present world; the events and characters described are much more mundane than, say, in SLAMMED!; there's very little of extraordinary, over-the-top; no striking plot twists, no clever narrative tricks; you don't even have a chance to do many "heroic" deeds. It's a simple and honest game and it has some simple truths to remind you of.
1-10 of 32 | Next | Show All