Reviews by Joey Jones
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Surprisingly effective, November 7, 2015It gradually won me over with its minimalist charms. It successfully carries the style of many of the older dungeoncrawlers filled with thematic discontinuities (i.e. a mismash of whatever thing the developer thought of next), and so I was initially unimpressed but the stinger at the end made the journey worthwhile.
Minimalist Tarot, November 6, 2015Neat use of the constraint, gives appropriate advice for each draw, draws seem appropriately random, pictures are a nice addition. A small concept expertly realised.
Combinatorial Storytelling, October 29, 2015This is bathetic Lovecraftian horror-comedy in much the same register as Hunger Daemon. The replay-to-get-all-the-endings structure isn't as tedious as in some games as the work is very short. Ideally, the different section's text would be dependent on the order of selection so that the acts more organically lead up to the various endings. But for what it is, it's competently written and the different endings were all about equally engaging. (Spoiler - click to show)I liked the conceit of the ritual being so unclear as to have wildly different results depending on how its performed.
If you think this might be your cup of tea, then it's definitely worth playing.
Patanoir: Like Chocolate Wine, September 22, 2015The following review was for the original competition game. I replayed the later release and it easily deserves 4 stars (4.5 even?) and so I've adjusted my rating up accordingly.
Patanoir is like chocolate flavoured wine: interesting, unique, not to everyone's tastes and too much of it is likely to give you a headache. But either way you'll be pleased you tried it.
I probably played PataNoir for more than two hours on and off. It was good enough for me to bother finishing but not good enough for me not to resort to using the walkthrough a few times. The name 'PataNoir' is taken from the word 'pataphor'. Some people might object that a pataphor is a metaphor but the game deals in similes, but my contention after studying the various philosophy of language arguments about metaphor is that a metaphor is just a truncated simile. So I approve of the name.
I love the concept of the game: similes coming to life such that they can be manipulated to solve puzzles. There were some issues in the implementation. A lot of it made me smile. The writing is very sparse, similes aside, but sometimes it works. Simon is obviously going for the Chandler style patter and occasionally he gets it right.
The game was blessedly free of typos and grammar mistakes. My overall impression of PataNoir was that it's a neat idea, mostly well implemented- with some puzzles overhinted at and some nearing impossible without the (mostly excellent) in-game hint mechanism. This is surely a sign that the puzzles were hard to hint for as they weren't very naturalistic, which I suppose is an inherent danger in a surreal game. I'm glad the game was made, and it's exactly the sort of game that lends itself to non-IF players as a good example of the possibilities of IF. I wouldn't recommend it first, but then I wouldn't recommend it last.
Charming-- sometimes too charming, January 31, 2013The Book of Living Magic is a short and easy graphical point-and-click adventure game with a zany fantasy setting, aimed at a younger audience. It's chief draw is the wealth of examinable discrete scenery objects, rewarding exploration. The over-arching plot is sweet, if a tad ham-fisted at times. The conversation system could do with being more organic: typically, you can talk about most things before knowing why they're relevant. The tone of the piece wavers around the zany/sentimental border, with slight nods to the macabre (especially with the cat). I don't regret playing it.
More Branches Than a Shrub, August 7, 2012Related reviews: nodal narratives, scarcely warranted enthusiasm, early morning reviews, late night reviews, run on sentences
Myriad steps towards the kind of branching story I always wanted to read: to hell with merging nodes, I want full bifurcation, 24/7; and Porpentine obviously also heard the sirens of unreasonable work-load calling and dove into the pools of unending possibilities and dragged out this strangle-weeded narrative, a pocket of infinities. The quality is high, mostly consistently so; for most of it I was thinking 'Yeah, this is pretty good, I can see what she's doing here, blah blah, blah,' but then I played the scorpion queen section, which borders on being a puzzle, and it was okay; BUT THEN, then afterwards the denouement hit me like the well crafted metaphor that it was and I felt compelled to give it a write up pronto-like.
[So uh, don't waste time not reading Myriad when you could be reading Myriad. For me, (and I love-hate star ratings) this would have been a five star experience if my jaw hadn't taken four play-throughs to drop.]
Florid, Baroque, Masochistic, June 2, 2012The Algophilists' Penury must take the award as the most arcane and prolix of interactive fictions, and I've played a bit of Gamlet. Jon Stall has a vocabulary almost equal to the greatest of verbose authors (Mary Shelley and her perquisitions and purlieues comes to mind) and he employs it in the most prevaricatory of stories. The protagonist of his tale is a strange collective who are looking back (possibly from beyond the grave) on their time when they were woefully poor and engaged in depravities.
For a game ostensibly about masochism, it does a very job of punishing the player. Foremost, there is the viciously opaque language that forces all but the most erudite of players to struggle to put together meaning. And then what little of the scant gameplay there is pushes the player to fully embrace the role of the algophilists. In the end, they are a collective formed by all those that play the game.
Unfortunately, the game as it is is very short with low implementation. It leans heavily on the novel default past tense first person plural responses offered by Ron Newcomb's custom library messages extension. Also, where it says 'soubriquets' in the text (a just about acceptable variant), the game actually only understands 'sobriquets'. Jon has released the game into the public domain along with its source, so perhaps we'll see some Algophilist remixes in the future.
Charming Exection (for a Speed-IF), May 12, 2012A Minimum Wag Job is charmingly executed for a game probably written in less than two hours. The game sort of presumes that you clear each room in an east to west order- and lays down clues to help you build a picture of what to do at the game's conclusion. As such, given the sparsity of possible successful actions in the game, it does a good job of signalling what sort of thing would be successful.
This is a Speed IF in which you may well die several times before completion, and the nature of the death is such that you have to restart the game each time. This is no great hardship as the successful solution can be achieved in less than a minute.
As a game qua game, I couldn't give it more than 2 stars, but as an example of the Speed IF genre it's a solid 3, especially in its clever integration of the conceits of the Speed IF challenge.
Also, I'm definitely using the word 'flugulate' in my everyday speech!
(''flugulate'' (floo-gyu-layt), v.i.: To run about wildly in an attempt to catch a piece of paper that has been caught up in a breeze)
Great Little Puzzler, May 5, 2012Fingertips: Fingertips is a first class little multi-layered cryptographical puzzler with a richly evoked science fiction setting that neatly makes the one move requirement make sense.
It's the kind of game that you need to write notes on (or uh, at least I did), and has different solutions such that when you find the better solution, the work involved getting there has made it that much more satisfying.
A Game for the Status Bar, April 16, 2012The best part of the game is the fun riff it has with casual gaming themes like achievements, meters and bars for all sorts of things. There are great jokes here. I recommend playing the game for a half dozen turns and just look at the status bar.
The game itself is difficult in unsatisfying ways: it's often thinly implemented and it requires arbitrarily trying out commands from a long list of possible commands. Despite it being an escape-the-room game, the set up fails to give any particular motivation or direction for doing so.
The only npc exists only to annoy you, in which it is fairly successful, and what with its constant jabbering and the swarm of useless info on the status bar and humongous text dumps all over the place, the game feels very claustrophobic and cluttered. Which you'd think would be good for an escape-the-room game, but as the whole thing is so unmotivated, the clutter doesn't serve any narrative or thematic purpose. It's just sort of painful.
That all said, the creative use of the status bar throughout is inspired, and it's possible that there's a compelling game underneath all the clutter. Maybe it would appeal more to those well steeped in the conventions of escape-the-room games.
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