Reviews by Emily Short
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Barebones race game, June 17, 2012Sloth on a Stroller is a racing game in which you are competing against a tortoise on a tricycle. Play consists of applying gas, brakes, and nitro at appropriate times on a racing course; the status bar indicates where you and your opponent are, as well as your current speed of travel. It's possible to end the game in a number of ways, though my best outcome was a tie.
Simple-verb, mechanical games can work in IF, and at its best, this could have been something reminiscent of Textfire Golf or the racing minigame in Lost Islands of Alabaz.
I didn't enjoy Sloth as much as those other games, though, and I think that's because a) the writing and general atmosphere is comparatively bare, so I have less reason to invest in individual outcomes or derive enjoyment from non-winning states; and b) there wasn't much feedback about what I was doing wrong and what I might be able to improve. It was clear from the track layout that there were certain places where I really needed to be traveling at a particular speed, or applying gas or nitro. But even with careful notetaking and optimizing for speed against these restraints, as well as (Spoiler - click to show)solving a puzzle to oil my stroller wheels with olive oil, I am still unable to win the thing.
The same mechanics and puzzle enhanced with stronger feedback and more rewarding writing (even for the loss-state endings) would make for a much stronger game.
Dickensian parody, June 17, 2012The core mechanics of Olivia's Orphanorium are more reminiscent of time management-style games than typical IF puzzle fare.
Your task, as orphan master, is to decide how to spend money on food and devices (such as treadmills, baths, et al) that will in some fashion alter the discipline, vigour, appearance, or morale of the orphans in your charge. Undisciplined but vigorous orphans are more likely to escape; attractive and well-disciplined orphans are more likely to receive good jobs. Orphans with terribly low morale are likely to die. Good orphan outcomes mean more money for the player, while there is no profit from orphans who die or escape.
Most of the active gameplay consists of moving through the orphanage's three rooms (junior, middle, senior); washing and/or beating certain orphans; and assigning orphans to tasks, such as walking the treadmill. The risks and difficulty ramp up gradually. You start the game with just four orphans, but new ones are steadily assigned to the place until you're managing a significant number of them at a time.
One help I would have appreciated is a tabulated way to inspect the well-being of all my orphans at once, in order to decide which could most profitably be scrubbed and/or beaten that day. As it stands, as far as I can tell, one must go around examining them all. I also would have preferred if gameplay weren't so front-loaded with the task of reading the manual. The game starts with the player carrying multiple explanatory items, introducing the major concepts of the game, the commands you can use, and the catalogue of items you can buy. Players with a habit of thoroughness will probably read every entry in each of these manuals before beginning play. They are entertaining reading, which helps, but I think I might have preferred to have the catalogue of purchasable items introduced after a few days of gameplay, since a) none of the items available for sale are going to be affordable sooner than that anyhow and b) this would have spaced out the amount of looking-up necessary, and made sure I received the catalogue *after* I already understood enough about the concepts of discipline, vigour, etc., to know what I might need.
To enliven the core play elements, Orphanorium also features a series of special tasks or missions that pop up every day or two. These typically involve some sort of amusing event, and require the player to do something slightly more puzzle-oriented than the main gameplay: search the grounds for a stolen treasure, for instance, or identify an appropriate orphan to perform a particular special task.
After you've processed thirty orphans, you will be subject to a Periodic Assessment, which tallies up your success so far and assigns you an ending. For me, that was just about right -- the Assessment occurred just at the point when I was slightly starting to wonder whether the game had an end, but before I had gotten tired of it.
Orphanorium might sound like the sort of game that ought to be graphical rather than textual. But most of the pleasure of the game comes from the rich genre parody and descriptions. The catalogue items you can buy to enliven your orphanage, the environment, and the orphans themselves are all described with a consistently tongue-in-cheek mock-Victorian voice, taking the line that children benefit from frequent beatings and near-toxic baths. The actual mechanics of the game are more humane, however, as it is generally most effective to (Spoiler - click to show)feed your children the best, most fattening gruel and to refrain from using The Box for discipline.
So the text-out aspect is definitely a strength for Orphanorium. I'm a little more uncertain about whether the parser is ideal; there were times when the typing got a bit longwinded. Most commands are of the same type and there is little occasion to try out new verbs except, occasionally, during unusual story events. To be fair, the potential tedium of assigning every orphan in a room to a task is considerably reduced by the fact that you can use ASSIGN ALL TO TASK -- but I didn't discover this point until late in the game. A note about this in the instructions might help, or (better, I think) the game could detect whether the player had assigned multiple characters in a row and issue a hint message about combining those into one command.
Overall, Orphanorium is an unusual construct for IF, but it's solid, engaging, and amusingly written. Do not expect difficult puzzles or a strong narrative arc, just a lot of exploration of a particular milieu and mindset.
Four-star implementation of a two-star experience, June 16, 2012IFDB Spelunking replicates Joey Jones' experience playing (or trying to play) all ten games in a "10 random games" list from IFDB. Of the games on the list, two are in non-English languages, a couple are in obscure formats that are a challenge to play, and one is pornographic; several of the others are just really bizarre or really shoddy.
Joey's footnotes and hints make several of these games easier to get through: for instance, I was stuck in the playthrough of Minimum Wage Job (otherwise one of the more accessible of the games on the list), but was able to rely on nudges that presumably aren't in the original game. From time to time he also offers some amusing commentary, though not by any means at MST3K quantities.
On the other hand, the nature of the game means that you *can't* go on and finish the games that Joey himself didn't get through -- so even if you read French or German and would be curious to go further with those games, Joey quickly backs out, and you will have to do so as well. (At least it's possible to download the original games from IFDB and go on with them if you are intrigued.)
Spelunking also allows you to bring away your final inventory from each game and continue to carry it in the next. This is where a majority of the invention and entertainment come from. There are various gags that involve wearing inappropriate clothing in the wrong game, for instance, or having tools that a particular game isn't expecting you to possess.
These features are entertaining, but the overall experience still necessarily feels pretty haphazard. I think I might have derived more value from a guided tour of a series of games that the author thought fit together particularly well, or had some merits despite being low-rated -- but that would have missed the point entirely.
Given Joey's essential premise of committing to whatever ten games popped up on a random list, he managed to create a more accessible and enjoyable rendition of that experience than going through that list first-hand would have been. It's also pitched as an encouragement to other people to go IFDB Spelunking. I don't quite have Joey's patience -- I certainly wouldn't have downloaded some of those emulators just to be able to play games that had gotten negative reviews to start with -- but he certainly makes a case for the diversity of the IF back catalog.
Muggle Studies is a Harry Potter fanfic in IF form, designed -- so far as I can tell -- as an introduction to IF for Harry-Potter-loving fans. To that end, it doesn't do anything terribly shocking from an IF perspective, but introduces a variety of common types of puzzle much in the way that Mrs Pepper's Nasty Secret does. To ease in new players, "Muggle Studies" comes with detailed instructions, a complete hint system, and a sample transcript (rather deliciously, one that riffs brutally on "Twilight"). Parser improvements via Aaron Reed's extensions correct common errors and clean up minor typos for the player, making for a smooth interaction experience.
There are a few odd decisions in the puzzle design. I ran into one guess the verb problem ((Spoiler - click to show)I tried PUT SCARF ON THESTRAL rather than GIVE SCARF TO THESTRAL, and this wasn't recognized as a solution at all; it's also a little strange that the scarf isn't marked as something you can wear, since this seems an obvious thing to experiment with.); several other puzzles are things you can solve by going outside the game before or instead of finding the solutions internally, which might or might not be considered a defect.
"Muggle Studies" also makes use of several outright riddles, something I haven't seen much in recent IF, saving one room in the esoteric "Ted Paladin and The Case of the Abandoned House". Riddles make somewhat tricky IF fare, because they tend to have no connection to an implemented world model and have no hinted feedback on partial failure states; you can't typically solve a riddle puzzle by progressive experimentation. Fortunately the riddles in "Muggle Studies" are confined to one particular puzzle area and are fairly consistent in concept, so the effect is fairer and more accessible than it might be.
These quibbles aside, however, "Muggle Studies" is solidly crafted: I didn't run into any obvious bugs, and it deals cleanly with flashbacks, conversation, and other potentially challenging elements. A nice set of feelies rounds out the package, and I was fortunate to get a copy of the Collector's Edition, in physical form: a handsome black envelope containing the letters and brochures that are also available by PDF.
As story, "Muggle Studies" feels somewhat limited. There's the shell of something here. It's not a story that would stand very well on its own. Too much is unexplained, I think, for a reader who doesn't know the Potterverse to follow, or to have much investment in it, but there's certainly a concept: the protagonist is a non-wizard introduced unexpectedly to the wizarding world, and the story involves the injustices of certain wizard laws, together with the protagonist's relationship with her ex-girlfriend. Questioning the rules of a well-known story -- and thus the preconceptions of the audience that accepts and admires that story -- is one of the more interesting functions of fanfic, from Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" back to Euripides' Electra.
But "Muggle Studies" doesn't so much richly explore the question of muggle/wizard relations as raise it in a short essay at the end. Because the majority of the puzzle content takes place in an abandoned Hogwarts, there's not much opportunity to interact with the major characters except during framing elements at the beginning, in flashbacks, and at the conclusion. The end does give the player the chance to make significant decisions one way or another, but it doesn't necessarily feel very well connected to the more objects-and-puzzles substance of the midgame. In addition, there's a bit of a player-protagonist disconnect, as the player is likely to know quite a bit more than the protagonist. (Spoiler - click to show)Some of this is because the player may have read Harry Potter before and recognize all the characters; a large part, however, is that the protagonist is shown as failing to notice the clue-by-fours that the narrative is laying on the player. Thus it's clear to the player very early on that both the protagonist's grandmother and her girlfriend were witches, but the protagonist continues not to realize this officially until the end. And because we've spent so little time with the major characters, the player is unlikely to feel as strongly about the protagonist's girlfriend as the story deserves.
The other thing I found myself missing in "Muggle Studies" was an in-depth exploration of Hogwarts as a place and the inhabitants, present or not. The protagonist is a muggle and so cannot do any magic; none of the spells of Harry Potter are available in play. This is probably a safe design decision, since J. K. Rowling's concept of magic is so wildly inconsistent as to be a real bear to implement, and includes such puzzle-breaking powers as the ability to unlock any lock, to fetch any object from a distance, and to produce water from nowhere.
Even with those constraints, though, it would have been nice to see a little more about the personalities and history of the canonical characters. As it is, we get a peek in Lupin's diary and a visit to Snape's classroom, but in neither case are there many hints of the owners' personalities. (Spoiler - click to show)Another missed opportunity was Filch's catalog of detention cards. While it was fun to look through the catalog and find items at random, it would have been more rewarding to be able to look up specific characters and find their records: this kind of content rewards the in-the-know player for demonstrating familiarity with the series, but someone with less background won't even notice it.
All of this is not to say "Muggle Studies" is a poor game. On the contrary, it's well above average in implementation and polish, a substantial debut piece, and the extras show a lot of love and enthusiasm. But I consistently felt that it could have been significantly more impressive if the human content and the puzzle content had been better unified, and Hogwarts given a richer texture. Perhaps the result would have been less of a pattern card of typical IF interaction styles, but it would also have been a better interactive story.
Surreal, in a good way, April 11, 2012If you like escape the room puzzle games and you didn't get enough of Dr. Sliss in Rogue of the Multiverse, this game is for you.
According to the odd premise, you're the a subject in a pavlovian test being run by a dog, and must perform tasks meeting your training requirements. The tasks in question mostly require thorough searching and obedience to the game's not-very-subtle precepts, though there are a couple of puzzles that require a bit more sideways thinking to separate the quest objects from their surroundings. (Spoiler - click to show)I particularly enjoyed the solution to finding the one real pear in the bucket of wax pears. Though it's not an extremely long game, there's enough there to keep a player occupied for 45 minutes or so; this would not have been conspicuously undersized as a comp game.
Overall it's a very solidly made and tested piece. I didn't run into any bugs or situations where the parser patently should have been more intelligent, and there were many points where it was possible to refer to objects that were only figuratively present and still get some kind of interesting response.
What really sets this game apart, however, is its particular humor and narrative voice. Most of the game's major objects are things referred to in the They Might Be Giants song of the same name -- enough so that the song could almost serve as a walkthrough for most of the elements. More than that, though, the narration is often self-conscious and fourth-wall-breaking in order to deliver a payload of puns, references, and commentary. Those familiar with Polodna's blog posts and reviews will have a pretty good idea of whether they're likely to enjoy such asides. (I did.)
The game's final point is moderately noteworthy as well. (Spoiler - click to show)After a sequence of puzzles in which the player is railroaded into finding but not eating a series of foodstuffs, the game gives the player a chance to eat some cake; but rewards him with a final point and a different ending for choosing to follow his accustomed conditioning and setting the cake aside instead of eating it. It would probably be a stretch to claim that this is a serious commentary on agency and player conditioning, but it was a more memorable outcome than I had expected.
Some rough edges, but amusing, March 13, 2012It Is Your Responsibility is a short(ish) puzzle game about your protagonist's wild attempts to accomplish a task whose purpose is never clear, in a dystopian futuristic bureaucracy. The puzzles are mostly about smashing things up and recombining objects in slightly startling ways.
There are a few rough spots: a hatch can be referred to or discovered by accident before the game properly introduces it, and a few verbs give misleading failure messages until you use them in exactly the right way. (Spoiler - click to show)If the game tells you that putting something on the shard is useless, persist anyway -- you just haven't found the right object yet. Many of the puzzles I solved in reverse order, first noticing that something could be done with an object and only later realizing why that might have been useful to do. The design does have its strengths as well, however: the game does a good job of pointing the player towards usefully interactive objects, and it is so compact that it's hard to get too terribly lost. As far as I could tell, it is not possible to put the game into an unwinnable state.
The presentation of the game adds to the appeal. The Quixe website is attractive and has a handy hint list, and the comments on the Youtube trailer suggest that a number of players enjoyed the game despite little previous exposure to IF. Customized fonts and cover art help dress the piece up.
It Is Your Responsibility reminded me a little of Ryan Veeder's You've Got A Stew Going! It's not as thoroughly polished as Veeder's work, but the scope of the story and the tone and style of the puzzles were similar. Overall, not a bad debut work.
"Out of Babylon" is an interactive version of one of those leaflets that you sometimes get handed at street corners when you haven't done a good enough job of avoiding eye contact.
It lays out a scenario in which the Pope is planning to change the world's calendar in 2012 so that one day a year is "World Day" and isn't a day of the week. That throws the whole seven-day cycle off, and when this happens, it becomes more difficult for people to celebrate the true Sabbath correctly. The player's choices all revolve around whether to worship and whether to do so on the new, Pope-approved Sundays. (Spoiler - click to show)Hint: worship yes; Pope calendar no. Get that wrong and you'll wind up in the Resurrection of the Wicked at the end, which appears to be some sort of zombiepocalypse event. Meanwhile, the end days are at hand, with lots of meteors and earthquakes and unexplained disasters. Did the calendar change bring this on, or is it just a coincidence?
There's a lot about this piece that I don't really understand. Is it sincerely meant? It felt to me like a spoof -- not least because I hadn't heard the slightest rumor of some kind of 2012 calendar normalization plan before I played this piece -- but then when you get to the end of the story, you can click through to a whole informative website full of Bible quotes and lunar phase diagrams that explain the author's theories about which days to keep as Sabbath. I suppose the website could be a giant feelie for the spoof, but overall I came away thinking that perhaps the author sincerely believes this line of argument.
That raises a secondary question, which is: if you actually think the world is under threat because of an imminent blasphemous calendar revision, why use choose your own adventure to get the word out? Pedestrian leafletting is probably a better bet. Possibly the thinking was that the interactive story about being eternally damned would be more persuasive than a leaflet, but, well, it really didn't feel that way to me, because the horrible events that happen to the protagonist are so lightly sketched in, and the choices offered are so heavy-handed.
In any case, I have the same problem with this piece that I do with most propaganda of its ilk: I just don't believe in a deity who would judge people in such a way that the only way to avoid eternal torture is to solve some tricky calendrical riddles embedded in Leviticus -- and if I did believe in such an entity, I wouldn't have a high opinion of its goodness and loving kindness.
It's not clear to me that interactivity adds much of value to the author's argument. If anything, I think it increases the moral disconnect. (Spoiler - click to show)Not least because the only options for reacting to the death of my whole family in a car crash are to thank God for sparing me, or to feel lucky.
Small but effective, July 12, 2011The premise: you're a rat trying to gather ingredients for a stew, since your friend has put together the broth but is too lazy to assemble anything else.
In gameplay, this is essentially a treasure hunt for food items, but the tiny, ratly world is entertainingly realized, complete with suggestions of internal rodent politics and their attitudes towards the world of humans. The narration breaks the fourth wall quite a few times, sometimes to give the player direct advice about how to play, sometimes just for amusement's sake. It works, though.
Overall, "You've Got a Stew Going!" is short and easy -- I don't think it took me more than fifteen minutes to win the first time -- but what's there is solid and reasonably polished, with snappy retorts to a number of odd attempted actions. It's possible to win with 5/6 points, and played that way, it's a lightweight charmer suitable for kids.
Getting the last point of the game changes the complexion of the whole experience a bit. (Spoiler - click to show)To get full points, you have to first rescue your friend Fran's pet cockroach, and then "borrow" it back... and stew it. So much for warm fuzzy happy fetch quests! Fran is broken-hearted, but your stew is de-licious. It's kind of genius the way this makes the game a sappy, frilly kids' game unless or until it occurs to you to act horrible. And then it rewards that horribleness. Considering that the piece contains a reference to 9:05, I think that's probably the real point of the thing. But you don't have to go there if you don't want to.
Death a la Pratchett, July 11, 2011A Fine Day for Reaping presents the player as a semi-competent Death. The game's puzzles turn on the idea that Death doesn't really have particularly supernatural abilities: your challenge is to make sure that the people who are supposed to die do so on time. This is a somewhat embarrassing predicament for Death to be in, and the game makes the most of it; the required actions are occasionally a bit goofy and undignified. Most of the puzzles have multiple solutions, however, which keeps the game reasonably playable.
What stands out about the piece is the humor and the flashes of excellence in the writing. Sometimes reminiscent of Pratchett, the text works in a number of fine jokes, especially on the topic of what it's like to be a very tall thin skeletal man.
Parsing issues were the most common problem when I played (and these may have been addressed in post-competition releases). Nonetheless, the game as a whole is entertaining light comedy of a flavor that's not terribly common in IF. Worth a try.
Early Slice of Life, July 11, 2011Though listed as fantasy, this game departs from most contemporary fantasy tropes and focuses on the magical in the real world. Sunset Over Savannah is the story of a man disenchanted with his current life and work, spending some time at the beach and rethinking his situation. It's an almost entirely inward journey: the protagonist's mood changes over the course of the story, and he begins to think about ways to improve his life.
What makes this story so enjoyable is the lush, detailed setting and the sense of wonder with which it approaches seemingly mundane details. Savannah's beach, as seen here, is a surprising and beautiful place with surprising set pieces (Spoiler - click to show)such as a sandcastle made and apparently fused into glass by tiny sea creatures.
Supporting all this is a lot of hard technical work. Sunset Over Savannah allows the player interactions that most games would rule out because of the technical complexities of coding: there are passages set underwater, interactions with liquid and sand, ropes and tie-able objects. All of these things generally work, and work in a way that isn't fiddly or annoying for the player to specify; the result is the feeling of a very tangible, viscerally accessible world, where it is possible to affect the environment in precise ways. Few other IF games -- or other games of any kind -- offer quite this experience.
There's a lot of prose to read in this game, and the puzzles are not all easy, so it does require some commitment from the player. What's there is well worth exploring, though, rewarding the time you have to give it.
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