Reviews by Spike
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An innovative optimization game that's also a lot of fun, December 2, 2020It's a bit of an odd thing, reviewing a game that explicitly says it was inspired by one of your own. So I think I'll confine myself to a few general comments about the game -- instead mostly using this review to discuss how The Curse of the Scarab fits into the optimization game genre, at least as I see it.
So, yes, The Curse of the Scarab is an optimization game. It's set in an Egyptian tomb. Your goal is to enter the tomb, steal a scarab amulet and as many other valuables as you can, and then escape.
After my first few plays of the game (it's very easy to die), I thought, "Not bad, probably a 3-star game." After a dozen or so plays, I began thinking, "O.K., this game is pretty good. It deserves four stars." Several hours later... well, any game that engages me this much has earned a five-star rating.
I think that's it for general comments about the game. For a more traditional review, read one of the others already on IFDB.
Let's now look at how The Curse of the Scarab fits in the optimization game genre. The basic setup for an optimization game is that you're trying to maximize your score, usually by acquiring as many valuable objects as you can, subject to the restriction that you only have a certain amount of time. Different games offer variations on that basic setup. For example, Captain Verdeterre's Plunder (the other acknowledged influence on Scarab) innovates in the way it restricts the action space: You're on a sinking ship, and each turn the water level rises. Thus as the game proceeds you slowly lose access to locations and valuables that are on the lower levels of the ship. Sugarlawn (my optimization game) doesn't restrict the action space much from what you would see in a hypothetical basic optimization game. Instead, its primary novelty is that it adds a nonlinear term to the objective function in the form of allowing you to earn rewards by placing valuables in "target locations" rather than simply escaping with them.
So, what does The Curse of the Scarab bring to the optimization genre? Several things, actually. These mostly affect the action space, but they also affect the objective function some.
First, the action space. The main timing restriction in Scarab has to do with light. Your torch has only so much fuel, and once that runs out then you can't really explore the tomb anymore. But there's also a small part of the game near the beginning in which you don't need the torch. Thus, unlike Verdeterre and Sugarlawn, the game timer isn't always ticking. So Scarab effectively extends the action space. From the player's standpoint, the question becomes, "How much can I do in these lighted spaces?"
In addition, Scarab introduces a feature not present in either of the other games I mentioned: You can be chased around the tomb by (Spoiler - click to show)the mummy and (Spoiler - click to show)a swarm of flesh-eating scarabs. One of these will (Spoiler - click to show)curse your items, making them worthless, and the other will (Spoiler - click to show)kill you. So in addition to grabbing as much loot as possible within the constraints you have, you also need to find away to avoid these two entities.
There are also things you can find in the tomb that will allow you to relax both the rather severe carrying capacity restriction as well as the amount-of-light restriction.
Finally, Scarab makes a few innovations to the objective function. Two important objects are more valuable together, for one, and there's also a way to increase the value of one of your objects.
Each of these innovations by itself might not change the basic gameplay much, but when you put them all together you get a game that is a great deal more complex -- and so a great deal more fun. In particular, solving puzzles is even more rewarding than in a basic optimization game because not only can doing so lead to more treasures, it can also relax some of the restrictions you had been operating under. Overall, then, The Curse of the Scarab is a rather deep optimization game given how short a single play can be.
While I'm clearly biased here, I hope others will continue pushing the boundaries of the optimization game genre like The Curse of the Scarab has.
An excellent science fiction game, September 22, 2020Coloratura is an excellent science fiction game.
In a sense, the game gives you two stories in one. Foregrounded is the story of the alien PC, who drives most of the events in Coloratura. But the humans on board the ship experience the alien's actions very differently, and therein lies the second story. The way that Coloratura allows you to experience these two stories simultaneously is, well, brilliant.
I have mixed feelings about the puzzles in Coloratura, though. The puzzles are fairly easy, but that's not because the solutions to the problems you face are naturally apparent. In fact, these solutions are generally not actions that would easily come to mind at all. However, the puzzles are made easy by the game repeatedly hinting at what you should do next. I find that off-putting with puzzles, and it affected my enjoyment of the game.
To be fair, though, there's a quite difficult design problem to be solved here: A game with an alien PC is going to be played by humans who have no good intuitive sense of the actions that alien PC is easily capable of taking. To avoid a game with an "other" PC being unfairly difficult, then, such a game has to slowly teach the PC's abilities to the player. Coloratura does this some - but, in my opinion, not enough.
Still, this is a relatively minor point. Coloratura is a great game, and its greatness lies in the tension it creates between the story of the alien - who wants something basic, understandable, and just - and the story of the humans who experience the consequences of the alien's actions as horrific.
Fairly directed magical puzzler, January 1, 2020In Remedial Witchcraft you play as an inexperienced practitioner of magic arts. Not an uncommon premise: Games from Infocom’s classic Enchanter way back in 1983 to both Charming and my own Junior Arithmancer from the previous IFComp have featured a similar PC. Remedial Witchcraft reminds me particularly of Charming, as in that game and this one you’re not just inexperienced, you’re also kind of bumbling.
The gameplay is quite directed. At the very beginning the witch you’re apprenticed to gives you a couple of tasks to perform. Then, after you complete those, you’re presented with another set of tasks to perform. And frequently in the midst of completing these tasks the game will make suggestions for what you should do next. All of this means that there’s very little stumbling around wondering what you’re supposed to be doing. It certainly eases the gameplay and reduces the frustration that often occurs in puzzle-heavy games, but for me it was a little too much hand-holding. Of course, I also like banging my head against puzzle-heavy games.
The writing style is short. Choppy. Frequently not full sentences. Very casual. Distinctive. It’s an interesting choice that fits the PC’s character.
One of the magical items you get to play with is particularly delightful: the (Spoiler - click to show)teleportation rock.
Overall, I think I would have preferred more of a challenge, but I enjoyed figuring out the puzzles that I did in Remedial Witchcraft.
An amusingly fun way to spend half an hour, December 29, 2019This choice-based game made me smile pretty much the whole way through. It's a short parody of fantasy role-playing gamebooks; it even comes with a character sheet to print and fill out. I enjoyed adding traits like (Spoiler - click to show)Orcular Trauma and (Spoiler - click to show)"Smooth Moves" (the latter in scare quotes, of course) to my character sheet.
The humor has a light touch. It's frequently sexually suggestive (the title is "Girth Loinhammer," after all), but it's on the level of Leather Goddesses of Phobos's "suggestive" mode.
All in all, an amusingly fun way to spend a half hour. (I played it twice, and after my second play I clicked the back button a few times to check out alternative endings.)
Better resource management game than a first impression would indicate, December 26, 2019I had more fun with this game than most other players seem to have had, judging by its current ratings and its placement in IFComp. I suspect many players were turned off by some noticeable bugs (some cosmetic, some more serious that affect gameplay), as well as the bare-bones interface. Looking past those, I found The Chieftain to be a decent resource management game.
My sense is that writing a good resource management game is all about the mechanics. What makes the various resource levels go up or down? And, more importantly, how much of this is under the player’s control, and how much is random? Too much control for the player, and the game becomes less interesting: You just do the same thing over and over again until you hit the goal. On the other hand, too much randomness starts to feel either unfair or like you’re simply tossing dice to see what happens. A good game of this kind needs to strike the right balance.
And I think The Chieftain mostly does get this right. The major random activity is scouting the surrounding area, and this can lead to many different outcomes. Some of the resource-gathering activities also produce a variable amount of goods. And then several of the activities are deterministic: The game tells you, for instance, that throwing a party consumes 5 food and increases happiness by 3. It took me quite a while to settle on a strategy that was consistently effective; I had to try a lot of the different activities over multiple days to see what they led to. Yet this process didn’t feel unfair, either; it was clear when I was taking a risk and that that risk was my choice. This seems to me to be what you want the player to experience.
There are also intermediate goals to keep the player’s attention. For instance, I saved up my coins and bought a longsword for display in the village. I also built a shrine and raised it a couple of levels so that it was generating more resources for me.
However, once I did finally settle on my strategy, it was mostly a matter of just doing the same things over and over until I hit the happiness level required to win. Some tweaks to the game’s mechanics could have improved this. It did take me a while to realize that this would be an effective strategy, though.
Overall, I think The Chieftain does most of what you want a resource management game to do correctly; that is, its mechanics are pretty sound. But there are places where those mechanics could be made better, and some more testing and changes to the presentation could have greatly improved the player experience as well.
Pirate-themed light puzzle comedy, December 11, 2019Pirateship is a lighthearted, pirate-themed puzzle comedy with the feel of a classic parser game. It's not technically a parser game because it's built with Johnson's point-and-click Versificator development system, but its room-based geography and use-the-right-object-in-the-right-place puzzles very much fit the classic parser style.
Most, if not all, of the humor in Pirateship comes from playing with pirate tropes. Sometimes the comedic effect comes from subverting these tropes, and sometimes the tropes are carried to such extremes that you can't help laughing. For me, the game tended to walk a fine line between funny and silly, but occasionally it hit absolute comedy gold.
The puzzles range in difficulty from relatively straightforward to somewhat hard, which I think is the right range for this kind of game.
I found myself wishing for more emotional depth in Pirateship, though. I know the game is going for the feel of a classic parser comedy, and those kinds of games aren't generally noted for their extra emotional layers. But I can't help thinking that Pirateship could have done more here - and that that would have made it a better game. By way of contrast, Lost Pig is a great IF comedy not just because the prose is so often funny, but because (Spoiler - click to show)Grunk is oddly philosophical for a supposedly dumb orc, because the relationship between Grunk and the gnome is touching and a nice contrast of personalities, and because Grunk's blunderings actually serve as the catalyst for the gnome to make some changes to the lonely life he's been leading. The only layer in Pirateship beyond the laughs is its playing with pirate tropes (which, again, are the source of much of that comedy).
But I did enjoy Pirateship, and I think the game successfully does what it's trying to do. So, if you're looking for a light-hearted puzzle comedy with an old-school parser feel (but without the guess-the-verb frustrations of old-school parser games), or you just like pirates, you should give Pirateship a try.
Huge space exploration-and-trading game, November 29, 2019Skybreak! is a huge space exploration-and-trading game, with RPG elements and multiple win states. You can explore star systems; mine planets, asteroids, and comets; recruit spies; unearth lore; acquire alien artifacts; and collect beetles - among other things.
Skybreak! feels like a cross between Superluminal Vagrant Twin and Sunless Seas. Skybreak!'s setting, method for moving between locations, and text-based format are reminiscent of the former, but it has some of the features (such as lore-gathering) of the latter, and its scope is closer to that of the latter.
That isn't to say that Skybreak! is as large as Sunless Seas. It doesn't take nearly as long to win Skybreak!, for instance. (A few hours, three playthroughs, and judicious use of UNDO got me a nice ending in Skybreak!.) However, much of the reason Sunless Seas takes so long is that you spend a lot of your time moving your boat around on the screen and managing your fuel. Strip Sunless Seas down to its item- and knowledge-gathering aspects and its quest trees, and the scope comparison between it and Skybreak! starts to seem more reasonable. Skybreak! really is huge; I can tell from the few hours I've spent on it that there's a lot to the game I have not seen.
Where Skybreak! surpasses both Superluminal Vagrant Twin and Sunless Seas is in its number and variety of role-playing options. At the beginning of Skybreak! you've got a choice of five species (well, four and then an "other" option), two of ten background characteristics, and three of sixteen talents. These affect your win-state goals (as in Sunless Seas), your secondary goals, and the kinds of tasks you're most likely to succeed with. They really are meaningful choices, too: On my first and third playthroughs I made very different character selections, and those two playthroughs looked quite different. By comparison, SVT has no RPG elements, and Sunless Seas allows you fewer options.
By biggest criticism of Skybreak! is the random navigation. I can see that this prevents players from doing as much grinding, which would destroy a lot of the fun of the game. But it is also frustrating to be presented with half a dozen or more interesting options for a particular solar system and yet only be able to choose one of them before having to move on, perhaps never to return on that playthrough. The UNDO command does mitigate this frustration somewhat, though, as it allows you to try out the different options and then select the one you like best.
There's a great deal to see and do in Skybreak!. If you enjoy games like this, there's enough content to keep you engaged for many, many hours.
Engrossing mystery in a fantasy setting, November 28, 2019My biggest critique of last year's Dungeon Detective was that I wanted more game to play, which is really more of a compliment than a critique. Well, I got what I wanted! Dungeon Detective 2 continues the adventures of our furry sleuth, Sniff Chewpaw. This time he's hired by a devil to look into the bombing of the devil's dungeon, and the resulting investigation is both longer and more in-depth than the one in the first DD. There are several more characters to interview, night and day periods that offer you different event options, a couple of minigames, and a currency system where you can earn and spend money. There's also an animated Chewpaw graphic, which is quite fun. You've got a lot to keep track of, but it all worked for me, and I found myself more engrossed in Dungeon Detective 2 than I did its predecessor.
A couple of critiques: The dungeon itself is on the small side, but there's enough interesting content before you reach the dungeon that that doesn't matter too much. There are also a few too many typos for my taste. But these are minor critiques, especially compared with Dungeon Detective 2's immersive play and appealing PC.
The original IFComp version had some bugs in it that stopped gameplay for me (and perhaps others). I suspect the game would have placed even higher in IFComp without those bugs, and I hope the author makes an updated version of the game publicly available.
One of my favorite games from IFComp 2019.
Large, systematic puzzler with an interesting but somewhat awkward interface, November 28, 2019Language Arts is a deep, systematic puzzle game. Gameplay has you learning a collection of increasingly-complicated rules to solve a total of twenty increasingly-challenging puzzles, all of which feature the manipulation of letters on a grid. I enjoy systematic puzzlers a great deal, and I had a lot of fun with Language Arts.
The game's interface is one of its more interesting aspects. Language Arts is made in Unity, and Jared Jackson had to create a new interface just for the game in addition to writing the content. It's an impressive bit of coding - although perhaps all in a day's work for Jackson, who is a professional game programmer. I love how the interface recreates the feel of a 1980s-era Macintosh computer. There's even an orange in the upper-left hand corner where a Mac would have had an apple! Unfortunately, using the interface can be a bit of a challenge at times. For example, I would have liked the cycle of trying a solution, seeing what goes wrong, editing the solution, and trying again to go a bit faster.
I also experienced something of a steep learning curve with the game. I had a lot of trouble with some of the first puzzles as I was absorbing how to "think" in terms of the Language Arts way of expressing things. Once I entered that mindset, though, I found solving many of the later puzzles to go faster, even though they are objectively more difficult than the earlier ones. (The game's manual can be quite helpful here; I recommend players refer to it regularly at the beginning.)
If you like large systematic puzzle games, you should definitely play Language Arts. If you can stick with the game through the early stages until you learn to think in the game's code, and you can ignore some of the slower aspects of the interface, you'll be rewarded with an excellent, intricate puzzler.
Does so many things right, July 1, 201980 DAYS is an interactive, steampunk retelling of Jules Verne's classic 1873 novel Around the World in 80 Days. You play as Passepartout, valet to Englishman Phileas Fogg. Fogg has made a wager with some members of his London club that he can traverse the globe in only 80 days. It's up to you to see that he succeeds.
Much of the charm of Verne's original novel is the madcap dash around the world, using a variety of modes of transportation: steamships, trains, elephants, even a sledge. 80 DAYS outdoes Verne's novel, though: Its steampunk take allows for dozens of fantastical ways to travel, from mechanized versions of horse-drawn carriages to ice walkers to submarines to experimental hovercrafts - not to mention the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian Railway, and a hot-air balloon.
You can, if you want, try to recreate Fogg's actual route from Verne's novel. In fact, that's what I had planned to do at first, since I thought it would be the most efficient method to navigate the globe. However, I picked up an object in Paris that the game told me could be sold in Berlin for a tidy sum. So I took a detour to Berlin and then Athens before heading to Suez to get back on track. But then I bought another item that I could sell in Dubai for a nice profit, and so I spent an inordinate amount of time getting to Dubai before finally arriving in Bombay for the trek across India. After having my passport stolen, surviving a mutiny and an aircraft crash in the Indian Ocean, being blown off course over the Pacific, being held up at gunpoint by Jesse James, and earning the American lightweight boxing title, I did eventually make it back to London. But not within 80 days. And then, of course, I had to try again. Because there were so many choices and routes I did not take - choices and routes that I just had to explore.
And therein lies much of what makes 80 DAYS work so well. A major way to make a game fun is to give the player a combinatorial explosion of choices. However, as an author you do not want to (and in many cases simply cannot) create a different scenario for each of those exponentially-growing number of choices. So the trick is to find a way to combine a small number of choices on the author's end into an exponential number of scenarios on the player's end. I wouldn't call the number of choices Inkle and Meg Jayanth had to create a "small number," but the fact that these choices are generally city-to-city decisions means that they can be combined in a way via the map to achieve the desired combinatorial explosion. Yet the combinatorial explosion never feels overwhelming: At any city there's never more than about half a dozen choices for where to go next, and often there are fewer. Plus you have a clearly-defined goal to help guide your choices: You've got to keep going east around the globe, as quickly as you can. A combinatorial explosion of choices on the player's end that never feels overwhelming, without a combinatorial explosion of work required on the authors' end, is great design - and leads to a lot of fun for the player.
80 DAYS handles another couple of issues deftly as well. One is the cultural difference between Western Europe in the 1870s and us today. Mainstream views on topics like gender, race, and colonialism are obviously quite different now than they were then. If you're writing a game based on an 1873 French novel (especially one in which the globe-encompassing aspect of the British empire is a plot point), how do you address that worldview gap? 80 DAYS's steampunk twist on Verne's novel provides a solid platform to handle this. For example, people groups in regions that were heavily colonized by European powers in 1873 frequently have their own takes on the advanced steampunk technology in 80 DAYS. Their technologies and their cultures don't come across in-game as inferior - just different. Something similar holds true with respect to the game's portrayal of women; in 80 DAYS women are engineers, pilots, and steamboat captains with as much frequency as men are. While this would be anachronistic for a game set in the historical 1870s, it fits right in with 80 DAYS's steampunk version of that era. This isn't to say that 80 DAYS falls into the mistake of presentism, either; here and there the game gives choices that allow you to explore some of why folks from that era might have thought differently than we do today.
As a final example, even though I doubt the authors view 80 DAYS as an educational game, it actually is - and it's even a good educational game. 80 DAYS requires the player to gain a decent overview of world geography, but it does this in a very natural way - one that is completely integrated into the gameplay rather than artificially tacked-on. It even sent me to the Internet several times, looking up central Asian cities, or wondering why Yokohama rather than, say, Tokyo, was the major Japanese port of that era. A desire to learn more is the kind of player response you want for an educational game.
Overall, 80 DAYS is an interactive tour de force that does many things well. Highly recommended.
Retro puzzle game with great pixel art, May 22, 2019Wolfsmoon advertises itself as an "old-style experience, with all the comforts of 2019." I think that's accurate, as well as the right mindset to have going into the game.
Wolfsmoon features terse descriptions and responses to actions, instead letting its well-done pixel art do the work of setting the game's atmosphere. Commands are generally limited to verb-noun, although the game parses certain phrases like ATTACK [thing] WITH [other thing] well enough to tell you that ATTACK [thing] is sufficient if you're carrying the correct other thing. (It's written in Inform 7, after all.) There are few characters, and those who are present don't feature a wide range of responses, but this is in keeping with the older style of game Wolfsmoon is imitating.
As far as the story, you're investigating a series of murders around a small town. There are lots of ominous signals from the beginning that this might be due to werewolves, but the one police officer you meet is much more interested in her reading material than discussing the case with you. You'll have to marshal evidence and uncover the secret behind the murders on your own.
I found the puzzles to be mostly straightforward. The one exception is that I was stuck for a long time near the beginning of the game; I didn't realize that I could simply (Spoiler - click to show)take the boar cub. However, once I stumbled across that, playing through the remainder of the game went fairly smoothly. The game does subvert your expectations with respect to objects you find: Some are tools that end up being used in non-standard ways, and that added freshness to the puzzles.
There were a few moments that reminded me of other games: Zork 1, Anchorhead, The Chinese Room.
If you enjoy this older style of puzzle game, Wolfsmoon is well worth your time.
(I'd give the game three-and-a-half stars, but I'll round it up to four for IFDB purposes based on the enjoyable retro pixel art and the fact that it's reasonable to judge the game in the context of the older style it's aiming for.)
Huge old-school IF featuring old-English magick, May 14, 2019As other reviews have mentioned, Birmingham IV was originally written using the text adventure design system Quill in the late 1980s but then ported to Inform 7 in 2014-16. The current version still retains the feel of a non-Infocom text adventure circa 1989. By way of comparison with some other old-school games in IFComp 2018, Birmingham IV feels more modern than Flowers of Mysteria or Escape from Dinosaur Island but less modern than Bullhockey!.
The setting appears to be the area around Birmingham (England) in the early to mid-1600s: Queen Elizabeth’s face appears on some money you find, and there’s a reference to the Virginia colonies. It’s not clear what the plot is, though. You play as the Phil, a scholar and scientist. Or, as they would say back then, “natural philosopher.” In fact, as you eventually come to realize, “the Phil” is actually a title - “the Philosopher” - not the name of the PC. You can explore your cottage and the surrounding area, and there’s a note from the parson that gives you a couple of long-term goals, but for the most part at the beginning of the game you just wander around solving puzzles. As you keep playing, though, the end-goal eventually becomes clear. Or "end-goals," I should say, since Birmingham IV gives you a choice at the end.
There's also magic in this world. But it's a subtle magic - magic of an old English kind, where elves are tiny and fearful of humans and where ancient skulls and standing stones are infused with power that you can use but never really understand. In terms of how magic is portrayed, there's a pretty clear line running from English folk tales to The Lord of the Rings to early Dungeons & Dragons to the current canonical takes on fantasy races in role-playing games (both computer and paper), as well as many modern works' systematic and almost scientific approach to magic. Even Infocom's Enchanter series takes this systematic approach, and the Harry Potter series does as well. In the latter, magic is something almost mundane: It has been apportioned into school subjects to be learned as a matter of course by children! Birmingham IV, however, is solidly pre-Tolkien: Magic is mysterious, ethereal, and perilous. For me, that was refreshing, and Birmingham IV's consistent take on this constituted much of the game's charm.
Unfortunately, Birmingham IV has some weaknesses, playability-wise, that affected my enjoyment of the game and that will frustrate many modern players. (1) The game does not always tell you which directions you can travel in. It doesn’t take much additional effort on top of drawing a map (if you’re doing that) to figure out which directions are allowed, but it will be a hurdle for modern players. (2) There are a few too many one-way directions near the beginning of the game. (3) You have an inventory limit of five. (4) It is easy to get yourself into an unwinnable state without realizing it. (5) Many of the puzzles are underclued. The puzzles I'm thinking of for which this is the case aren't bad puzzles, but some of their solutions are the kinds of things that you wouldn't come across unless you had the patience to try a bunch of random things that might work. (Fortunately, David Welbourn has published an excellent walkthrough!)
In other words, Birmingham IV is a huge, old-school piece of late 80s IF. If you enjoy that sort of game, then you'll probably enjoy Birmingham IV.
Well-done noir homage that plays with noir's tropes in interesting ways, March 12, 2019Dark background. Sweet jazzy opening music. First person narration. Rain pounding on the windows. Early entrance by a femme fatale… who is actually your business partner, not to mention (Spoiler - click to show)a succubus - the ultimate femme fatale! - and who totally calls your bluff on pretending to be asleep. With all of this, plus the title, I’m thinking that Grimnoir is going to be a noir detective story that nevertheless plays with noir’s usual tropes. And, sure enough, that’s what it is.
One major aspect of the game perhaps takes noir in a different direction rather than playing with its tropes. This is the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)the PC specializes in the supernatural - particularly tracking down various undead spirits. There are probably other works that feature this as well, but I was reminded of Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co. series of novels.
A second aspect is truly playing with noir’s tropes. As you slowly come to realize over the course of the game, (Spoiler - click to show)the detective PC is gay. This affects the story and gameplay some, as it makes him immune to the charms of his succubus partner, while leaving him susceptible to an incubus in one of the mid-to-late-game cases.
Gameplay involves solving a series of cases. You're given three cases initially that you can investigate in any order. After you complete those you're given three more cases that you can investigate in any order, followed by the endgame case(s). (It's kind of like Detectiveland doubled, in that respect.) Three cases at a time gives the player some choice without it feeling overwhelming in the way six or seven cases might.
The player also has access to the Grimnoir, which contains a list of monsters and their powers. This was fun and reminded me of a miniature Dungeons & Dragons monster manual.
The cases feature some interesting narrative and investigate variations. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)in one case you play as the succubus partner, which was fun partly for variety and partly because she has cool powers. In addition, another case involves two spirits rather than one.
My one gameplay critique has to do with your selection of the monster that you think is causing the crime. After you've completed your investigation, the game gives you a list of three monsters to choose from. With only three names it’s easy (if you remembered to save just before the monster encounter) to try all of them and then reload if you’re wrong.
Also, from a narrative standpoint I’m not sure why naming a monster would cause it to freeze, although from a gameplay standpoint I can understand this: The game needs some way for the selection of the monster type to be decisive in terms of the investigation, and having the monster freeze when named accomplishes that.
The final case is a nice wrap-up of the PC's storyline and series of investigations.
Overall, I enjoyed Grimnoir. It's a well-done noir homage that nevertheless plays with its tropes in interesting ways.
Dynamic fiction with strong, spare writing, March 11, 2019Polish the Glass is a medium-length choice-based game with an unusual story. The PC’s mother can’t stop herself from (Spoiler - click to show)polishing the glass in the Bar (it’s always capitalized) down the street. This leads to a breakdown in the PC's parents’ relationship and eventually the dissolution of their marriage. However, as the PC grows up, she eventually takes a job working at the Bar, just like her mum. She finds herself drawn to the Bar, continuing to polish the glass, and slowly cutting herself off from relationships with other people, again like her mum.
There aren’t too many choices in the game. The vast majority of your clicks are to advance the text a sentence or three. At first I didn’t care much for that, but the more I read of Polish the Glass the more I came to appreciate this mechanic: It forced me to slow down and actually read every sentence. I couldn’t as easily skim the text and only carefully read the parts just before my next choice. So, even though I didn’t have many choices, the story actually did feel interactive to me - and more so than some other choice-based games I’ve played that also give you few choices but have much larger chunks of text between successive clicks.
The writing is good. It’s spare in a way that works with having to click to advance the text every couple of sentences.
I feel like the events in the game are a metaphor for something, but I can’t decide what. Here are some ideas I’ve had: (Spoiler - click to show)Alcohol addiction. Addiction in general. Aging and death. Depression. Perfectionism. Giving yourself too much to other people and having that suck the life out of you.
It might also just be a story, with nothing particularly metaphorical about it. I think it’s fair to say, though, that I feel like I didn’t really “get” Polish the Glass. For some works you’re on the author’s wavelength, and for some you’re not. Or perhaps dynamic fiction is just not my thing.
Again, though, I thought the writing was strong, and if you like dynamic fiction you may very well appreciate Polish the Glass.
Explore ideas from positive psychology, March 8, 2019Eunice is a short, parser-based game with a rather unusual purpose: As it states in the intro text, Eunice is “an introduction to research-based Positive Psychology tools.” The research-based jumps out at me there; I assume it’s because “positive psychology” sounds like “self-help,” and the latter doesn’t have all that great a reputation. However, positive psychology is a legitimate branch of psychology, and it’s clear that the author has some knowledge of the latest research in this field. The ABOUT section says, “Data shows that some simple actions can improve mood, perspective, and resilience.” Eunice is intended to introduce us to some of these actions, such as gratitude, connection, mindfulness, flexibility, and hope. Aiming to give others a deeper understanding of a particular branch of human knowledge may be an unusual motivation for writing a parser-based game, but it’s one I’m certainly sympathetic to, as I’ve done it myself with A Beauty Cold and Austere. Eunice is aiming for something more than just understanding and appreciation, though; it’s also hoping that players will incorporate into their lives (even if just a little) the insights about positive psychology learned from playing the game. I can’t help but admire the author’s goal here.
In terms of the story, you’re in the land of Eunice, where everything is in a state of neglect. In order to win the game, you have to perform, as the PC, acts of gratitude, connection, mindfulness, and flexibility in order to release hope and heal the land. The game world and characters aren’t deeply fleshed out, but that’s the intent: Everything is supposed to be understood metaphorically. For example, in one location you (Spoiler - click to show)encounter a group of people frozen as statues. To free them, you must LOOSEN YOUR LIMBS, thereby demonstrating flexibility.
I think the metaphors could be a little tighter, but overall I think they do work.
The solutions to some of the puzzles require unusual verbs, as in the example I just gave. However, the text (with one exception, given below) always tells you exactly what the right phrasing is; you just have to pay careful attention. For example, in the scenario described above, if you first (Spoiler - click to show)EXAMINE STATUES, the response includes the sentence "Looking at them life-like and lifeless, frozen in various pretzel positions, makes you want to loosen your limbs."
This is a good way to incorporate atypical verbs in your game without introducing awful guess-the-verb problems.
There was only one puzzle I really had trouble with, (Spoiler - click to show)unfreezing the troll. If there was a clue in the text for the right approach to solving this puzzle, I missed it.
Overall, how well does Eunice succeed? As a pure parser game, it would be more fun with more attention to some details: stronger puzzles with better cluing, setting and characters that are more richly described, directions the player can travel to in each location mentioned in the location descriptions, and corrections to several punctuation mistakes.
But, again, Eunice’s goal isn’t to be the latest and greatest parser game. Rather, it’s to get these psychology concepts in people’s heads. How well does it succeed at that? The answer probably depends on the player. In general, though, interacting with a concept is going to make you remember it far more easily than if you just read about it or hear someone explain it. For myself, I think the concepts would stick with me better if (as I mentioned earlier) the metaphor choices were somewhat stronger. But I do think the value of gratitude, of connection, of mindfulness, of flexibility, and of hope will remain with me more now that I’ve played Eunice.
Complex and multilayered, March 4, 2019A powerful, choice-based work, Bi Lines manages to weave together multiple hard-hitting issues in just three short acts - and do so pretty much seamlessly, in my opinion. Like a few other works in IFComp 2018, it's hard to say much without giving a great deal away. I’ll start with a few technical comments.
Bi Lines uses an old typewriter font to present the text. Mousing over text indicating a choice blurs the text, although not so much that it becomes illegible. Also, if you leave the mouse in the right spot for some of the choice texts they will switch back and forth rapidly between the unblurred and blurred versions. These are all interesting presentation choices that underline the story, since (Spoiler - click to show)the PC is a reporter who can see and interact with ghosts.
Also, the title is a nice pun.
As I said, it's really hard to discuss Bi Lines without giving much away. Minor spoiler: Bi Lines presents a complex portrayal of the experience of (Spoiler - click to show)coping with sexual assault, particularly the problem of trying to get other people to believe you.
Long, major spoiler, which tries to unpack some of the layers Bi Lines uses to present this experience:
(Spoiler - click to show)It hits hard from the very beginning. The first page of text lays out a difficult scenario: You're a guy on a date with a woman. She's confessing her love to you. Your first choice: Do you trust her with your secret? Do you respond with, "I also like guys. I think."? Or do you hide that?
Then you learn that it’s 1981, not 2018, and this raises the stakes on the PC’s choice here even more.
The next big twist comes when you discover that the PC can see and hear ghosts. Not only that, the PC has inherited this ability from his mother. Mother spent her life helping ghosts find and complete that one more task (different for each ghost) that was preventing them from moving on from this world. This was her mission in life. As Mom would say, "Always bear the weight of love on your shoulders. No matter how much it costs you." It cost Mom her life. However, even in death (she's still a ghost) this is her motto, and she expects you to uphold it as well.
In the first act you meet a ghost at a party. He kisses you, without your consent. Then he fondles you and grabs your now-erect penis. A desire for this experience must have been what was holding him to this plane of existence, because after he grabs you he fades away, satisfied.
Acts 2 and 3 work out the consequences of this setup. First, there are your feelings about being sexually assaulted: It’s a violation of your physical self, and it leaves you so shaken that you have trouble going about your life for the next couple of days (and beyond). On the other hand, the text indicates that you found this arousing on at least some level. After all, your desire to be with other men isn't something you can be very open about.
Then there are others' reactions to this episode. It's not like you can easily explain to people why you're so upset: You were fondled by a ghost! Who is another male! It's a great dramatization of the frustration and fear of (I presume) many people who have been sexually assaulted: Who’s going to believe me?
There's also your relationship with Mom (and, now, Mom's ghost). You love her and want to honor her memory, but she does not approve of your attraction to other men. In fact, she says the assault would never have happened if it weren't for your (in her words) "unnatural love" for men. There's another aspect of the sexual assault survivor’s predicament: Being blamed for the assault. But it's given additional emotional heft by being said by someone you love and who actually uses the episode as justification for her disapproval of a part of you she does not like.
Not only that, there are your conflicting feelings about helping these ghosts move on. You’re the only one who can, and so you feel some responsibility to assist them. And you do want to help them. But it's also a burden, one that you didn't choose and that feels kind of like something your mother forced on you. Do your responsibility and desire to help them extend to letting them take advantage of you? Even to the point of allowing them to violate you physically and sexually?
Finally, there's Gregor, the ghost who assaulted you. It's clear that Gregor was attracted to men as well, and I don't think it's reading too much into the story to draw the conclusion that what was holding him back from moving on from this earth was a probably never-fulfilled desire to touch another man sexually. So his assault and violation of you itself came from the same source of much of your anguish as the PC: same-sex attraction in a society that does not accept it. From another angle: How else was Gregor going to move on if he hadn’t forced himself on you? In his mind, what if he had asked and you said "No"? Would he have been stuck here forever? This line of thinking is heading toward the very uncomfortable conclusion that, in his mind, maybe he felt like he didn't have any choice other than to sexually assault you (!).
All of this is to say that I'm amazed at the degree to which Bi Lines manages to dramatize several anguishing issues in a relatively short work.
In the blurb the author mentions that Bi Lines was inspired by the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Lest some readers misunderstand this, let me emphasize that Bi Lines is not an attempt to rehash those hearings. Rather, Bi Lines stands on its own as a powerful dramatic work without explicit reference to anything external.
Cute Christmas-themed game, March 2, 2019The Mouse Who Woke Up For Christmas is a parser game written with the Quest design system. It starts off really cute: You’re a mouse, and it’s Christmas Eve. You have a few more things to do to get ready for Christmas, including finding a present for your young daughter (endearingly represented on the cover art). It turns out that all she wants is (Spoiler - click to show)to have her mother back. Mom went out to the garden months ago and never returned. Nobody knows where she is.
I had fun playing as a mouse. Actions that a human wouldn’t think twice of performing aren’t so easy for a mouse, some of which the author has turned into features of the game. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)you can’t take the spade in the garden; it’s too heavy. Also, you can’t carry anything else if you pick up the cricket ball.
I do think the size aspect of the PC could have been exploited for a few more interesting puzzles, though.
My critiques of The Mouse Who Woke Up For Christmas are the same issues that so often bedevil us parser authors: a few underclued puzzles, like (Spoiler - click to show)wetting the rock to create a "whetstone" (it's a nice pun, but really hard to come up with on your own) and knocking out the weasel with the cricket ball; some guess-the-verb problems like (Spoiler - click to show)FILL BUCKET, when PUT WATER IN BUCKET and GET WATER don't work, LIGHT/BURN something isn't understood when you clearly need a fire for something, and THROW HOOK to get in the pet shop; as well as not enough feedback when you try something close to the solution, like (Spoiler - click to show)how the text says, "You can’t use it that way" when you try to use the match on the lump of charcoal before pouring lighter fluid on it. It would clue the player that they’re on the right track if the text response was something like, "You try, but the lump of charcoal won’t catch fire. It’s too dry."
My ten-year-old son played through the endgame with me. He really liked (Spoiler - click to show)the ninja outfit, as did I.
The story is sweet in a way that’s endearing rather than annoying (as opposed to certain children’s television programs). The ending is (Spoiler - click to show)predictable but still moving. Meeting Santa Claus and having his elves help save the day was a nice touch as well, storywise.
Overall, a cute Christmas-themed game.
Too heavy-handed with its theme, March 1, 2019In Shackles of Control, a short, choice-based game, you find yourself in a hallway of your high school. However, nobody is there, and so you have to figure out what happened to them and what is going on.
Given the game's title, it's perhaps not surprising that the whole thing turns out to be a metaphor for letting go of the strictures placed on you (your memories, say, or others' expectations).
To achieve this, you must (Spoiler - click to show)find the secret passage in the teachers’ lounge, discover the machine that holds everyone’s memories, and turn it off so that you can, as the best ending text says, find
"a place where you would never be corrupted by others, a place where you could make your own unique memories, a place where you could find out who you really were.
A place where you could be genuinely you."
My thoughts on this theme: (Spoiler - click to show)I do think we need to get away by ourselves from time to time, for self-reflection and self-understanding. And I do think that others’ expectations on us can feel like “shackles of control.” It is important to find out who we are.
But I disagree that becoming genuinely you requires shrugging off the influence of everyone around you. A large part of who we are as individual humans exists in terms of our relationships with others. Identities we have like “father,” “wife,” “brother,” “grandmother,” “daughter,” “boyfriend,” “student,” “employee,” “boss,” etc., all exist only in relation to other people.
I suppose that, to many people - and particularly teenagers like the protagonist of Shackles of Control - these relationships can often feel oppressive. People just have so many expectations, and they can feel like shackles. But part of growing up is figuring out how to hold fast to (or perhaps create) your own identity - your own sense of who you are - while still embracing those relationships that help make us human. It’s often not an easy thing to do, and it may take years, but it is part of growing up.
There are some unfortunate spelling mistakes. I’m thinking of “alegebra” and “econimics” on the first page, but there are others, including two that give somewhat humorous unintended meanings to their phrases: "last year’s plaque of radioactive raccoons" and "your character arch was supposed to end on a high note."
A few technical comments: Mainly, I think the game pushes the player too much to achieve a particular ending. I played through multiple times, and many of your choices end up routing you in a certain direction, sometimes with odd narrative explanations as to why. I’m thinking in particular of the game telling you that (Spoiler - click to show)"You could have not known that that innocent coffee marker [sic] is hiding a terrible truth that none of the faculty wanted to be revealed," followed by explicit instructions to turn it (for no reason that's foreshadowed earlier in the game) 17 degrees to the left.
Shackles of Control also kind of mocks you if you don’t finish the game with a specific ending (or, possibly, one of a few specific endings). I think the game would be stronger if it explored the consequences of players choosing poorly (in terms of the game’s theme) by laying out a natural set of outcomes of those choices rather than the text just telling you that those are bad choices.
So, ironically, I think that the way Shackles of Control pushes the player to achieve a particular ending kind of serves as its own form of “shackles of control.”
Exploring the theme of how others' expectations can feel like a prison could make for an interesting and thought-provoking game, but I don't think this one succeeds at that.
Rather clever, actually, February 27, 2019StupidRPG is a mid-to-longer-length parser game that simulates a session of a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons, complete with a not fully competent Game Master. As far as I can tell, the author has written the parser and interface. It’s somewhat Quest-like, in that you not only have a parser but you can also click on a hyperlinked object, which then gives you a short menu of ways to interact with the object. If both the parser and interface were actually created by the author, they alone constitute an impressive piece of work.
The game itself is a comedy. The GM makes several humorous mistakes, most notably (Spoiler - click to show)failing to load the correct module for Act 2. Instead, he loads a backup from when the story was a different genre altogether (!). The font and background color in this older module... oh, my eyes!
The GM also dialogues with some of the characters in the story. In addition, one of your items takes you aside to make some comments about the GM’s “ignorance.” There are puns galore - groan-worthy puns that still elicit a chuckle even while you’re enduring the pun-ishment. The text itself takes a tone that can come across as silly, amusing, or hilarious, depending on your mood and tastes in comedy. In fact, I can see people having lots of different reactions to the humor in StupidRPG. For me, it worked most of the time.
Also, StupidRPG features multiple levels of awareness of itself: You’re playing a game mediated through the voice of the parser, and that game is itself a simulation of another game mediated through the voice of the GM. Who is not entirely competent. All the different ways that these levels of awareness interacted with each other in StupidRPG was my favorite part of playing it.
The RPG elements don’t seem to figure into the story much. I had a choice between several races - and, later, several professions - but these didn’t seem to affect gameplay a lot. I only saw one very minor place where my race affected the text (I don’t think it affected the gameplay at all). There was one important place where my profession mattered, though: (Spoiler - click to show)In the final boss battle, where my attempt to use my wizardly skills to cast a cantrip failed spectacularly and turned the final boss into a toad.
There are several monsters, but (Spoiler - click to show)you generally don't fight them. I even walked right past a troglodyte once and never interacted with him again. The exception was the endgame, where you do have a final boss to defeat.
All of this turns the experience of playing StupidRPG into something closer to a parser comedy than an RPG (which I’m sure is the intent). As a parser game, it feels fairly linear, and the puzzles tend to be straightforward. The one exception was (Spoiler - click to show)hugging the wyrmling. I'm thinking I missed a clue somewhere, but if not, I don't know how I would have ever gotten that without the walkthrough.
Overall, StupidRPG is a much cleverer game than the title would indicate - with a great deal of content and multiple levels of awareness of itself.
Immersive, addictive spy-themed game with some implementation problems, February 23, 2019I spent more time playing Six Silver Bullets than I did any of the other IFComp 2018 games during the competition period. Its immersive, addictive gameplay kept me engaged for hours.
The game itself is parser-based and written with ADRIFT. You wake up in a hotel room with your memories gone, a locked safe, a mysterious note, a silver gun, and six silver bullets. It turns out you're "Silver," one of several secret agents with colored code names.
The story is written in a noir-like style, complete with six-shooter, a femme fatale you meet early on, and short, clipped sentences. Also, the locations are more like archetypes than they are locations in some real world. For example, there are The Restaurant, The Church, The Hamlet, The Library, etc.
As is usual for a game featuring amnesia, the goal is to figure out what's going on. The mysterious note may or may not be from someone you can trust, and the people that you meet may or may not be looking out for your best interests.
The gameplay, though, is what kept me sticking with Six Silver Bullets for hours. It is very easy to get killed in this game. But that's intended: On each playthrough you gain more information about what's going on, and you can use that information on subsequent playthroughs to uncover even more of the story. In this sense it's a lot like Ryan Veeder's game The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening from last year. However, Six Silver Bullets is MUCH larger and has a much more complicated plot than The Lurkening. In fact, there are all kinds of plot twists and turns; I kept changing my mind about which of the characters were trustworthy and even what goals I wanted to pursue.
The endgame is satisfying, providing you with a narratively consistent explanation of the entire setting, as well as why you can continue to die and replay the story.
The only thing that kept Six Silver Bullets from being one of my very favorite IFComp 2018 games is its implementation. Some of this may be ADRIFT's parser, but there are lots and lots of issues here - ranging from minor to serious to very frustrating. For example, you often have to type the entire name of an object, even when it's quite long. I really got tired of typing (Spoiler - click to show)"the gray microfilm canister" over and over. Sometimes you can just type one or two of the words, though. Also, sometimes you have to include "the" in front of a dialogue option, and sometimes you don't. More serious problems include dialog options that characters don't respond to, as well as several guess-the-verb issues. There was even one instance where the parser only accepted a particular misspelling of a word, not its correct spelling!
Still, frustrations aside, I very much enjoyed Six Silver Bullets - enough to keep playing the game for many hours. If these implementation issues could be fixed I'd easily rate this game as five stars. Even with the parser frustrations, I'd call it a four-star game.
Needs more polish - but creative, original, and charming, February 22, 2019Space Punk Moon Tour is a long parser game written using the Quest system. You play as nineteen-year-old Tina, who lives with her grandmother after the death of her mother and the disappearance of her father. Tina has just won tickets to the moon to see her favorite band in concert.
I found the game a bit daunting at first. There are A LOT of objects in the first two rooms. In addition, I quickly discovered that the game needs more polish. There are several reasonable actions you can try that don't do anything, some objects aren't fully implemented, and I had guess-the-verb problems on multiple occasions.
I was on the verge of giving up (there's no walkthrough), and then I checked some of the other reviews. Ade McT indicated that he had (Spoiler - click to show)made it onto the spaceship within two hours, so I thought I would give it another try. And I'm glad I did. The story gets more interesting - particularly with the quirky characters. For instance, (Spoiler - click to show)there's Tina's former coworker she meets on the subway who is on his way to a job interview but who also, oddly, has had his shoes stolen. Then there's TJ, Tina's boss (I think) who wants her to meet him in a sketchy room in the Underground and deliver a mysterious package for him. These guys, Tina, and her friend Jantasha all know each other and have a history with each other.
There are also a couple of strange wire collectors in the subway, a woman with whom Tina bonds in the bathroom over feminine hygiene products, and an alien working the space flight information desk. Even Tina's grandmother, who won't let Tina touch her hot chocolate, was someone I found kind of endearing.
In addition, there's a subplot about a fire years ago in a factory owned by Cobri, a major corporation that seems to control everything. I'm wondering if this will tie in to the story behind Tina's father's disappearance.
In general, the fact that Tina appears to be from a lower socioeconomic class than you normally get for an IF protagonist makes her more interesting to play.
In the end, I made it to (Spoiler - click to show)the second day on the spaceship before stopping. I hope sometime to return to the game and finish it.
The graphics are charming and remind me some of those in Sierra's 1980s graphics/parser hybrid games. (Space Punk Moon Tour is pure parser, though; the graphics are there to enhance the experience - not to interact with.)
You can also check your phone in each location, which is a neat feature. "Read News" checks your news feed for something new, "Check Calendar" summarizes your major goals for that location, and you can also text multiple people.
In addition, there are decisions you can make (or not make) in earlier locations that affect what you can do later or what happens later. I didn't play far enough to determine whether failing to do something would lock me out of victory, but it was interesting to see those events play out or not play out. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)if you don't text TJ on the subway then you can't meet him in the underground, which might change your options for the party on the spaceship. Also, I didn't say anything to my grandmother about the bad milk in the refrigerator before I left, and while I was on the spaceship Jantasha texted me to say that Grandma had gotten sick and had gone to the hospital. I wonder if that would not have happened if I had warned Grandma.
Overall, while Space Punk Moon Tour could have used a lot more testing and polish, I found it to be a creative, original, and charming work of IF.
A roller-coaster ride of a sex comedy, February 22, 2019H.M.S. Spaceman is a ribald sex comedy, which is not one of my preferred comedy genres. And the first act dragged for me. However, I stayed with the game and slowly started to warm up to it. By the middle of the second act it had grabbed me, and from there on all I could do was hold on for dear life - between laughs, that is. It's kind of like the reaction I had the first time I read A Confederacy of Dunces. I kept thinking "The game is going there? And there?! And there!?!"
Like A Confederacy of Dunces, though, you can sense that there's more to H.M.S. Spaceman than just the outrageous bids for laughs. For one, while the game starts out with the male humans' point of view, it eventually switches to that of the aliens. And these humans are clueless - totally clueless. What you end up with is a lampooning of patriarchy and colonialism, right down to some William Shatner / Star Trek elements.
But it's the rollicking comedy that dominates. The part that made me laugh the hardest was (Spoiler - click to show)when Penumbra is trying to find a song to listen to on the radio. I finally settled on, "I hear you call my name." And then the game slowly gives you the next few lines:
---
"And it feels"
---
"like"
---
"home."
Me: "I think I recognize that. What is it?"
And then: "It's... it's... oh, right!"
So, an alien tentacle creature planning to seduce and deceive some clueless humans is listening to Madonna's "Like a Prayer." I laughed long and hard.
Also, for some reason, (Spoiler - click to show)the whole sex scene told from Penumbra's - the alien tentacle creature's - point of view. Like how she remembers the need for humans to slow down and engage in "the fourth play." Just... wow.
Overall, an outrageously funny sex comedy - but with more going on underneath the surface.
A rich, varied, and open-ended choice-based game, February 18, 2019The Master of the Land is a long, choice-based game set in a small, imaginary European country on the Mediterranean Coast in 1834. You play as Lady Irene, the daughter of a prominent nobleman and politician, although your penchant for spending time in forests studying plants is considered decidedly unladylike for this time and place. The events of the game unfold over the course of several hours at a party and festival at the Palace.
The presentation is top-notch, with attractive images accompanying the text for most choices, as well as a sidebar containing a list of the rooms you can access from the one you're currently in. There's also a map of the palace where the game takes place, as well as a link to "reminders" for what your goals are so far and information you've uncovered.
Gameplay entails selecting from a list of options in the room you're in or moving to an adjacent room. Each selection gives you (usually) a few paragraphs of text. There are lots of scheduled events at the party; you can choose to attend some, all, or none of those. You can pursue another goal related to your botanical interests. Alternatively, there are several additional storylines that you can uncover by being in the right place and the right time and making the right choices. And many events are on timers: For example, dinner is at ten, and if you're not in the dining room on time, the doors close, and you have to find some other way to spend the next half-hour or so.
All of this means that there is a lot going on. If you're a completist (and I have some of those tendencies), you should be warned that there is no way you can do everything in this game in one (or probably even a few) playthroughs. There are just too many intertwined events on timers. In fact, if you pause for just one enticing choice in a room as you're trying to get to another room for a particular event or catch up with a certain person you may miss that event or person entirely. This happened in both of my playthroughs, in fact.
(Spoiler - click to show)On the first one, the young poet Octavio told me to listen for the crying man in the dining room. I paused for just one moment on my way to the dining room to ask the servants about the whereabouts of some other men I was trying to find, and I reached the outside of the dining room just as the doors were being closed!
On the second playthrough, I was trying to identify the woman in the mask with all the keys. I finally figured out who she was, and I saw her entering a certain room. I paused for just one choice to pursue another goal (I forget which one), and when I followed the woman into the room, she was gone! I never did find her again.
It all combines to create a rich, varied experience.
A lot of times when I play choice-based games it's clear the author has designed the game to anticipate every possible set of choices I could make and has written text to account for that. Or, at most, the author tracks a few stats to affect gameplay. But, for the most part, playing a choice-based game has me feeling like my choices are still within a small set of outcomes the author has already planned out for the game. You just don't get the feeling of sheer open-endedness in terms of the events of the story that a good parser game can give. This is not to say that parser games aren't constrained in their own ways, or that choice-based games can't achieve other important artistic goals besides providing an open-ended experience. But The Master of the Land, with its location-based events, time-based events, and various goals to pursue, feels more open-ended than any choice-based game I can remember playing right now. And, since it's a choice-based game, it doesn't suffer from the problems open-ended parser-based games usually have: guess-the-verb issues, many of your actions resulting in default or error messages, or wandering around all over the map with nothing interesting happening.
It must have been an incredible undertaking to code this game and get all the potential plot events coordinated.
All in all, I really enjoyed The Master of the Land.
An Agatha Christie-type murder mystery with a noir feel, February 16, 2019Murder at the Manor is a short, choice-based murder mystery set in London in 1936. Glancing at the cover and title without reading the blurb, the noticeable palm trees had led me to think the game was set in Los Angeles. After realizing that I was a continent and an ocean off, I did some searching: Sure enough, there are palm trees in London! I wouldn't have thought they would grow so well that far north.
Murder at the Manor features a typical set of characters for such a setting: the murdered lord, the business partner, the ne'er-do-well nephew who stands to inherit, the mistress, the former housekeeper. These are the kinds of suspects you would see in an Agatha Christie novel. Christie didn't write hard-boiled police inspectors as her main protagonists, though; that's closer to Dashiell Hammett. However, his protagonists were, I believe, generally private detectives; the police were usually viewed as incompetent. Murder at the Manor features a character like that as well, though: the constable. In fact, some of the most amusing lines in the game are from the dialogue between you and the constable. The game is also written in the first person, which allows for some of the inner monologuing that you get in detective fiction from that era. In general, I think the game does succeed in capturing the "noir" feel, albeit outside of its usual American setting.
Gameplay consists of examining the body, visiting various locations in the manor and its grounds, interviewing the suspects, and examining the potential murder weapons. Then, at the end, you can decide which suspect to arrest. The game throws out several red herrings, but if you pay careful attention to the evidence you can deduce the identity of the murderer.
My one critique is that I would have liked to have the interactive nature of the work - the choices - align more with the deduction process. For example, when you move from one stage of the investigation to the next the PC says things like, "I know the location of the murder," but you (as the player) might not have quite figured that out yet. I haven't attempted to write an IF mystery, but this interactive/deduction alignment sounds hard to pull off. One has to select the mechanic that implements the investigation just right. Yet it can be done; to compare with another IFComp 2018 game, I think Erstwhile's mechanic of linking clues manages it.
A minor anachronism: At one point a character refers to the PC as one of "Her Majesty's agents." The U.K. had three monarchs in 1936, but they were all male. So this should be "His Majesty's agents."
Long and beautifully presented, but few choices until about midgame, February 11, 2019The Broken Bottle is a long choice-based story about a young boy, the wolf he has befriended, and a nearby encampment of gypsies. The game is made in Unity, and the "welcome" page says that it's a prototype. However, it mostly felt like a completed story to me.
The cover art is beautiful, although it's also somewhat confusing: What is Professor Elwood's Castle of Oddities? There's no such person or thing that I could find in the game - or even a hint of anything like that. Perhaps The Broken Bottle is intended to be one story in a collection that is somehow tied together by Professor Elwood and his castle.
The game's presentation is also beautiful. Like another IFComp 2018 game, Abbess Otilia's Life and Death, the story is in book form. Also like Abbess Otilia, I found the book lovely to look at. In addition, you get this nice "page turning" sound effect every time you, well, turn a page. I think Myst and/or Riven had something like that as well. It helped draw me in.
For about the first half or so of The Broken Bottle it felt very much like I was simply reading a beautifully-presented online novella: This part of The Broken Bottle is heavy on the fiction and light on the interactive. (I only remember one choice up through midgame.) Around the middle of the game, though, you start being presented with choices (always binary choices) with a fair degree of regularity. I wasn't sure at first how much many of these actually mattered, but by the end I could see that some really did have effects that showed up - sometimes much later.
I got an ending I was mostly happy with. I did kind of want to try for another ending, but the story is so long, and the first half is nearly all straight narrative. I couldn't make myself click through all the pages again to find something different.
Overall, a long, beautifully-presented story whose interactive elements don't really kick in until about midgame.
Wordplay with word fragments, February 7, 2019Dream Pieces 2 consists of a series of wordplay-based puzzles. There is a story, but it's light, and it's clearly only there to give some kind of a frame to the puzzles. (Which is fine with me - I've written a game like that myself.)
In each room in Dream Pieces 2 you are given a few objects. By breaking the objects into their component letters or word fragments you can rearrange them to make new words that will help you escape that room. For example, in the first room you are given a HORSE and a DONKEY. Breaking these two objects gives you an H, an OR, an SE, a DO, an N, a KE, and a Y to play with to make new words. The game interestingly calls these letters and word fragments "Legos," although they're not the kinds of Legos my kids play with.
It's a really neat idea (wordplay at its most basic, I suppose), and I enjoyed Dream Pieces 2. It felt kind of like playing Scrabble - the way you're constantly reordering the letters and word fragments and then seeing if the result makes sense.
I did find the puzzles somewhat frustrating at times. I think it's because there are so many ways to rearrange the letters but only a small number give you actual words. So you rarely have that experience with complicated but well-designed parser puzzles of being rewarded for making partial progress. For the most part, in Dream Pieces 2 you either figure out the solution, or you don't. I say "for the most part" because if you create something that is part of what's needed for that room, the game generally gives you a message about that object, which is helpful. Still, the sheer number of possible ways to arrange the word fragments is so large that the vast majority of the time you're not getting feedback. I don't know how to solve this problem, as it seems inherent in the kind of wordplay the game presents.
However, Dream Pieces 2 does provide hints for each room, as well as an explicit walkthrough for each room. These are quite helpful and ameliorate the problem I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
I could have used little more guidance at the beginning about how to make the objects in the game interact with each other. For example, I was confused in the first room because (Spoiler - click to show)I had made a key and a door, but it took me a while to figure out how to get them to interact in the right way. I kept trying to select the key and use it on the door. But USE wasn't an option. PUT was the closest option, but that didn't make sense - and it didn't work. It took me a little while to realize I needed to TAKE the key and then OPEN the door - the game automatically using the key on the door if I'm carrying it.
In general, it might be nice to have more user-friendly features like Ailihphilia has, although those might be hard to implement in the Quest system.
Overall, though, I enjoyed the wordplay puzzles in Dream Pieces 2. My ten-year-old son played through some of them and enjoyed them as well.
An exploration of trust and betrayal in the context of prejudice, February 6, 2019Careless Talk is a short, choice-based work in which you play as a member of a magical corps fighting for your country, Albion, during wartime. The dedication to Alan Turing at the beginning of Careless Talk immediately made me think the country was Britain and the war was World War II. And I continued to think of Albion as a magical version of Britain as I played through the game: The navy, the monarchy, and the character and mannerisms of the major all have a British feel - not to mention the fact that Albion is an old name for Great Britain. I didn't pick up much more of a vibe about the war itself by the end, but the exact nature of the war is not really the game's focus.
Instead, as the title indicates, Careless Talk is more interested in exploring questions of trust and betrayal. Despite the military setting and the title's reference to an old World War II slogan, though, the trust and betrayal in Careless Talk don't have to do with inadvertently spilling military secrets. Instead, as the dedication to Alan Turing hints, Albion is a society with a lot of prejudice towards gay and queer people. So much so that, like Turing himself, gay folk must hide that part of themselves from society at large - even gay people who are instrumental to the war effort.
However, Albion's society is also prejudiced towards magical folk, despite their obvious usefulness in wartime situations. In fact, I wondered early on if the game was going to use magical powers as a metaphor for homosexuality. Then it surprised me by portraying homosexual prejudice as a distinct, separate dimension of prejudice in Albion society. Then it surprised me again by explicitly associating the two (sending my thoughts back to what I was thinking originally), with these sentences: "Prejudice and hatred against magical folk and homosexuals have been linked for over a century. They both carry associations with the decadence of the aristocracy, without the protection that class affords."
I think the writing in Careless Talk is strong. I'm not sure what the message is, although here are some thoughts.
(Spoiler - click to show)The game tells you that you have to be careful who you trust - to watch out for, as the title says, "careless talk." Tom's murder is the most obvious example of that. On the other hand, the reverend explicitly chooses to trust you, the PC, with his secret. Isn't he being careless? Surely he shouldn't be so trusting of you.
Although maybe that is the message: That, in a society in which you have to hide part of who you are, you never know whom you can trust. Sometimes trust leads to betrayal, and sometimes it leads to a deep connection. There's a hint that perhaps the PC and the reverend will be lovers in the future.
Overall, I think Careless Talk is a bit too obvious about its central metaphor (for example, with the dedication to Turing and the two sentences I quoted before). Metaphor generally works better as a literary device when the reader picks it up on his or her own.
Short, old-school text adventure with just a few puzzles, February 1, 2019Nightmare Adventure is a short, old-school style text adventure written with a homebrew parser. The plot is that everyone else in your village has fallen into a magical sleep, and it's up to you to save them.
I found Nightmare Adventure to be weaker than the two other old-school text adventures (Flowers of Mysteria and Escape from Dinosaur Island) I played in IFComp 2018. It's much shorter, for one, with only three or so puzzles (depending on how you count them). The puzzles are also quite easy - with the exception of the last one, which is a bit more clever.
One player-friendly feature of Nightmare Adventure is that it tells you exactly which objects you can interact with. I appreciated not having to type a bunch of EXAMINE [scenery object] commands, wondering whether I'd missed something important.
I do wish Nightmare Adventure had been more fleshed-out. For instance, the last stage of the game was (for me) the most interesting part, with a setting just brimming with potential for creative story choices or puzzle design. But there's not actually much to do there. Also, the game felt to me like it ended a bit abruptly, even when I managed to win it.
I also think Nightmare Adventure could could have done more, puzzle-wise, to increase player engagement. Not that parser-based puzzle games can't be short and engaging at the same time; The Origin of Madame Time pulls this off, for instance. But a short parser game is under that much more impetus to make the puzzles clever in order to keep the player's attention and give them a sense of satisfaction once the game is over. (A long parser game can more easily pull this off with the sheer quantity of puzzles.)
Solid old-school text adventure, February 1, 2019Escape from Dinosaur Island is exactly what it says it is on its title page: a retro-style text adventure. I enjoyed it, in a nostalgic sort of way. I can't help but compare it to Flowers of Mysteria, the other 1980s-style text adventure in IFComp 2018. Both are somewhat similar in puzzle style, although the plots are quite different. In addition, while Flowers of Mysteria was written with a homebrew parser, the author of Escape from Dinosaur Island apparently wrote the game as a way to learn the Adventuron design system.
In EfDI, your hot-air balloon has crash-landed on an island, and you must figure out a way to escape. This mostly involves gathering items from the island and assembling them in different ways to MAKE new objects. In fact, the use of the MAKE command is one of the more interesting aspects of the game. I'm not used to, in a parser game, using a verb on a noun I can't actually see. But in Escape from Dinosaur Island, there are multiple things you need to MAKE, that you can't currently see, out of components that you're carrying.
Let me take an example that's not actually in the game to illustrate this. Suppose you need to make a leather vest. If you're carrying the bear skin, the awl, and the spool of thread then simply typing MAKE VEST will make the vest for you. There's no need to deal with any guess-the-verb problems as you attempt to POKE HOLES IN BEAR SKIN WITH AWL or something else complicated like that. Also, if you don't have all the right components, then the game will tell you.
Normally the game gave me enough hints at what I needed to make that I didn't have problems with MAKE-ing things. The one exception was (Spoiler - click to show)the fire. I kept trying things like BURN LOGS or LIGHT LOGS, and none of these commands worked. There's no walkthrough for the game, so I eventually went to the game's thread on intfiction.org and discovered the proper command is MAKE FIRE. But this was the only place where I needed a hint.
The help menu says that every item in the game can be examined. I found a few exceptions to this, but only a few. Overall, I found the game's implementation to be solid.
The difficulty level felt just about right for me. I was never seriously stuck (with the one exception that I mentioned), yet the puzzles were more interesting than the fetch-quests that tend to comprise much of the puzzle design in weaker old-school text adventures. I think my favorite was (Spoiler - click to show)getting the objects into the cave, making the soup, and then drinking it so that you're strong enough to push the altar aside. This one hit the sweet spot for me of feeling complex enough to be interesting but well-clued enough to avoid frustration.
If you like 1980s-era text adventures, you'll probably enjoy Escape from Dinosaur Island.
Great art, unique protagonists, and some interesting special effects, January 29, 2019In Ürs you play as a rabbit whose warren is threatened by ominous THUDs, and you have to figure out how to save it. After a while you realize that the setting isn't quite what it appears to be at first. It turns out that (Spoiler - click to show)the THUDs are meteorites hitting the shell protecting the large space rock (small moon?) that the warren is located in. You have to uncover some secrets of the ancient rabbits, increase the strength of the shell, and move the large space rock so that it is orbiting a different celestial body in order to save the warren. (I think that's right. Somehow the ancient rabbits must have built an engine of some sort into the rock itself.)
The art in this game is great - like the cover, with its strong hint of rabbity-ness.
The plot feels right within the mainstream of science fiction plots - uncover secret knowledge that no one else has dared to find and save your world, but the rabbit protagonist and the art give it some freshness.
One interesting feature of Ürs that I've seen in the Geronimo Stilton series of books that my kids read is that the fonts of certain words are changed - in the middle of a sentence - to augment their meaning or effect. For example, the THUDs actually go "THUD!". I think this effect works well most of the time. The one place I'm not sure about is the dialog that's rotating or moving while changing colors. That's unfortunately a bit hard to read.
Ürs has a rather impressive set of influences. The authors list Watership Down, City of Ember, Skyrim, Caves of Qud, Super Mario Brothers, and Apocalypse Now. I confess that I don't see how most of these fit the game (Watership Down is obvious - the rest less so). Maybe it's not an influence, but the game also reminded me at times of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
An exploratory RPG-lite game starring a corgi, January 26, 2019In Adventures with Fido you play as a cute little corgi. It starts out quite simple, with you in your backyard. However, as you begin to explore the area, you discover that there's a whole lot more to this game than appears at first. There are hidden areas to unlock, achievements, multiple major quests, side quests, a race, various knowledge quizzes, and I'm sure a bunch of other things that I didn't uncover.
Your score is primarily measured in the number of bones you find.
So Adventures with Fido ends up being a kind of an exploratory RPG in text form. You're not killing monsters and earning experience points to unlock more powers, but things like achievements and quests certainly fall within the general RPG framework. The author has provided an excellent walkthrough (24 pages!) that serves as a guide to all of the game's secrets.
The game is cute, and the writing is amusing in places. I can see Adventures with Fido being a good RPG-lite game for kids who are old enough to read long passages of text but not quite old enough for, say, The Witcher 3. I'm afraid it only kept my attention for about half an hour, though, as some of the RPG aspects were a little too repetitive for my taste. (Well, one could argue that there's a lot about RPGs that is repetitive. Crafting comes to mind.)
The game does feature some unusual color choices that were hard on my eyes, such as white or green text on a light blue background.
Haunting, atmospheric game that allows for multiple interpretations, January 23, 2019In this choice-based game you play as the last priest of a dying cult. You have never heard your god's voice, and you wonder if the god is still there. Your primary choice in the game is to decide which particular act of devotion you will perform, in the hope that your god will speak to you or give you some kind of a sign.
The music is excellent, particularly the piece that sounds like Gregorian chant. It completely changes the feel of the game. The background graphics are also lovely.
Also, the opening line is up there with Erstwhile's as one of the best opening lines in IFComp 2018: "You have devoted your life to a god whose voice you have never heard." Immediately gripping.
More substantively, DEVOTIONALIA manages to pull off a feat that is difficult for any artwork in any form: It's emotionally powerful and yet ambiguous enough to allow for multiple interpretations.
For example, I kept coming back to how DEVOTIONALIA dramatizes a question that many of us probably ask ourselves at least once in our lives, perhaps when we're alone with our thoughts and no distractions: "Has my entire life been based on something that does not matter?" The priest wants a sign that the deity is there, that the god he has spent his entire life serving still cares, that what he's done with his time on this earth has served a real purpose.
There's plenty of religious literature that wrestles with situations like the priest's: of people going forward, day after day and year after year, living out their acts of devotion (in all kinds of ways) - without direct confirmation of the value of what they're doing. I think of some of the Christian mystical works like John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul; or the title of Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness; or Mother Teresa's diaries, in which it was revealed that she spent decades working with the poor of Calcutta because of a directive from God, all the while questioning God's very existence; or even of C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, in which he wrestles with his faith and his wife's death from cancer.
But you don't have to be a religious believer to wonder whether this thing that you've devoted your life to is worth it. Have I made the correct career choices? Is this political movement I'm involved in really for the best? To reference another game in this Comp, have my reproductive choices been the right ones? Many of us, like the priest, just want a sign from God, or some confirmation from the universe.
In DEVOTIONALIA the priest gets his sign. Something is there. But the sign doesn't really answer his fundamental question: "Does what I've done with my life matter?"
Which is probably the right ending. This question may ultimately be one we must answer for ourselves.
Excellent graphics-based exploration-and-trading game, January 22, 2019Sunless Sea is a wonderfully captivating exploration-and-trading game, set in a Lovecraftesque watery underworld. You'll visit ports; buy and sell goods; uncover secrets; and run errands for groups ranging from the Admiralty of Fallen London to a monkey kingdom to an underwater monarch to a colony of spiders. You'll encounter devils, revolutionaries, cannibals, and an island that's gone postal. You might earn the wrath of the Storm God, install spies in other ports, propagate mushroom creatures across the sea, witness nuns engaging in martial arts, and found your own colony. The sheer variety of things to do in Sunless Sea is astounding, and the game has kept me engaged for dozens of hours.
The game's arch and witty writing is a treat to read. To take just one minor example, there's a subtly menacing character you can meet who has a keen eye for fashion. The mouseover text for her picture says, "She has no difficulties with blood. But she very much dislikes bloodstains."
Sunless Sea reminds me of a much, much more in-depth version of Superluminal Vagrant Twin. It's graphics-based, though - not text-based. You'll spend much of your time piloting your ship around the Unterzee.
Out of all of the games I've played that are listed on the IFDB, Sunless Sea seems the least like IF. Although the writing is strong, and you (as the player) are effectively telling interesting stories by the choices you make, it's not a text-based game. Thus I'm omitting my rating from the game's average.
But the most important thing about Sunless Sea is not the label you place on it; it's that the game is a lot of fun. Highly recommended.
A short love story with an unusual mechanic, January 21, 2019Linear Love is a short and sad love story. It is, as the title says, quite linear. You navigate through the story by pressing the arrow keys or the WASD keys. The walkthrough says that clicking will work, but it's counterintuitive (you click in the direction opposite that of where you want the text to go - see the next paragraph) and so kind of hard to use.
The navigation is unusual and took some getting used to. You're essentially moving the text "Reader One" around on the screen, even when that text appears to remain stationary in the middle. Thus, for example, in order to make the text look like it's moving down, you have to press the up arrow key.
You don't have choices to make in Linear Love, as far as I can tell. You interact with it by pressing the cursor keys to (effectively) scroll through the text.
The love story is interesting, but there's just not much to it, or much interactivity.
One of the most intriguing aspects of this game, though, occurs when (Spoiler - click to show)you right-click on the screen and select "Escape." This opens an interface of some sort where it appears you can play with snippets of other games written by the author. These all involve using the arrow keys to navigate through pieces of text, with different events triggering when different pieces of text come in contact with each other.
I played with one of these for a while and eventually found a hermit in a desert cave, and then a story about killer plants. After that I jumped off a cliff in order to die and be resurrected and obtain eternal life. And then I stopped.
I do not know if this was an intended Easter egg or a bug, but it was kind of entertaining. Also, it's a really neat mechanic and one that I hope the author makes more use of in the future.
Not very interactive - but well-written and poignant, January 18, 2019This short, choice-based game feels to me like someone baring his soul, with all of the accompanying awkwardness, pain, and poignancy.
The story is about Michael, a lonely, shy gay man, recalling his first junior high crush - ten years ago - on a straight boy, Billy. He reflects on the intensity of his feelings for Billy, the things he did to impress Billy, the poetry he wrote for Billy, Billy's smile. He wonders what would have happened if he had ever confessed his feelings for Billy.
So, they're both adults now, and Michael decides to go visit Billy and tell him about the crush that he had all those years ago. Michael seems to want closure or acknowledgement - or maybe he just wants to prove to himself that he's a braver man than he was back then.
A story like this could come across as maudlin, but Time Passed did not feel that way to me: The continual self-reflection and raw honesty of the prose save it from that. In fact, Time Passed has my favorite writing out of all the IFComp 2018 games.
There's only one real choice that I can tell. It's (Spoiler - click to show)not Michael's but Billy's, actually. As the player, you get to choose whether Billy claims to remember Michael. Remembering Michael is the more interesting of the two options and spools the story out longer.
The ending text for the longer of the two options captures the self-reflection and raw honesty I mentioned earlier:
(Spoiler - click to show)"On the walk back to my parents' place I try to keep my thoughts blank, but soon enough one comes to me anyways: I wish I'd told you earlier. But of course I don't. If I had, if you had kissed me in our youth and dissolved my pain, so many things in my life would not be where they are now, and I'm happy now. I'm in a good place. I wouldn't want that to change.
"Then I scold myself. I don't have to think about the sequence of events. I can wish you'd kissed me and want to keep my life the way it is. I'm allowed to have uncomplicated regret. Aren't I?
"Aren't I?"
I really resonated with Time Passed. It reminded me of unrequited love, the times I said something, the times I didn't, the times I wondered whether I should have said something, the times I second- and third-guessed myself. It even reminded me of the times when I've had someone confess love to me and I had no idea they felt that way, leaving me wondering "How do I respond to this?"
Even decisions that aren't about romance - that job I might have taken, or that chance I had to move to that city. We all do this kind of thinking back and wondering "What if...?"
A short, awkward, raw, and poignant piece of IF.
Changed my view of a genre, January 15, 2019OH, MY WORD. I'm tense by the third screen or so of this game. I'm still a little tense, having played through it twice now. I'm so glad I played this game in the morning. I think it would have given me nightmares if I had experienced it right before going to bed.
Bogeyman is a choice-based horror game. Horror is one of my least-favorite genres. When horror doesn't work, it usually just feels dumb to me. If it does, then why am I reading fiction or watching a movie, just to be scared? Real life is scary enough as it is (just glance at a random day's headlines); why should I seek it out? But I'm playing through the games in this Comp and trying to give feedback, so I played Bogeyman anyway.
Maybe because I don't seek out horror in fiction much I'm more sensitive to it. Whatever the reason, I am still tense, even though I'm now three paragraphs into this review. Okay, deep breaths. I'll try to be objective from here on.
The blurb and cover hint well at the menace to come, especially the tagline: "You can go home when you learn to be good." Then you start the game, and you're faced with basic white text on a black background. This, the simple font, and the spare writing together just ooze menace. Something about the choices being in all caps enhances it, too.
I don't know that I want to say much about the content, other than that it is terrifying. For some reason (Spoiler - click to show)the prayer at the table, "We are truly grateful for what we have," was one of the worst moments. I suppose it's that effect of "Not only can I make you physically experience these horrifying events, I'm going to twist your soul so much that you'll be thankful for the horror." Then combine that with the fact that it's being done to children, in a perversion of a simple act of gratitude that many of us daily choose to make... Shudder.
The absolutely worst thing I've done in IF - ever, in any game - in terms of how it made me feel, was (Spoiler - click to show)eating Grace. Eating Grace! After saying grace! It would be kind of funny if it weren't so awful.
Despite my dislike of horror as a genre, I don't think I regret playing this game. Even while I'm feeling what I'm feeling, I'm thinking, "Wow. What an amazing piece of art, to be able to produce this reaction from me."
My conclusion: Bogeyman is an excellent horror game. Play it, and experience it for yourself. Just not right before bedtime.
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I wrote the above review on the authors' forum during IFComp 2018 right after playing Bogeyman. It led to a discussion among several of us about the themes in Bogeyman, as well as horror in general. I had always thought that the primary (sole?) purpose of horror is to frighten or disgust people, and those are not experiences that I've ever been interested in seeking out. However, the authors' conversation convinced me that horror can be used effectively in the service of worthwhile artistic goals.
For example, Chandler Groover argued that Bogeyman does an excellent job of making the player feel what it's like to live with an abuser. It's not a pleasant experience, but it's true, in the sense that there are people who do live under an abuser's power. It's important that we know this - and that there is art out there like Bogeyman that can dramatize it for us.
So, I no longer stand by my dismissive comments about works of horror in the second paragraph of my original review. Horror is still not going to be my go-to genre, but I have a much deeper appreciation for it than I did before I played Bogeyman.
That makes Bogeyman one of only a handful of works I've experienced that have been integral in changing my view of an entire genre.
Long, ambitious parser game that needs more polish, January 9, 2019Anno 1700 is a long parser game written in ADRIFT. Its cover, title, and blurb together combine to make it sound like time travel (backwards, to the past), pirates, and romance will be involved. I was envisioning something like Plundered Hearts meets The Outlander.
This turned out to be only partially correct, though. There's definitely time travel and pirates. However, Anno 1700 features much less romance than the cover art seemed to imply to me.
Anno 1700 is quite ambitious. It's not only long; there are also some complicated puzzle sequences (one in particular in mid-game), as well as an interesting setting and story.
Unfortunately, however, I ran into several implementation issues early in the game. For example,
(Spoiler - click to show)I floundered around for a long time trying to figure out exactly the right phrase to tell Susan that I had arrived for work. TELL SUSAN ABOUT ME, ASK SUSAN ABOUT JOB, ASK SUSAN ABOUT HOTEL, TALK TO SUSAN - none of these worked. Finally I got SAY HELLO to work.
After obtaining my room key from Susan I then went upstairs and had trouble getting the game to let me enter my room. I tried UNLOCK DOOR, UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY, and UNLOCK ROOM 101 WITH KEY before finally achieving success with UNLOCK DOOR 101 WITH KEY.
Inside my room I successfully managed to take the crack in the closet and carry it around with me.
I wasn't sure what to do next, so I went downstairs to talk to Susan again. SAY HELLO a second time just returned the command prompt.
I went back to my room, and the text said that after entering I dropped my suitcase on the bed and quickly changed into something more comfortable. But I wasn't carrying the suitcase anymore; I had left it in the closet before going downstairs. I had also changed into something more comfortable my first time in my room.
At this point, remembering the blurb's IFComp 2018 estimate of more than two hours, I decided to pull up the walkthrough and just follow it for the rest of the game. Which was kind of a shame, because there are the makings of a really excellent piece of IF here: I enjoyed the story, and the setting is strong. Also, the author has clearly put a lot of work into designing the flow of the plot and constructing some intricate puzzles. But Anno 1700 is unfortunately marred by its implementation, as well as some underclued puzzles. Having another five testers to play all the way through the game, find bugs, and suggest synonyms or better clues would have gone a long way to helping Anno 1700 achieve the potential that I think it has.
Finally, a couple of things I particularly enjoyed about Anno 1700:
(Spoiler - click to show)The graphic of the parchment is really, really well-done. It was quite a pleasant surprise to type EXAMINE PARCHMENT and have that graphic appear. My only suggestion here would be to display it with the READ PARCHMENT command as well; I almost missed it.
Also, I liked being able to find the secret passage behind the closet in the present-day as well as when I've gone back in time. In general, I found the connections between the hotel in the present and the hotel in the past to be thought through well.
Explore a haunted mansion in this choice-based thriller, January 8, 2019I played The Addicott Manor on Halloween, and it was a perfect selection: a solo visit to a haunted mansion!
In terms of gameplay, The Addicott Manor is choice-based. The choices are given to you in list form after a piece of text. Then you have to click on the number that corresponds to your choice. With the interface that this game features I suppose this is the only way to do it, but it feels a little more immersive to me to click on my choice itself than on a number that corresponds to that choice.
The title page tells you that there are six treasures. I played through several times, but I never did better than escaping the house with two of the treasures. This is a game with a good bit of replay value.
Overall, The Addicott Manor worked for me in terms of creating that horror vibe of slowly exploring a sinister, ominous mansion. I could feel my pulse rising a little while I played. And I wanted to find the treasures: I kept playing and playing until I had achieved a small measure of success.
A few minor critiques: There is a lot of text at the beginning, which made it a bit hard for me to get into the game at first. Once I got into the mansion the ratio of text-to-choices worked better for me, though. There are a few too many grammar mistakes; more proofreading would have helped. Also, occasionally the game presents a choice to you that's actually unavailable. This may be a function of the program used to create the game, but it would have felt more immersive for the game to list only those actions that are actually available.
Fun fact: The PC drives a Ford Fiesta, making this one of three games in IFComp 2018 to feature a character who drives a Ford Fiesta.
Classic fairy tale with a few interactive elements, January 6, 2019More than any other game in IFComp 2018, The King of the World resembles a classic fairy tale. The game begins with a father telling his two sons a legend about three powerful stones that were once combined in a crown, giving the ruler power over earth, water, and sky. The ruler was betrayed, the crown was broken, and the stones were separated. After the father finishes telling the legend, the story reveals that (Spoiler - click to show)he has one of the three stones, and he plans to pass it down to the older son.
There are four chapters in all to this story. In classic fairy tale fashion, you (mostly) play as the the younger son. You goal is to find the crown and the three stones and potentially become the king of the world.
The King of the World is choice-based, but there aren't very many choices. The vast majority of my clicks were to "Continue" and give the next few paragraphs of the story. As far as I can tell, each chapter has just one choice or one collection of choices. The choices do affect what happens later, although I'm not sure how much. In particular, there's a place in Chapter 4 where (Spoiler - click to show)the older brother saves the younger brother. If I had made a different choice in Chapter 1 I suspect this might have turned out differently.
The game tells you explicitly when it prints text that depends on a previous choice, which is an interesting mechanic. I'm not sure what I think about it. I like knowing that my choices mattered that much, but it does make the story feel less immersive.
A few quibbles: There's a maze in Chapter 3 that could have been made smaller or cut without sacrificing story. Also, the event that leads to the choice in Chapter 1 seems like a small thing to have such a huge effect on the game's later events. My main critique, though, is that I would have liked to have had more choices in this game.
If you're looking for a classic fairy tale with a few interactive elements, then you'll probably enjoy The King of the World.
Short, well-written gem, January 3, 2019Some games start off strong but become less interesting the more you play. (Too much of the same thing, in many cases.) I had the opposite experience with En Garde; it got more and more interesting the more I played. Part of that is baked into the design of the game. You can't tell exactly what's happening at first, and you slowly learn what's really going on as you play.
In fact, I think En Garde does a very good job of capturing this experience. At first, you're just lumbering around, and you have a limited set of actions. But you don't know exactly what those are; they're represented by colored buttons. By experience you learn what clicking on each one does, and you have to remember.
(Warning: This is a major spoiler.) Then, (Spoiler - click to show)you eat a mouse's brains. Which is weird. You get access to the mouse's thoughts and begin to think in a mouse-y way. Then you find a dog, and you eat its brains. Which gives you a few more abilities, and now you have the mouse and the dog in your head. By this point you have nearly ten colored buttons to click for actions, but you still have to remember which button does what. I felt like I was an animal being trained in some experiment: Click the right button, and earn the right action (the reward) from the game.
Then you find a slice of brain that turns out to be human. At this point I'm thinking, "Am I a zombie?" Then eating the human brain slice gives you the words that go with the buttons, and the room descriptions improve. Now I'm thinking, "This game is World War Z meets Flowers for Algernon." And sure enough, that's exactly what it is!
I really enjoyed En Garde, but a couple of things stood out:
1. The PC's progression over the course of the game, especially (Spoiler - click to show)watching the room names and descriptions change.
2. The dialog between (Spoiler - click to show)the various consciousnesses going on in the PC's head.
The cover of En Garde is a parody of the cover of the old Infocom game A Mind Forever Voyaging; its title is a bilingual pun.
En Garde was the second fun, well-written Inform/Vorple gem by Jack Welch I played in IFComp 2018.
Conversation-based murder investigation in fifteenth century Scotland, December 23, 2018Border Reivers is a parser-based mystery set in Scotland in 1495. I didn't know what the "border reivers" were, so I looked them up. According to Wikipedia, they were "raiders along the Anglo-Scottish border from the late 13th century to the beginning of the 17th century." This gives me a setting I had not seen before in any book I've read or IF game I've played.
At the beginning of Border Reivers you are summoned by your father to help solve a murder, that of the son of one of the local lairds. The opening text says you have suspicions that something is going on in addition to the murder.
Gameplay mostly consists of asking various characters (and there are over a dozen of these!) about each other, the murder, the castle, and various other related topics.
I think Border Reviers is particularly strong on setting. The writing is also good, and the implementation is solid. Perhaps more of the default responses could have been changed, but then again that doesn't matter a whole lot in a conversation-focused game like this one.
I think the game is weaker when it comes to the investigation of the murder. I would have liked more clues to discover and analyze. As it stands, there are a few conversation topics that function as clues, but other than those there is only one physical clue in the game (that I saw, at least).
Border Reivers also has a particular crucial event occur after a certain number of terms, potentially revealing who's guilty before you've actually figured that out. This limits the game's replay value.
Overall, strong setting, good writing, and solid implementation, but more physical investigation and an alternative method for having a particular crucial event occur would have made Border Reivers more fun to play.
Technically strong political thriller that's a bit one-sided in its politics, December 22, 2018Ostrich is a choice-based political thriller. You work for the government's "advertising corrections" team. A right-wing populist leader with strong fascist tendencies comes to power. As the story progresses you have to decide how much you want to continue to support the government's increasingly restrictive rules on what is allowed to be printed and how much you want to support the movement protesting the government.
I had two strong, opposing reactions to Ostrich. One had to do with the gameplay, which I found to be quite good at conveying the feeling of participating in a repressive regime. For example, the mechanic of slowly adding more and more restrictions was particularly effective. The cumulative feel of all of that censorship was overpowering in ways that I think were intended. Also, the game has one particular location be the source of more and more events that illustrate the consequences of the new regime's oppressive policies. Some political issues can feel abstract; showing how one's daily routine is actually influenced by political decisions is a good way of dramatizing those decisions. In addition, the PC's continual notice of whether the trains were on time or late was interesting. I kept thinking of that old saying about Mussolini that at least he made the trains run on time, which I'm sure was the intent here.
The other strong reaction I had was to the game's political voice. My preference for art that tackles political issues is for them to engage multiple perspectives. I think it's fine to take a strong stand on an issue, but (in general) I think political art should at least show that it understands why people may think differently on that issue in addition to taking that strong stand.
And I don't think Ostrich does a good job with that. The kinds of policies that a repressive government attempts to force on its citizens can fall all over the political spectrum; all you need to do is look at 20th century history to find repressive left-wing regimes and repressive right-wing regimes. The new government in Ostrich, however, feels to me to be repressive in exactly the kinds of ways that a 2018 progressive most fears. It's like the embodiment of a left-wing nightmare. At one point the text even gives you the option of choosing "progressive" vs. "dangerously unpatriotic" in a newspaper article that you're editing, with the clear implication that "progressive" is good and anything else is bad. This feels too easy to me. Since it seems the primary intent of Ostrich is to give the player the experience of being complicit in a repressive political regime, I think the game would have been stronger if it were more universal and not so clearly aligned with one side of the political spectrum.
Of course, other players' mileage may vary on politics in art, as well as on Ostrich's political voice.
In sum, I found Ostrich to be a technically strong political thriller whose effect was somewhat marred by the fact that it only presents one side of some important political questions of the day.
Short, choice-based kissing simulator, December 21, 2018This game's blurb describes it well: smooch.click is an experimental kissing simulator. And it's focused on the moments that lead up to the kiss.
Gameplay is choice-based. I played through a handful of times. (The game is quite short, and so it invites multiple playthroughs.) During each playthrough you are presented with a few scenarios, most of which give you three options. After three or four (or maybe five) of these scenarios, there is a final scene featuring a kiss.
I got mostly different scenarios on each playthrough. Once I saw a scenario at the beginning that had appeared near the end of a different playthrough, though. So the scenarios must be (mostly?) randomly selected each time you play.
The way the kiss scene plays out appears to depend on your previous choices. When I tried more romantic choices I was generally rewarded with a more tender kiss scene. The one time I tried choices that were more indifferent or dismissive toward my date the final scene featured a "bad ending," with (Spoiler - click to show)a spider, me hitting my head, and a trip to the hospital.
The choices aren't presented to you in list form. Instead, they cycle through at the choice's location in the text, on a timer of some sort. I don't in general like text on timers like this, but in this case I think it works. It felt like it emphasized the split-second decision of some choices (if I don't click this now, I'm going to have to wait until it cycles through!), as well as the almost arbitrary nature that choosing sometimes has. Romantic situations where you're trying to feel out the other person particularly feature this. Sometimes "the moment" passes, and you're aware that you've missed something that you won't be able to get back. (However, in smooch.click, if you wait long enough, you will be able to get "the moment" back.)
The text doesn't feature capitalization, which can sometimes come across as an artificial affectation. But I think it fits here, with the work's experimental nature.
I find the choice of the word "smooch" in the title interesting. Why not kiss.click? "Smooch" feels a bit informal and a cozier word than "kiss." It's also somewhat like the sound you make when you kiss. "Kiss" is a more generic word and so feels more bland. So, yeah, I think smooch.click is a better choice than kiss.click.
The game's long list of content warnings made me think that this would be a much racier, darker game than it is (although maybe I missed those endings). In fact, based on what I saw, I would not put smooch.click anywhere near the erotica or adult interactive fiction categories. The choices that you're presented with are more about how you treat people in general or whether you are bored or uninterested or emotionally attracted to them.
Overall, this was an interesting experiment, but it felt slight to me. I think a lot more could have been done with potential story arcs.
Well-implemented old-school text adventure, December 21, 2018Stone of Wisdom starts off like a fairly standard old-school text adventure. You're given a quest to find a magic item (the titular stone), as well as three objects to help you along the way. There isn't much motivation provided for why you need to find the item, although the queen does promise you your freedom if you bring it back. But why is she asking you? Well, it appears you've done her a favor before, but the game doesn't go into the details. Presumably this backstory is contained in the two earlier games in the Bash series (which I have not played).
Even not knowing the background, though, the beginning isn't that much different from a lot of the quest-driven text adventures from the 1980s. Or, frankly, from a lot of classic fairy tales. And in both fairy tales and old-school text adventures, it's generally the journey that matters most, not the beginning or motivation (or even, sometimes, the end).
Stone of Wisdom contains several amenities that feel modern and not the kind of thing you would have seen in a 1980s-era text adventure, though. Perhaps these are naturally a part of the ADRIFT language; I couldn't tell. (This was my first ADRIFT game.) But I appreciated the automap - especially the ability to travel long distances across the map just by clicking the location that was my destination. Also, the auto-complete feature was occasionally annoying but mostly helpful. I never had the inclination to turn it off, although that was an option.
So, in general, this is an old-school text adventure with a more modern interface. The puzzles felt mostly straightforward and of the old-school variety, too, although a few of them were more involved and thus a bit stronger. Regardless, I did not need the walkthrough. The game is also quite gentle with you: It warns you before you're about to put yourself in an unwinnable state. It also guides you in some places with the puzzles. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)if you try to attack the troll with the sword the game suggests using the magic ring instead.
Overall, I found Stone of Wisdom to be a well-implemented old-school text adventure with a classic plot and setting and some modern features to ease gameplay. I enjoyed it.
Solid, beautifully-illustrated game with a good bit of replay value, December 20, 2018The title of this game has a poetic ring to my ears, and it does a good job at evoking the game's setting. The credits say the original version of the game was in French, so I looked up the French title: Au Coeur d'un Cercle de Sable et d'Eau. My substandard French would transliterate this as "At the Heart of a Circle of Sand and Water." I like the English title the author selected better than my attempt, but I do think a little is lost in the title's translation: My sense is that "au coeur" captures something stronger than the somewhat weak English word "within" - something that fits the events of the game.
The title screen immediately made me think of a teenage Moana. (I can't help it; my kids are at just the right age for watching animated Disney movies.) But the story is different: The PC, Mananuiva, is not searching for the heart of Tafiti. (Or even for the heart of the circle of sand and water.) She's participating in a coming-of-age ritual that requires her to sail out beyond sight of her island. She's looking for something more meaningful than the typical life of the women of her island, although she's not sure what. She's been gone much longer than is normal for this ritual. The story begins as she finds another inhabited island, where the villagers have something that they want of her.
For me, the first page of the actual game felt rather like a wall of text. It was a bit intimidating. However, once I was a few paragraphs in I didn't care anymore; I was grabbed enough by the story that I wanted to keep reading.
Within a Circle of Water and Sand is choice-based. Playing it felt somewhat like reading one of those old CYOA books I remember as a kid, although the writing is better and the story is more compelling than those books tended to be. There aren't a lot of choices at the beginning, but the game does keep track of certain decisions, and these will affect your options later in the game.
I played through a few times, getting different endings each time and slowly uncovering the truth of what's happening on the island.
Overall, I enjoyed Within a Circle of Water and Sand. I found it to be a solid, beautifully-illustrated game with a good bit of replay value. Also, I have already recommended it to some friends who haven't played interactive fiction; it seems like the kind of game that could serve as a nice introduction to choice-based IF.
I looked it up: apparently "Tohu Wa Bohu" is a Hebrew phrase. It appears in the second verse of the biblical book of Genesis, where it is translated "without form, and void."
One of art's many purposes is to serve as therapy for the artist. Someone might write poetry to deal with the end of a romantic relationship, for instance, or perhaps paint to help cope with a child's suicide. For many years I kept a daily journal, and spending time each day organizing my thoughts helped me make sense of the events in those periods of my life. (Perhaps my journal entries aren't truly art, but writing them felt therapeutic in the same way I'm talking of here.)
Tohu Wa Bohu feels very much like it served as therapy for the author. It feels, to me, like something deeply personal. The work's blurb indicates this: "An immersive exploration of chronic depersonalization / derealization disorder. Content warning: This true story deals in part with suicidal ideation." So it's a true story. But it's not really a story in the conventional sense. Instead, you're taking a quiz about whether you have feelings of depersonalization. So the true story must be the author's, the one that underlies all of the quiz questions and answers.
One aspect of art-as-therapy is that the more personal it is the less universal it tends to be. And I think that's the case with Tohu Wa Bohu: It's very personal. But unless you've experienced something like what the author has gone through then it may be difficult to relate to the work. That's where I fall, I'm afraid, with Tohu Wa Bohu. (And that's probably how most people would respond to my journal entries from my college days, frankly. I'm still glad I wrote them.)
So, I don't feel like I can rate Tohu Wa Bohu. I do, however, appreciate what the author was trying to do with this work. It looks like he put a lot of effort into it, and I hope it helped him through what he's been struggling with. And I hope that others reading it who have had struggles similar to the author's will also resonate with it.
Uncover clues and solve a mystery, but in a fantasy setting, December 19, 2018I was predisposed to like Dungeon Detective because of its cover art. The signal it initially sent me was something like "comedy version of the 1980s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon starring a hyena." (I know it's a gnoll, but in the cover art the main character looks like a sentient hyena. Which works for me.)
And I did enjoy Dungeon Detective. You, Sniff Chewpaw, gnoll detective, have been hired by a dragon to determine the identity of the adventurers who looted your dungeon. So the game ends up being a choice-based mystery.
I played through twice. The gameplay involves uncovering clues that help identify the adventurers. For the most part, you're examining the same parts of the dungeon no matter what choices you make. Your choices do, however, seem to affect which clues you find and how much information you can glean from them.
The writing is evocative; it captured the feeling for me of walking through a dungeon, making decisions about where to go next and what to do. Also, the characterization is strong. There aren't very many characters, but they all have distinct personalities. I particularly enjoyed the interaction between the PC and the dragon; it reminded me some of (Spoiler - click to show)Grunk and the gnome in Lost Pig.
In addition, the major choices in the game mostly revolve around your interactions with these characters. Depending on certain options with them, the way you find various clues and the level of detail you gain from those clues appear to vary quite a bit.
There are multiple endings as well. Even if you successfully identify the adventurers, the story can play out differently depending on certain choices you made with respect to the other characters. I also liked how (Spoiler - click to show)the dragon still gave me three out of five stars on the ending where I failed to solve the mystery.
It was fun to play a gnoll. I remember them only as enemies in D&D games. I don't think I've ever played a gnoll before. Also, I like the idea of mashing up the fantasy and mystery genres. The combination of the two as displayed in Dungeon Detective felt fresh to me.
My only critique is that the game was a little on the short side. However, as I said in my review of Haywire, that's really another way of saying that I enjoyed Dungeon Detective and would have liked more game to play!
Amusing parody of a quest for enlightenment, December 18, 2018Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! is a short, light-hearted parody of a quest for spiritual enlightenment, complete with Dada Lama and 1970s-style aesthetics. Once I realized what the plot was I immediately thought of the Animaniacs episode where Yakko, Wakko, and Dot meet the Wally Llama. There are some similarities in tone - for example, the solution to one of the puzzles would fit right into an Animaniacs episode - but for the most part Yak Shaving's humor isn't quite so physical.
And there are a handful of puzzles to solve. I found some of the solutions to be a bit on the absurd side, but this is in keeping with the game's sense of humor. Plus the puzzles are always well-clued, and so the offbeat solutions come across as fair rather than frustrating.
There's even a meta-joke going on here, although I didn't catch it until I did some searching after finishing the game. Wikipedia defines "yak shaving" as "Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem." Which, of course, is a good description of a lot of puzzle-heavy IF games. So Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles! ends up being a joke on multiple levels: As a traditional IF puzzle game in terms of structure, most of Yak Shaving is "yak shaving" - and it features yak shaving as well.
Personally, I prefer the author's games Alias 'The Magpie' and To Hell in a Hamper, but I did enjoy Yak Shaving for Kicks and Giggles!, and it elicited several chuckles from me as well. If you like the sense of humor present in J. J. Guest's other work, you should try this one.
Short, dreamlike, December 16, 2018Like Tower, Dreamland feels like one of those games that's more about the experience than anything else. The scenes in Dreamland are more concrete, though. I played through three times. In all three playthroughs, I started off with a decision of what to do (read a book, have a snack, play a computer game) before going to sleep. After that choice, I was presented with three different scenes while dreaming: (Spoiler - click to show)watching a play (it's Shakespeare's As You Like It, apparently), perusing a market, and visiting a library. These scenes were presented in different orders the three times I played, though.
There are two small puzzles to solve in Dreamland:
(Spoiler - click to show)
1. Helping the shoemaker find his wife. You have a couple of different options when you find out where she is, though. For instance, you don't have to tell him the truth.
2. Giving the right book to the librarian. The right book was different for my two playthroughs. I think it was tied to whether I was dreaming to remember or dreaming to forget. I also think it was tied to my choice of activity right before going to sleep.
Neither puzzle is that difficult, although it took me several tries to (Spoiler - click to show)find the right book to give to the librarian.
The writing felt somewhat dreamlike to me, in keeping with the game's theme, although there were a few too many small spelling and grammar mistakes for my taste.
Surreal, contemplative experience, December 15, 2018Tower is a bit surreal, and that appears to be the intent. You're climbing a tower, and it's not entirely clear why or how you got there. At the various levels you have to make choices that have symbolic meaning. For example, there's (Spoiler - click to show)a room full of chocolates, a watermelon and a treasure chest that fit together somehow, a suit of armor, and a room that's so bright that you can't see. I had some trouble making sense of the variety of images, though.
My original take on the game was that the PC was dead and the tower represented the PC's journey to or through an afterlife. However, the author told me that isn't quite correct. The PC is still alive. However, he had (Spoiler - click to show)once attempted suicide and is recovering. I suppose the tower can be thought of as symbolizing the PC's attempt to work through his trauma.
At the end I unlocked the code that gives you a page of text explaining what the game means, but I don't think it helped me much.
Overall, I feel like Tower is supposed to be an experience more than a story, per se. The soothing, somewhat contemplative music helps set that mood.
Solid choice-based murder mystery, December 14, 2018Erstwhile has my favorite opening line from IFComp 2018: "It was a pretty good Thanksgiving until you keeled over and died." It's funny, it immediately piques your interest, and it covers a lot of the plot: You've been murdered. Now you're a ghost, and you have to figure out who killed you.
As this ghost, you quickly discover that you have the ability to read people's minds. This is how gameplay works: After watching the detective interview the suspects, you can enter the suspects' minds. You don't have access to all of their thoughts, though - just some of them. In particular, you can access certain relevant topics that become clues. As you uncover more clues you can begin linking them together to generate new memories in the minds of the suspects and thus more clues. The game keeps track of what clues you've used and what you've been able to deduce from each successful pair of linkages, which was quite helpful for me in mentally organizing what had happened. (It's basically the same mechanic as in Color the Truth, the second-place IFComp game from 2016. Erstwhile is choice-based, though, while Color the Truth is parser.) Eventually, you can possess one of the suspects for a brief period of time and force them to confess. Unless there's enough evidence, though, the confession may not stick.
As you slowly uncover more and more of the backstory, you realize that there's more to the relationships between all these characters than appears at first - which is usually the case in murder mysteries. But I thought it was well-done how these relationships were slowly revealed as you uncovered more clues. Also, the most interesting backstories hint at part of the PC's life that he mostly refuses to admit to himself - even now that he's dead.
Gameplay went fairly well for me. I did get stuck for a while somewhere in mid-game, when I wasn't sure what other topics could be linked. I eventually started lawnmowering through the options, and that got me unstuck. However, that was the only place where I had any serious troubles.
Overall, Erstwhile is a solid murder mystery that I enjoyed playing.
A light parody of edutainment games, December 13, 2018Let's Explore Geography! is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a light parody of edutainment games. It elicited several chuckles from me while I was playing, and I made it to day 24 in Victoria before stopping. (I actually visited Victoria for real this summer, for the first time ever. I was hoping to visit Butchart Gardens again in the game. Sadly, I had to settle for whale-watching. :) )
The game itself consists of traveling from city to city across the vast expanse of Canada, buying and selling different commodities and visiting various tourist attractions in the cities. So you're doing exactly what the title promises: You're exploring Canada, and you're trading.
I think the introduction has a nice "feel," with the email instructions for starting the game, the teachers' manual, and the map. Speaking of which, the map adds greatly to the enjoyment of the game; I'm glad the author included it. (I'm also a sucker for maps.)
The bright, bland, boosterism of the language was amusing, and certain lines landed particularly well. My two favorites:
1. "Still, you can't help but feel a little... unfulfilled. Sure, 'commodities trader' sounds like an exciting job, but you spend most of your work day looking at graphs and making spreadsheets. You secretly dream of leaving the office, of seeing the world, of buying lumber in person instead of virtually through derivatives transactions."
2. "You ride a cable car up the cliff to 'Le Manoir Montmorency' and head to the interpretation center, which helpfully informs you that the name means 'Montmorency Manor'."
The game reminded me some of playing Oregon Trail in the 1980s in my 7th grade homeroom teacher's class. In both games you're traveling across a large chunk of North America, with the same small list of options available to you at each location. You can buy things in Oregon Trail, too, although I can't remember whether you can sell them. A big difference, of course, is that you can't die of dysentery in Let's Explore Geography!. (At least I think you can't. Maybe that's a secret level of the game. Or, if not, perhaps an idea for Release 2? :D)
An oddly satisfying moment:
(Spoiler - click to show)Reaching Yorkton and finally offloading that pallet of wigs that I had been schlepping around since Charlottetown!
I found it amusing that (Spoiler - click to show)a pallet of diamonds is available for $30 million. Earning enough money to purchase that would take a lot of patience!
Also, the weird dreams, followed by "What a strange dream!" after each night made me chuckle several times.
I think I actually learned a little bit of Canadian geography by playing this game.
A final comment: Let's Explore Geography! came in 74th out of 77 games in IFComp 2018. I think the game is much better than that. I suspect a lot of the reason it placed so low is that gameplay is rather repetitive: You're selecting from the same small set of actions, over and over.
Edgy superhero origin story that invites multiple playthroughs, December 13, 2018Haywire is a short (10 min. or so) game that invites multiple playthroughs. You play as Hayley Weir, also known as "Haywire," a homeless young woman. Hayley has some special abilities: She can (Spoiler - click to show)read people's minds and force them to see what she wants them to see. Or not see, as the case may be - Hayley can effectively render herself invisible. When the story begins she has only been using her powers to entertain tourists for pocket change.
There are lots of ways a story like this could go. Haywire has an edge to it, which worked for me. For example, here's an early passage from the game reflecting on Hayley's abilities:
(Spoiler - click to show)You could probably blackmail people, but blackmailers usually end up in the gutter with a bullet in the head or their head bashed in with a bat. No thanks.
Street magic is a lot more fun. And, most days, you earn enough to avoid starving.
Especially on the first few playthroughs, the writing and story pulled me in, and I wanted to find out what happens to Hayley. I also enjoyed the occasional pop culture nods, the references to (Spoiler - click to show)Simon and Garfunkel, Star Wars, and James Bond. All in all, I played through several times, finding four different endings. I suspect there are more.
I do think the writing could have been a little tighter in places, but (as I said earlier) the edgy tone of the writing worked for me overall.
My only other critique of Haywire is that I would have liked to have seen more options for how Hayley's story ends, as well as longer narrative arcs. Which is another way of saying that I was invested in the story and would have liked more game to play!
A collection of ethical quandaries, December 12, 2018During IFComp 2018 Dilemma advertised itself as being parser-based and an hour and a half long, but both of those are misleading. First, the game is made with Unity, not a parser language like TADS or Inform. You do type in commands, but the game doesn't really parse them; instead, it appears to recognize particular keywords. These keywords are put in all caps in the text, so that you can't miss them. (The game occasionally recognizes other commands like LOOK, but I don't think there are very many such commands.)
Also, each playthrough is about 5-10 minutes. I suppose if you're persistent you can uncover all the endings in an hour and a half, and presumably that's what the author meant. The game does tell you how many endings there are, and it keeps track of how many different ones you've achieved. I think this is a good design choice; it certainly kept me playing several times to find different endings.
As far as what's going on in Dilemma, you're first faced with a trolley-type problem: An old man is crossing the street. A bus full of school children is headed toward the crosswalk, but the driver doesn't see the old man. What do you do?
Well, at first the three examples of actions suggested by the game seem like all you can do. But that's not the case. If you LOOK as your first option you're given a lot more possibilities of actions to try. In fact, you can completely ignore what's happening with the old man and the school bus if you want. But many (all?) of the actions eventually lead to some sort of situation where the consequences of your choice(s) are great yet it's unclear what the best (i.e., most moral) action is. Hence the game's name: Dilemma. Then, if you don't like what the consequences of your actions are, you are allowed to go back to the beginning of the game and choose different options. Because of this, after a while the game began to remind me of Aisle.
However, it seemed to me that many of the choices that I could make were unrelated. For instance, (Spoiler - click to show)getting on the city bus seemed to be unrelated to going into the food mart, which seemed to be unrelated to chasing the mysterious stranger. So I think each of the options are there primarily to give additional opportunities for the game to present moral dilemmas to the player - and not so much to increase the game's narrative possibilities.
Unlike games with heavy replay like Aisle, though, there are multiple steps required to restart, which slowed down gameplay for me.
You win Dilemma by (Spoiler - click to show)being satisfied with the consequences of your actions. The game doesn't attempt to say that any one ending is better than any other. This feels like the right way to win this kind of game.
One critique I have is that many of the consequences of your actions don't seem to be directly related to the choices you make. For example, (Spoiler - click to show)if you try to save the old man all the kids on the school bus end up dying, and a truck driver does as well. I don't see why that has to be the case, although I guess it fits the game's theme of presenting you with morally ambiguous situations. On the other hand, if a game presents you with a collection of ethical dilemmas, it seems to me the consequences of your actions ought to follow naturally from the choices that you make.
Dilemma had a little trouble keeping me engaged as a single player, but I can see it working well in the right kind of group (maybe even in a class on ethics), where the moral dilemmas in it can be used to generate interesting discussion.
Large, excellent wordplay game based on palindromes, December 11, 2018Ailihphilia is a large wordplay game by Andrew Schultz, who is known for making large wordplay games. This one represents a new kind of wordplay for Andrew's oeuvre, as far as I know: It's based on palindromes.
Wordplay games can be tough to play from a puzzle standpoint because, while the wordplay theme constrains the solution space some, it can also lend itself to egregious guess-the-verb problems. Counterfeit Monkey and Andrew's game Threediopolis are my two favorite wordplay games, and in both cases they succeed largely, I think, because they overcome this problem. Counterfeit Monkey lets you perform wordplay only on nouns, not verbs, and Emily Short put what appears to me to be an almost unfathomable amount of work into covering every possible thing the player could think of. Threediopolis hits the sweet spot by restricting the possibility space more than usual for a wordplay game while keeping it large enough to be interesting.
So, how does Ailihphilia measure up? Well, I beta-tested Ailihphilia in at least three different places in its development (including when it was still called Put It Up), so I had a front-row seat in terms of watching Andrew work through these problems. The first version I played, back in April or so, had lots of guess-the-verb issues where I never would have progressed without the walkthrough. I tested again during the summer. All during this time Andrew slowly added more cluing and more ease-of-play features, in response to my (and I'm sure other testers') comments, and the game got better and better. I did a quick limited test of a feature or two right before IFComp 2018 started, but I didn't sit down to play the full final version until late October.
And I was really impressed. There are tons of features that make the gameplay smoother. There's a map. There's a GO TO command for navigating the map. There's a THINK command for summarizing what you've figured out and what your current goals are. There's an AID command for one-off hints. There's an object you acquire very early that gives you a hint as to when a solution based on wordplay is needed. The USE command is there when the solution doesn't require wordplay, saving the player any guess-the-verb problems not intended by the game's theme. I found clue after clue after clue that I was on the right track when I tried an action. (Many of these are clues that were written specifically for that wrong action and that puzzle!) If you wander around for a while without making progress the game jumps in and nudges you with more hints. Many, many "wrong" answers are recognized if they're consistent with the wordplay theme; you might not get a point for them, but the game's responses still constitute a reward for you entering into its mindset and playing along.
So, in other words, with Ailihphilia Andrew has figured out yet another way to solve the problem I mentioned earlier, the one that seems to plague a lot of wordplay games: He put in an incredible amount of work to create ease-of-play features. (Well, like Emily, he also put in a lot of work to cover all the reasonable player actions that fit the theme of the game.) Racking your brain for just the right phrasing then becomes fun - not something that turns into a chore after a certain amount of time.
But even all of this doesn't exhaust what Ailihphilia does well. The game's error messages align with the wordplay, even things as meta as entering an empty command, SAVE, and UNDO. For example, if you try to take an object you already have, the game says
(Spoiler - click to show)You shuffle the (object) listlessly from one hand to another, which is in the spirit of the game, even if it doesn’t do anything.
I found that amusing.
The writing is often silly (of course, it's wordplay), but it's aware that it's silly - and it's also witty. For example, this made me laugh out loud:
(Spoiler - click to show)> KNOW WONK
The wonk is already known. Well, not REALLY, but then, this game isn’t about existentially reaching people.
I think Ailihphilia has nudged Threediopolis out of its spot as my favorite game of Andrew's. Overall, it's an excellent wordplay game. It deserves to be played and appreciated widely.
Write the life story of a medieval nun, December 11, 2018The first thing you notice when you start Abbess Otilia's Life and Death is the stunningly beautiful first few screens - the cover and beginning pages of a book from the middle ages. This art design is consistent throughout the game, and it makes you feel like you're writing out a medieval manuscript while selecting the choices that define the story of Abbess Otilia's life. The comparison with last year's third-place IFComp game Harmonia is obvious, right down to the marginalia. In Abbess Otilia, though, the marginalia is illegible. Clicking it makes it readable.
The game uses a medieval-style font (the final page of the game tells you exactly the name of it). At first I thought the font was visually appealing. Then, after a while, I thought, "This is actually kind of hard to read." Then I got used to reading it and went back to appreciating its aesthetic.
I played through two times to see how the game changes with different choices. What I found is that the same basic choices were given to me in both playthroughs, with some subchoices changing. In a couple of places I think the game kept track of some choices and my success at attempting later actions depended on earlier choices that I had made. But this was only in two places; overall I found the gameplay to be fairly linear.
At the very end the book you're writing summarizes and comments on the abbess's life. While playing I tried to choose actions that would represent my worldview (within the constraints of the game), and the book's summary successfully reflected this. For my second playthrough, I tried to choose the opposite sorts of actions, and I ended up with appropriately different commentary on how the abbess's life had gone. So, while, the gameplay is fairly linear, all of your choices do end up affecting more than just the text while you're reading: In aggregate, they create the summary of the abbess's life. It's kind of like how I imagine it would be to hear a short eulogy given at your funeral by someone who knows you well.
An aesthetically-pleasing and satisfying experience.
Two games in one: solve a logical puzzlefest and write a story, December 6, 2018What new can one say about a game that's been reviewed ten times already? Not much, perhaps, but Delightful Wallpaper is such a delight that perhaps reviewing it will bring it to other folks' attentions.
The most important thing to know about Delightful Wallpaper is that it is two games in one. The first game is basically a shorter version of Inside the Facility. (Well, Delightful Wallpaper predates Inside the Facility by ten years, so perhaps it's more accurate to say that Inside the Facility is a longer version of the first half of Delightful Wallpaper.) The puzzles all revolve around movement: Visiting certain locations or traversing certain passages triggers various doors to open or close in the mansion. You must learn and keep track of these in order to figure out how to reach all of the rooms. It's a logical puzzlefest of the kind I particularly enjoy.
You're assisted greatly by the fact that the game keeps "notes" for you that you can review. If something interesting happens when you visit a room or traverse a passage, the game records it in your list of notes, perhaps along with a question mark. When you discover what that particular action did, the game updates that entry in the notes. It makes the puzzles much easier than they would be otherwise: You don't have to worry about having missed something important in the text. It also means that the game records some solutions in your notes before you've completely figured out what's happening. I have a mixed opinion on the notes: I think they make what would likely be a fiendishly difficult game into something much more reasonable, but they also tilt the game a little too far to the easy side for my taste. However, I appreciate the challenge the author faces here, and I also can't think of a better solution for hitting the difficulty level "sweet spot" than the one the author has chosen.
The second game is very different. You have to collect "intentions" (these are sort of like motivations or actions different characters can take) and place them around the mansion. You're essentially creating a narrative for the characters. You don't have complete control of the narrative, though: There's a definite end state for each of the characters, and there are plenty of restrictions on which intentions you can place where. All in all, the second half of Delightful Wallpaper plays like a story that you're writing. It's interactive, in the sense that there are choices that you make for the characters, but you're not actually one of the characters. Instead, you're more like an author, deciding what each character does. While I think different interpretations are possible here, I felt like I was (Spoiler - click to show)Agatha Christie writing a sequel to And Then There Were None.
If I could have one wish about the second half, it would be to include a puzzle where you must put the intentions in a particular logical order in order to make the narrative work. In retrospect, the set of intention placements that I came up with did result in a narrative that made logical sense, but I would have liked to have seen the intentions constructed such that this was a bit harder to do.
So, what we have here are two games in one. And the games are very different. They're like two classic IF archetypes: the logical puzzlefest to be solved and the interactive story to be written. I suppose you could also say that in Delightful Wallpaper the opposing sides of Graham Nelson's "narrative at war with a crossword" description of IF have declared a cease-fire, with each side agreeing to take half of the game.
All in all, a delight to play.
Long conversation-focused game, December 6, 2018Intelmission is a long, choice-based, conversation-focused game made in Unity. You play as secret agent Selena Jones, gathering information at a party. You run into your archrival, Ben, who works for a different agency. Ben has a history of interfering with your missions.
And he messes this one up, too. The two of you are captured and thrown in a cell together. The vast majority of the game is a dialog between you and Ben.
Conversation-focused games aren't really my preference in IF, but it seems to me that they succeed or fail on the strength of the writing. Do the characters have well-defined personalities? Are the topics of conversation interesting? Does the conversation gating work, in the sense that asking certain questions leads to new, compelling topics?
Intelmission partially succeeds here, I think. The characters do have well-defined personalities. Ben is the stronger of the two: He comes across as that guy in a bar who's hitting on you and just won't give up. He's clearly full of himself, constantly asking Selena for affirmation that she thinks he's hot or that she's in love with him. He also frequently opines on his life philosophy and what's wrong with the world and with Selena. I found it a little hard to take him seriously: With all his flirting and negging of Selena, he comes across as immature. But he is well-drawn, with a distinct personality.
Selena isn't quite as strong a character; she's less sure of herself, and often she's merely reacting to Ben. I think Intelmission would have been a more interesting game if Selena's character were more of an equal foil for Ben.
Much of the conversation revolves around Ben's and Selena's relationship and past history. This was interesting, but it felt to me like it dragged on a little long. This effect was probably hindered by a couple of technical difficulties: I couldn't see all my dialog options sometimes. If there were three, the third one was usually hidden underneath the scroll window. Also, the trigger for the next piece of dialogue didn't seem to take into account the length of the most recent passage. This meant that some of the one-word dialog bits stayed on the screen for much longer than needed, while some of the longer ones went by quite fast.
As far as conversation gating leading to new interesting topics, much of the time the conversation felt like it was on rails. Many of the choices that I tried to skip kept coming back as options and sometimes as the only option, so I was eventually forced to select them. Overall, I couldn't tell how much my choices actually affected the story.
At the end, though, the game told me that I had explored 59/156 conversation topics and 1/24 secret topics. So there's a lot more to the game than I saw. In particular, my impression of the game being on rails does not appear to have been accurate, as there are plenty of probably interesting conversation topics that I missed.
If you like conversation-focused games, especially ones with flirty bantering, you might want to give Intelmission a try.
Old-school puzzlefest that could use more polish, December 4, 2018Bullhockey! is a massive, sprawling, old-school text adventure. (Think 1990s, not 1980s; it's not as old-school as Flowers of Mysteria or Escape from Dinosaur Island, two other games in IFComp 2018.) It reminds me some of Curses!. Both games start out with you in your home, in a relatively mundane and real-life situation. Then, as you play through the game and begin to solve puzzles, the story takes several twists and eventually turns into something odd, supernatural, and even - at times - surreal.
I loved Curses!, and there's a lot about Bullhockey! that I enjoyed as well. But I couldn't shake the feeling while playing Bullhockey! that I was watching an Olympic figure skater try for a triple axel with a double toe loop and just not quite nail the landing.
To me, Bullhockey! feels both heavily implemented and underimplemented. That may sound like a contradiction, but they actually go together. It's heavily implemented in the sense that there are a lot of objects - especially at the beginning, when you're still in your apartment - that appear in the game. However, only a few of those are actually relevant for solving puzzles or advancing the story. So, as the player, you spend a lot of time interacting with these objects but not making progress toward your current goal. Because there are so many objects, though, there's no way that the author can anticipate all the different things that a player will try. This means that there are plenty of reasonable actions that a player will take that aren’t implemented - or that just give the default response when the default response isn’t quite appropriate. Sometimes this means that the player is sent the wrong signal on a puzzle or runs into a guess-the-verb problem. To take a very early example, while you're still in your apartment one of your first goals is to turn off the ceiling fan that is annoying you. One thing I tried was
(Spoiler - click to show)
> THROW STAFF AT SWITCH
to which the game responds
Futile.
This is Inform's default response for this action, yet the action is not that far from the intended solution for the puzzle. Moreover, the act I attempted turns out to be the right idea for another quite similar puzzle, much later in the game!
For a game this size, (and Bullhockey! is huge) it also feels undertested. (There are only two testers listed in the credits.) I'd say another five testers willing to play through the entire game would have resulted in the removal of much of the underclued feeling with certain puzzles, parts that felt underimplemented, or places where the default response was misleading.
I feel like I'm being more critical than I am with most of my reviews. This is because I think Bullhockey! has the makings to be one of the great puzzlefests in the old-school style, and I love puzzlefests in the old-school style. It's got wacky, clever puzzles that... just often need to be clued better. It has delightful responses to many actions I tried, but... with other, equally-reasonable actions it doesn't recognize them or just gives the default response. It has complicated sequences that lead you along just right in places... but then has other places where I would have never gotten through without the walkthrough.
Maybe "polish" is the word I'm really looking for here. More polish, and Bullhockey! could become one of those diamonds of an old-school puzzlefest that many of us in the IF community still relish.
Now that I've critiqued Bullhockey! for a while, let me mention a few things I particularly enjoyed. Many parts of the game are quite funny, like the scoring system. There's a sly running joke about various locations that you attempt to enter that I enjoyed. Also, exchanges like this one:
(Spoiler - click to show)
> GO UP.
Maybe you should try flapping your wings?
> FLAP WINGS.
I was being sarcastic.
Some of the puzzles are total Rube Goldberg machines that once you see how they work you have to sit back and marvel at which you've just done. Two of the most prominent are (Spoiler - click to show)the literal Rube Goldberg machine in the science museum that's being built (and I mean the entire thing, including the trampoline on the men's clothing store and the fact that you end up back in your apartment!) and the extended sequence that starts in the amusement park and ends with you in jail. Several of the other puzzles have this feel as well.
I also really enjoyed the solution to the puzzle where you are standing at a dot. I'm not sure it's an entirely fair puzzle, in that it requires outside knowledge, but I loved the solution - and am a little proud that I got it without having to resort to the walkthrough. :)
If you like old-school puzzlefests, you will probably enjoy Bullhockey!. Just don't be ashamed to have a walkthrough handy.
(As a final note, I was pleased to read that the author is planning a Bullhockey! 2. I look forward to playing it.)
Entertaining game with replay value that could have been fleshed out more, December 3, 2018In LET'S ROB A BANK you must assemble a team of three accomplices to help you, well, rob a bank. Each accomplice has different attributes that may or may not mesh well with those of other accomplices. Each playthrough is short, encouraging you to try combinations of accomplices, as well as choices once inside the bank. As can be expected, there are lots of different endings. The game gives you "stats" with most of the endings, too. These tell you
(Spoiler - click to show)1. Whether you successfully robbed the bank.
2. Whether you successfully escaped.
3. How many accomplices you had left at the end.
One of the accomplices reminded me a lot of (Spoiler - click to show)the title character in last year's movie Baby Driver. I'm guessing this similarity was intended.
One thing I particularly appreciated seeing was how often the accomplices would get into fights with and/or double-cross each other. For me, this gave the game some darker overtones than the sort of light comedy feel it might have had otherwise.
While the game does some interesting things with combining the accomplices' different skills, some of this could have been fleshed out more. There were two characters in particular, (Spoiler - click to show)Amy Hawkins and Lucy Honeysuckle, whose descriptions implied more interesting interactions than I was able to uncover. (Well, for the latter, there is one very interesting and amusing effect, but it appears to be the only effect you get when you choose that character. This means that 1/3 of the possible combinations for your team only have this one ending.)
LET'S ROB A BANK isn't trying to do anything other than entertain you for a while, and it succeeds at that. Each playthrough is probably between 5 and 10 minutes long, so it's definitely worth playing.
A little comedic gem that good-naturedly pokes fun at the IF community, December 2, 2018Strap on your meta-goggles, indeed! In Re: Dragon you play as long-suffering IFFComp organizer George MacBraeburn. A lawyer representing a group of dragon oracles is threatening IFFComp and its parent organization, the Interactive Fiction Technological Freedom Foundation, with a lawsuit. The offense: "the outrageous and vile misrepresentation" of the dragon oracles' professional activities in a game from last year's IFFComp, The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now.
The thing is that there really was a game entered in last year's IFComp called The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now. I didn't play it, but apparently it was a bit of a joke game: You can't progress very far in the game at all - and you certainly can't have the dragon tell you your future - because you can't get through the dragon's office doors. No wonder the American Association of Professional Draconian Oracles is upset!
As can probably be told from this setup, Re: Dragon is a comedy that repeatedly makes reference to the IF community. It is, in many places, hilarious.
The gameplay is mediated through George MacBraeburn's email account. It's well-done technically, using Inform and Vorple. I'm quite impressed with one feature in particular, the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)you can actually play The Dragon Will Tell You Your Future Now within Re: Dragon itself!
While it's fun to catch the references to IF and the IF community, Re: Dragon sets its parody sights on other targets, too: gossip magazines, lawyers, weather forecasts, even those forms they make you fill out at the doctor's office.
Some of the funniest parts of the game are incidental to the plot. Make sure you read MacBraeburn's "junk" and "sent" folders. The email to Lorentz Umbert is a masterpiece.
Overall, a little comedic gem that's worth your time, even if you haven't been in the IF community long enough to catch all the references.
Beautiful and poignant, December 1, 2018When I started up Railways of Love I was taken aback by the game's old-school graphics. Then, on my first playthrough, it didn't feel very interactive to me. There were only a few times I was provided a choice that would affect the story of protagonists Abel and Juna on their train ride, and most of the actions I could select were actions like "The attendant comes by" or "The light blinks" - actions that Able and Juna couldn't take for themselves. The primary exception was that each time I was given a choice one of the options was for Abel or Juna to confess their love. However, when I tried to select that option, Abel or Juna always found an excuse not to confess their love, and the game forced me to select another option. So it wasn't clear to me who I, the player, was supposed to be. The author of their story, I suppose, but an author with some rather severe restrictions on the story I was writing. I wasn't that impressed at first.
But then at the end of the story the game encourages you to play again and try to change Abel's and Juna's fates. The game was so short I thought I would try it. And here's where Railways of Love really starts getting interesting. You can replay the story multiple times, with each playthrough revealing more of Abel's and Juna's backgrounds and often giving you a different ending.
And these endings are not the kinds of endings you come to expect from a work with the word "love" in the title - if, like me, you're an American. This is not a game with a Hollywood-style "true love conquers all" sensibility. Railways of Love is more mature than that, displaying an understanding of what it means for two people to commit themselves to each other long-term and all of the costs to careers and other relationships that go along with that.
I found it beautiful and poignant.
So, my recommendation is: Don't stop with the first playthrough of Railways of Love. Don't even stop until you've seen all the endings.
Solid drama that shows off a new IF language, November 26, 2018Tethered starts with an adrenaline-pumping premise: You, Charles, are climbing a snowy mountain. You are roped to your partner Judith, when she slips and falls into a crevasse. What do you do? Well, there's really only one thing you can do. Then the game proper truly starts.
Most of Tethered takes place in a cave on a mountainside. This is a classic IF setting and so can often feel stale, but the premise of Tethered makes it come across as natural and fresh - more of a nod to IF's roots in Colossal Cave than something derivative.
Gameplay-wise, there are a couple of clever puzzles involving a rope that can be stretched between multiple rooms. One of these puzzles has an alternate solution that I found by looking at the walkthrough after I finished the game; this alternate solution may remind some players of a prominent puzzle in a prominent game from last year's IFComp. Also, I love the game's solution to the problem of navigating a cave in the dark: It's completely intuitive yet fairly original from an IF standpoint.
Like several other games from this year's IFComp, as you play Tethered further you realize that there is more going on here than appears at first. The ending is poignant and moving - and it adds a powerful twist on the game's name: "Tethered."
Make sure you check out the game's response to XYZZY.
Finally, a word about the language: Tethered is the first game in the author's new IF-writing language Dialog. It looks impressive to me so far. In particular, the rope-between-multiple-rooms feature is apparently a difficult one to implement in most traditional parser languages. The fact that it works smoothly in Tethered indicates something about the complexity of Dialog.
Overall, I found Tethered to be yet another of the many strong dramas in this year's IFComp.
Haunting, layered work that worms its way into your head, November 25, 2018Playing Cannery Vale is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the box top, where each new piece you place makes you realize that the picture in your head is wrong - and so you must rethink how you view the entire game.
You start out playing as a man who drowns, and then the game yanks you back: No, you're not drowning. You're an author reading through a draft of his novel, and he's only gotten up to the point where the man is drowning. These two scenes encapsulate the gameplay: You toggle back and forth between playing as the author and as the main character in the author's novel. As the author, you keep rewriting what you've written so far. You also explore the hotel (TheLovecraftInn) where you're staying and interact with the somewhat odd but eager-to-please innkeeper. As the main character in the novel, you effectively live out the author's latest draft, but your actions also create new storylines for the author to try. It's a very clever game mechanic, although I confess it took me a little while - probably longer than it should have - to realize exactly what was going on.
Some of your actions in the inn (as the author) also parallel what happens in the novel. On example: (Spoiler - click to show)Losing my finger in the police station as the character in the novel and having my finger injured in the mousetrap as the author. This is part of what writing is all about, of course, but in Cannery Vale you experience it from both inside and outside the story.
The game is self-aware in places. At one point I thought I had found a bug: I clicked on an option, and I got a "passage not found" error. But then I went down to the lobby (as the author) and discovered that one of my dialogue options with the innkeeper was to ask about the "passage not found" error!
Near the end of the game the two storylines begin to merge, and the character in the novel gains the ability to affect the author's life directly. I'll leave it to other players to find out how, exactly.
There's a lot of provocative imagery going on here - (Spoiler - click to show)the couples who are murdered in the haunted house tour, only to reappear later unscathed but with different personalities; meeting Medusa in the apartment of the woman I hooked up with and being turned to stone; my finger healing miraculously; the Poe-themed inn being turned into a Lovecraft-themed-inn; working in a meat-canning plant that is clearly using human body parts... to name just a few things.
I had wondered if the game might reference Steinbeck's Cannery Row, but if there were any such references I didn't catch them. It does, however, allude strongly to Dante's Divine Comedy. (Spoiler - click to show)At the end, you realize that the town is actually built like the mountain of Purgatory, and so the character in the novel is working his way up and thus out of Purgatory, just like Dante does in The Divine Comedy's second book. However, unlike in Purgatorio, it's not the earthly paradise that awaits the main character at the top of the mountain. Also, depending on the author's choices, the author escapes the innkeeper-as-Satan and must climb his way out of hell, using language that sounds almost straight out of Dante: "wailing hypocrites serving as footholds, detouring through freezing waterfalls and waist-deep rushing pools past broken mansions..." Then, at the very end, the author's Beatrice helps him with the last bit of his escape from hell.
The game's blurb hints at the Dante theme - it's not obvious, but once you know it's there it's hard to miss. Also, try entering the names of various famous authors as your pseudonym. This reviewer found several that produced a quote from that author - most having to do with hell.
On a technical note, I found the visual "feel" of the game to be strong - particularly the changing colors of the sidebar image as you progress through the game. Also, the audio is excellent - both the sound effects and the background music greatly enhance the playing experience. The author clearly put a lot of work into the audio and visuals.
Cannery Vale is an impressive game with a lot going on. I have continued thinking about it, even though I played it over a month ago.
A light-hearted puzzle comedy with a clever primary mechanic, November 24, 2018Basilica de Sangre is a medium-length puzzle-based comedy. You play as a demon trying to rescue your mother, who has been captured and held prisoner by a convent of nuns.
It reminds me a lot of the other game of Bitter Karella's that I've played, last year's Guttersnipe: St. Hesper's Asylum for the Criminally Mischievous. Both games were written with Quest. Both feature the same irreverent sense of humor that pokes fun at authority but never comes across as mean-spirited. Even the puzzle styles felt similar. I did manage to solve Basilica de Sangre without hints, though, and that wasn't the case for Guttersnipe. I think that's partly due to the design of Basilica and partly just good fortune on my part.
To continue the comparison, while I enjoyed Guttersnipe, I do think Basilica de Sangre is a better game. The puzzles are a little better-clued. Mainly, though, I think Basilica is better because of the main puzzle mechanic: Since you're a demon, you can possess any human character you meet in the game. This means that many of the puzzles entail figuring out which character has the attribute you need to achieve your current goal. It's also fun to speak to all the other characters while in the body of particular character. The responses are amusing and often give you clues about the puzzles.
I'm a fan of a simple puzzle mechanic used in multiple ways, and Basilica's primary mechanic achieves that.
My favorite line in the game occurs when you finally reunite with your mother. It weaves the mother/child relationship together with the fact that you're both demons in a manner perfectly in keeping with the game's overall tone. It made me laugh out loud.
I also enjoyed the final climactic scene. I wouldn't call it a plot twist, but it was somewhat unexpected and even kind of appropriate from an IF standpoint.
If you're a fan of Bitter Karella's other games or just enjoy irreverent, light-hearted puzzle comedies, you should play Basilica de Sangre.
A short, fun (and wacky) comedy with light RPG elements, November 24, 2018Trying to escape your past, in The Forgotten Tavern you turn up at a run-down tavern, out of other options. Soon you discover that there's something unusual about this particular tavern.
The proprietors, Max and Diana, give you a hammer and apron and send you through a secret portal to fight vegetables. When you defeat these vegetables you can bring them back to serve to customers. This allows Max and Diana to attract more customers, slowly upgrading the tavern (and your weapon and armor as well).
It all effectively amounts to a light RPG experience.
I found The Forgotten Tavern to be laugh-out-loud funny - one of the funniest games in IFComp 2018, in fact. Something about the whole setup, especially fighting animated vegetables (as well as the descriptions of such) struck me as hilarious. My family did as well; we had a good laugh around the dinner table one evening discussing what it would be like to do battle with large vegetables.
The tavern's continual menu changes and my character's status updates were fun. I was proud of my final title, (Spoiler - click to show)Tourism Board Chair.
The RPG aspects did come to feel a bit repetitive after a while, which eventually distracted from the comedy. But overall, I enjoyed The Forgotten Tavern.
Atmospheric game in which you play as a vampire, November 23, 2018Into the Lair is a choice-based story in which you play as a vampire. Out for revenge against another vampire, you must enter his lair and perform your choice of three tasks. These are not mutually exclusive, though: On my playthrough I completed two of those tasks and partially completed the third.
Playing this game brought back some of the same feelings I had reading the better of those old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books as a kid. Something like "You're walking down a corridor deep underground. There's a sound coming from the side tunnel to the left. Up ahead the main tunnel appears to fork. One branch features well-set stone, and the other has a dirt floor. Which do you choose?"
It's atmospheric and it pulls you in. I found myself hesitating before making each decision because the game led me to feel like my choices actually mattered.
However, I eventually discovered that this turns out not to be entirely the case. The story repeatedly lets you backtrack during your trek through the lair. I liked that from a playability standpoint, although it did take away some of my feeling of agency. (To be fair, this is also something that many of those old CYOA books allowed you to do.)
My major criticism of the game is that it felt too abrupt at the end - anticlimactic, even. But I enjoyed it overall.
Into the Lair is horror-themed, and it does feature vampires, but I wouldn't have trouble recommending it to ten-year-olds who like adventure stories. Adults can enjoy it, too, of course.
Brilliant meta game, November 23, 2018I.A.G. Alpha was my favorite game from IFComp 2018, and I played all of them. An English translation of a work originally written in Russian, I.A.G. Alpha appears to be an unfinished game about a guy working at a post-Soviet research institute. Its opening text consists of a note from the author explaining that he never finished writing the game but decided to release what he had written anyway. On the second screen there are comments like "TODO: finish the scene on the roof" and "TODO: comment out the debugger." And, sure enough, there's a DEBUGGER command in the upper right corner that lets you peek into parts of the game's source code. After a few scenes the author stops the action once again, this time to say that he thinks the introductory text is too long, to detail what his original plan for the game was, and then to explain more about why he never finished it.
You play a little further, and you eventually come to realize that the "unfinished" aspect of the game you are purportedly playing is entirely intentional - in fact, it's a setup for the real game to pull what I think is the most genius meta move I've ever seen. I really don't want to spoil it by giving it away, but it's so simple and yet so fundamental. And that's what makes it work so well.
An absolutely brilliant game.
Solid choice-based puzzlefest, November 23, 2018Lux is the game that proved to me you can make a solid puzzlefest using a choice-based interface. I imagine there are other strong choice-based and puzzle-focused games out there, but Lux is the first one I have played.
In Lux you are Sandra, the only survivor of an explosion on a research station in space. The explosion has left you blind, and you must navigate through the station with help from the station's AI to reach the command centre and send a distress signal.
In terms of gameplay, you can have one item active in your inventory at any time, and if you have the correct item active for a particular puzzle you'll see additional choice options that will enable you to solve the puzzle. (Detectiveland uses a similar mechanism.) By midgame there are enough inventory items, and the number of choice subtrees is often large enough, that simply selecting every item isn't going to help much in solving a particular puzzle. So you still need to figure out the puzzles - or at least narrow down the possibilities to just a few items.
It's a large game, too. There are five distinct areas of the station, multiple puzzles in each area, and several red herrings. The author's estimate of "longer than two hours" was accurate for my playthrough.
The puzzles are challenging but always logical. Having five distinct sections and having the AI telling you what the goals are in each section are good design choices - they help prevent the player from being overwhelmed in such a large game. The game has achievements as well. I didn't earn all of them, and so I'm guessing some of the objects that I didn't find a use for are actually related to achievements.
Finally, Lux contains my favorite single moment out of all the games in IFComp this year. I won't give it away, but those who have played the game may be able to see what I'm referring to.
I tend to like puzzlers, and I enjoyed Lux.
Strong, well-written drama that packs a punch, November 22, 2018In Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303 you control a robot with one of your employees, Lemmy, inside. An explosion has occurred elsewhere in the facility, and Lemmy wants you to use the robot to destroy some incriminating evidence before the police show up.
This is just a bare outline of the plot. I don't want to say much else on the story other than there's more to this game than appears at first - which shouldn't surprise anyone who has played other games by Victor Gijsbers. (Check out some of his other titles to get a sense of what I mean.) Also, discovering what that more is led to one of the strongest emotional reactions I had to any game in IFComp 2018.
The writing is quite good. Lemmy's character comes out clearly from his patter. If I were more familiar with the UK's regional dialects I would probably be able to place Lemmy, but this American's ears couldn't do any better than "working-class" and "British."
Implementation is also strong. For example, to nail down the effect of controlling a robot remotely Victor had to replace many of Inform 7's standard error messages. It must have been a lot of work.
(Fun fact: This game is one of three in IFComp 2018 to feature a character who drives a Ford Fiesta.)
Overall, Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303 is a strong, well-written, and well-implemented game that... packs a punch.
Unfinished but interesting, November 22, 2018Awake is a little hard to review because it is (as the author says up front) part one of an unfinished story. I enjoyed the bit of story that I did read, though.
Part of the gameplay is the slow reveal of what's going on, so in terms of the plot I'll just say a little: It involves a high-tech research project. There might be something sinister going on, and there may be more to the PC's involvement with this than is obvious at first.
It's an interesting setup. My one critique is that it seems like my choices didn't affect the story much. As far as I could tell, all the choices loop back eventually to the main part of the narrative without changing it. However, it is probably difficult (perhaps impossible) to write a completely distinct part two that tries to pick up multiple storylines. In that sense I can understand the choice to have all the different decisions basically end up in the same place for part one.
I do hope the author finishes the story; it sounds promising so far.
A sardonic commentary on RPGs, November 22, 2018This is not your usual text-based role-playing game. In fact, I'm convinced that it's intended to be a sardonic commentary on role-playing games - and particularly of the noble, heroic figure that seems to be the classic RPG player character.
To start with, the game calls itself "A Final Grind." Grinding is one of the un-fun things you nevertheless sometimes have to do in an RPG. It's not why you play RPGs. Then, the game bills itself as being about "frustration, regret, and slaying goblins."
There's also the fact that (as you gradually come to realize), while the PC does have a quest, he really has entered this particular dungeon not in order to complete the quest but to die. His self-loathing and exhaustion increase with every level (never his strength, the only other stat). He's tired of fighting, and he repeatedly dissuades a younger character he encounters from ever becoming a hero. In fact, the PC says something like real heroes are those who settle down and raise families. The PC says that the only skill he's ever learned from his misspent youth is murdering monsters, so he's not capable of doing anything else. Also, at the very end, (Spoiler - click to show)after you kill the goblin king and save the Duke's son, the PC's emotional reaction is primarily to lament the death of the majestic being he's just killed. He also deeply regrets that he had come into these mines to die and hadn't even managed to get himself killed.
A Final Grind goes one step further, though, in that it very much recreates the feeling of grinding through a dungeon. For one, you quickly realize that the optimal action in each encounter is to (Spoiler - click to show)parry, as opposed to attacking or using magic. In most RPGs, you nearly always want to go on offense, not defense. Every time you attempt to carry out this action, though, the game requires you to solve a math problem. And these math problems are all over the place, from kindergarten-level arithmetic to calculus to questions that require lightning-fast calculation tricks (you're supposed to answer the math questions within ten seconds) - and even to a question whose answer is a fraction that the game doesn't appear to recognize. Not only that, the questions repeat multiple times, so after you've solved a semi-interesting one you find yourself having to type in the same answer again and again. I'm a mathematician, and even I don't have the patience for this.
(Editorial: Do not write games that pull the player out of the main flow of the story in order to solve what are effectively a collection of math homework problems that have nothing to do with the plot. It's not very educational, since we tend to retain knowledge only when it is integrated into some overarching framework. It also reinforces the stereotype of math as something boring that's completely disconnected from real life. That said, this feature does work in A Final Grind, since it very much creates that feeling of grinding. End editorial.)
As if this wasn't enough, A Final Grind also features far more than its share of random encounters, particularly on the second level. There were multiple times where I fought a group of monsters, then immediately had to fight another group of monsters, then immediately had to fight a third group of monsters. Then I got to move one step further down the corridor and do it all over again. (And again, every one of these encounters requires you to solve multiple math problems if you're playing optimally.) By the time you get close to the end, every step feels like a major slog.
The game also features some unpleasant bugs. However, they're kind of in keeping with what the game is doing - especially a bug at the very end.
I think I'm actually impressed with A Final Grind. Getting through it did feel like a grind. I think that's exactly the experience the game is going for. However, I'm not sure I want to have that experience again.
A short, tight, well-written thriller, November 21, 2018In Pegasus you play as a secret agent. The game starts off dramatically, and after that it mostly consists of a series of flashbacks that explain how you ended up in the situation that opens the game. At the very end there's an important choice to be made.
The writing is strong, and the pacing mostly keeps the game moving quickly. I found myself invested in what happens with the PC and his partner Sarah, and I wanted to see how things ended. There are puzzles, but this is a story-focused game, with lots of conversation.
The game also explores Sarah's background and how she ended up as an agent for the Pegasus organization.
I had some trouble with some of the puzzles (especially the first two). The puzzles themselves weren't hard, but I thought they could have been better clued - in the sense that I tried some things that were similar to the correct solutions, but the game's response didn't indicate to me that I was close. There were also more spelling and punctuation errors than I expected given the quality of the writing. I think having a few more testers on the game would have helped with both of these issues.
Story-wise, I think fleshing out a few more things would improve the game, such as more on the background of the PC's partner Sarah. (This is mostly just hinted at, albeit intriguingly.) Also, there were two choices near the end, (Spoiler - click to show)how you respond to the phone call in the office building as well as the major choice at the very end, where the working out of the consequences of these choices could have taken the story in even more interesting directions.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, I enjoyed playing Pegasus. It's a short, tight, well-written thriller.
Fun, bite-sized puzzler, November 21, 2018Last year Mathbrush donated "A short (~30 minute) game based on the author's work" to the IFComp prize pool. I was hoping to get this prize, but it was chosen by the authors of the game that came in one place higher than mine. :) (Instead, I ended up choosing custom artwork, which is excellent and that I love. I've had it framed, and it is now hanging prominently on my office wall.)
Still, I have to thank Thomas Mack, Nick Mathewson, and Cidney Hamilton for choosing Mathbrush's prize. If they hadn't, then none of us would have this fun, bite-sized puzzler to enjoy.
Picking up at the end of the events of The Owl Consults, high school student Justine Thyme is caught in an abandoned amusement park witnessing a battle between several superheros and supervillains when Rex Dashing's nuclear-powered airship explodes. The cataclysm triggers her latent powers, and she inadvertently freezes the entire amusement park area in time.
The gameplay consists of using the frozen superheros' and supervillains' powers to solve a series of puzzles. It's a fun concept that's akin to having a set of magical powers. (Also, watch for a guest appearance by one of the characters from The Owl Consults.)
Mathbrush knows how to write games that head off player frustration, and this is in evidence once again with Madame Time. There aren't too many puzzles in this game (it's rather short), but there's plenty of cluing. There's also a wonderful hint system in the form of the FORESIGHT and AFTERSIGHT commands - a system that actually makes sense within the context of the story and so doesn't break your feeling of immersion in the game.
The understated and somewhat sly sense of humor present in Absence of Law shows up here as well. I got a big chuckle out of what amounts to a "For your amusement" option after completing the game.
I'm also impressed that Mathbrush managed to get this much game into 12K words in Inform.
My one critique is that the game feels a bit short. On the other hand, it's supposed to be short: That was, after all, the promise in the statement of the prize Mathbrush was offering. Still, I would love to see the story and gameplay in Madame Time extended; it would make it even more fun.
Overall, a fun, short puzzle game that you should play.
Writers may be strangers, but they're also real people, November 21, 2018Writers are Not Strangers is a story about Alix (a writer), Alix's dying mother, Alix's aunt, and a meteorite that's threatening Earth.
But the plot seems to me to be less important than the overall theme; namely, how readers can affect writers' lives. As the player you rate stories that Alix has written, and Alix responds emotionally to them. Then at other times you select actions for Alix. So you switch back and forth between playing as one of Alix's readers and playing as Alix herself.
In addition, Alix responds to the ratings you give her when you're playing as a reader. For example, the first story of Alix's that I read I had trouble following, so I gave it a very low rating. Then I watched Alix go through a difficult visit to the hospital to see her dying mother. Afterwards, she checks her ratings and is quite upset by the low score. I felt like I had just punched her in the gut after she'd already been through this emotionally-wrenching experience. But at the same time I was Alix, as I had directed several of her actions while she was in the hospital. So in a sense I had gut-punched myself with the low rating.
This continues throughout the game, as you keep rating Alix's stories and watching her respond to them. In addition, her later stories are actually affected by your ratings. I found myself trying hard to be honest and give her writings the scores I thought they deserved, but I definitely felt the temptation to give her high ratings just to make her feel better. I think this is a tension many players will find themselves in.
I found it all quite moving. Alix is a stranger at the beginning, but you come to know her better as you play through the work: both through her writings (when you're the reader) and through her life (when you're Alix herself). So, by the end, Alix the writer is definitely not a stranger.
In real life, though, we don't get to play as our favorite writers. We are only the reader, not Alix. And how much can you truly get to know someone through their writing? Some writers you probably can come to know - at least somewhat - through their writing. More often, though, I suspect that when we think we're coming to know someone through their writing what we're experiencing is actually an illusion of familiarity. If this is the case, then most of the time writers do remain strangers; the claim in the work's title is not actually true. But what is definitely true, and Writers are Not Strangers succeeds in dramatizing this, is that writers are real people, with real feelings.
Some of Alix's stories are mashups of famous works. Readers may have fun playing "catch the reference" on replays. I know I did: Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities, Anna Karenina, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Kafka's Metamorphosis were ones I caught. In one of the stories there was also, oddly enough, a hint that you're a character in the old arcade game Centipede!
I think Writers are Not Strangers is definitely worth a play for the way it dramatizes how readers can affect writers' lives.
Tough, fun puzzler with a well-drawn setting, November 20, 2018Playing Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night! made me feel like I'd been dropped into the middle of a text adventure version of one of those old space opera radio serials from the 1930s, like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. The game does a great job of immersing you in this setting from the very beginning, with its cover art, the opening scene featuring the titular hero trying to escape yet another deathtrap, and the game billing itself as Episode 7. There are also some classic IF references and even a Looney Tunes reference.
Gameplay is fairly linear and entails solving a sequence of challenging puzzles. There are only a few such puzzles, but they're all rather intricate and require multiple steps. It took me about two and a half hours to play through the game, which included two instances of diving into the hint system.
Said hint system is a helpful feature, too. Each of the major sections of the game has a large number of hints that you can slowly uncover until you learn what you need to do. I was able to keep uncovering hints until I had just the right nudge to send me back to the game without spoiling the puzzle.
There is some learning-by-death involved, which I'm not normally a fan of. However, the puzzle that features this most strongly - the second major puzzle in the game - is quite clever, and I really, really like it. In fact, I'd say it's my favorite individual puzzle out of all of this year's IFComp games.
The game is also cruel on the Zarfian scale, although outside of the learning-by-death puzzle I noticed this mostly with respect to some information that you need. Thus if you can acquire this information some other way you don't actually have to restore to an earlier save game.
The last major puzzle is particularly challenging. Again, though, the hint system is strong enough that I was able to uncover just what I needed to proceed while still coming away with the feeling that I had solved most of it myself.
The final scene is a pretty much perfect ending to the game.
Overall, I enjoyed Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night!. It's got a fun setting and some challenging puzzles that I enjoyed thinking through. It was also in my personal top ten for IFComp 2018. I'll definitely be tuning in next time for Episode 8!
Scavenger hunt, puzzlefest, Infocom homage, November 20, 2018Diddlebucker! consists of an all-night scavenger hunt around a city, set in 1987. It's intentionally reaching for a comparison with Infocom - the cover art and the era, for instance, as well as the fact that the scavenger hunt plot is somewhat reminiscent of Hollywood Hijinx. But the comparisons go deeper than that: The terse location descriptions, the level of scenery implementation, the extent of character interaction, the kind of puzzles and their degree of difficulty - they're all a good enough imitation of Infocom's style that, to me, Diddlebucker! plays more like an Infocom game than any non-Infocom game I can right now remember playing. (Thaumistry might be an exception, but of course that game was written by a former Infocom implementer.)
The 1987 nostalgia runs deep. For example, while you don't interact with them, many of the Diddlebucker! teams that you're competing against consist of real people who would have been well-known in 1987. I won't spoil the game by mentioning any of them specifically, but this child of the 1980s enjoyed that aspect of the game. (Why they are all contestants in this scavenger hunt remains unclear, but that's all part of the madcap fun. Also, younger players may not catch some of the references.)
Puzzle-wise, I found Diddlebucker! to be one of the more challenging games in IFComp 2018. It's not quite as difficult as Bullhockey! or Birmingham IV (although it's also not anywhere near as long as those two games are), but I found it harder than just about all the others. Well, the puzzles in Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night! are, strictly speaking, probably more difficult, but Diddlebucker! is so much broader in most places that the search space for potential solutions is a great deal larger. (Diddlebucker! does feature somewhat distinct stages, though, which helps you mentally narrow down the options for potential puzzle solutions.)
One thing I will recommend to potential players: Pay attention to the scenery. That includes what appear to be ephemeral random events; some of these contain clues or can even be interacted with.
Overall, while I do think a few of the puzzles could use more cluing, I found Diddlebucker! to be a solid puzzlefest that I would recommend to puzzle-game fans.
A fun, light-hearted game with somewhat intricate puzzles, November 20, 2018In Charming you play as an apprentice witch who has destroyed several magical items and must repair them. This requires solving a series of puzzles, often with multiple parts. Unlike, say, Dynamite Powers vs. the Ray of Night!, though, the gameplay isn't linear. After you solve what amounts to the initial puzzle you can work on a few different tasks at once. Normally having multi-part puzzles simultaneously going on would be a lot to keep track of, but the game includes a very helpful TODO command which will tell you what tasks are available, what tasks you've completed, and what tasks remain.
The puzzles themselves require a lot of consulting the various magical books for information. You really have to pay attention, and there's a lot of extra information that you don't end up needing. But I found this to be a plus; it provides background for the world that you're in, making gameplay feel more immersive. It also makes the puzzles more interesting; you can't just go through the magical books and say "O.K., what information have I not used yet?" in order to solve the puzzles. Some of the information can also be used to perform actions that later show up in the "For Your Amusement" list, increasing the game's playability.
One thing I found particularly satisfying was (Spoiler - click to show)creating a crystal ball. Structurally, it wasn't much different from the other multi-step puzzles, but something deep in me just really appreciated the act of constructing a fabled magical item that I've seen in dozens of stories and games.
One thing a player should be aware of going into the game is that some of the magical book topics only trigger on the entire phrase, whereas some will trigger with the entire phrase or the right keyword. However, the game does includes a shortcut READ verb, so that you can, for example, READ [a topic] instead of always having to CONSULT [a particular book] ABOUT [a topic].
Overall, I think Charming lives up to its name. I found it to be a fun, light-hearted game with somewhat intricate puzzles, and I would recommend it to fans of such. It's particularly impressive that this is the author's first work of IF. I hope she continues making games!
We all deal with death in different ways, November 20, 2018Dead Man's Fiesta tells the story of a young man coping with the death of someone close to him. However, the game never gives the identity of the deceased or the PC's relationship to him. Nor does it focus much on the PC's grieving process - at least not directly.
Instead, the game spends most of its time on the events of the last several days of the PC's bereavement leave. He takes his inheritance money and buys a used Ford Fiesta, which turns out to be haunted by the ghosts of a former owner. The rest of the story entails the PC dealing with these ghosts and what they want while continuing to work through his grief.
The game has a strong voice. The PC very much comes across as aimless, without much direction in life, and this affects his attempts to deal with both the ghosts and the death of his loved one. Most of his sentences feature neither punctuation nor capitalization, which underscores (punctuates?) the PC's aimlessness: It's as if he can't be bothered even to complete his thoughts fully.
At this stage in my life (probably a generation older, and with many more responsibilities than the PC), I have trouble relating. Much of Dead Man's Fiesta just didn't work for me. However, I suspect I might have clicked more with the PC when I was younger, and I bet there are plenty of people who would identify with him right now. My rating is thus more about my subjective response to the game rather than my opinion about its quality as a work of art. It is, of course, hard to separate the two, though.
Several scenes in the game feature well-done illustrations that remind me of the art design in the movie Waking Life.
If you like puzzles, give this one a chance, November 17, 2018My ten-year-old son wanted to play through one of the IFComp games with me one night last month. I selected Instruction Set kind of on a whim, and it turned out to be the perfect choice. It's written in Scratch! My son has been learning Scratch this past year, and it was really nice for him to see something vastly more complicated than anything he's tried to do on his own. We opened up the Scratch code, too, and looked through it. My son was able to follow the basic structure of the game's code as well.
The gameplay of Instruction Set consists of a series of logic puzzles. Some of them are old classics, like the one where you have only a three-liter container and a five-liter container and you need to create four liters of water. I realize that this particular puzzle is now used as an example of an old, tired puzzle for a lot of folks in the IF community, but I missed that phase of IF where this puzzle was used frequently, and so it did not come across as stale to me.
More importantly, the puzzles get more and more complex the more you solve. So even if you don't like some of the early puzzles, I'd recommend sticking with the game. The puzzles do get better. The last puzzle you actually solve was particularly fun - one of my favorite puzzles in IFComp this year, in fact.
The story involves some researchers in a lab testing a new haptic interface on a patient, Nora Atwood, and understanding what's going on with her. But the gameplay is really about the puzzles.
Folks used to the elegance of Inform's parser will probably find the interface clunky. It is a little clunky. But I'm impressed that the author managed to create a parser-like interface in Scratch at all! To my knowledge there's no native support for such a thing in Scratch. The interface works, too, and there's a window that tells you exactly which commands are allowed on each puzzle, as well as displaying the puzzle for you graphically. (This adds interest to some of those classic puzzles, by presenting them in a form that's not pure text.) There was only one puzzle where I got seriously stuck. I was able to go to the walkthrough, though, and I realized that I had misunderstood the directions for that puzzle.
The author says that he made the game with his kids and that his twelve-year-old daughter did all the artwork. I think that's awesome.
I had fun with Instruction Set, and I'm glad I played it with my son. I'd recommend it for puzzle fans aged ten and up.
Another solid DiBianca puzzlefest, November 17, 2018I might as well state my bias up front: I love puzzle-focused games, and I think Arthur DiBianca is among the most innovative puzzle designers in IF these days. He tends to write parser games where only a few commands are allowed. Some folks in the IF community dislike that approach, but I am not one of them. In fact, I think restricting the verb set for a game heavy on puzzles and intentionally light on story is an excellent design move: It keeps the game focused on the puzzle-solving.
The Temple of Shorgil is another such puzzle-focused, limited-parser game from Arthur. The setting is that you are a scholar studying the ancient Pirothian culture. You've discovered their fabled Temple of Shorgil, and the game consists of you exploring it to uncover its secrets. But the experience of playing the game is mostly of figuring out how to place a set of figurines on pedestals in different ways. This may sound like there's not much to do, but once again (see, for example, The Wand and Inside the Facility) Arthur has taken a simple mechanic and transformed it into a large number of puzzles ranging from easy to much more difficult. The result is a unified game experience that nevertheless provides a varied, complex set of challenges. It's great design.
With the placement of objects being the mechanic, The Temple of Shorgil has some shades of his game Excelsior. It also reminds me of Inside the Facility, in that gaining more figurines unlocks new areas (in Inside the Facility, you collect higher-level keycards).
The Temple of Shorgil also features a collection of illustrations by Corinna Browning, which aren't necessary for solving the puzzles but add some nice atmosphere. The various map settings range from helpful to extremely helpful with respect to orienting yourself and solving some of the challenges.
Highly recommended for puzzle enthusiasts.
One of the Best IF Comedies I've Ever Played, November 16, 2018Alias 'The Magpie' drew me in quickly, with its very English tone and sense of humor. I found it cleverly-written, well-implemented, and a lot of fun to play.
Like last year's The Wizard Sniffer, as the story in Alias 'The Magpie' unfolds it keeps raising the comedic stakes higher and higher in ways that leave you thinking, "How is this all going to hold together?" But it does. Does it ever: I have rarely laughed so much playing an IF game! J.J. Guest has already demonstrated a fine-tuned ear for comedy in To Hell in a Hamper, but it's clear he's gotten better with time: Alias 'The Magpie' is longer, features several more characters, and has a much more complex plot, but that comedic fine-tuning somehow manages to be even more on pitch.
My one critique is that I think a couple of the puzzles are rather difficult for a light comedy game. But this is a minor critique in what is a truly excellent parser comedy - one of the best IF comedies I've ever played, in fact.
An Old-Fashioned Text Adventure, Just as It Says, November 16, 2018The subtitle of Flowers of Mysteria is "an old-fashioned text adventure," and that is very much the truth. For example, the title page features ASCII graphics, and after each command you are asked "What now?" followed by the prompt. It was also written with what looks like a homebrew parser.
The plot is that you are tasked with finding four mystical flowers in order to brew a remedy for the ill king. Finding the flowers isn't too hard; the puzzles are mostly straightforward and logical, in keeping with the game's old-fashioned text adventure sensibility. I did go to the walkthrough for help once, but that was the only place where I was stuck for a while. (And the solution made sense once I knew what it was.)
One solid design choice in particular helps Flowers of Mysteria avoid some of the problems often found in older text games: It tells you exactly which verbs are understood, so there are no guess-the-verb issues. (I went back to this list several times - it was quite helpful.)
If you like old-fashioned text adventures, I'd recommend this.
A Work That Explores Reproductive Choices, November 16, 2018This is the kind of work that goes better in a choice-based format than in parser. You play as Jennifer, a woman who is faced with a series of choices over the course of the early part of her life (through her early 30s, I think) as to whether to have children.
Playing A Woman's Choice and exploring Jennifer's options had me repeatedly thinking back to my wife's and my decision to have kids and the decisions I've seen friends make (both yes and no), as well as why we made these decisions. I haven't really done that in a long time. That's the kind of reaction I'd want from a reader if I had written this work, and so I'd call A Woman's Choice a success.
I do have two critiques to offer, though (with the caveat that I did not play multiple times to see different endings).
A Woman's Choice argues that society places expectations on women with respect to children, and, contra those expectations, women should have the freedom to make their own choices. The choice that I made felt abrupt, though: I think it was when (Spoiler - click to show)I had just met Paul at the party and I chose to laugh when he asked me about kids. I picked this option because I had hoped it would let me delay the choice so that I could think about it some more. Instead (I think) it was my final choice: Everything else seemed to play out from that decision. My first critique is that I would have liked the chance to think about this more and maybe even change my mind.
My second critique is harder to explain without giving away too much of the work, but here goes: I think A Woman's Choice would have been strengthened with more exploration of the different consequences to a long-term relationship from having a disagreement as fundamental as having children. A Woman's Choice felt to me to present the choice to be solely Jennifer's, but my observation is that in practice this usually involves more negotiation. Often the relationship is so important to the two parties involved that together they work out between them how they will handle the question of children. (And, yes, sometimes the distance between what the two people want is so far apart that it makes sense for the relationship to end.) At any rate, I would have liked to have seen more of this exploration in A Woman's Choice.
Comedic Genius, November 16, 2017Writing farce is like a figure skater launching into a spin: It’s easy to overdo it or underdo it just a little and spoil the effect. Overdo the comedy in farce, and it’s embarrassingly silly. Underdo the comedy in farce, and it comes across as cruel.
The Wizard Sniffer nails it, though, in a spiraling cascade of zaniness that had me laughing out loud several times. Slapstick antic followed slapstic antic, the stakes getting higher each time, and I found myself saying again and again, “I cannot believe the game just went there!”
Part of what makes this work is that the puzzles and pacing are just right. The puzzles are clever and well-integrated into the game but not too difficult; too much player frustration would kill the effect.
Also, the text plays “straight man”: The writing is strong, but Hudson wisely avoids the temptation to go for laughs within the text itself. Instead, the humor is enhanced by the discrepancy between the crazy action in front of you and the I’m-just-describing-what’s-happening text that’s mediating that craziness.
The Wizard Sniffer is really, truly funny. It reminds me of one of those 1930s screwball comedies - or maybe a classic Looney Tunes cartoon. I’ve never laughed so much playing an IF game.
One of the first IF games I ever played, November 4, 2017The Hermit's Secret is an early 1980s Colossal Cave knockoff: find the treasures, put them in the right place, magic words, someone who chases you, someone who steals your treasures... but without the originality and atmosphere of Colossal Cave.
The parser is limited, in keeping with its 1980s release date. Some of the puzzles aren't too bad, but at least one of the better ones is lifted almost directly from Colossal Cave.
It's also buggy, but in a strange way. I've played two versions of it, and each had a different major bug that wasn't present in the other version.
This game holds my personal record for longest time to win an IF game. I first played it in 1985, and after a few weeks I was close to being finished with it. But with no InvisiClues and no Internet, I had no way to find out how to solve those last few puzzles. I played it on and off again over the years but never won it. Finally, in about 2004, I was playing through it again and stumbled across the solution to the one puzzle I hadn't figured out yet. I suspect I'll never top 19 years between starting and finally winning an IF game.
The Hermit's Secret probably wasn't bad for its time, but it's not anywhere near Infocom quality. While I feel some nostalgia for it, I can't recommend it except for historical reasons.
I recently showed this game to my nine-year-old son. He had a lot of fun with it, spending a couple of hours playing it over a few nights. He even went so far as to ask me to print out some maps of the U.S. so that he could practice finding routes from state to state.
Overall, my son really enjoyed the game, and it increased his knowledge of U.S. geography. A win.
I wouldn't really call this "interactive fiction," although it is parser-based. It's more of a text-based mini-game. Thus I don't feel I should give it a star rating.
Pleasantly surprised: some clever puzzles, April 11, 2017I was pleasantly surprised by this game. (I wasn't expecting much: a non-Infocom game from the 80s with an educational focus.) Yes, the parser is weak. Yet this was not a source of frustration: The game was clear enough on what you needed to do at each point that I had no "guess-the-verb" problems. It also comes with a player's guide that lists all verbs recognized by the game.
The puzzles are the game's main strength. Several are quite clever, getting into mathematical topics like tessellations, Eulerian paths, and prime numbers. I never felt like the puzzles were unfair - either for adults or for the intended audience of 8-14-year-olds. In fact, I could easily imagine a class of students bunched around a computer, saying "Try this!" and "What about that?", as they work through the game together.
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