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Number of Ratings: 15
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1-15 of 15 - Kinetic Mouse Car, August 4, 2022
- tekket (Česká Lípa, Czech Republic), April 21, 2022
- Say (Paris, France), January 10, 2022
- thedigitaldiarist (Canada), January 10, 2022
3 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
A simple idea well-communicated, November 23, 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)
A short mood piece – if it were a painting, it’d be a landscape – The Miller’s Garden provides a tidy meditation on impermanence. There’s no backstory or characters, just a situation: the player comes to an abandoned garden by the side of a river, which is slowly being reclaimed by weeds and water, and each day can choose how and whether to try to shore it up – cutting the reeds, mowing the grass, maintaining the rocky banks.
Of course there’s a catch, and the catch is – well, spoilers for a ten-minute game: (Spoiler - click to show) entropy, because this isn’t a farming sim. No matter how much you shore up the riverbank, the water will eventually drown the garden. Pleasantly, this isn’t just a matter of nature swallowing the hubristic works of man, since my reading of the game is that the construction of the now-defunct mill changed the behavior of the river, and now the river is in turn changing the garden. There’s a nice sentiment that emerges here, as you tend the garden to create some transient beauty before the inevitable comes, without the game implying that this is a futile or useless task (besides the occasional prompt asking you if you’re sure you want to persist until the end – I detected no judgment when I said I wanted to do so.)
It’s a lovely idea and it works on its own terms, but I wished there’d been a little more descriptive zing to the prose. Since this is such a small thing, confined to the same few locations and the same few tasks over multiple days, I would have liked to see a little more detail on exactly what kind of flowers are growing, or have the river’s rise rendered with a bit more sensitivity. Still, there’s a power in restraint in a piece of this kind, so I can respect that.
Highlight: The game is pretty much of a piece, but I got a lot of enjoyment from the opening epigram, which quotes from a recent scientific paper on the game’s exact subject matter – I can’t help but wonder whether it was the impetus for the piece’s creation.
Lowlight: I’m not sure if this was a bug or not, but about midway through the game, the garden’s flowerbed location seemed to disappear, so I could only go from the lawn to the river-bank. I liked that flowerbed, so I missed it!
How I failed the author : it took me way longer to realize the flowerbed had gone away than it should have (blame sleep deprivation).
- Jacob MacDonald, November 16, 2021
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 15, 2021
- Pegbiter (Malmö, Sweden), November 15, 2021
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
Was it really worth the reduced floodplain inundation rates?, November 10, 2021This game looks nice and is easy to navigate, but it wasn't much fun. It's very repetitive. It makes a heavy-handed point if you play through to the end, but some of the subtle changes that happen during the game are easy to misinterpret. I believe that the purpose of the game is to demonstrate what effects water mills had on river-floodplain systems. It sounds like it probably was bad, but I'm not 100% because I don't understand anything I read when I did a search on it. I also don't know what a river-floodplain consists of, or how many there are, but I guess we can be thankful that cheap electricity means we don't have as many water mills around anymore.
1 of
1 people found the following review helpful:
Short game where nothing much happens, October 26, 2021The IFComp blurb and quotation that displays on the title screen had me interested to play this game, but it greatly disappointed. Unless I missed something significant, rather than examining the impacts that a person can have on a place, in both life and death, and how time can change a landscape, the game is little more than a pacing simulator. You just walk back and forth between a few locations until the sun sets, then you can do it again the next day. I played through three days and didn't really notice any mechanics or philosophical musings. I feel this was a missed opportunity. Pull up the game to enjoy the river soundscape that plays in the background, that was the best part.
- OverThinking, October 25, 2021
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
A short and simple game with surprisingly little feedback, October 24, 2021I took a lot of ballroom dance classes in college, and I remember one of the biggest problems a pair could have is noodle arms. If the arms are rigid, the two dancers can communicate effectively, but if they're lose, dancers tend to step on and run into each other.
This game has some good ideas but has so little feedback. I had no idea what was going on until I peaked at the code.
Gameplay-wise, you wake up and have 3-4 areas you can take care of by watering, removing trash, etc. (Spoilers for ending and mechanic)(Spoiler - click to show)This lasts for 7 days, and, each day, the river grows bigger, removing gameplay areas unless you shore it up enough the day before.
For me, it was difficult to see any effect of my actions, besides the immediate ones of watering and such. (Spoiler - click to show)The effect of the river was indicated by the absence of old text, not the presence of new, and as I was shoring up a lot from the beginning, I saw few changes. This, for me, made the game more or less a tedium simulator. Even once I knew what was going on, I had no real reason to care for either out come, because I was nobody in a nobody land. I can see the thought experiment, but it just didn't pan out for me.
- Xavid, October 19, 2021
5 of
6 people found the following review helpful:
Potamological potterings, October 9, 2021Curious, impressionistic piece about time, impermanence, and ‘net channel incision’ (to use a technical term concerning the effect of water mill construction and demolition on the topography of river beds of which I was previously unaware; one learns something new every day).
You play a visitor to the garden of the title, the mill itself having long been demolished, where you can wander through a small number of locations and spend time pruning, tidying, shoring-up and generally fighting entropy while, hard on your heels, time stalks you like a jealous ex-lover and unravels all of your good work as fast as you accomplish it so that you have to continually loop back and start all over again. And all this to the soothing (if bathroom-visit inducing) accompaniment of running water and some pleasing poly art graphics.
As both a game and a story, it’s rather slight, if not unpleasing. One could spend more time than the 20 minutes or so that I spent with it contemplating what it shows us about the futility of existence and suchlike, but it doesn’t really justify the effort (or at least it didn't, for me). “Is this really how you wish to spend your days?” the game asks pointedly, after a few cycles of building up and knocking down, and the answer has to be: no, not really. But as something to while away a quick tea break, it will do just fine.
- Zape, October 4, 2021
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