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1 people found the following review helpful:
But Dr., AM Famous Clown Pagliacci, January 5, 2024Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review
Thanks to the 2hr time limit, there are a few behaviors I find myself repeating when judging IFCOMP. For long games, it is not uncommon for me to be surprised by the timer expiration and just cold stop, a really frustrating experience for all. If I notice it ticking down, I may try to get to what I perceive to be a clean break spot, perhaps short of 2hrs. For shorter pieces I almost always replay a few times to get the breadth of a work, except for works that have been so frustratingly or perfectly rendered that a single playthrough feels like the right way to capture my experience. All these cases are typically orthogonal to hint/walkthrough consultation,which is instead driven by a frustration trigger.
Honk! is the first work where I felt the puzzles were great fun to play with on my own (I mean, it is in the title!), but I went to the hints anyway. I realized the final step of one puzzle wasn’t going to let me finish by the time limit and had a mini puzzle of my own to solve: what is worse, losing a full solve opportunity, or not reviewing the full game? I made the right choice, I consulted the hint system and finished at 2hrs. That decision’s difficulty feels like a compliment! [sidebar: strong hint system implementation!]
This is a save-the-circus piece. Clown protagonist must prevent the Phantom from sabotaging three acts and so preserve audience goodwill and stop the unfeeling hands of progress. It had a few things stacked against it from the start: #1, preserve noble, quaint entertainment against Cold Capitalism has kind of run its course with me? No that’s wrong. Unnuanced ‘Cold Capitalism’ I mean. I don’t line up with Corporate interests, I’m not a monster, but how many times can I be expected to engage this plot, basically the same way? #2, if you’re going to invoke as bland a villain as a Phantom at the circus, I can forgive not referencing Tobe Hooper’s Funhouse, but not referencing the seminal formative text Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park just feels intellectually dishonest. #3, YOU MADE ME BE A CLOWN, GAME. Why do those things even exist, let alone get turned loose on CHILDREN???
I am happy to report, the sweet humor and light tone of the piece almost instantly made me forget all of those objections. No, not true. Made me forget TWO of those, and periodically forget the third. The prose and jokes are not laugh out loud funny, but just universally winning in creating a jolly, bubbly mood. Yeah, it’s people’s livelihood’s and the death of a quirky, dated institution, but it doesn’t have to be DOUR, sez game. I agree! The tone of the piece is its primary strength and it is rock solid start to finish. I grabbed some fun lines as I played, but quickly realized in isolation they suffer a bit. It’s really the riffing they do within the holistic mood of the piece that is so pleasant. So you just have to read them for yourselves! I will note that some puzzles actually trade on the mood of the piece in a natural and satisfying way, which is also fun. Though this line did seem unintentionally, humorously cruel:
"Freda fills the poky camper like how custard fills a pie dish,"
LOL, Is that what you meant to say game?
Implementation wise it was robust, with notable gaps. There are a LOT of things you might try that have funny ‘no, not this’ responses, more than there needed to be which is always appreciated. That made the gaps maybe jar a little more? Gaps like stock text about wandering through a crowd appearing while you are on a roof. Balloons floating away while in a cage that explicitly noted the presence of a gridded top. Dialogue presuming things not yet revealed if you hadn’t >X SPEAKER before hand. As robust as it was otherwise, I also spent a good amount of time trying to solve puzzles reasonable ways and getting rebuffed, and without the humor I might have expected. In particular, I would have hoped using the ladder for the rabbit, making noises with balloons and/or breathing helium, or trying to get helium balloons to lighten the Phantom would be some easily anticipated alternate solutions deserving of humorous rebuttal.
Those are all easily forgiven in the face of some left field puzzles with fun ‘real’ solutions, fair play cluing, and terrific mood. It was the kind of a game where I was repeatedly rebuffed, had to take a break for unrelated reasons during which alternate possible solutions flowed like rivers. Some even ended up being right! That’s a special kind of Engaging for sure. The anxious race for the finish against my timer was also a thing I only experienced once before during IFCOMP23 and speaks well of the piece.
Notwithstanding the shambling horror I was forced to inhabit for two solid hours, it was a fully Engaging work of fun puzzles and sweet humor. I particularly liked the completely subversive tweaking of the ‘what a surprising reveal about this prominent NPC!’ unmasking trope. And a ROCK SOLID updog implementation. Enough glitches and unanticipated puzzle paths to make it Notable, but barely so. Totally justified itself against concern #1. There is no possible justification for #2 and #3.
Played: 11/3/23
Playtime: 2hrs, finished with one hint to make time
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging, Notable gaps given robust overall implementation
Would Play After Comp?: No, experience seems complete
Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Heartfelt clowning, January 4, 2024(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp. I alpha tested this game).
One of the things I worry about, as a critic, is turning into one of those people who says everything under the sun is a liminal space. It’s a cool-sounding phrase, sure, but it’s one of those concepts that can easily become a crutch, allowing one to say something that seems impressive but doesn’t communicate much beyond “this is a place that’s between other places”, which for sufficiently loose values of “place”, “between”, and “other” can be made to fit whatever you like.
Having written the above paragraph I am now seized with concern that actually I’m already one of those people and just haven’t noticed. …but OK, I just searched my IFDB-posted reviews and only 3 out of 387 use the phrase, referring to trains, bus stops, and public transit, which seems fairly restrained. So I think that means I can burn some of that banked capital and say you know, when you think about it, traveling circuses sure are liminal spaces. At a basic level, they move from place to place, but there’s also a temporal component, because when they’re pitched up somewhere and you visit, you’re sandwiched between its past nonexistence before they came into town and its future nonexistence once they leave. It’s unsurprising, then, that the circus is often positioned as a site of transformation: shuffling through my mental inventory of circus stories at random, you’ve got Big, where Tom Hanks literally enters one a boy and leaves a man; sticking to IF, Ballyhoo sees the player character lunge at the chance to stop being an anonymous punter and take on a new life of adventure.
For the people who work at a circus, though, it certainly can’t function as a one-off engine for change. In reality I’m sure for many it’s just a job like any other, but from a literary point of view, the approach taken by Honk! seems exactly right: the winning cast of this top-notch comedy puzzler are predominantly queer in one way or other, but comfortably so, at peace with an existence that the narrow might say is perennially in-between more conventional alternatives. The main character, a clown named Lola, takes hormone pills; her lover Freda is the circus strongwoman, gigantic and mighty and tender. The magician Adagio changes gender as part of her act, and the goose-trainer, Ken Lawn, clocks as neurodivergent (beyond his questionable decision to spend lots of time with an animal as ill-tempered as a goose as part of his profession, I mean). Against this, the Ringmaster seems a plain-vanilla kind of guy, but hey, he’s nice so we can let him skate by.
Actually pretty much everybody is nice, even initially-prickly Ken – except for the Phantom who’s haunting the circus and sabotaging everyone’s acts. The main business of the game involves assisting the three other main characters in their performances, seeing how the Phantom tries to wreck them, and foiling his plans to keep the shows moving (they’re endlessly repeatable until you succeed, this being a merciful game). This is a lovely structure, since it gives you multiple avenues to work on at once without any interdependences, so if you’re momentarily stymied you’ve almost always got another avenue to switch to. It also makes the player feel more proactive than in many parser games, since in practice you wind up scoping out the carnival grounds, then trying the acts to see what the Phantom’s going to do, then going back to the free-roaming section to hatch your plan and prepare.
Honk! is also among the funniest games in the Comp. The author’s a dab hand with farce – pretty much every scene involving the assholish goose left me giggling, for example:
“Completely asleep!” marvels Lawn. “I don’t believe it! How did yaargh fnaaargh,” he continues as the goose wakes up and bites his nose.
But there are also really good laconic, tossed-off jokes:
“It was your day off, you got back late, maybe you didn’t hear from anyone yet,” says the Ringmaster. “The circus is haunted now."
And the best gags to my mind are the ones that play their hand slow, telegraphing the punch line to the player and then drawing out the windup longer and longer and longer until an initially-good joke becomes sublime; it’s an impressive bit of comedic legerdemain that’s totally appropriate to the setting.
The puzzles themselves are a strong bunch, too. Most aren’t too hard, requiring just enough forethought to feel clever; there’s maybe one puzzle that’s a little too hard because it tips into overly-cartoonish territory (Spoiler - click to show)(the bit where a helium balloon makes the rabbit float upwards) but even that is mostly delightful and funny. In fact for all that it’s all mostly standard medium-dry-goods manipulation, the puzzles have a very strong thematic focus – the tools of your trade involve pie-throwing, making balloon animals, and playing around with magic tricks – that make Honk! truly feel like a circus game, not just a game taking place at a circus.
That strong theme comes into play in the ending, too; after a deliriously-escalating climactic sequence, the game’s final text ties a surprisingly-affecting bow around everything the game’s played with – queerness, found family, laughter, killjoys using the law to stop people doing stuff they don’t like. While it never lets its message get in the way of the fun, Honk! is the rare silly parser puzzler that actually has something to say, positing that people who live in liminal spaces deserve a place to call home, too.
Circus based parser game, full of fun and ingenuity, January 4, 2024(Note this is a review of the game version available mid competition)
This parser game sees you as a clown - armed with clown car, bendy balloons and custard pies - trying to beat a mysterious Phantom who is messing up the circus shows.
This was a lot of fun. Full disclosure: I used the walkthrough a bit to speed through some of the puzzles. There are also comprehensive in game hints. And it’s really smoothly coded.
The core part of the game centres around 3 main puzzles, which can be tackled in any order. After that there’s more to play.
The NPCs are neatly written and characterful. Interaction generally works well with them. And there is clever use of a limited number of objects scattered around the circus. One of the big puzzles especially is just sheer genius ((Spoiler - click to show)the goose one).
Nicely done. I do have a soft spot for a comedy themed game. Thanks!
Of geese and circus-people., December 19, 2023The ringmaster’s nerves are in tatters. Along with all the paperwork threatening to overwhelm him (and flood his camper), there’s now Phantom of The Circus sabotaging the crowd-drawing main acts of the show! As the clown of the troupe, surely you have the necessary skill set to save the spectacle…
Armed with naught but your brain and the tricks of your trade (balloons and pies), you must find out how exactly the Phantom succeeds in spoiling the performers’ acts and counteract his schemes. There’s a fair amount of freedom to do some clowning in the meanwhile, but I would have liked DANCE and SING and JUGGLE and JUMP to draw a bit more of a crowd. I loved some of the classic slapstick routines you can initiate while navigating your way through the crowds.
Honk ! consists of three thematically separate parts. The player is free to mix and mingle these though, there’s no pressure to tackle them in any prescribed order.
I opted to treat the parts as distinct chapters:
The NPCs’ campers are huddled close together, perfect for accessibility, and also to hear their stories one after the other, so as to form a coherent picture of what exactly this Phantom is up to. Dialogue happens through a menu of topics, but there are a bunch of freeform ASK ABOUT options too. Either way, the characters’ conversation goes beyond what is strictly necessary for your investigation. The personalities and the social dynamics within the circus are as much a talking point as the manner in which the Phantom disturbs the performances.
With the requisite knowledge about the saboteur’s modus operandi, I headed out to treat myself to a grand tour of the fair grounds. If you should feel an inclination to clown around, have at it! Your appearance alone will draw some looks, carrying around a certain object will necessarily cause some unintentional(?) slapstick antics, but it’s perfectly possible (and in-character!) to add a little more clownesque mayhem to the general hubbub. Just for the heck of it!
Finding (and safely acquiring) any objects you think you might need is fairly straightforward. Some are just lying there ready to be picked up, some need a bit of laid back puzzling. This is not a puzzle area. It’s for preparing the puzzles to come.
Hearing your circus friends accounts’ of how the Phantom goes about sabotaging their acts, combined with the objects you picked up on the circus grounds, should have given you a reasonable idea of what to expect and how to handle it, at least in broad strokes. I found that my plan for saving one of the performances worked exactly as I had imagined. The others needed a little tweaking. Luckily, after a failed attempt, there is a short “debriefing” with the circus artist involved where they point out how close you came to the solution.
Helping your colleagues get through their acts unscathed is all well and good, but the point is of course to thwart the villain’s attempts once and for all. The endgame turns out to be an action packed sequence where, when the player takes too long with certain actions, the game narrows the interactivity and proceeds the plot on its own. Tempo is more important than guessing the next move. This works brilliantly, and the final confrontation with the Phantom permits one final triumphant clown move.
I laughed a lot!
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2 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent comedy circus puzzle game, November 22, 2023I deeply enjoyed this game. It’s a well-scoped, polished parser game with a lot of humor.
The idea is that you are a circus clown at a circus that is being sabotaged by a villainous Phantom! You have three friends whose acts get sabotaged and you have to find a way to defeat the enemy.
Most of the puzzles revolve around finding creative uses of items, although there are also some other puzzle types like math.
The characters are pretty distinct and memorable, like the grumpy animal trainer or your ‘dense’ muscle bound girlfriend. There are a lot of hidden details in the game, like a character being trans.
Most of the puzzles made perfect sense, and hit the sweet spot between being non-obvious but not being too hard to figure out. I did get stuck on the rabbit puzzle, but once I got hints for it I realized that I just hadn’t experimented enough earlier. I enjoyed the payoff of the game name.
I like a circus setting for a parser game (Ballyhoo is one of my favorite Infocom works) and the pacing worked great here. Excellent work, deeply enjoyed it.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Honk if you love this game!, November 18, 2023This was fun! I completed it without using the walkthrough or any hints, which always makes me feel accomplished; the puzzles weren’t too easy, either, but were lightly challenging in an enjoyable way (and there was one I found especially clever). The circus setting was well-detailed; I especially liked the variety of useful props I acquired. The writing was funny (“The Ringmaster began his career as a tightrope walker, and to this day he’s still high-strung”), the NPCs were all distinctive, and I’ll always love an anti-greedy-developer plotline. I also really appreciated the casual queerness, e.g.:
You’ve watched her pull off many incredible feats over the years, among them pulling a rabbit out of a hat, sawing herself in half, transitioning her gender, and pulling a rabbit out of a different hat.
I do think it would have been a stronger game with a bit more polish. Some examples:
-Unimplemented nouns providing the classic “You see no [thing mentioned in room description] here.”
-Conversation options for each of the NPCs still showing up long after they don’t make sense anymore.
-While I liked each of the three acts being its own self-contained puzzle, being able to repeat them (endlessly?) after failing felt like it broke the narrative a bit, especially since you couldn’t discuss your failure with the involved performer at all.
-A portion of the end game sequence seemingly not having anything for the player to do besides wait.
I think a post-comp release could easily take care of these things, though, and make for a truly solid game.
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3 people found the following review helpful:
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, October 3, 2023I got to be a beta tester for Honk!, and the game blew me away.
The game takes place in and around a circus, where the performances are being sabotaged by a mysterious Phantom. You, Lola the Clown, must use your skills (mostly pie-throwing and nose-honking) to put a stop to it. The main portion of the gameplay is figuring out how to work through your circus mates' performances by using the tools you find around the carnival in creative ways. The performances can be solved in any order you want, and each has an engaging and fast-paced puzzle to go with it. You're also given as many chances as you need to get through one, and the respective performers have plenty of hints to offer, so it never feels like you're out of options.
Each of the characters are full of personality. The game shows this through letting you talk to them before, during, and after the performances, explore the inside of their campers, and giving each one unique speaking styles and idle actions. The first puzzle I chose to solve was with Freda the strongwoman, who happens to be your girlfriend. During her final show, lifting up an audience member, the Phantom shows up and turns out to be too heavy even for her. While the solution is inventive and one of the easier segments here, there's also a lot of ways for this to go wrong -- some of them involve hurting Freda, which made me feel guilty and forced me to go back, a testament to just how well this came sold me on its characters.
Ken Lawn's show was easily one of the funniest parts of the game for me, which is saying a lot. Lawn is a goose tamer who tries to have his goose tell a story for the audience (titled The Goose Who Ran Into Traffic And Got Hit By A Car) through hand motions -- but when the Phantom blindfolds the goose before the show, Lola has to use noises to get it to follow along. Lawn's oddly serious, no-nonsense personality contrasted with him desperately gesturing at a blindfolded goose had me laughing even when I was still figuring out the puzzle.
Adagio the magician also has her magic show sabotaged. The Phantom steals her method of escape when she ties herself up and lowers herself into a tank of water, forcing you to think fast and come up with an alternate solution to cut the rope. I liked the solution here a lot: (Spoiler - click to show)it makes use of a lot of small parts you'll probably have noticed, but not known how to put together yet.
This game's jokes also bring it up a lot: multiple lines had me laughing out loud. One highlight would have to be the dialogue when Adagio is about to tell you how her magic trick works. Rather than keep it a secret, you can ask if you can tell Freda. Then Ken, then your boss, then your brothers, then the guy who runs the Monster Manor, then the goose... she says yes to that last one, at least. There's also plenty of fun to be had in throwing pies at whatever you can imagine. Default responses are practically nowhere, as the game responded accordingly to whatever I tried to do during my playthrough -- everything has a bit of extra flavor to it from Lola's perspective.
I don't want to go into the endgame portion too much, but I found it satisfying and everything comes together in the end. The one flaw I had was a janky mechanic involving the circus ring and how hard it was to get back up once you left -- but I hear that this has been addressed since I played it. With all this said, Honk! is a masterclass in working humor, puzzles, and characters I care about all in one easily-accessible package. There's no objectionable content here and nothing is scary, it's very kid-friendly! I'd recommend it to anyone.
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