Reviews by Christina Nordlander
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(Disclosure: I participated in EctoComp 2016.)
The Curious Incident at Blackrock Township is a short Twine story about a witch trial in colonial North America, told entirely through snippets from contemporary and later documents.
Historical fiction seems to be a comparatively rare genre in IF, which makes me all the happier when I find a game that lets me immerse myself in an alien time period. Witch trials are a concept that's hard to screw up when it comes to good drama, and I'm always a fan of the "found document" gimmick, which is used excellently here.
I'm not a historian of 17th century America, but the story feels well-researched. My only major nitpick with the storyline is that (Spoiler - click to show)I find it hard to believe that Ezola would be allowed to go free for denouncing Hopkins; to me it seems more likely that they would both have been executed. That said, again, I'm not an expert on witch trials, and perhaps that has indeed happened. (As a minor nitpick, I also find it hard to believe that a Puritan would name one of his children "Diffidence".)
The documents, both contemporary and those of later historians, are well-written and catch an authentic tone. Some of the 17th century spelling felt hokey to me, even taking into consideration the lack of standardised English spelling in that era. (I'm particularly dubious about the spelling "tortor" for "torture".) However, that seems like something that would be difficult to get right in a 3-hour time span - and, to repeat myself, perhaps some of the weirder spellings come straight out of actual documents from the time.
Ezola's character is nicely sketched in a brief space. The horrors are hinted at in a matter-of-fact way, making them stick in the mind better than any melodrama or explicit gore could have done. While many of the passages just have a single link leading to the next one, there is a reasonable amount of interactivity for such a short story.
For all that, I came away feeling vaguely unsatisfied. It felt like the game simply didn't add much to distinguish itself from other witch-hunt stories. The hints in some endings that (Spoiler - click to show)Ezola was indeed a witch is a twist that has been done before. There is some interesting potential in the concept that the player gets to influence events that are already set down by historians and should thus be immutable, but this isn't really given much emphasis in the text.
Well worth playing: for starters, it's a setting and genre that is relatively rare in IF, with a dark, interesting and well-written (my misgivings about some of the archaic spelling aside) story. At the end of the day, though, it feels like there could have been more meat on it.
Fun and original concept, but the lack of interactivity is detrimental, August 30, 2017The title of this game led me to expect something pretty dark: both "mind control" and "slaughter" are heavy, frightening terms. In fact, the game turns out to be a slapstick comedy, if one with a nightmarish, Kafkaesque side (actually, isn't that true of most slapstick?). You're an ordinary guy, out drinking with friends on your birthday, when you try a mind-control drug. Things spiral out of control quickly.
The effects of the mind-control are funny, surreal, and lead to some original havoc. I won't spoil the events that ensue, since they're the best part of the story.
Sadly, this is one of those Twine games where the lack of interactivity is a negative. Drunken Mind Control Slaughter is not completely linear, but player choice is restricted to the ending. This bothers me, because the effects of the mind-control essentially set the player up with a puzzle: perhaps a difficult one, due to the chaos and the characters' lack of control, but original. Instead, I clicked my way through a mostly static story, without a chance to affect the action. Perhaps more interactivity would just have compounded the chaos, but that would be great for the comedy, too.
The characters are cyphers: good as slapstick props, but virtually blank otherwise. The writing is hardly great literature, but it's good enough. Most importantly, it's clear: more florid writing might have made the chaotic events more difficult to follow. On the downside, there were times when it felt slapdash. Slapdash isn't necessarily a negative: Porpentine has sometimes used a more informal tone without her games suffering for it. Here, however, it made the story feel skimpy in some places (such as in some of the ending scenarios) where more involved description would have added to the drama.
Not a bad story by any means: give it a playthrough, it's short and sweet. However, I would have enjoyed a way for the player to do more. The set-up is good enough that the lack of interactivity felt like a missed opportunity.
Not much there, July 11, 2017The Morning After the Night Before is to all intents and purposes a "my crappy apartment" game in Twine. You wake up after a bender and presumably have to figure out what happened last night, though there is little actual investigation done. There is something of a puzzle (finding the key so you can go outside), which is good as far as it goes, but that is pretty much all there is to it. The rest of it is "my crappy apartment"-text. It's not noticeably badly written, just extremely bland.
The tags promise a twist, so I played to the end looking for the reveal that, for example, I was Donald Trump all along. Instead I got (Spoiler - click to show)one of the most cliché storylines of modern games, the zombie apocalypse. It's not particularly scarily written. There are prior hints that something is wrong outside the apartment, but again, they fail to build up any really ominous atmosphere. It was almost enough to make me wonder whether I'd missed something.
I don't want to be too harsh. Like I said, the writing isn't actively bad, and there are no bugs. The "my crappy apartment" genre isn't bad in itself: some excellent works have started out with a similar premise. And I always enjoy puzzles and puzzle-like elements (such as needing to find an item to proceed) in Twine games.
We all have to start somewhere, and there are much worse first games than this.
Cute, but not very memorable, July 4, 2017Saybutts is an interactive story entered in Twiny Jam about the perennial plight of a cat owner: how to stop your cat waking you up in the middle of the night. The cat in question is named Sabriel, "the Patience of God", apparently so called because that's what you need to deal with her.
The moment I played it, the lovely and character-filled photos of Sabriel won me over. If you have even the slightest fondness of cats, it's worth giving it a playthrough for the photos alone.
That aside, there's not much here, for better or for worse. The shortness is of course a component of Twiny Jam, and it does do a good job packing that small scope with a complete story (a gentle, slice-of-life story) and interactivity. However, other Twiny Jam games had far more impact on me while still adhering to the same space constraints. The prose isn't bad, but neither does it stand out. There are some cute and amusing observations, and the ending made me chuckle, but by and large, the story is pretty unmemorable.
Worth playing for some excellent photos and a sweet little story, just don't expect it to blow your mind.
For a much more in-depth game about feline cuteness and annoyance, I recommend Cat Petting Simulator 2014.
Well-written fantasy horror, but feels like it could have done more, June 28, 2017The Cursed Sword of Shagganuthor is a dark Twine short story casting you in the role of a villager participating in an uprising against an evil sorcerer-king.
The writing is extremely fine, and the central horror conceit is original and memorable. Chances are, it will stay with you for a while.
As for downsides, I will refer to Gijsbers' review: the story is so linear, it barely merits the interactive format. For much of the plot, I found it justifiable as an expression of the fatalism mentioned in the game blurb: the protagonist is swept along by events outside of his control, first in the battle, then by the effects of the curse. Even so, I found the linearity too overbearing: there are events that the protagonist should realistically be able to influence, but the story won't let you.
Also, while I've mentioned that I found the conceit original, the larger storyline of the curse is less so. Perhaps it's just that I read a lot of horror, but I still found the overall story predictable. Sometimes, predictability can add to horror: the inevitability of classical tragedy. In this case, however, I didn't experience that effect. That said, I wasn't expecting (Spoiler - click to show)the protagonist to infect his wife and father-in-law, rather than killing them.
A bit where the storytelling felt unclear: (Spoiler - click to show)when the protagonist proceeds to his father-in-law's house, I assumed that he would kill his father-in-law, and thus the man showing up alive later confused me a bit.
In short: brilliantly written, with some gruesomely original imagery, and well worth a read if you're a fan of body horror and dark fantasy. It just feels like it could have gone deeper.
(Disclosure: I participated in EctoComp 2016.)
Scars is a low-key horror game set in an alternative present where (Spoiler - click to show)superiors have the right to punish their subordinates by scarring them.
I like this concept a lot. The game stands out from most EctoComp games I've played: there's no supernatural element, and no reliance on shock tactics. The story does a good job building up an unpleasant atmosphere, and there's no gratuitous gore. The horror is mundane, at least for our viewpoint character. I would love to read a longer work going into more detail about how this society works.
The writing is very good, if a bit unpolished due to time constraints. Around the middle of the story, it felt like it bogged down a little: a bit too many details that didn't really give me any useful information, a bit too much "telling". On the other hand, the ending is vague and enigmatic, leaving for the reader to infer what is between the lines.
The only major flaw is that the story is very linear. A long section of the opening has no interactivity other than pressing a link to see the next page. While it does get more interactive, that interactivity primarily expresses itself in letting the player choose a few different scenes that provide more information, rather than actually affecting the plot.
You can't even say that the second-person CYOA format makes the story more personally engaging. The protagonist is simultaneously too individualised to be the iconic blank slate PC, and too bland to be a compelling character. We're given a lot of details about her job and past events, but not much that made me identify with her.
These are minor quibbles. I still found it well worth a play-through, for the plot and writing.
Fun coffee break RPG, June 4, 2017As other reviewers have pointed out, brevity quest takes the stripped-down aesthetics of ultra-short Twine games (such as, for example, RPG-ish) and puts them to work in a more large-scale and sprawling (if fairly mechanically simple) RPG. You can choose between three different character classes, and several storylines are mutually exclusive, thus adding a large element of replayability.
Your feelings for brevity quest will probably depend on how you feel about unabashedly classic (or conventional?) Dungeons & Dragons tropes. Me, I enjoyed it enough to come back for multiple playthroughs. A lot of my enjoyment may be powered by nostalgia, but you know, it's exactly what I needed. The length feels just about perfect. It gets quite challenging early on (the mine quest), but only enough to make me determined to find a way through the obstacles, not enough to make me lose interest. Getting a winning ending is enough of a challenge to feel rewarding. The writing is, as mentioned, succinct, but clear and transparent.
While I described it as being mechanically simple, it's far from stupid. The ending screen tracks your adventures and skills, and while there's no over-arching plot, your previous actions may come to affect the events in later quests.
There are a few flaws that stop me from giving it five stars. Most importantly, it is up-front about being unfair and rife with learning-by-death. The author is disarmingly aware of this and suggests using the Undo button when needed, but the fact remains that picking options without having a fair chance of knowing the outcome hardly counts as "gameplay", any more than flipping a coin does. A minor issue is that the tone of the narration fluctuates a bit: the first couple of quests are written in a straight-faced manner, whereas later ones have a more tongue-in-cheek narration. Now, don't get me wrong: the comedy is good. (I particularly enjoyed the intro to the final dungeon.) Still, I might have enjoyed it more if it had been present from the start.
I also found a bug (I assume): in the final dungeon, during the battle against (Spoiler - click to show)the multi-armed monster, the game displays the links for both success and failure.
The story doesn't really break any new ground in terms of fantasy games: the enemies are conventional, the quests are mostly comfortable fantasy RPG tropes. If you don't have a problem with that, you won't have a problem with this game either.
To sum up: a polished, coffee break-sized fantasy quest. Exactly what it says on the tin, in other words. Recommended for everyone who wants a nostalgic, adventurous fantasy experience, or like their Twine to be on the "game" side of the spectrum.
(Disclosure: I participated in EctoComp 2016.)
The following is not Andrew Schultz's fault, but when I saw the title, I got a strong mental impression of a shaded, elegiac ghost story. What it is is a decidedly non-complex "visit all the rooms without retracing your steps" puzzle, with some plot justifications involving ghosts and the afterlife. No descriptions, no NPCs, essentially nothing to interact with (though the last part is justified, given that you're non-corporeal). Still, once I started I found it a fun, semi-mindless way to spend an afternoon. An ASCII auto-map is included, and the game is just the right length not to feel too light, nor to outstay its welcome.
(Spoiler - click to show)Then, you have to guess a verb in order to win the game. While I found that part difficult, I wouldn't call it illogical. It also stands out as a puzzle that wouldn't work in any medium other than IF, and draws attention to the PC's powerless nature as a ghost in a way that is somewhat darker than anything we have been led to expect.
Technically, it's good: I appreciated the map, and there is even a system where progressively more blatant hints appear if you get stuck. (Also, as Easter eggs, try going UP or DOWN.) The only place where I felt the constraints of the three-hour time limit was in the writing, which felt a bit unpolished, even to the point of being difficult to understand. In places, this may even have affected my ability to solve the final puzzle. That is the only major fault I could find, though.
There is a bit of a story, even a pretty good one, but it's almost exclusively doled out in the intro and ending text.
Not horror in any sense of the word, and barely counts as the F in IF, but a fun diversion if you're in a puzzly mood, and technically robust for a speed-IF.
(Disclosure: I participated in EctoComp 2016.)
First of all, let it be said that I agree 100% with the concept behind this game. The idea of a horror parody of a disliked troll game is funny, and anyone who can make toilets scary is a friend of mine.
Unfortunately, this game feels like a troll itself. It's not egregiously bad; there's just barely anything there. The writing is... okay. It's a bit overblown in a way I assume is intentionally parodic, but again, it's hard to tell.
I don't want to knock it too hard: there's some sophisticated coding, and the actual horror content manages to be disorienting and startling. It just didn't make an impact on me at all, for better or for worse.
(Note: I didn't get the Lousy Last Point. Perhaps if I had, my feelings about the game would change.)
I think I like the concept of this game more than the actual game, May 15, 2017My interest for Save the World in 7 Moves was piqued after I read Sobol's review, which described it as a Rematch-style replay puzzle that manages to fit a vast amount of puzzle-solving into the Twine format. That is indeed true. The puzzles are the high point of the game: some challenging, some not particularly logical (as befits the surrealism of the plot), but I stuck it out and felt that the game rewarded my persistence. I'm particularly impressed with (Spoiler - click to show)the Emporium puzzle. I'd quite like to know the code that went into that.
Everything else? The plot is minimal and not very original. The solution to the problem is, again, not massively original, but at least it contains one or two twists rather than being a straightforward journey from point A to point B. The writing, while not bad, is somewhat ungrammatical: I can't tell whether the author is going for a Porpentine-style expressionism or simply isn't a native English-speaker, but that in itself is a bit damning. That said, some descriptions are atmospheric, and even the clunky grammar becomes background noise due to the many replays you're going to go through. There is plenty of satire of office life: it's amusing enough (stick it out through the meeting-room presentation at least once), but this is extremely well-trodden ground in IF, and this game doesn't add anything much.
While the puzzles are the high point of the game, towards the end I found myself lawn-mowering through the locations trying to find something I hadn't tried, and it ended up feeling like busy-work. Also, quite a chunk of the game is spent on a red herring (though it does point you in the direction of the correct solution).
EDIT: Removed a complaint that turned out to be due to my own misreading.
I hesitated whether to give this a 3 or a 4. Picture 3.5 stars if you will. The plot, writing and setting are nothing particularly memorable, but the puzzles really are good enough to make up for it. Play it for the puzzles. I'm glad I did.
PS. Was that a Stanley Parable reference?
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