Reviews by CMG
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You're catching the gist but not the exact phrasing., September 4, 2015This game placed 40th in the 2014 IFComp and has a bunch of negative ratings on IFDB, but I love it. You won't find much plot here. You won't find much coherence. But this game is drunk on language, and it is also hilarious.
B Minus Seven just knows how to write a sentence. Even a non-sentence. Even a nonsense sentence. Even a gobbledygook list filled with misspelled words. The text plays with you and you can almost bite into it and eat it at certain spots.
Inward Narrow Crooked Lanes is about putting you through the wringer. You the player, you the character you're playing as, and you know that the author went through the wringer too while writing it. You're on a little road of trials. The trials make no sense. You fill out intake forms. They make no sense. The lines in the text are the crooked lanes in the title, channeling emotions through the text like veins directing blood through a body. Cleansing. Purging. Producing either purity or waste, you can't tell which; the code is broken; you can't piece it back together.
The words "inward narrow crooked lanes" are taken from a Donne poem quoted in the game. The poem's gist is that a writer can't exorcise demons by putting them onto a page. It may seem possible at first, but then a reader comes along and feels the demon trapped inside the text, and now you've got three demons: one in the author, one in the text, and one in the reader. So much for snuffing out the original demon.
That's what's happening here. This game contains frustrations. It's a prison for them, funneling them inward through those narrow crooked lanes, into the game. And now there's a danger: they might get out again.
It is almost, in a certain sense, a triumph that this game has gotten poor reviews. It has succeeded in failing, which is to say that it hasn't transferred its demons into most people who've played it. All the strange things the game does are like a defense mechanism. When I mentioned broken code before, there really is broken code in the game, in the second room you enter, and it's there on purpose. The game is ripping itself open, showing you everything, but interestingly this direct exposure creates distance rather than closeness between player and game.
But what if you take the game's offer, get on the train, go with it where it wants to go? Is it going to sink you with its negativity? I say, no, because its humor is a buoy.
The snake suggests shearing your mane. You have no razor ready at hand; the idea is apropos of nothing. You don't believe you and the snake are on quite the same wavelength.
Humor is subjective. I know this stuff won't work for everyone, but it works for me.
On a more mundane note, I appreciate one technical feature in the game that allows you to rewind it to any page you've already visited. This makes going back to explore different branches very simple. You don't have to restart from scratch every time.
Simulated mourning, August 28, 2015Apparently there is a grave-digging sub-genre in interactive fiction. Or maybe it's just this game and Ryan Veeder's Dig My Grave. In any case, both games wear their monotonous premise on the sleeve: your object is to dig, therefore you dig.
At first glance, Funeral for a Friend seems like it would function just as well as a Twine game, and you can see when you play it why Porpentine did move on to Twine to write most of her other titles. That format works conceptually for the experiences she usually wants to deliver. But at the same time, I don't think Funeral for a Friend would quite work as well in Twine, because the more open-ended parser interface makes the action of grave-digging feel that much more restrictive when it's pretty much all you can do. The same holds true for Veeder's Dig My Grave.
This game feels like a precursor to ALL I WANT IS FOR ALL OF MY FRIENDS TO BECOME INSANELY POWERFUL. It's got that same dour minimalism finally giving way to something more alive as the game ends, although the handling is much more lightweight in Funeral for a Friend, since this game is essentially an extended joke.
Time-wise, it takes less than five minutes to play.
A fairy tale without a happy ending, June 26, 2015This game is about a journey into a fairy world. You step into a mushroom ring and emerge in an enchanted woodland filled with enchanted creatures. But the creatures are sly and dangerous, and it's much easier to die horribly on this journey than to find what you're seeking.
I really appreciate the take on the subject matter here. I can imagine some people saying that this is a "dark" spin on fairies, but actually, it's simply accurate. Fairies were respected and feared for a long time throughout history until they transformed into the wand-waving Tinkerbells that people think about today. In certain traditions, they're even associated with spirits risen from the dead. But mainly, they are amoral, and just as likely to drive a visitor to their realm insane for their amusement as to reward the visitor with (probably booby-trapped) gifts.
What we have in this game is almost a "greatest hits" of fairy trickery from different legends. You pass from one obstacle to another and see whether you can survive to keep going. It's nice, but it doesn't really do anything new with these ideas. I suspect that someone unfamiliar with the folklore would enjoy the game more than I did (I'm obsessed enough to have written a novel on this subject matter).
There are at least ten endings. I know this because at the end, the game lists them in ten spots with ???? next to the ones you haven't unlocked yet. But I do not know why it does this. I do not know why games in general do this. By giving players a checklist to complete, the game is encouraging you to lawnmower its branches until you have 100%. Nobody who does this will read the text fully each time. Whatever magic you might have first felt exploring the enchanted woodland is reduced to a mechanical, automatic exercise in clicking through the passages.
With this particular game, I bit the bullet and found eight endings. Finding these eight endings did not make me reevaluate the story or understand things in a new light. It diminished the experience.
I don't like multiple endings that exist just for the sake of having multiple endings. Normally, though, I don't care enough to write a review about it. But in this case, I love the subject matter so much, and the subject matter is so delicate, that being presented with such a game mechanic really threw a wrench into it for me.
I would recommend this game. Especially if you're only familiar with the sorts of fairies that fly around collecting teeth from under pillows. I would not recommend replaying this game once you reach any ending with the queen.
Go North, young man, May 28, 2015I first played this game months ago and rated it three stars. But sometime later I started thinking about it again, and then I came back and replayed it. And still later, when I was still thinking about it, I came back and replayed it again.
Obviously this game is working for me on levels I didn't initially understand.
You play as a character under a curse who can only walk north (well, almost only walk north). As a result, you have next to zero agency, and playing the game consists mainly of reading about scenes that you're traveling through. Scenes that you cannot participate in.
A huge component in the game is seeing, at every step, exciting new events and locations, and knowing that they are untouchable. This is a clever subversion of parser gameplay, but it's also the reason for my original three-star rating. I felt as though there was nothing to do, that the game could've been a short story instead.
I was wrong.
This game has a single puzzle. On my first playthrough I didn't solve it. I didn't even realize it existed. A short story could not have this puzzle. A hypertext game couldn't have it either, because a hyperlink would announce the solution, and solving the puzzle requires mentally adjusting your approach to the game after it has drilled its "go north" command into your head. It has to be presented in the parser format to work.
Another reason it couldn't be static fiction is because, in that case, you wouldn't feel the tension of wanting to interact with anything. The potential, even if not the implementation, of interactivity must exist in order for the player to feel thwarted.
Now I'm giving this game five stars because I've come to the realization that it succeeds exactly in what it wants to do, and furthermore, its content is fused to its medium. It's a game that does still seem like a short story in the sense that it invites the occasional replaying/rereading, but it's also 100% a game.
And the writing is great too.
Nothing to see here, May 10, 2015This game isn't a game. It's a message. When you click on the play link, you're presented with a 404 error and text that reads: "What you are looking for no longer exists." Additional links lead to websites for the White House and the House of Representatives.
And that's it.
I get why this was made. The attitude being expressed here is common nowadays. In fact, it's so common that this game is beating a dead horse. Perhaps it's somewhat clever, mechanically speaking, to illustrate American happiness's supposed nonexistence by creating a "nonexistent" game, but such an illustration adds nothing to the conversation. All it does is parrot the sentiment that "the American dream is dead" with a smirk.
How players feel about this sentiment doesn't matter. The game won't make anyone think differently about anything. At the most, it will serve as a two-second pat on the back for someone cynical enough to believe the game's boilerplate catchphrase but not interested enough to think about the ramifications behind that catchphrase.
I suspect that the author did want to make people think, and that this game was intended to be subversive. And I'm all for subversive media creeping in and suddenly springing new ideas at people. But in order to do that, it's got to have ideas to spring.
The reason I wrote this review is because, even though this game has little value as a game, I consider it a perfect object lesson in how not to present sociopolitical criticism. In that sense, it may still teach people something.
An absurd distress, May 6, 2015This game will make many people wrinkle their noses. That's just a fact. It doesn't have a coherent story, doesn't have coherent characters, and its writing style shifts from passage to passage -- from unintelligible legalese to fairy-tale to script format, and more. Whether you're willing to play along is entirely dependent on your personality, and the game does warn you upfront that it will be "a trial."
With that said, this game made me laugh out loud more than almost any other interactive fiction I've played, and that counts for a lot. And even though the writing style shifts (which I don't perceive as negative, but which others might), it always flows, streaming along with words that simply sound good. Consider this example:
I come from the pen/feather that leaks ink. I come from the brush, that brief blush when we hold hands. I come from the bottle, the blotter the stopper. The well. I do not come well but I come as I am I suppose.
I feel this is a good representation of the game. Perhaps it sounds like nonsense at first, but it's not. We're in some government hellhole where the player-character's identity will be "approved" with a scrawl from a bureaucrat's pen, similarly to how the author's own pen granted this game its identity. The text quoted above is from an answer to a questionnaire's prompt: "Where did you come from?"
Not all the game's text is original. A Trial, in certain respects, is a collage. I'm interested in narratives cobbled together from disparate sources, so I enjoyed what was going on here, with the player-character being cobbled into some rough form as the game cobbles itself together from its influences. Whether this is a valid process to create something is what the game is (at least partially) about. How does one form an identity, anyway?
My favorite sequence was probably a walk down a hallway where the player is obstructed by three uncles, three fathers, three brothers, and three agents. A few lines recited to drive them away are great:
I know many tongues; I have grown many tongues and had many cut out. I know how to speak around you.
I will tie my hands into two thousand knots before I open the door to return to you.
Another sequence involves playing a game-within-a-game when the player loads a save file in a Pokemon parody, only to discover that an old friend corrupted the file with sinister intentions. This would've been right at home in the uncle who works for nintendo.
By now, anyone reading this has probably been able to decide if the game is something they'd be interested in experimenting with or not. It has thirteen endings by its own count, and its opening menu checks each ending off whenever you reach a new one, but I only found eight. In another game, I still probably wouldn't have found them all, just because I don't like replaying games over and over if that's what it takes to get a "perfect" score. In this case, I also feel like breaking away and refusing to satisfy the system is something the story would encourage.
Unfinished? I wonder..., May 3, 2015At two points in this game, out-of-world text assures the player that a full version will be released, because what we have here is only one episode pulled from a larger story without context. The game was originally released as an IntroComp entry, so all right. But no full version ever appeared afterward.
I assume that the author was in earnest about wanting to release a full version, and yet I can't be sure, because this game succeeds right now in its unfinished state. It drips with atmospheric jungle menace, briefly sketches characters who are already involved in an ongoing espionage plot, allows something nasty to scuttle into the picture, and ends on a cliffhanger.
Despite this cliffhanger, the player has a mission and is able to complete that mission. There aren't any unsolved puzzles left dangling. Which means that as a bite-sized puzzle game, it works.
What does remain unresolved is everything else. Potentials extend in every direction, inviting questions about the setting, the characters, the social climate, the native fauna, etc. Since these points remain unresolved, they feel alive, on-edge, as though anything could happen, and then the text runs out.
Comics are mentioned a few times throughout the game. The player-character muses that the environment resembles a certain comic book, comics are mounted on various walls alongside paintings, and, at one point, three comics are spread out across a desk to examine. They're the serialized pulp variety. And that's just what this game feels like to me: an installment in a pulpy magazine.
I'm reminded of Edward Gorey's The Bleeding Trunk, which takes the same fragmented format and begins with the recap: "As the last chapter ended, Violet was being chased through the sewers by an alligator dispatched by Kafatasi..." In Gorey's book, there never was a "last chapter," there never will be a "next chapter," and we never learn anything about Violet or Kafatasi or why an alligator should have been dispatched. Considering the adventure setting in Hey, Jingo!, a more apt comparison might be something like the episode "Escape from the House of Mummies Part II" from The Venture Bros. There never was an "Escape from the House of Mummies Part I."
Fragments like these have a strange value all their own, and whether Hey, Jingo! is fragmented on purpose or by mistake, it still has such a value. It will not satisfy anyone looking for a game with a complete beginning/middle/end, but if you're in the mood for an episode, then this is a very good one.
The smell of sulphur and hot mud, May 3, 2015Considering that this is only the second Age I've played in Seltani, I may not be equipped to judge the format. But I have played the Myst series, and Riven is my all-time favorite game, so I have some experience to rely on -- for good or ill.
Salvanas does capture that classic isolated-explorer-tinkering-with-strange-machinery ambiance from Myst. It's actually more than a single Age, since it contains five different worlds interconnected via linking books. Each world features a different puzzle. Some of these puzzles are more successful than others.
The home world itself, which links to the rest, is a series of rusted platforms suspended over bubbling mud in a caldera. Abandoned industry reclaimed by nature is such a key atmospheric note in Myst (and Riven especially), and here it's done justice. It's sparsely described but effective, and the puzzle to unlock the other linking books, which involves setting sliders to match a code, strikes about the perfect difficulty balance for my tastes. You have just enough configurations to keep your mind turning them over until, click, you've solved it.
Discovering what awaits you in the other four Ages is part of the game's charm, so I won't spoil that by describing their details. What I will say is that one world, whose puzzle heavily features a stream, worked for me just as well as the home world. Perhaps better. The others... not as much.
One world's puzzle involves extending and retracting catwalks and ladders to reach different locations. The environment here is lovely but the puzzle's goal is obscure, because the player doesn't know exactly which location they need to reach until, bam, they've suddenly reached it. You essentially fiddle with opening different pathways until you stumble into one that lets you win.
Another world's puzzle is something I would just consider cruel. Its solution hinges around an ocean's tide rising and falling, and the tide does this in real-time. The player cannot influence the tide, and indeed, unless the player just stands around waiting, they may not even notice that the tide fluctuates. The only reason I noticed was because I kept the game open in my browser and fortuitously glanced back at the right moment. But even once you do notice that the tide can change, you still only have a few opportunities in which to solve the puzzle. If you fail, you'll have to wait until the tide rises again. For me, that meant turning the game off and waiting until another day -- and then waiting again while I did something else for an hour because the tide was still in the wrong place when I restarted.
Maybe this is common in Seltani, and some Ages are meant to be changeable landscapes that players can return to throughout a twenty-four-hour period to discover new features. In that case, my criticism is empty. Otherwise, I found it very frustrating, especially since it was the only puzzle in Salvanas to feature a real-time mechanic.
Salvanas has a fifth Age that you can access immediately from the home world. You can do nothing here, but this Age changes slightly (and I do mean slightly) when you solve all the puzzles in the other Ages. I thought there must be something more to it, but after poking around without success, I finally searched for hints only to find a comment by the author stating that that was the end. The game never pretends to have a story behind its puzzles, but this was still an anticlimax.
However, despite my qualms, I would recommend Salvanas for both puzzle-fans and Myst-fans. It has enough positive qualities to outweigh the negative, and I think it would be more enjoyable for players going into it with the right expectations, which is what I wanted to provide with this review.
As for Seltani itself, that's fantastic, and I look forward to exploring more Ages.
When an adventurer sees a dragon, an adventurer slays a dragon., May 2, 2015This is a very short game where the player, upon meeting an old man on the road, is randomly tasked with going on an adventure. The "adventure" itself happens immediately when dragons attack and need to be dealt with. But the old man appears to have shifty motivations behind enlisting the player's help, and perhaps the adventure isn't as random as it seems.
As far as storytelling goes, the ground covered here is basic, which is the point. This is a simple fable with a simple setting and simple characters. I only came across a few spelling and grammar mistakes, although there was one jarring programming error involving an elixir. Otherwise, on the programming side, the interface is nice and glossy.
What stands out is the combat. When you fight a dragon, it happens in real-time, with links appearing for you to launch an attack, defend yourself, or retreat. The dragon will continuously attack, and the text will progress, whether you click these links or not -- meaning that it will progress even faster if you do click them. Even though it's difficult to die, this mechanic gives a real sense of urgency to the battle.
The good thing here is that the combat feels like it has stakes, especially when your health, listed in the status bar, begins to deteriorate and flash red as the dragon deals damage. But the bad thing is that, in a text-based medium, this gameplay style encourages you to click links without pausing to read the text, since pausing might allow the dragon to hurt you.
The game also gives the appearance of branching at some points, but most of the branches I picked were dead ends. For example, when you're given the choice to speak with the old man, rob him, or just walk away, only speaking with him will advance the story properly. I see this a lot in CYOAs, where the player will have multiple options to select from, but only as a kind of illusion to suggest there's more choice than there is. In reality, the game has a linear path it wants you to take, and if you don't take it, you lose.
I had to restart this game quite a few times when I picked the wrong option. Since it's so short, that wasn't a hassle exactly, but it did detract from the experience when I found myself wondering why this was necessary to finish such a simple story.
An indolent fever dream, January 20, 2015In this game you never move. You see and remember and hallucinate.
You are standing on a sunbaked wharf and your commanding officer, a wizened general in a wheelchair, orders you to prepare her a cocktail: a green skull. It requires limes. You have no limes. This is the game's premise, and acquiring the limes is its only puzzle.
Because you cannot leave the general's side, all that you may do is "examine" your surroundings, and as your examinations deepen, you peel back diaphanous layer after diaphanous layer until the atmosphere is swimming with lost memories. The scenario is hazy and beautiful, but also wrong, diseased.
Castle of the Red Prince uses this same mechanic, but whereas that game allows the player to move lightning-fast across the landscape by simply "examining" different objects or locations, Lime Ergot internalizes the action by rooting you to a single spot. The sensations that you uncover gather around you like a fog, and experiencing this mood is the game's purpose.
I discovered two endings. Both are easy to find, and both are worth reading. More might be possible.
The game is short, the writing crisp, with subtle eccentricity throughout. On the surface it is as light and refreshing as a breeze, but there is a creeping plague wind underneath. Try it if that sounds promising; move on if you prefer more varied gameplay or puzzle-solving.
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