Reviews by CMG
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Remapping life, November 30, 2015In Map you play as a dowdy housewife who finds that her house is expanding. Rooms take longer to cross. Ceilings feel higher. Suddenly, one day, there is an extra doorway that wasn't there before. When the protagonist enters this doorway, it takes her into her own past, where she is given the opportunity to remake certain major life decisions.
The game does not have puzzles in the normal sense, but as more and more doorways appear and you're given more decisions to reshape the protagonist's life, the entire story becomes a sort of master challenge. Once you change an individual moment in the past, you cannot redo it; you have to enter the command "tomorrow" and advance the current timeline to the next day to see how the present has altered. And while at first it may seem like you want to change everything you can in the past, you soon realize that these changes are impacting each other. You're gaining one thing only to lose another.
Once you've come to this point, no decision in the game is easy, and none is right. There isn't a "good" ending you're trying to reach. Every outcome involves compromise.
Photopia is the nearest relative to Map that I know about in the text adventure world. There's a stereotype about the "my shitty apartment" genre that many games fall into, and I'd say that Photopia and Map both fall into the "my shitty middle-class life" genre. They deal with realistic problems, sure. They deal with tragedies. And they're uplifting in the end, even though they don't iron out life's complexities. You're meant to relate to them. But personally, this is not my style whatsoever. It is everywhere in modern literature -- in fact, it's what the term "literary fiction" often means as a genre label (poor literary fiction, being saddled with that). I can appreciate Photopia for what new tricks it did with the parser, but if I came across its story as a novel, I would pass right by that novel without looking back.
Well, for me, Map was better than Photopia, even though Map suffers from what I call the Moll Flanders Effect. If you don't know about Moll Flanders, here is the book's full title:
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.
All the novel's major events are summed up in this title, and even though the events themselves are very serious, when they're compiled into a laundry list they become silly. Moll Flanders is doing this on purpose. Most stories that suffer from the Moll Flanders Effect are not. Map does not mean to be silly, but when it hits you with major event after major event, the story strains beneath such a dramatic load. You've got everything from teenage pregnancy to extramarital affairs to Aunt May being shipped off to the nursing home, and more.
Again, these are realistic issues. They happen to people. They sometimes even happen all together as they do in Map. It's not the issues themselves that I'm talking about, but rather how they're being handled by the narrative.
But whereas Photopia remained mired in its "my shitty middle-class life" muck for me, Map broke free. That's partly because the interaction is integrated really well into the story. You are seriously making these choices, and you seriously feel their weight every time you make them. By the end, it's as though you're performing a high-wire act, aware at every step that the wrong decision might send you plummeting -- and as I said before, there are no "right" decisions. You will make sacrifices, and you will feel it.
The other thing that Map does really well is ramp up the tension. As you approach closer and closer to the ending, one horrible past event slowly unveils itself, and you know where you're going, you know you have to face it. It almost becomes a horror game, with the supernatural house bending around you, driving you toward this confrontation.
One thing that Map does need, objectively, is a copy-edit. It has lots of text, and there are lots of typos. I also felt that the text could've been trimmed back at certain places. It will always go for more explanation rather than less when it has the chance, even once something has already been established clearly.
Those quibbles aside, this is a game that everyone should play. It shows what you can do when you put the story first and use the parser to full advantage to tell that story.
Your jeep has crashed and you're stranded in a desert wilderness . At the outset you can choose to be an athletic rock-climber or a more knowledgeable but less physically robust nature-loving survivalist. These classes will have obvious repercussions on how you navigate the desert. Would you prefer to scale that cliff wall, or would you prefer to know whether this water is safe to drink?
The game is choice-based and has stat-tracking. Your water and stamina levels are what you need to maintain. Sometimes they'll decrease for obvious reasons. Trekking for hours in the midday sun is going to dehydrate you. But sometimes you'll suffer an accident like a tumble down a ravine and unexpectedly lose some stamina. If either stat drops to zero, you're dead.
There's no plot in sight. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The game is purely about wilderness survival, and I was actually surprised by how engaging it was. Normally I want a story, but this game is filled with enough environments and events that it pulls you along anyway.
I was also tremendously lucky to get as far as I did. I felt like I was skirting disaster a few times only to barely scrape through and keep going. Occasionally this was because the game gave me a challenging situation and I put on my little thinking-cap and did the right thing, but occasionally it was because I randomly stumbled across some garbage like an old glass bottle that I wound up needing later. No thought went into that on my part. It was total chance. And it did strike me as odd how you sometimes needed these artifacts to accomplish a survival task when surely there would have been other ways.
(Spoiler - click to show)For example, the glass bottle provided me with a shard to scrape bark from a tree and brew some medicinal tea. But someone stuck in the wilderness would've dug into that bark with their bare fingernails if they didn't have a tool for it.
Eventually, however, I did die. I was so far along that I felt like I had to be near the end, and when I checked the walkthrough I discovered I was one node away. Rather than encouraging me to try again, this made me stop playing. I didn't want to reread all that text just to try changing one variable to earn the extra stamina point that would've let me live, especially since it wasn't guaranteed that I'd be able to change a variable that easily.
This was also where the game's plotless aspect finally caught up with it. Because there was no story, I wasn't invested in reaching the ending to see what happened. I had experienced the wilderness survival simulation thoroughly enough. Other players might be more motivated to make it all the way through.
The Problems Compound is a pure parser puzzlefest filled with fetch quests. You play as Alec Smart, an intelligent but socially maladjusted student, and the world around you is being formed by your imagination. Most of the NPCs are snide, condescending, dismissive, self-important, and terribly pleased with themselves. They obey a social order established by a tyrant in the fortified Problems Compound, who is the nastiest and also most popular person around, and your goal is to usurp that tyrant.
Every location and character in the game is based on a pun, where common phrases are reversed in word order and sometimes in meaning. For example, the Labor Child is a successful boy businessman who owns the Scheme Pyramid. This doesn't impact the puzzles or story as much as I thought that it would. Mostly it functions as a representation for how Alec disassembles everything in his mind to find the logical underpinnings at work. But it's also a constant reminder that things can be reversed. Alec wants to reverse his own submissive personality. Whether that is a good idea is what every interaction in the game is about, and one fantastic episode with a "cutter cookie" demonstrates that becoming a Smart Aleck might not really be the best outcome.
The writing is snappy, filled with little quips, and it skewers just about every form of social interaction that you can have. It goes for some obvious targets, like art critics, but it also goes for really subtle things in everyday language. Although he might be hesitant to assert himself, Alec has studied people and can pick them apart to the bone.
The game wears The Phantom Tollbooth as a huge inspiration on its sleeve, but The Problems Compound really made me think more about the Alice books. Alice is a young girl and everyone speaks down to her as adults will speak down to children. Wonderland is more socially hostile than the world in The Phantom Tollbooth, and The Problems Compound is also swimming in social hostility. But Alec Smart isn't a child. He's practically an adult, and his own peers are behaving this way toward him.
Even though the game doesn't have much plot momentum, all the puzzle vignettes cohere to create a strong narrative tone and theme, and interpreting the story involves more delicacy than you might at first realize. After all, no characters you encounter are actually antagonizing Alec; they are constructs inside his own fantasy land. He's not doing himself any favors by dwelling on their negative attitudes, and yet confronting them is what might allow him to make progress in the real world.
Have a fish, November 25, 2015Fishstomachs. For this concept alone, Summit would have my praise.
The story here is universal. You play as a character dissatisfied with many things. You can see in the distance, both metaphorically and physically, a summit. Climbing this summit might erase your problems. Therefore you set out to climb it.
The game is episodic. You're waylaid beside the road, in cities, in towns, you meet people, you part from them, years pass, and still you are trying to reach the summit. The world is unusual and alien, yet familiar. One sequence involves attending a pseudo-religious function where the participants convulse on the floor after ingesting nano-machines. This echoes our world directly. Just remove the nano-machines.
Fishstomachs are extra stomachs that everyone in this game has, and that are filled with living fish. The fishstomachs eject the fish, the characters eat the fish, and then the fish eat through the characters' normal stomachs to nibble at their internal organs before the fish die and decompose. Eating a fish and having your organs nibbled is an ecstatic experience like taking a potent drug. Everyone is dependent on eating fish, but not like drug addicts are dependent on drugs. You need to eat the fish to stay alive. There's no rehabilitation possible. If you don't tend your fish, your fishstomach will erupt and kill you. If you do keep eating fish, eventually that will kill you too, once they nibble your organs enough and their fishrot infuses your body.
This is a thoroughly nightmarish concept to me. I'm averse to most seafood anyway, but having fish swimming in your body, nibbling your organs, rotting away into toxic slime? Phantom Williams has created a potent metaphor with this fishstomach business. It's not a metaphor for anything in particular. Like the game's summit, it's universal. It resonates on many different levels.
And you totally understand why the protagonist would want to reach the summit and have all their problems wiped away, including their fishstomach.
One curious feature of this game is that "you" is not really "you." Sometimes "I" takes over when "you" gets too tired, and the game addresses this, proclaiming that the "you" in most text games is actually narcissism masked as empathy.
It's interesting, but I don't entirely agree. Although there's some truth here, the "you" in a text game is no more narcissistic than the "she" or "he" in a novel. No matter the narrative viewpoint, the player/reader is always consuming the material, absorbing it to change or reinforce their own perspectives about the world. Whatever pronouns are being used, everything is another fish going down the gullet.
Comparisons to Porpentine will be made, with reason. Summit seems to have studied Porpentine's work for inspiration. But this game stands on its own.
It has a soundtrack that you shouldn't miss.
In the fairy tale "Godfather Death" collected by the Brothers Grimm, a poor man chooses Death as his child's godfather, passing over God and the Devil, who are also in the running. This game retells the fairy tale and gives you the choice to pick God, the Devil, or Death. Whatever you pick, the story continues the same way, with the son becoming a physician who eventually finds himself at odds with his godfather over whether to save a king and princess from a fatal illness.
Some text is quoted from the Brothers Grimm and some text is original. I am guessing that English is not the author's native language. Many sentences do not make sense. Example: Devil appeared as he broken his promised, and served as godfather in as bad influence.
It also seems as though the author didn't understand the original fairy tale, where the poor man doesn't choose God because he mistakenly thinks that God's mercy is biased toward aristocrats. In this game, God is actually biased toward aristocrats, which creates a weird dynamic where, during the climax, God wants you to save the king and princess... and maybe you won't do it, because you're sick of God's upperclass favoritism. So, uh, you can kill these innocent people and be a rebel, or you can treat their sickness as God would prefer. A very weird dynamic, as I said.
The game is made in Ren'Py and has illustrations. They are basic MS Paint style pictures.
You have no other options. That's why you've come to the woods to meet with a witch. She can perform a ritual for you, and what she performs will depend on your emotional state, your motivation, what you want to accomplish, and what you've brought with you.
All these variables can be changed, and the story is presented as a choose-your-own-adventure where you make your selections and then find out what ritual you're going to experience. What happens will be radically different depending on your choices. I played to three endings, none were anything like one another, and there were even more variables I could have tinkered with to find who knows how many additional outcomes.
There's an irony in the fact that a game where the premise is "you have no other options" gives you so many options, which is the whole idea. I wasn't even sure whether I was playing as the same protagonist all the time, or whether my choices had retroactively altered the past to shape a different narrative going forward. And I'm not even talking about the parts where the protagonist tries to alter the past.
This muddy understanding about the evolving game state is both a strength and a weakness. It really makes everything feel dynamic, but things are so dynamic that I wasn't always sure how I was affecting the story. At one point, as the witch was guiding me through the forest, there was a snake attacking a mouse beside the path and I had the chance to intervene before continuing with the witch. How did this tangent tie into the final ritual? Did my decision mean anything? It probably did, judging by how flexible the game is, but I couldn't begin to guess the impact or why this tangent should have had an impact. Other decisions give you much more obvious results with logical cause-and-effect chains, but you have the sense that there are hidden, magical mechanics under the surface too, and you never quite grasp them.
In the end, the game's ultimate irony is that even with all these options, you still don't really have any options. The universe is out of your control. Maybe a very dedicated player who's willing to explore every single branch would come to another conclusion, but when I reached this interpretation I felt as though the game had rounded itself off.
Spine-Tingling Text-O-Rama, November 24, 2015Brain-guzzling aliens have arrived from outer space to torment a New Mexican town. The citizens are oblivious, and it's up to you to convince them they're in danger before they've all been brain-guzzled. You play as Bonnie Noodleman, a Well-Adjusted Teen-Ager, and your yearbook profile lists your accomplishments as:
Winner, Miss Human Compass Junior Orienteer, 1956
Winner, Pine Nut Days Girls’ Grocery-Balancing Competition, 1958
I think this succinctly encapsulates the game's intent. It's a traditional text adventure that is self-aware about its tropes, and it's going to exploit them to have fun. And that's exactly what it does.
Structurally, the game is divided into a prologue followed by two main parts. The prologue is pretty much perfect. A character customization system built into an in-game magazine questionnaire, which then segues seamlessly into the action and establishes the setting, tone, and Bonnie's motivation all at once. It's great.
After the prologue, both of the game's two main halves are centered around object fetch-quests. You solve puzzles to collect items to deliver to an NPC in order to progress the story. When the first half concludes, you're treated to a satisfying action set-piece that feels like it will fundamentally alter the game. But then the dust settles, and not too much has changed, and you have to solve another puzzle sequence very similar to the one you just finished.
The second set of puzzles is actually better than the first, and the first set was already good. But the structure saps tension from the story right when things are starting to get dicey. I wanted the stakes to keep rising.
Of course the stakes were never going to be really high, because the game is a parody of B-movie horror. But parodies can have their own high stakes. And actually, the game is more a satire of American society "back in the day" than it is of horror films. It takes place on the cusp between the 50s and 60s. You've got Scooby-Doo hijinks, "ultramodern furniture" in "avocado, orange, and mustard-yellow," and the town fair has a Tomorrow Pavilion whose displays (including a robotic wife) are "glittering with the promise of tomorrow."
This reminded me a lot of The Venture Bros., which has a similar nostalgia for the era, even though it recognizes and criticizes the era's bigotry, repression, and naiveté. Brain Guzzlers is also critical, but it's never as scathing as Venture Bros. It's more interested in using the time period as a playful backdrop.
In the end, this is a very solid text adventure that will appeal to both sci-fi and horror fans, and it's got nice character illustrations too!
Teens and birds, November 23, 2015Birdland is a very long Twine story (probably at least novella-length for each playthrough) about teen girls at summer camp. They participate in standard camp activities like swimming, they gossip, and they fumble with their developing adolescent identities. This could've been horrible. All the ingredients are lined up for a sappy Hallmark special. But it's not horrible. It's great.
It's written in script format with occasional character illustrations (that are very nice; you can look at them all from the main menu, but they only show up once each in the game itself). What this means, of course, is that practically everything is conveyed through dialogue, and what that means is that major emphasis is put on character interaction. There is no flab. The game is laser-focused on these characters' mindsets.
I have the sense, although I could be mistaken, that you'll get the same overarching story no matter what choices you make. Which is no problem. It is a good story, not just about teen girls canoeing at summer camp, but about the dreams that the main character Bridget Leaside experiences -- strange dreams that seem to have ripple effects in the waking world.
Rather, what choices you make influence sub-scenes in the story by changing Bridget's mood, giving her access to certain actions or cutting them off. You're basically presented with different angles of approach to the same goals. What's especially thoughtful is how the game shows you every possible action, even if you can't choose one because you're in the wrong mood at the moment. This way you know what impact your decisions had. I am growing more and more fond of transparent game mechanics like this.
Since nearly all the writing is dialogue, the dialogue has to be good, and it is. Especially in the dream sequences, where humanoid birds speak to Bridget using stilted, mechanical language. Brendan Patrick Hennessy has a history writing stilted prose. You Will Select a Decision is all about the stilted prose. But whereas that was a pure comedy game, and the prose was stilted because it was meant to be a poor translation from Russian, in Birdland there's more going on. It's still funny in Birdland. The technique is just being used with more purpose.
Actually, Birdland feels like the natural next step after You Will Select a Decision and Bell Park, Youth Detective. Those games crashed together, refined themselves during the crash, and became Birdland. Bell Park herself is a central character in Birdland.
This game made me think about Wes Anderson movies. Moonrise Kingdom specifically. Kids who are more mature than the adults around them, but who are still kids learning how to survive. Kids who find themselves in over their heads as bizarre circumstances develop. Birdland is strong interactive fiction, pushing the medium more toward literature, which I completely support.
Aesthetically, this game is definitely polished. Nice blocky buttons. Smooth graphics. It's got "mass market appeal" with a neutral design scheme, like an IKEA catalogue. Which is exactly what it's trying to do.
Not be an IKEA catalogue. Just tap into that commercial zone.
The game is entirely about a product: a contraption that can take "basic creative building blocks" and combine them together to make new products. All that you really do in this game is combine the different ingredients, and then the game spits out an invention at you. The ingredients themselves are vague concepts like "quantity" and "sound."
At the end of my playthrough, the player-character (who had purchased this contraption) was showered with success for the great things they made with the machine.
Maybe I wasn't supposed to react this way, but I felt like this game was making a really sharp criticism about creativity and technological development. Everything that's normally called "creativity" is negated by the GROWBOTICS machine, where you just slot combinations together, press a button, and the machine does all the creative work for you. A product rolls down the conceptual conveyor belt, you snag it for yourself, and then you claim the credit without needing to have a single creative thought yourself.
Not to say that the game's text actually sounds cynical. Everything is upbeat. You're a happy consumer, after all, and you have a shiny new product to play with! Only at one point near the beginning does the game (maybe) show its hand, when the player-character reads the product manual and thinks:
An extended marketing spiel crafted to make you feel good about your purchasing decisions. Absurd thing is, it kind of works.
GROWBOTICS kind of works like that too.
Untold Riches is a simple parser puzzle game. You're an assistant to a wacky treasure-hunting professor, and you've been stranded alone on an island during a treasure hunt. You've got to locate the treasure and then figure out a way to contact someone to leave the island.
What you get from the game's blurb is what you get inside the game. The tone is irreverent. The story is slim and self-aware, with references all over the place to past adventures you've had with the professor, which in turn reference pulp adventure tropes from literature and film. Like the gameplay, the writing is simple and direct, but it knows what it wants to be and it's charming.
The "about" text explains that this game was actually written to be played in a middle-school setting as an introduction to the medium for students. It sets explicit guidelines for itself: clear goals, clear clues, thorough implementation. In all three realms, it's a success.
As an intro-level puzzler, this is solid. The only thing it could do better is provide standard verbs for the player, since the game is assuming that its audience will be unfamiliar with the parser format. Otherwise, it's a nice little snack.
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