Reviews by Hanon Ondricek
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Interesting co-authored scenario, June 14, 2015As the title states, you have breakfast on a wagon with your partner in this short scenario, but who your partner is and what actually is going on around the wagon is up to the choices made by clicking through a rotating set of possibilities. It feels a little like an improv scenario in an acting class, or a setup for a longer game (which would be nearly impossible due to some of the widely varying choices that you can inflict on the world). It reminded me a bit of Emily Shorts Holography where each choice sharpens the focus by slicing huge swaths of unchosen material out of a (not really, but seemingly) limitless singularity of potential. A fun story toy, and a good example of the type of experimental co-creative writing that is possible in IF.
I only perused the demo to check this out (so I am not scoring the game). This is a standard "wake up with amnesia - zombies are attacking your location" scenario, however the writing seems pretty good, and I got a very strong sense of atmosphere...aided by the ambient soundtrack and scare chords when something attacks.
There is what seems like a battle system, and a unique interface that I like a lot: Every word in the story is a potential hyperlink, so interacting feels more like searching and investigating rather than lawnmowering through pre-set choices. The player can click any permutation of "you" or "your" to see inventory. Text that pops up with a block around it is a non-interactive description and can be clicked to return to the previous passage, but this block text is also sometimes combined with text outside that allows the reader to interact closely with the examined object.
I'd love if this system were an Inform extension or its own touch-based fiction system along the lines of Texture.
Twine 2's "Harlowe" format is the default, and it's so much nicer than "Sugarcane" which was the previous default format. Harlowe sports black on white, large, serif text.
This game is not completed yet, but the author made it public on IFDB and requested feedback. Therefore I'm not giving it a star rating.
I thought this would be a zombie story the way it sets up. You are in an elevator and can only choose to go to the first floor. You exit the elevator and there are dead and dying everywhere. Somehow the protagonist turns out to be a doctor. In my sequence I defibrillated a dying patient (glad I knew what I was doing) and she vomited all over me. The staff member helping asks if I want coffee.
There are lots of typos, lots of dropped punctuation, lots of missed capitalization, lots of missed commas inside quotation marks. The writing seems reasonably competent in what can only be considered a first draft. My feedback is "fix the typos, finish the game."
I would highly encourage (with all respect) this author to find a Twine or IF community and solicit beta-testing in the future before submitting work here, as IFDB is usually the place for a finished product. Good places to find help and beta testing would be the intfiction.org forums and the twinery.org forums.
I had feels too., May 7, 2015I'm always reluctant to play altgames. For my purposes, an an "altgame" is an interactive experience which has an active purpose to illustrate a alternate point of view or teach the player about a a problem, often using a type of gameplay as metaphor. The point of the this is almost never to entertain, but hopefully promote understanding and illuminate an uncomfortable situation the player might not be completely familiar with. Depression Quest is probably the most famous altgame.
Altgames are hard to write, as it is so completely easy to step over one of the many intricate narrow lines and overdo pathos, or reduce a situation to complete absurdity. Absurdity can work in a game's favor, but is its own delicate balancing act.
Hana Feels sidesteps much standard awkwardness with solid, honest writing, and by not casting the reader as the protagonist. Instead, the reader has several conversations with Hana, reacting as different people in her life. Hana then spells out her own reaction to the encounter in her journal based on the choices made.
I was moved, and I was compelled to replay four times to get the best ending. The thing I learned is (Spoiler - click to show)sometimes the worst thing you can do for a person in turmoil is to actively try to solve their problem for them. Listening without judgement is often the best course of action. I found the friend very hard to roleplay because there isn't a way for her not to get angry and push Hana too hard. (Game-wise, it seems you need to play the previous conversations leading up to this one well enough so Hana has enough positive reinforcement not to take the bad experience so poorly.)
Often a person is too close to another person to act successfully as their pseudo psychiatrist, and accepting that one can not always be a white knight is hard for any friend to swallow.
Very recommended.
What you get for Trick or Treating at Todd Solondz's house..., May 2, 2015PaperBlurt makes very impressively designed Twines. This seems to be a collection of random bits all put together. It's a mixed bag - there are a few short little games reminiscent of Wario Ware, there are several short stories ranging from a lengthy pun to a disturbing tale of kidnapping and escape. There are two apocalyptic logs filled with loneliness. Like the majority of PB's work, these are stories made in Twine, not games - I don't think there's ever an option besides "click to continue" There's a couple of times where the author's preferred "continue" link is an ellipsis and sometimes three dots are hard to find. The story "Ines" is the most triggerworthy and contained the most typos - consistently "chock" for shock and "quite" for quiet and a couple more. This all adds up to a surreal and absurd and sometimes funny but occasionally disturbing jukebox which will entertain you if you're in the mood for PaperBlurt's unique brand of WTF?
One of the best examples of how Twine can work, May 2, 2015Instead of moving through a story, this is interactive text that morphs and changes, and you experience a full change of setting based on how you poke at the text, and the text changing itself based on timers. It lasts the length of a song and it's over. Some people could be driven crazy by constantly changing text "I didn't get to read that!!" but this definitely lends a feeling of life and movement to static prose that suggests ways of making IF in Twine more dynamic and random and alive. It's delightful how if you examine the rabbits they run away, but then come back. I would love a developed game/story that used this atmospheric technique.
ANY TIME YOU WANT IT: SNACKYTIME, May 1, 2015Don't use that one. That one's mine. And you're a copy-writer, not a copy-paster.
This is a really neat and original idea with lots of obvious knowledge of the industry. I enjoyed trying to come up with slogans for for a very unhelpful ad agency.
Unfortunately late in the game, the creative director's office just kept leading to a blank screen. Glitch? Or did he go home for the day?
I got the point, but I am sorry I didn't seem to get to the finale. Or maybe that's the point?
I really would have loved to have seen a list of my responses at the end - or even some other people's ideas to see how they evolve. I'd even like to try some different campaigns with different weird parameters.
Don't read any spoilers. Solve this absorbing mystery., April 12, 2015Dogs have superior olfactory abilities, and this game simulates that. Scents have memories attached, and you can explore scent-memories and the entire world of a case and solve it from one room as Sherlock Holmes's dog. This is a great use of a "Castle of the Red Prince" style approach, which the author notes is intentional.
There's no time limit or pressure as Toby reviews scents and memories. The case can be solved by guessing right on the first turn, but definitely don't try that. I accused everyone *but* the right person. Well, I didn't accuse Holmes or Watson. Needless to say, great mystery, great game. Only a few tiny minor disambiguations to be expected (Spoiler - click to show)such as opium pipes and church organ pipes but nothing I found that ruined the game.
Another for the fans, I guess?, February 23, 2015Anyway, you got your typical Porpentine urban/medieval/futuristic dirty/slimy/barren wasteland which reveals itself interestingly by adding interaction words to a menu as you explore. If you LISTEN in the first area, that lets you GOSSIP and then SKULK, and you have access to an increasing list of areas where you can LISTEN, GOSSIP, and SKULK and acquire new buttons like KEY and DEVOTION and HORROR. Basically each one of these is potentially a sensory description of the location you are in and an action, but you won't know until you click, and it doesn't matter because there's not much you're going to do wrong by just clicking. Getting new interaction words and then revisiting locations where you didn't have them before is the bulk of exploration. I never felt like I was doing anything intelligently with this, just click every interaction, find a new area, go to that one and click every word, loop back if I have a word I didn't try in an original area. I like this as a prototype for a larger work.
Porpentine excels at visceral imagery and making Twine do what she wants. I don't think she's interested in story cohesion or character development. Perhaps it's a flavor you either get or you don't, and this type of thing over and over is obviously not intended for me. I appreciate and admire the imagination and HTML skills that go into her works, but I don't feel in any way affected at the end as many other people are. Does that make me a monster?
Not bad, Incomplete, February 1, 2015Howwl is a choice-based game, but the interface is interesting. It sort of looks like a Wordpress site with pictures. Beneath the description are a list of parsery-type things to do, which seemed quite satisfying. Everything you'd probably want to try in this situation is presented. You have an inventory, and choices to use items you have show up automatically without you needing to fiddle with them in the inventory.
The story says it's "loosely apocalyptic" but I'd say it's fully apocalyptic. You start in an abandoned apartment with no memory or idea who you are or why you're there. You do the expected scavenging, and encounter several odd creatures pulled from mythology and art. Helpfully, the story links to information about the creatures or items you find with pictures. If you're not sure what a molotov cocktail is, there's the wikipedia entry.
It's very nicely done. The writing is straightforward and dead-serious without any IF wacky. I got through the game basically lawnmowering choices waiting for something interesting or explanatory as to what kind of apocalypse this was (museum of art paintings suddenly come to life and eat the populace?) but then I hit a message saying "End of beta ###". It was a little disappointing, but an example of a smart balance between parser and choice systems.
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